Day 728: Daleks in Manhattan

So today, provided that everything goes to plan, the blog will have a double post. I've not done one of these in the history of the blog, but a certain opportunity presented itself the other day and left me with no other choice than to do two episodes on one day over the course of the next couple of weeks. And there seemed to be no better candidate in my mind than the two parter Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks.

Why did I want to cover these two episodes on the same day? Because, to be perfectly frank, they are pretty bad episodes, and I kind of want to get them done as soon as possible. But why are they so bad? I mean, yes there is the problem of the Dalek/Human hybrid's design, which has far too many phalluses on it to be believable, but there'e enough in this story for it to be worth watching. We're dealing with the return of the Daleks, as well as the Daleks being faced with their own twisted moral dilemma of whether they should evolve or not. It shouldn't be as bad as it is, and yet I can't bring myself to call it any good.

I think the reason why it's not great is a question of scale. Looking at the other Dalek stories, it's clear that they have something that adds to the story in some meaningful way, that just couldn't be achieved by any other race. Eccleston's Dalek stories are all about using them as a way for the Doctor to relive the horrors of the Time War. The rest of Tennant's Dalek stories are all about having already stressful situations and making them even worse. Smith's Dalek stories are about having them be the legendary foes of the Doctor, and Capaldi's Dalek stories are about using them as character studies of the Doctor himself. The one thing that connects all of these stories is that they feel big, and that only big stories are worthy of capturing the inner hatred of a Dalek. But Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks doesn't really have any of that stuff. Instead, it's just woefully generic, with even the reveal of the Dalek being a Dalek emerging from a lift, and you can't help but feel that it needed more work or more money to make the story feel more spectacular. Instead, we're left with something average, that goes as an example of how not to do a Dalek story.