Into the Dalek: Shrunk Down Inside a Damaged Dalek

Into the Dalek opens with the Doctor getting coffee for Clara, which is about as ordinary as a Doctor Who episode gets before it goes sideways. He uses the TARDIS to pull Journey Blue, a soldier fighting the Daleks, off her exploding spaceship and then delivers her back to the command ship Aristotle. Instead of a thank you, he gets treated as a possible Dalek spy and only avoids being executed by agreeing to treat a Dalek that has malfunctioned and apparently “turned good”. He collects Clara from Coal Hill School, where she’s just set up a date with maths teacher and former soldier Danny Pink, and on the way back to the Aristotle he asks her whether he’s a good man. She doesn’t know, and I thought that was a very honest answer.

I found the script much tighter and more coherent than Deep Breath, though there’s far too much time spent talking about the Twelfth Doctor’s moral ambiguity. The sparse storyline and the reduced number of characters help enormously, and even the cut-away to Missy in the “Promised Land” is kept to an absolute minimum. After a more ponderous opener it felt good to get back to rugged storytelling and some proper action.

The Aristotle itself is a good setting for the first half, a cramped, tense command ship full of soldiers who’ve been losing to the Daleks for a long time. Journey Blue is the one who sticks with you, a young soldier who doesn’t trust the Doctor an inch, and she gets more to do than most one-episode characters do. The soldiers all treat the Doctor as a threat before they treat him as a help, which fits a man who’s just turned up in the middle of a war. It also sets up the question the episode keeps coming back to, which is what the Doctor really thinks of soldiers, and I’d say that part is handled well.

Shrunk Down Inside a Damaged Dalek

The Doctor, Clara and the soldiers Journey, Ross and Gretchen are miniaturised and sent inside the Dalek the Doctor has nicknamed “Rusty”. It’s a classic idea that’s been borrowed from the Fantastic Voyage-style trip through a body, and Doctor Who has done a version of it before with the Tom Baker serial The Invisible Enemy. I think it works well, with the Dalek’s antibodies attacking the party and Ross dying early on to show that the danger is real. The Doctor seals the radiation leak that’s been causing the damage, which sends Rusty back to being a Dalek, and he leads an attack on the Aristotle.

What turns Rusty good is a lovely idea, because inside the Dalek the party find the one thing that has gone wrong, and it’s a memory of a star being born. The Dalek has seen real beauty, and that’s what makes it question everything it was built to do. Clara is the one who works out that the memory has to be restored, which is a good use of her, and it’s why she’s so central to the second half. When the Doctor links his own mind in, though, Rusty doesn’t take the lesson he hoped for, and I found that moment properly unsettling.

My one complaint about the trip is that the unique jeopardy of being shrunk inside a machine gets forgotten about, and it turns into just another labyrinth of corridors. Gretchen sacrifices herself so the Doctor and Clara can recover the memories that made Rusty “good” in the first place. Linked in to the Doctor’s mind, Rusty then turns on his fellow Daleks and wipes them out, and the Doctor’s reaction to that is where the episode leaves you thinking. At the very end the Doctor turns Journey down as a companion because she’s a soldier, and Clara tells Danny she isn’t so prejudiced. It’s a neat way to tie the two halves of her life together.

Daleks as Metal Props

As with other Dalek episodes in the Moffat era, the use of the Doctor’s most iconic enemies feels fairly incidental. There’s no longer any real continuity between the Dalek stories, and often they feel like metal MacGuffins moving the plot along on castors. The Doctor talks about his first run-in with the Daleks, but the sense of Dalek history is very fractured. They seem more like abstract ideas of good and evil than fully realised villains, and I’d have liked something that only the Daleks could have done.

The captured and conflicted Dalek storyline is also a little too close to Dalek back in 2005, and I thought it was done far better then. That one had a lonely survivor, a Doctor with real hatred and Rose in the middle of it, and Into the Dalek has some of the same beats with less weight behind them. I’m not angling for a return to the years when the Daleks were overused and all-consuming, because they stop being special when they turn up every year, even in a story as big as Asylum of the Daleks. I just think the stories they feature in could be more quintessential to them, rather than having them as a piece of metal to hang a premise on.

There’s one more point I keep coming back to on the Daleks, and it’s the way the Doctor talks about his first run-in with them. He mentions it like it’s a favourite old story, and then there’s nothing behind it in the episode itself, so you’re left wondering what the Daleks actually remember. A series of stories that treats the Daleks as a one-off each time means every appearance has to start from scratch, and that’s why they come across as concepts rather than characters. I’d happily take a Dalek story that carried something over from the last one, because it would make them feel like a real enemy again.

The Twelfth Doctor Without the Haze

This is the first time we’ve seen the Twelfth Doctor outside his post-regeneration haze, and he shapes up to be a deeply pessimistic and cynical man. He seems terribly fatalistic about Ross’s death and about how impossible a “good” Dalek is, and he’s noticeably less certain of his own moral authority than any Doctor I remember. Clara has to become more confrontational with him as a result, which really lands when she roughly slaps him across the face in a moment of callous disinterest. She’s starting to be the antidote to his increasingly judgmental attitudes, and I like that she doesn’t back down.

The second story with a new Doctor is usually where you find out what you’re going to get from him, but Peter Capaldi came in so strongly, with such an abrasive and strange portrayal, that there’s not much work left to do. His sinister side seems to have peaked here. We also learn how the series is going to run, because the Doctor will be dropping by Coal Hill School to whisk Clara away rather than her being a permanent resident of the TARDIS. Danny Pink gives us a link with contemporary Earth and possibly a new companion, and it looks like Missy and the Promised Land will only get glimpses in each episode until at least the finale.

The Danny Pink and Clara thread is a nice little human counterweight to everything going on inside the Dalek. Clara has just set up a date with a maths teacher and former soldier, and I liked that the show gave her something ordinary to be nervous about. When the Doctor refuses Journey because she’s a soldier, it gives that earlier detail a sting, because Clara knows exactly who she’s got waiting for her back at Coal Hill. I found the closing exchange a smart way to end the episode, since it quietly shows Clara pulling away from the Doctor’s attitude. It makes me curious how he’ll react when he meets Danny.

Satisfying, Not Special

I’d call Into the Dalek very satisfying sci-fi, but it doesn’t do much for the Doctor or the Daleks. It was a good, solid hour with some real tension inside the Dalek, and Clara got plenty to do. I just kept wishing the Daleks had been more than a premise to hang it all on, and that the Doctor’s moral questions had been answered rather than asked again and again.

Even with the complaints, I think the episode earns its place early in the season. The Doctor asking Clara whether he’s a good man at the start and her not being able to answer is the thread that holds it together, and the end of the episode doesn’t tie it off. That leaves a lot of room for the next few stories to play with, and I’m keen to see where the season goes with it.

Should the Doctor have trusted Rusty in the first place, and was he right to turn Journey away because she’s a soldier? Tell me in the comments.