My wife loved the first three episodes of Martha Jones’ time in the TARDIS and she’s also a huge Andrew Garfield fan but I suspected that she wasn’t going to get a great deal out of this two parter and I was right. Whilst it doesn’t reach the lows of Fear Her I’d describe it as the new series’ second ever flop.

The show is cast well and in the most part they do a decent job of summoning 1920s New York but you have to wonder why Lazlo and the showgirl are featured so heavily when they have an incidental relationship with the main Empire State Building storyline. The Hooverville scenes are somewhat interesting but home to too many “rousing speeches” none of which land particularly well.

The half-human Dalek Sec looks unsightly and weird, the wiggling worm fronds being particularly ridiculous. Sec is easily disposed of by his Dalek counterparts, so it doesn’t feel like his arc adds up to much, I’d like to have seen him do more with his hybrid powers. We end up in generic territory with The Doctor talking about what he loves about humans and hates about Daleks - and the Daleks talking about human weakness. It’s been done better.

Even with tweaks to the script, there is something off with the production generally. You get the sense that in 2007, realising this time and place in the middle of the series is stretching the budgets and expertise of the production team. I would love to see this world realised in 2022 - for a start they would actually film large chunks of the episodes in New York.

Andrew Garfield’s bit part is fun to see after the huge year he has just had with Tick Tick Boom, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and his Spiderman revival. This show doesn’t doesn’t exactly showcase his full ability though!

In my opinion, Evolution of the Daleks feels like a particularly significant step back from the already questionable Daleks in Manhattan. Gone is the more impressive scene setting of the previous episode, and instead we get a weird story about a hybrid that never really moves in a direction I didn't see coming. The stuff with Sek feels like it could be more interesting but instead his character arc and the Daleks turning on him feels pretty basic. Perhaps its because we have dealt with this idea of a nice Dalek being bad to the other Daleks, and maybe this story is original for broaching it a lot earlier than Moffat's Rusty character, but either way it feels pretty weak to me. The ending with the theatre feels extremely underwhelming to me and also just doesn't look all that great. The effects just don't hold up well at all near the end with the weird energy and lightning going everywhere - it's an extremely dry experience.

New Who Review #33

Evolution of the Daleks

Part 2 was better than Part 1 but not by much. This whole story made me kinda bored because its too slow. The idea of the dalek's leader becoming human and trying to change everything it means to be a dalek is an interesting concept on paper although This episode just made it fall flat. The side characters were fun and weren't just there for decoration. Part 2 gets a 4/10 and the whole story gets a 2/10

This half drags quite a bit, focusing more on the Daleks and the humanoid Dalek Sec than it does the more interesting character dynamics and themes the previous part had brought up. Tallulah is still the shining star, she’s my favorite thing about this story. But overall, it’s a a pretty plain story where we end up right back where we began because the Daleks couldn’t change the status quo.

On paper I think that a Human/Dalek hybrid sounds like it should theoretically be an interesting idea. But when I stop and think about it, I don’t really know what you can actually do with it, and honestly I’m not sure this episode knows what to do with it either.

The problem is that inhumanity is somewhat central to being a Dalek. So when you give it humanity, a Dalek stops feeling like a Dalek, and your Dalek story also feels less Dalek as well. You take the inhumanity of the Dalek and the humanity of a human (even a villainous human like Diagoras) and they kind of cancel each other out leading to a somewhat neutral story.

This episode does have Dalek Sec struggling with his new found humanity, which is good to be fair. However, this show already did a Dalek struggling some newfound humanity in the episode ‘Dalek’. So the best scenes that really grapple with what this new hybrid monster is, honestly feel like a worse rehash of a much better episode.

It also makes the Daleks feel far less threatening. This episode has the Doctor say

“Daleks are bad enough at anytime, but right now they’re vulnerable. That makes them more dangerous than ever.”

A vulnerable Dalek is more dangerous than an invulnerable one, that’s just nonsense. This episode can tell me this is the case to try and build some tension. But, all it ever shows me are reasons why this isn’t the case.

For example Dalek Sec keeps preventing the other Dalek’s from killing people. The plot does at least attempt to give him reasons to do so. But, even if the reasons were good, having Daleks who won’t kill just highlights that the Daleks here aren’t as scary or as dangerous as they usually are.

I honestly don’t think the reasons that the episode gives are that good either tbh. Dalek Sec spares the citizens on Hooverville on the condition that the Doctor helps them with their genetic experiments. They need to finish their work on creating another sort of human/dalek hybrid (this time they’re just zombified people who just want to exterminate) before a Gamma lightning storm hits the Empire State Building in a few hours.

My issue here is that keeping the Doctor alive is obviously a huge mistake. Why would the Doctor go out of his way to help the Daleks take over the world? The Doctor is the Daleks greatest enemy, so the longer you let him live, and the more ways you give him to scupper your plans, the more likely you’re plans are going to get scuppered.

The storytelling feels pretty rushed in this episode as well. The Daleks need a lightning strike from Gamma storm to hit the Dalekanium they’ve placed on the top of the Empire State building to carry out their plan. But there’s only going to be a Gamma storm that night. The episode doesn’t really bother to explain what a Gamma storm really is; it’s just magic sci-fi plot contrivance to justify what’s happening. The Doctor then throws his body into the lightning strike, bonding some Time Lord DNA into the genetic experiments or something. The episode doesn’t really bother to explain how this makes any sort of sense; it’s just magic sci-fi plot contrivance to justify what’s happening.

Anyway this causes the new Human/Dalek hybrids to have some to have some of the Doctor in them, and they end up killing all but 1 of the Daleks (who uses an emergency temporal shift to escape), saving the world. I wouldn’t say that this doesn’t make sense, but it does feel like pretty lazy hand waving to just keep the story moving.

The Doctor and Martha do get some good moments throughout this episode though. The Doctor’s interactions with Dalek Sec are pretty interesting for example. His shock and confusion when Dalek Sec admits that killing people in Hooverville was a mistake is a moment that particularly stood out.

Martha gets opportunities to figure out what’s happening, and when tasks with buying time by fighting the Pig Slaves, she works out a smart way of defeating her enemy without the need for physical violence (she uses the lightning strike to zap them all instead). Unfortunately for Martha she also has another conversation about being in love with the Doctor, this time to Tallulah (that’s three Ls and an H). They’ve hit this point so hard, so often that it really has become very repetitive, and highlighting how the Doctor overlooks Martha (at least romantically), really does make her feel less important.

An episode that is hampered by an intriguing albeit inherently flawed premise. There are good character moments to be found here, although some of the character beats feel derivative of other episodes. Ultimately the plot feels rushed and the ideas undercooked, leading to a story that underwhelms overall.