The Evil of the Daleks (1969)

D. Gordon Flemyn
Colour


This is the point where ‘Doctor Who’, the TV Programme and the adventures of the cinema character, Doctor Who, who does nothing but battle daleks on the big screen, really do diverge. What was a symbiotic relationship breaks apart and isn’t put back together until late in the next decade. Let’s be fair the signs have been there for some time. On television, The Doctor is now a scruffy man with a Beatle haircut who has the knack for pretending he’s incompetent even before Peter Falk started squinting his way through ‘Columbo’. While on the big screen, Doctor Who (his actual name, making him son of Mr and Mrs Who and the brother no doubt to twin siblings, Elvis Who and Priscilla Who) is still a slightly stand-offish Victorian fogey. One is Patrick Troughton, the other is William Hartnell-eque. Neither of them, to be fair, is the original Doctor.


Of all the Dalek films, this might actually be my favourite – it’s Sherlock Holmes, it’s Hammer Horror, it’s steampunk before steampunk and it’s just so damn weird. We open with Doctor Who arriving in Victorian England with a deerstalker on his head and his granddaughter’s former boyfriend in tow. This is a break with tradition as granddaughter number one, Susan, and  A.N.Other granddaughter were hitherto always present for these trips. Instead now it’s Roy Castle, back again from the first film. Where he’s shown up from is never really explained, he’s just there – tagging along with Doctor Who on his trips through space and time. And in a way that might be a problem for the film, we can accept the character has the unlikely surname Who and travels in hither and thither throughout the universe and all of history – but really, he’d go back and pick up the wet lettuce Roy Castle again? Pleeaaasseee. The two of them are investigating how come 1960s style gadgets are showing up in Victorian London. Look, there’s a record player, there’s a tin opener, there’s a Vespa, there’s a Beatles doll and – more alarmingly – isn’t that man threatening them holding a machine gun? Clearly something is amiss. The two of them track these objects down to Professor Waterford, who has built his own time machine – although one far inferior to Doctor Who’s Tardis. It seems that he is some kind of time meddler, but swiftly his true purpose becomes apparent – he is merely a cog in a plan designed to lure Doctor Who into investigating. And behind that plan is, of course, the daleks.


From that point things just get far madder. There are for some gobbledegook reason, daleks with the ‘human factor’ who Doctor Who, although initially wary, ends up befriending and finally playing with: leading to a montage of shots of Doctor Who dancing an old fashioned jig with some rhythmic pepperpots and Roy Castle playing snakes and ladders against another (although how a dalek rolls the dice or moves the counter is anyone’s guess). Then there’s a trip to the dalek home planet Skaro – for the first time since the original film, and the place has had one full on multi-coloured redesign. It’s 1969 and daleks are clearly as in awe of the psychadelic as everyone else. There the human factor daleks take on pure daleks in one of the most exciting and visually striking battles these films have ever seen. Never elsewhere was Gordon Flemyn as good a director, it’s a gripping lightshow and explosion spectacular. (Truly, science fiction was not this exciting again until George Lucas woke up one morning and said “Hey! I know, a samurai western in space!”) And at the end of it – SPOILER ALERT – Doctor Who’s plans are defeated, he’s stranded without his Tardis (even worse, he’s stranded without his Tardis but with Roy Castle) in one of the most pessimistic endings ever whacked onto a children’s film. The bad guys win, the heroes lose and now the whole universe seems imperilled.


And this is the real break from the TV show. In the television version of this story it’s The Doctor and Jamie who win and the daleks who are defeated. These arch villains of 1960’s British Science Fiction were saying goodbye to the programme that spawned them. Their creator, Terry Nation, was taking his ball away and making sure that the daleks only appeared in films (and hopefully their own TV show, but that never really came off). As such the daleks left the TV version of ‘Doctor Who’, albeit – as things turned out – only for the time being. However in films it’s Doctor Who himself who is leaving and he is left stranded and lost at the end. I like Peter Cushing as an actor, although don’t think that his work in these films is his best. However that expression of sadness and disappointment on his face as he realises how utterly defeated he has been (realises he has been left alone with Roy Castle and his snakes and ladders board – and maybe, and this is a dreadful thought, his fucking trumpet too!) is worth the price of seeing all five films. But even that is blown away and topped by the final shot: a camera moving slowly and menacingly ever closer and closer to the eye-stalk of the Dalek Supreme, as it tells us that the mighty daleks are coming for all of us. Rarely has a piece of talking metal ever been made to look so chilling.


‘The Evil of the Daleks’ looks great, if there’s one thing Elstree could do (as proven by Hammer and here by Amicus) it was Victoriana gothic, the inclusion of modern technology (even of a 1960s kind) in a Victorian setting is surely what steampunk is about, and in the human factor daleks we have another pushing at the envelope of what daleks can do – but one that leads to some spectacular dalek on dalek violence.


It will be a long time before those exterminating pepperpots are anywhere near this good on the big screen again.