Resurrection of the Daleks, violence and outdoing Robert Holmes

Eric Saward’s Earthshock script is well-recognised by fans as a piecemeal ‘greatest hits’ compilation of successful elements from previous Cyberman stories. It was a success and Saward followed the same pattern when writing Resurrection of the Daleks: a popular returning foe; a story that starts on Earth and moves into space; the Doctor uncharacteristically using guns; grisly deaths of uniformed cannon fodder; a high body count, etc. But it also plunders the series’ past for scenarios and set-pieces, though far less successfully than in Earthshock.

Earlier Dalek stories are drawn upon heavily. The deserted dockside warehouse setting and the Daleks’ use of humans as troops come from The Dalek Invasion of Earth; the duplicates from The Chase; the modification of Daleks and their resulting conflict from Evil of the Daleks; the two connected time periods from Day of the Daleks; the Daleks’ biological weapon from Planet of the Daleks; a character called Galloway from Death to the Daleks; the Movellan war and Daleks awakening Davros from Destiny of the Daleks; and the opening machinegun massacre, the Doctor’s fudged moral dilemma, and the Dalek mutant’s attack are from Genesis of the Daleks.

Saward later admitted in an interview with fanzine DWB that when writing the story he had “watched everything that existed with the Daleks”. It shows, and his denial in the interview of conscious imitation (suggesting instead that it may have been unconscious) is not altogether convincing. But it’s not only Dalek stories he ransacked. There’s also a very deliberate attempt to outdo Robert Holmes, a writer whose Doctor Who work Saward is known to have much admired.

Consider the opening scene, in which the escaping slaves are massacred by Lytton and his two henchmen in their police officer disguises. What function does it serve? It puts Stein on Earth to meet the Doctor and establishes Lytton as a ruthless bastard. But how necessary are these functions and is there an alternative reason for the scene? In short: not very, and yes.

We discover later that Stein’s not really an escaped slave but a Dalek agent. It’s rather unclear whether he knew this himself at the time of the escape, but it doesn’t matter. As an agent he would need no pretext to get to the warehouse. Believing himself a captive, he could have escaped alone or with just Galloway. The mass escape device is redundant in plot terms, it simply allows for a massacre to be played out.

Do we need to establish Lytton’s ruthlessness with such an otherwise pointless and excessively violent scene (which is certainly one of the nastiest bits of 1980s Doctor Who)? No, not when we learn in the next scenes that he’s the Daleks’ chief mercenary and advocates the use of biological weapons.

The inclusion of the tramp who has no role in the story but to add another random murder to the tally is wholly unnecessary, as is the later killing of the metal-detecting man on the mud. This extreme and gratuitous violence is not appropriate for tea time family viewing.

In fact, if it was necessary to have some violence at the top of the episode, why not have it just the tramp who’s killed, perhaps after witnessing Lytton or a trooper transmatting into the warehouse to check on the virus canisters? The scale of the killing here is massively excessive to any function it serves.

All the opening succeeds in doing is to show police officers killing ruthlessly. Consider also that they use sub-machineguns. We are told that they are not allowed to take anachronistic equipment with them, but this is hardly convincing. The Daleks have no problem with leaving canisters of the Movellan virus in the warehouse, or killing soldiers with their own weaponry. They use machineguns because it doesn’t immediately alert the viewer to the police officers’ extra-terrestrial origins. But why should that matter, as only seconds later this is revealed as they transmat away? And why police disguises, particularly when they kill all witnesses? A massacre is a massacre, plod disguise or no. It’s all contrived and purposeless.

Except there is a purpose of a sort. This is where Robert Holmes comes in. Back in 1971, Holmes’s Terror of the Autons had received criticism for making police officers scary, for the scene in which two police officers are revealed to be blank-faced Autons. In Resurrection of the Daleks, Saward tries to replicate that shock and top it, outdoing Holmes by having his police officers seen to perpetrate a full massacre, and with the sort of real-world weaponry used in ‘realistic’ contemporary gangster films and crime series to make it all the more lifelike.

Perhaps you could argue that if Holmes can pull it off to great fan appreciation, why shouldn’t Saward too. But Terror of the Autons is about perverting the mundane and turning the comforting into the deadly. Murderous Autons disguised as police officers, like suffocating armchairs, is appropriate to the storyline – and it provides a great cliffhanger too. Resurrection offers none of this. It is a story primarily about Davros and the Daleks. Mock police officers are irrelevant. A script editor would surely have picked this up and excised the sequence, were the writer himself not also the series’ script editor.

Saward does something similar in Revelation of the Dalek. I would suggest that the mutated Stengos begging Natasha to kill him was inspired by a similar scene involving the mutating Nohah imploring Vira to kill him in Holmes’s The Ark in Space, which was removed in post-production for being too intense. Presumably Holmes related this to Saward. Saward again goes one-up by getting his version to air.

Recognising the lapses in his scriptwriting, Saward called Resurrection of the Daleks “the worst script ever written for Doctor Who”. It is such shockingly inappropriate sequences as the opening scene which make it a strong contender for that title.

[This is a slightly revised version of an article published in Panic Moon in April 2011]

Images © BBC

Sources

Eric Saward interview in DWB #57 (August 1988)

Production subtitles on the DVD of The Ark in Space