#and mark gatiss completely nailed gold

[all-irregularities]

Sapphire and Steel Audios 01: The Passenger

This is a choo-choo train, puffing down the track! Now it’s going forward - now it’s going back.

[daisylikesmedia]

Series 5 Episode 3: Victory of the Daleks

Ok so here we go, the infamous first historical. Series 4 was able to save even these kinds of episodes from my criticism, can series 5 do the same? Woah and there’s DALEKS in this story?! Well damn now we’ve gotta watch it let's go.

I’m gonna quickly run through the usual points in these episodes. So any fun genre-bending based on the time period/story? Nope. Interesting villains? …we’ll get to that. Glorification of the time period/historical figure? Holy shit yeaa it’s bad. As you’ve probably been able to notice, I’m not incredibly well read on history (@me thinking that The Shakespeare Code was an 1800s episode lfdjsk), but that’s partly because I find history to be quite ugly. No-one personifies that ugliness more than Winston Churchill. As someone who was born and raised in the UK, Winston Churchill is portrayed as a hero to us through our education and media. The truth, obviously, is a lot more complicated than that. He was a guy who was willing to use entire countries and millions of people’s lives as pawns in his war game VS the Nazis, and undoubtedly caused a crazy amount of suffering across Europe during the war. And we just gave him DALEKS?! It’s the perfect opportunity to explore this ugly side of his character but surprisingly enough Mark Gatiss doesn’t have the balls to do so. Like even at the end of this story there’s no anger/resentment that is shown towards Winston Churchill from The Doctor for using literal walking war crimes in the form of the Daleks. AA I grumble.

The Daleks are also sadly underutilised in this script. Their whole plan was to infiltrate WWII Britain, make a humanoid robot and implanting Dalek ideas into his brain so he can create Daleks on Earth (which is a whole mess in itself), and then use these Daleks purely as bait to get The Doctor to come and awaken the paradigm. Surely it’s easier for them to just… invade anyways? With none of the infiltration. Like, if you want The Doctor to come just make some noise somewhere and he’ll come running cause you’re *Daleks*. Why do all this espionage? It makes no sense to me, and it makes a joke out of the “master strategists” that the Daleks are supposed to be. THO the rainbow pride month Daleks do look cool, and I’m sad they didn’t stick to their guns and explore them more in other episodes because I still think they could’ve been made threatening/had their own personalities like the Cult of Skaro. It makes their escape in this episode feel incredibly lazy and underwhelming knowing they literally never get addressed again.

There is one person that saves this episode from being truly awful, and that person is Matt Smith. He acts his ass off during this episode, and nails The Doctor’s anger and angst towards the Daleks here. They are his biggest enemy and he sells it so well. Every time The Doctor was interacting with the Daleks it was just gold, and if you had any doubts about whether or not Matt Smith could nail The Doctor those should be thoroughly wiped away in this episode.

TL:DR/Overview: Glorification at possibly its worst in new who, a complete misuse of the Daleks, and a stunning lack of creativity or education when dealing with the time period. This episode, despite Matt Smith doing his best to save it with an electric performance, is Series 5’s first big miss. C tier.