Daleks in Manhattan: Something Stirring Under New York

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 properly grim central idea, and some choices that had me wincing about 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, with hungry people queuing for soup, casual racism, and 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, and he’s the moral centre of the whole thing, 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 exactly why the Daleks chose it. 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, so 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 her medical training comes in handy when they get a proper look at what’s become of one of the missing men. Two episodes ago she was still being told this was a one-off trip, and now she’s running her own lines of enquiry. There’s a good thread underneath about her being a Black woman in 1930s New York, handled with rather more directness than The Shakespeare Code managed in Elizabethan London. Solomon takes her seriously the moment they meet, the world beyond Hooverville plainly doesn’t, 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, because 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, and the accent is doing a lot of heavy lifting, so 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 sad thread to run under a Dalek story, and it gives the episode a human stake beyond the usual running about.

The Cult of Skaro’s final experiment

And then, the Daleks. Seeing them scheme rather than just exterminate is the most interesting thing the two-parter has going for it. The Cult of Skaro, the four who climbed out of that sphere at the end of Army of Ghosts, 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 isn’t enough to survive any more. Which is a fascinating place to take the most rigid monster in science fiction, a Dalek arguing for change against the fury of its own kind. Their scheme is pleasingly grandiose. They’ve had their human collaborator, the brutally ambitious foreman Mr Diagoras, add a little something to the Empire State Building’s 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. Lovely pulp.

The Doctor’s contempt is well played too, with a weariness to him that takes me straight back to the lone survivor he faced in Dalek, the same recognition that a cornered Dalek is at its most dangerous when it starts adapting. These four are all that’s left, the last Daleks anywhere so far as they know, and Sec’s answer is to stop being a Dalek at all, a heresy so total that Thay, Jast and Caan can barely process the words. Their muttering in the dark about their leader’s blasphemy is the most quietly unsettling thing in the episode, and better drama than most of what’s happening up on the surface. Doctor Who News’s review liked the grim script a lot more than what ended up on screen, and I’m mostly with 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 figure in Diagoras’s suit with 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, startling image, and when the credits rolled I honestly couldn’t tell whether it was brilliant or ridiculous. Possibly both. There are kernels of a great story here that New York never quite lets out, and I can see the argument going both ways, but I wanted to know what happened next, which is what a cliffhanger is for.

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’s suit announcing itself as the future of the species. Part two gets its own post.