Four Daleks vanished out of the wreckage of Canary Wharf at the end of Doomsday, blinking away through an emergency temporal shift to who-knew-where. Here’s the answer: 1930, New York City, hiding in the sewers under a half-built Empire State Building. “Daleks in Manhattan” is the first half of a two-parter with a terrific setting, a genuinely grim central idea, and some choices that had me wincing as often as I was gripped. Ambitious, uneven, and never boring.
Hooverville
The period detail is the best thing here. The show drops us into the depths of the Great Depression, and rather than doing skyscrapers-and-flappers New York it goes for the version most dramas skip: Hooverville, the shanty town of the destitute and unemployed that really did sit in the middle of Central Park, a city of tents and packing crates in the shadow of the towers going up on the skyline. It’s a great choice, and the episode takes it seriously — hungry people queuing for soup, casual racism, men signing up for lethal work because the alternative is starving.
Presiding over it is Solomon, the camp’s unofficial leader, played with enormous dignity by Hugh Quarshie. He’s the moral centre of the whole thing: a man holding a desperate community together on nothing but decency and force of personality. When men start disappearing from Hooverville, nobody outside cares, and that’s precisely the point. The Daleks have picked their hunting ground with cold precision — a population nobody will miss and nobody will come looking for. The show also resists making 1930s New York picturesque. There’s no jazz montage and no soft-focus nostalgia, just cold and hunger and men queuing in the dark — which makes the Daleks feel less like an intrusion into a period romp and more like one more predator in a city that already has plenty.
Martha, meanwhile, gets to be the sharp one again. She spots the anomalies, asks the right questions, and — in a nice bit of continuity with her medical training — is the one who examines a body and works out something is very wrong with it. Two episodes ago she was still being told this was a one-off trip. Now she’s leading investigations. There’s a good thread running underneath about her being a Black woman in 1930s New York, handled with rather more directness than the show managed in Elizabethan London — Solomon takes her seriously the moment they meet, the world beyond Hooverville plainly does not, and the episode lets that sit without stopping for a speech about it. After the solo ordeal she came through in Gridlock, she’s noticeably harder to rattle.
Pig Slaves and Showgirls
The sewers give us the episode’s most effective horror: the pig slaves. Humans dragged off the streets and surgically half-converted into shuffling, squealing pig-men, used as disposable muscle. They’re a properly nasty creation, and the show is smart enough to make them tragic rather than monstrous — these aren’t creatures, they’re people, hollowed out and turned into tools, with just enough left to know what’s happened to them.
That lands hardest through Laszlo, a stagehand who’s been partially converted and is hiding in the tunnels, and Tallulah, the showgirl who loves him and doesn’t know where he’s gone. Miranda Raison plays Tallulah as a big-hearted, fast-talking Broadway hopeful — the accent is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and your tolerance for it will vary — but the relationship works. A man who can never go home again, watching the woman he loves from the shadows, is a genuinely sad thread to run under a Dalek story, and it gives the episode a human stake beyond the usual.
The Cult of Skaro’s Final Experiment
And then, the Daleks. Seeing them scheme rather than simply exterminate is the most interesting thing the two-parter has going for it. The Cult of Skaro were built to think the unthinkable, to have imagination — and cornered on a strange world with their species effectively extinct, they’ve concluded that being a Dalek is no longer enough to survive. That’s a genuinely fascinating place to take the most rigid monster in science fiction: a Dalek arguing for change, against the fury of its own kind. The tension inside the Cult, with Thay, Jast and Caan increasingly appalled by their leader’s thinking, is better drama than anything happening on the surface.
Their scheme is pleasingly grandiose. The Empire State Building is going up, and they’ve had their human collaborator — the brutally ambitious foreman Mr Diagoras — add a little something to the mast: a conductor to catch a gamma strike from an incoming solar flare and pump Dalek DNA into thousands of captured humans stored in the vaults below. An army, grown out of the bodies of the poor, powered by the most famous building in the world. It’s a lovely piece of pulp.
The Doctor’s contempt is well-played, too. He’s met these things at the end of everything, and there’s a weariness to him here that reminds you of the lone survivor he faced back in Dalek — the same recognition that a cornered Dalek is at its most dangerous when it starts adapting.
What really makes the Cult’s plan land is the desperation sitting underneath all the grandeur. These four are all that’s left — the last Daleks anywhere, so far as they know — and every option in front of them is terrible. Sec’s answer is to stop being a Dalek at all, which is a heresy so total that his own lieutenants can barely process the words. There’s something almost pitiable in watching a species defined entirely by its purity conclude that the only way to survive is to dilute itself, and the scenes of Thay, Jast and Caan muttering in the dark about their leader’s blasphemy are the most quietly unsettling thing in the episode. The Doctor sees exactly what’s happening, and for once he doesn’t gloat about it.
Then the cliffhanger. Dalek Sec goes through with the final experiment on himself, absorbing Diagoras — and what steps out of the casing is a hunched humanoid figure in a Dalek’s shell, a tentacled Dalek head on human shoulders, declaring itself a new species. “I am a human Dalek. I am your future.”
It’s a bold, genuinely startling image, and I’ll be honest: I can’t tell yet whether it’s brilliant or ridiculous. Possibly both. Either way, I want to know what happens next, which is what a cliffhanger is for.
What Daleks in Manhattan Leaves Us With
An ambitious, atmospheric setup that swings hard and doesn’t connect every time. Here’s what it plants:
- The Cult of Skaro, thinking. Daleks that question their own nature are a far more interesting proposition than Daleks that shout, and the schism opening inside the Cult is the strongest thread here.
- Hooverville. A superb setting, taken seriously — the Daleks preying on people the world has already decided are disposable gives the story a genuine edge.
- Body horror with a heart. The pig slaves could have been a cheap monster; Laszlo turns them into a tragedy.
- Martha stepping up. Confident, medically useful, running her own lines of enquiry. She’s fully a companion now.
- A hybrid nobody asked for. Dalek Sec’s transformation is the swing of the season so far — enormous, strange, and completely unresolved as the credits roll.
Rating: 3/5 — Strong period atmosphere and a fascinating idea about Dalek desperation, undercut by wobbly accents, some clunky dialogue, and a monster design that’s a very hard sell. The bones are good; the execution keeps tripping.
Daleks in the sewers, pig men in the tunnels, a showgirl in love with a man who daren’t show her his face, and something with a squid’s head wearing a Dalek suit announcing itself as the future of the species. I genuinely can’t tell whether next week resolves any of this or simply doubles down on the madness. Either way I’ll be watching. See you then.