Doctor Who 3.5: Evolution of the Daleks

[selenay]

I enjoyed this episode, but it's the first one of the season where I haven't been entirely satisified. The episode had lots of interesting ideas, lots of things to squee about but felt slightly disjointed, as though it was trying to do too many things and hadn't quite connected them right.

That's my only real quibble with the episode, though, and as mentioned there was lots to squee about too.

I loved the Dalek attack on Hooverville. Daleks flying through, strafing everyone below and being totally indestructable - it was possible to see how a couple of Daleks could potentially destroy the Earth. The season 1 episode, Dalek, is the only other episode where I've had that impression. The scene where the Dalek is in the big room in the base, elevates itself and kills all those soldiers really gave the impression that individual Daleks can be immensely powerful. I know that we've now had a couple of episodes where thousands of Daleks appeared and starting attacking, but somehow it's more impressive to see one or two.

The moment Solomon stepped forward to make his speech, I muttered something along the lines of "Oh, he's totally bought it" and a moment later I was right. That "Exterminate" never gets old :-)

The storyline between Lazlo and Tallulah was very sweet and I enjoyed it. Aw.

One of the interesting points that I hope we'll be coming back to is Martha's actions. I loved that she got to be smart and come up with a way to kill the pig men in the elevator, but that's got to have repurcussions. If I'm not mistaken, it's the first time she's killed and that's going to be a huge thing for a doctor (even a trainee) to do. I'll be a little disappointed if there isn't any fall-out from that in the next couple of episodes.

I still don't know whether Martha has been told exactly what the Daleks are and how they related to the Time Lords. I assume so, but there wasn't anything in the episodes to tell me and I no longer have Gridlock to check against!

The Doctor's speech about not wanting to cause a genocide by killing the last Dalek (and do we believe that it's the last? Thought not!) shows that he's changed a bit since season 1, although I wonder whether how permenant that change of heart will be. The Daleks won't change so at some stage the Doctor will have to do something.

The rest of the conclusion I can't really comment on because that's where I felt that it fell down. Possibly it's because there was one too many confrontation after the adventures up on the mast, so the episode didn't quite mesh. The shenanigans in the theatre didn't make quite as much sense as the writers obviously hoped, although watching the human-Daleks blow the crap out of their so-called masters was fun :-) The programmed destruct on them wasn't that surprising - we're talking about Daleks, here.

The final scenes and the hope in them did seem to carry on the theme of hope even in the worst circumstances that permeated last week's episode and I quite liked that. It was a nice element to end on.

As for next week...I'm looking forward to it :-) The previews look pretty good (didn't quite manage to ignore them this week) and they've been remarkably restrained in keeping Martha away from modern Earth so far, so I can't complain. Hopefully there will be some mention of the whole killing a bunch of pig men in the elevator element but otherwise I'm quite happy to see what RTD and co. can throw at me :-)