In much the same way that I prefaced my review of Doctor Who and the Silurians with a rant about the UNIT era, consider this a preface to three upcoming Who Reviews - Planet, Genesis, and Remembrance of the Daleks.
But first let's skip ahead to the new series for a moment. One of the things I love about Nu Who is that, like Deep Space Nine, Buffy and Angel, every action has consequences. In "Bad Wolf," for example, we see the Doctor confronted by the consequences of his previous interference in a way that hasn't been done well since... The Ark. In the next episode, "Parting of the Ways," he has to make an awful choice for all the Humans on planet Earth: Die as a Human, or live as a Dalek. Actually, that's just the way he phrases it, but the real dilemma is something else entirely. As far as he knows, he can wipe out every Dalek left in existence here and now, at the cost of his own life and that of everyone on Earth... or he can stand by, let them conquer the Earth, and then move over into the next star system and do it all again. The choice he actually faces is "save the next victims by sacrificing people you can't save anyway," and in that case, anybody with an iota of common sense on Earth should be screaming at the Doctor to press that button.
He doesn't. He decides to stand back and let his most terrible enemies have their way with the Universe. Happily, he pays for that decision with his life a few minutes later.
Fast-forward to Season 29, where the Doctor shows Dalek Caan mercy at the end of "Evolution of the Daleks." Just to bring you up to speed, Dalek Caan is the last surviving member of the Cult of Skaro, who by this point have...
-invented whole new ways of killing people
-unleashed an entire flood of Daleks on modern-day London, leading directly to the Doctor losing Rose in a parallel Universe
-kidnapped people from Depression-era New York and mutated them into barely-intelligent slaves
-violated untold numbers of corpses to turn them into Human-Dalek hybrids
-done the same to a living human being
-murdered a respected community leader
-committed genocide against the aforementioned hybrids.
The Doctor's response to all of this is that he's not going to let two species die today. I'm still waiting for someone to ask him if he's found the "something good" in the Daleks that Four promised all those years ago.
Ultimately, the Doctor pays for this mistake as well. Caan activates an Emergency Temporal Shift, winds up in the middle of the Time War, and saves Davros so he can threaten everyone at the end of the next season. Blah blah Caan's elaborate gambit blah blah redeemed... bull. Caan never wanted redemption - his last act as a sane being was to rescue perhaps the most evil individual in the history of the Universe. He went insane and subsequently saw the evil of the Daleks, and so arranged to manipulate the Doctor into wiping them all out, again. Davros would never have escape the Time War if Caan hadn't rescued him, if the Doctor hadn't shown Caan mercy (remember, "Evolution of the Daleks" is the one where Time Lord DNA can travel down wires; if the Doctor wanted, he could have offed Caan with his screwdriver). The delicious payoff for all this is that the Doctor must say good-bye to Rose a second time (and leave her with his more "unstable" self, hilariously) and then wipe Donna's mind. Ouch. Oh, and all the Daleks are dead anyway. Except those three that somehow survived, because of course they always survive.
Anyway, in the new series, we can see that every time the Doctor hesitates in the face of evil, he loses big. (Hey, wait! I figured out what the good of the Daleks is! They're the ones who arrange for the big alliance to trap the Doctor in the Pandorica, which leads to Amy's parents and Rory being restored to life. Guess that cancels out every planet destroyed, every person exterminated, etc.)
Okay, let's go way back now. In Planet of the Daleks, Terry Nation makes a big deal of the story's Aesop, that courage means being afraid, but doing what you have to do anyway. The story concerns "the largest Dalek force ever assembled," which turns out to be laughably small because a) Terry Nation can't do math, and b) the task force is played by toy Daleks. At the end of the story, the Doctor drowns the task force in insta-freeze, apparently killing them. Nobody bats an eye over this.
In Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor is ordered by the Time Lords to do one of three things to the Daleks in their infancy: he can avert their creation entirely, he can alter their creation to make them less violent, or he can at the very least find some sort of weakness and report back. He winds up having an open-mic session with Davros where he compares the Daleks to a disease. He comes away from this discussion utterly disgusted with what Davros has done. Throughout the first five episodes of this story, he's crusading for the Dalek project - hilariously euphemized as the "Mark III Travel Machine" - to be shut down. Then, episode 6 rolls around. There are already at least three Daleks out of the tank (there are probably more than that, but three is all they had, so three is all you see on the screen with one or two exceptions near the end). The Doctor has seen these Daleks in action; they cut down a bunch of Thals recently. Hell, the Doctor's reaction in that same serial to the destruction of the Kaled city is "I sent Harry and Sarah there," not "you've just murdered an entire civilization." But then it comes time for The Wires Scene. You know the one: the Doctor's got the two wires. Connect them together, the Dalek hatchery goes up. He wonders if he has the right, but Sarah (rightly) points out that he can't seriously doubt that. Nevertheless, the Doctor insists that if he kills the Daleks in their infancy, he'll be no better than them.
...now, what's actually going on here is that the Doctor's perfectly fine with the idea of someone else nuking the xenophobic fascists; he just doesn't want the burden of doing it himself. When someone shows up and tells him that Davros is going to accede to their demands, the Doctor's delighted. As if he seriously thinks that Davros can see reason, given what he said in the previous episode in that "the tiny pressure of my finger" speech. And what happens right after that speech? The Doctor threatens to kill Davros if Davros doesn't shut down the Dalek production line (like he really would).
Anyway, after everything goes to hell, the Doctor comes back to the wires, but again he gets someone else to do his dirty work for him. In this case it's a Dalek who conveniently rolls into the wires. Note that we already have Daleks out and and about; this isn't xenocide, it's basically the same as the flash-freezing of that army back in Planet of the Daleks. Still, the Doctor hems and haws a lot about doing it himself, and finally blows them up by proxy.
Surely killing in self-defense is not nearly as bad as killing for the sheer hell of it. The Doctor was essentially tasked with doing the former, while the Daleks do the latter. The argument the Doctor makes - "If I kill, I will be just as bad as them" - doesn't hold water. What's really at stake here is whether the hero of a family TV show can singlehandedly wipe out a bunch of enemies. If he can, then he should do it. If he can't, then that scene should never have been written.
Lastly, we have Remembrance of the Daleks. The Daleks are tearassing around England in 1963, and the Doctor must stop them. He has no margin of error here; the Daleks could wreck all of history by exterminating the wrong person. On top of that, his plot is very nearly co-opted by some non-alien fascists. There's one low-key scene in the diner where the Doctor contemplates about how "every decision creates ripples." This is during a lull in the fighting; the Doctor has a moment here to steel his resolve and move forward with his plan, and that's exactly what he does. There's no wait-let's-not-let's-find-another-way-wait-that-didn't-work-okay-let's-go-back-to-plan-A here. It's "Here, Davros, here's a bomb. Go do something stupid with it." Watching them back-to-back, Remembrance is nearly a refutation of Genesis. In the earlier serial, the threat was largely distant; we know that no matter what, it's going to be a while before the Daleks ever threaten anyone we care about other than the Doctor and company. In Remembrance, they're here on Earth. There's no time for theorizing about any possible good they might create. Someone must get them off the planet with as little fuss and as few bodies as possible, and Seven does precisely that.
Now, then, what about the Time War? Those who don't like Remembrance claim that the destruction of Skaro was the first act of that war, and that the destruction of Gallifrey between seasons 26 and 27 was comeuppance for Seven's rashness. But does the Time War start in Genesis or in Remembrance? Does it start because the Time Lords tried to alter the course of Dalek history entirely, and their agent just royally fouled it up, or does it start because one person finally took a stand, drew the line, and held the Daleks accountable for their evil? Clearly, Genesis was a pre-emptive strike from the Dalek perspective; frankly, it's the more logical candidate, because it means that the Daleks and the Time Lords have always been at war. RTD even subscribed to this theory in an article in DWM at one point. But the destruction of Skaro? That was caused because some idiot the Renegade Daleks don't even like tried to steal a Time Lord artifact. If Davros had left well enough alone, Skaro wouldn't have done the big firework.
The point I'm getting at here is that evil must be fought. Three and Seven certainly got that. Four understood, even though he was apparently unwilling to act on it himself. Nine and Ten I'm not sure ever got it - to the point where Ten condemns his half-human clone for saving the day!
Yes, killing is wrong. Still, given the choice between killing an evil person and letting an innocent die, I'd have a much easier time living with the evil person's death on my conscience.
No comments:
Post a Comment