"Did you ever tell them that they were eating their own relatives?"
"Certainly not! That would create what I believe is called 'consumer resistance!'"
If there's one thing more polarizing about Classic Who than the entire reign of JN-T, it's Colin Baker's Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Thankfully, it spends half of this particular serial under a cape that's slightly less of a sartorial disaster.
The plot is never more complex (well, see Trial of a Timelord if you must, but at least this one makes sense) than it is here. At the Galaxy's greatest funeral parlor, one massively socially awkward student has the hots for Teacher. Meanwhile Laurel & Hardy manage security for the establishment, which also provides foodstuff for several nearby starving planets, thanks to the ministrations of the Great Healer. Unfortunately, his business partner, Kara, doesn't like him and hires a disgraced Knight Templar to kill him. Besides, it turns out that Soylent Green is people, and the Great Healer is... Davros. Or rather, Davros' head in a jar. Or rather a robotic mockup of Davros' head in a jar. Also a pair of young people (one of whom is "a doctor, not a magician") are trying to find one of the pair's father's corpse. They find some brains in tanks, and later some murderous pepperpots, but in between they stumble across possibly the most grisly thing the show ever did; they find the corpse all right, partially mutated and stuck inside a transparent Dalek shell. And, oh yes, begging them to kill him.
Oh and it's got the Doctor in it. He spends an entire episode walking into the trap (and remember that in this season, the episodes are 45 minutes long and there are only two of them per serial) that Davros set for him. Because in addition to turning bodies into food, Davros is also turning them into Daleks and wants to gloat at the Doctor a bit.
The bounty hunter gets the drop on the mech-head, but then the real Davros shows up. He can hover, sort of, and blast lightning out of his hand. Well, before it gets shot off, that is. "No 'arm in trying," indeed. The bounty hunter loses a leg as well, Kara shows up and gets killed, as does a DJ who spent his life playing rock and roll at the dead. In case you couldn't tell, the script was written by someone who clearly loves Robert Holmes but can't quite write like him. The double-acts are Holmesian enough, but the violence really isn't.
Frankly, there's so much wrong with this entire premise that you wonder what right it has to call itself Doctor Who. When I discuss Trial more next week, I'll come back to this, but it's a point that deserves to be made here: Colin Baker's tenure might as well have been a different show. If you didn't hold it to the same standards as That Thing That Patrick Troughton Used To Be On, and if it weren't full of continuity references to the same, then it might actually have been well-remembered. Revelation's greatest strengths - the black humor and the prevalence of violence, mutations and bounty hunters - are frankly not right for Doctor Who.
However, my all-time favorite Pertwee serial is Doctor Who and the Silurians, which, with its overt political subtext and no mention of the TARDIS, is hardly That Thing That Patrick Troughton Used To Be On either. So the fact that Revelation of the Daleks misses the mark by a considerable margin isn't actually as bad as you might think. It's unfortunate, and coincidence most certainly does not imply causation, but Colin Baker's best ever serial is the one that he has the smallest role in. Writer Eric Saward apparently under-wrote Orcini (the bounty hunter) and Davros (for once) to show Baker how it should be done. This officially is the smartest thing Saward ever did, and that includes killing Adric.
Doctor Who is a program that thrives on change. Not all change is good. This is the paradox at the heart of the JN-T era, and especially Colin Baker's tumultuous stint. Revelation of the Daleks is a bit like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in that it's darker and edgier than the franchise's usual fare, and non-fans might like it more for the exact same reason that diehard fans tend to hate it. Still, this is hands-down the best Colin Baker serial. On a scale of 0 to The Mind Robber, it probably rates no higher than a (generous) 6, but on a scale of 0 to Revelation of the Daleks, no other story from Season 22 ranks even that high. It's decently-paced, the dialogue is unusually good, the Daleks can (sort of) hover, and Colin Baker gets what is as far as I'm concerned his best moment early in episode 1; when a mutant grabs Peri's abandoned sandwich, she screams and asks what that was. "Would you like me to find out?" Colin asks. He's wearing his wizard cape to underline the effect; he's just as much a stranger to this environment as his companion, but he's willing and able to investigate. Any other Doctor ever would have said either "It's probably nothing" or "trouble," followed by a silly grin. Not so with Colin: "I've got the power to discover what this thing is," he's saying, "but I'll only use it if you want me to." More of this, earlier, might have made all the difference.
This week's word I'm surprised the spellcheck recognized: "Technicolour."
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