Inspirations - The Brain of Morbius

It was a dark and stormy night...
Actually, it was a dark and stormy year. Welcome to 1816 - the Year Without A Summer. The previous April had seen the biggest volcanic eruption in some 1300 years - that of Mount Tambora in what was then the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This event led to a volcanic winter, lowering global temperatures and resulting in freakish weather across the planet for the next 18 months. In Europe, summer never came. It remained cold and wet and crops failed, leading to famine and civil unrest in many countries. It wasn't all bad news. A chap in Germany invented a prototype bicycle, when there weren't enough oats to feed the horses, and JMW Turner got some spectacular sunsets to paint. Lord Byron won't have known what the weather was going to be like when he booked himself a villa in Switzerland for the summer. Villa Diodati lies on the shores of Lake Geneva. Tourists staying in nearby hotels hired telescopes in order to catch a glimpse of the infamous poet, and his equally infamous house guests. Present were Dr John Polidori, Byron's travelling companion, as well as fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his soon-to-be wife Mary Godwin, plus her step-sister Claire Claremont (who was hoping to rekindle a romance with Byron).
The weather was so bad that the group of friends had to spend a lot of time indoors, and one way of passing the time was a scary story competition. Polidori came up with The Vampyre - based on Byron himself. For many years it was believed that the mad, bad and dangerous to know poet was the actual author. Mary Godwin, meanwhile, devised the story of Frankenstein - a scientist who attempts to create new life from the bodies of the dead. There's a lovely sanitised version of these events as a prologue to James Whales' 1935 movie Bride of Frankenstein. Elsa Lanchester plays Mary, before later reappearing as the titular Bride.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, was first published anonymously two years later, with Mary Shelley credited as author only from the second edition in 1823. She was inspired by a number of sources, including the story of Pygmalion. The Swiss setting came from where they were staying, as well as it being a location for some of her father's works. She was aware of the electrical experiments that had been conducted by Luigi Galvani in the latter years of the previous century - experiments which had led some followers to attempt to reanimate the bodies of executed criminals.
Mary Shelley's own life story also fed in themes of death and guilt.
The Brain of Morbius is, of course, the Frankenstein Doctor Who story, wherein a mad  scientist makes a monstrous body in which to house the brain of a renegade Time Lord. We don't know for certain how many of the Frankenstein trappings were in writer Terrance Dicks' original story. His version had the Time Lord's body being built by a robot servant, using whatever it could find to make a patchwork creation, not having any sense of aesthetics. It simply used what was practical. Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes had reservations about the robot being realised in a studio, and certain aspects of the plotting. Dicks had gone off on holiday and couldn't be contacted, so Holmes was told to start redrafting. It was he who came up with the human scientist building the body. When Dicks returned, he read the new draft and was furious at what Holmes had done to his story. He argued that a brilliant scientist would never have created the patchwork body, for instance. He eventually told Holmes to take his name off the story, telling him to "use some bland pseudonym instead". When he discovered that the story as broadcast was credited to one Robin Bland, he found it hilarious, and the rift with Holmes was healed.

What we see on screen is a Robert Holmes story, so we can safely assume that much of the more explicit Frankenstein references came from him. He looked not so much to the book, but to the movie versions of the story - especially the Universal Studios series of the 1930's and '40's (from Frankenstein in 1931 to House of Dracula in 1945), and to the Hammer series, which ran from The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 to Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell in 1974.
The first two Universal films feature the creature's creator, Henry, whilst the next two feature Henry's sons, as the franchise wanted to move things to contemporary times. No Frankensteins feature in the final three movies - just the creature, which led to the popular misconception that Frankenstein was the name of the flat-headed bloke with the bolts through his neck. Hammer chose to have Peter Cushing's Baron as the protagonist in all their movies, whipping up a new monster each time.
The Universal movies created the idea of the mad, amoral scientist, which was picked up with a vengeance in the 1950's after the world entered the atomic age. All the 1950's Sci-Fi movie mad scientists owe a debt to Baron Frankenstein. One of the archetypal amoral scientists of the golden age of Sci-Fi is the one played by Walter Pidgeon in Forbidden Planet - one Dr Morbius...
The Brain of Morbius' mad scientist is Mehendri Solon - played impeccably by Philip Madoc. Solon was a follower of the rogue Time Lord Morbius, who had been President of the High Council. He had craved even more power and had promised his followers access to the Sacred Flame on the planet Karn, which produced an elixir that greatly prolonged life. Captured by the Time Lords on Karn, Morbius was executed - but Solon managed to remove his brain and keep it alive before his body was vapourised. Hammer did the same trick when they had the Baron's brain transplanted into a new body by one of his acolytes at the conclusion of The Revenge of Frankenstein - a body which just happened to look very like Peter Cushing.

One of the elements which comes from the movies is the hunchbacked assistant - generally known as Ygor. In the original James Whale film, this character is actually called Fritz (played by Dwight Frye. He returns in a number of later films in the franchise as other characters, and had previously portrayed Renfield in the Bela Lugosi Dracula movie). The Son of Frankenstein, the third installment, does introduce a character named Ygor - a murderer who broke his neck when hanged but who did not die. He's played by Lugosi. He has befriended the monster and wants the new Baron, played by Basil Rathbone, to make it well again - mainly so he can use it to kill the people who tried to hang him. Ygor is in the next film as well (The Ghost of Frankenstein), at the end of which he has his brain transplanted into the monster, and Lugosi goes on to play the monster in the fourth film (Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman).
In The Brain of Morbius, the Ygor figure is Condo -  a character of brute violence as well as having an affectionate side, as he takes a bit of a shine to Sarah.

The Sacred Flame is in the care of the Sisterhood of Karn. The elixir has meant that they can live forever. The inspiration for this part of the story derives from H Rider Haggard's She. She: A History of Adventure was first published in 1886. That's She, as in She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. The tale tells of explorers coming across an African civilisation ruled by a queen named Ayesha who is immortal. Her kingdom lies beneath a dormant volcano, and she gets her longevity from bathing in a pillar of fire which has magical properties. There have been a number of film versions of the story - the best known of which is the Hammer one from 1965 starring Ursula Andress as Ayesha. Peter Cushing is the leader of the expedition. I should point out at this juncture that director Christopher Barry had hoped to get Cushing to play Solon or, failing that, Vincent Price, who worked a lot in Britain in the 1970's.
Another cinematic version of She you may have seen is the 1935 one starring Randolph Scott and Nigel Bruce, which relocated the action to a lost civilisation in the Arctic.
For much of the action in The Brain of Morbius, Sarah is blind. When she first realises this she becomes a little self-pitying and mimics a flower seller - "buy some lovely violets...". This may be just coincidence, but Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady is a Covent Garden flower seller - and that musical is based on George Bernard Shaw's play of Pygmalion, the classical original of which was one of Mary Godwin's inspirations for Frankenstein...

We can't leave this look at The Brain of Morbius without mentioning its most controversial sequence. (Controversial for fans that is. Mrs Whitehouse really started to go to town on the programme following this story's broadcast). The Doctor and newly reanimated Morbius fight a mental duel, in which they force each other back through previous incarnations. After we see Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee, we get a number of other characters (all played by members of the production team). Hinchcliffe and Holmes maintained that, as far as they were concerned, these figures were earlier versions of the Doctor. When the first regeneration took place back in 1966, David Whitaker originally had the Doctor say that he had been renewed several times before - so the Hartnell Doctor was not the first. However, this dialogue was cut from later drafts of The Power of the Daleks, and The Three Doctors explicitly states that there have only been two Doctors before the Pertwee one. As it is Morbius who loses the contest, and not the Doctor, these other figures have to be his earlier selves - despite what they intended at the time.
Next time: The Thing From Another World meets an episode of The Avengers, as not everything in the garden is rosy for the Doctor and Sarah...

G is for... Glitz, Sabalom

The Doctor first encountered Sabalom Glitz, who hailed from the planet Salostopus in Andromeda, when in his sixth incarnation. He and Peri had come to investigate the planet Ravolox, which had the same mass, rotation and angle of tilt as the Earth, yet lay on the other side of the galaxy. Glitz was there with his young associate Dibber, sent by a mysterious backer to steal some data files from an underground bunker. A career criminal, Glitz was prepared to lie, cheat and even kill to achieve his goal, and would do anything for money. When brute force failed, he would attempt to charm his way to success, but this failed to act on Queen Katryca of the Tribe of the Free, who could see that he was nothing but a rogue. Glitz joined forces with the Doctor when it suited him, but later abandoned him when he saw the chance to trick the L3 robot Drathro into giving him the data files he sought. The files were ultimately destroyed when the robot burned up, but Glitz was consoled by having the remains of the power mast, a black light converter, which it had used - composed as it was of a valuable mineral.
The events on Ravolox - really the Earth of the far future, transported across space by the High Council of Time Lords to hide the fact that the data files contained information stolen from the Matrix - formed part of the evidence used against the Doctor during a judicial inquiry into his meddlesome actions. When the inquiry turned into a full-blown trial and the Doctor faced the death penalty for genocide, the Master brought Glitz to the space-station where the proceedings were taking place to act as a witness for his defence. It was the Master who had employed him to steal the data files. Glitz joined the Doctor in the nightmare world of the Matrix, created by the Valeyard - the prosecutor who turned out to be a future incarnation of the Doctor. Once again, Glitz appeared to be helping the Doctor, but he was still working for the Master. He gave him a copy of the data files, but these proved to be a booby-trap prepared by the Valeyard, and the Master and Glitz became trapped in the Master's TARDIS by a limbo atrophier. Once the Valeyard had been defeated, the Doctor asked the court to be lenient with Glitz.

Some time later, now in his seventh incarnation, the Doctor and his companion Mel visited the Iceworld complex on the planet Svartos. They encountered Glitz in one of the restaurants. He had had his spaceship - the Nosferatu - impounded as he could not pay the landing charges, and he had even been forced to sell his crew into slavery with Iceworld's ruler, Kane. Kane was going to turn them into a mindless army once he got free of the complex, which was really his prison. Glitz had been duped into buying a map, which was supposed to lead to a fabulous treasure hidden in the lower levels of Svartos. However, it was said to be guarded by a dragon. This was really a bio-mechanical creature which housed the power source Kane needed to reactivate his spaceship. The map had a hidden tracker device, enabling Kane to discover the dragon's whereabouts. Once he realised he had been tricked, Glitz attempted to run off in his ship but was stopped by one of Kane's officers who wanted it for herself. It was later taken by a group of customers trying to flee Iceworld, but Kane destroyed it. Once Kane himself had been destroyed, Glitz decided to commandeer his ship - renaming it the Nosferatu II. Mel decided to join him on his travels in order to keep him out of trouble, whilst the Doctor traveled on with a new companion, a worker from the restaurant named Ace.

Played by: Tony Selby. Appearances: Trial of a Time Lord [Parts 1 - 4, 13, 14] (1985), Dragonfire (1987).

G is for... Gilmore, Group Captain

Group Captain "Chunky" Gilmore led the Intrusion Countermeasures Group - a British scientific-military organisation which was a precursor to UNIT. Gilmore had as his chief scientific adviser Prof Rachel Jensen. In late 1963, the Group were called in to investigate strange radio signals coming from the Shoreditch area of East London - emanating from Coal Hill School, and a nearby junkyard in Totter's Lane. The Doctor arrived in the area soon after, accompanied by Ace, and he inveigled himself onto the investigation. At the junkyard, he identified the alien life-form which the Group had cornered in a shed as a Dalek. Gilmore was forced to accept the Doctor's help when it became clear that he had knowledge of the Daleks. He clearly reminded the Doctor of his old friend the Brigadier, as he called Gilmore "Brigadier" at one point. As the Doctor struggled to stop two rival factions of Daleks from destroying the planet in their hunt for the Hand of Omega, which he himself had hidden in the district many years ago, Gilmore discovered that he had a traitor in his midst. His seemingly loyal sergeant, Mike Smith, was secretly working for a fascist group who wanted to ally with one of the Dalek factions. Gilmore was forced to relieve him of duty, but later attended the young man's funeral after he had been killed by a Dalek agent.

Played by: Simon Williams. Appearances: Remembrance of the Daleks (1988).

• Williams came to prominence in the long-running drama Upstairs, Downstairs, playing James Bellamy. He is the brother of the poet Hugo Williams.
• His son, Tam - now also an actor - played one of the Coal Hill schoolchildren in this Doctor Who story.
• The Intrusion Countermeasures Group have been revived in recent years on audio by Big Finish, with all the original TV cast reprising their roles.

G is for... Gillyflower, Ada and Winifred

Mrs Winifred Gillyflower ran the Sweetville match factory in Yorkshire, with her unseen partner Mr Sweet. The factory was run on Utopian lines, and Mrs Gillyflower often crusaded against the slack morals of the Victorian age. She used her blind and disfigured daughter Ada in her lectures, as a symbol of what was wrong with society - claiming her drunken husband had been responsible for hurting her. Such was Sweetville's reputation that many people wanted to work there, but Mrs Gillyflower only hired young, good looking men and women. The Doctor and Clara infiltrated the factory posing as new recruits, and discovered that Mrs Gillyflower was working on a scheme to quite literally preserve only her ideal workers - dipping them in a vat of toxic red liquid. The bodies of those who did not survive the process - the rejects - were later found in the nearby river. The Doctor was rejected, but was saved from death by Ada, who saw him as a kindred spirit - a monster like herself. She kept him locked away and looked after him.

Sweetville was later investigated by Madam Vastra, Jenny and Strax - the Paternoster Gang. Jenny was able to break in and managed to rescue the Doctor, and together they freed Clara. It transpired that Mr Sweet was really a Red Leech - a prehistoric parasite which secreted the red liquid. It was attached to Mrs Gillyflower's chest. Her grand scheme was to fire a rocket full of the red toxin into the atmosphere so that it would poison the planet, with only her chosen acolytes left to repopulate the Earth - and her daughter would not be amongst them. Ada was horrified to learn that it was her mother who had disfigured her, whilst testing the red toxin. Strax managed to remove the toxin from the rocket before it was launched, and Mrs Gillyflower fell from the rocket gantry to her death. Ada then crushed Mr Sweet with her cane as it tried to crawl away. The Paternoster Gang took her to London to begin a new life.

Played by: Rachael Stirling (Ada), and Diana Rigg (Winifred). Appearances: The Crimson Horror (2013).

• Rigg and Stirling are, of course, real life mother and daughter. This was the first time that they had ever acted alongside each other. Mark Gatiss wrote the roles specifically for the pair, after having appeared on stage with Dame Diana.

G is for... Gibbis

A member of the mole-like Tivolian race who had been transported to the prison vessel in which dwelt an alien Minotaur. This prison looked like a 1970's English hotel, and each of its inhabitants had something which they feared hidden in one of the many rooms. The Minotaur had been trapped on the vessel after the people who once worshiped it turned against it. The captives fed its need for faith - their fears causing them to turn to what they most believed in.
Like all his people, Gibbis was naturally cowardly. His race were known as the most invaded in the universe, as they always meekly accepted subjugation. The capital city had wide boulevards for invading armies to march down, and their national anthem is "Glory to <insert name here>". Gibbis' fear was personified by the Weeping Angels, as they could not be reasoned with in any way. He was prepared to sacrifice his fellow captives in order to save himself. As it was, his strategy worked, as he was the only one of the group of captives encountered by the Doctor, Amy and Rory to survive.

Played by: David Walliams. Appearances: The God Complex (2011).

• A life-long fan of Doctor Who, Walliams had featured in a number of comedy skits with Mark Gatiss for the BBC's "Doctor Who Night" in 1999, and he had sought out Tom Baker to provide the narration for Little Britain.
• As he had to come in early for his make-up, and leave after others had gone home, it was only on the night of the wrap party that his fellow cast members saw him without the prosthetics.

Inspirations - The Android Invasion

It's an invasion. Using androids.
Back in the day, we never had these things called "spoilers". With every new Doctor Who story broadcast the BBC generally let you know what was going to be in it in advance, going so far as to release pictures of the new aliens and monsters to the press as a means of encouraging people to watch. Story titles tended to be of the "Something of the Daleks" variety, so you knew at least one of them would turn up before the closing credits of Episode One.
When the 2019 New Year's Day Special dispensed with opening credits, I'm sure a lot of people were expecting the real episode title to be revealed as "Resolution of the Daleks" - or just Dalek, singular.
Back in Season 11, best friends Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke fell out over the re-titling of Part One of the latter's Invasion of the Dinosaurs. It went out simply as "Invasion", as Dicks wanted to keep the fact that the monsters invading London were prehistoric ones as a cliffhanger surprise. Hulke, on the other hand, felt that knowing dinosaurs were going to appear would attract more viewers.
I mention all this as having The Android Invasion as a title at the start of Part One of this story really acted as a terrible spoiler, and totally undermined the mystery which writer Terry Nation was about to set up.
The story opens with the Doctor and Sarah apparently arriving back in present day England, the TARDIS arriving in the middle of a forest. They go for a walk to see where they are, and come across a UNIT soldier who is blundering blindly through the woods. Ignoring their warnings, he then walks over a cliff and falls to his death. They are then attacked by some men in white overalls, their faces hidden under helmets. They flee to a quaint little village, which Sarah recalls from a story she covered some time before. This is Devesham, site for a space defence station. The village seems deserted, and strange things are found in the pub - like a calendar with every date the same, and all the coins in the till of exactly the same year of minting.

Things get even stranger when a lorry pulls up outside containing a bunch of villagers, who all file silently inside - and one of them is the UNIT soldier who they had earlier seen fall to his death. At the stroke of the clock, everyone suddenly comes to life, and acts as if nothing has happened...
If it hadn't been for that title, this would have made for a great mystery. It's not the first time that we, the audience, know what is going on, whilst the Doctor has to run to catch up.
Sadly, the rest of the story fails to live up to the atmospheric opening segment.
Following the success of Genesis of the Daleks, Terry Nation had been asked to deliver another script for Season 13. You'll recall he has been contributing something every year since Season 10. He had only ever written one story for the programme which did not feature the Daleks, and that was The Keys of Marinus way back in 1964. He was keen to do another Dalek-free story, and seems to have looked to another TV series which he had script-edited for a while for inspiration - The Avengers. Nation had been heavily involved in the final season of that show - the one with Tara King.
One of The Avengers' regular tricks was to take something fairly commonplace, and give it a twist. A number of episodes were set in seemingly ordinary English villages, where strange things tended to happen. The first Mrs Peel episode was about a village where the population had been replaced by enemy agents (1965's The Town of No Return), whilst another was about a whole enemy base built underneath a village (1967's The Living Dead). Later that same year we had Murdersville, wherein the entire populace of a village have been recruited as assassins by Murder Incorporated.

The Android Invasion even has, as one of its guest stars, an actor from the Tara King era of The Avengers. Patrick Newell, who appears here as Colonel Faraday, had appeared as the character 'Mother' - Steed and King's wheelchair-bound boss.
Newell was brought in when Nicholas Courtney was unable to reprise his role as the Brigadier, for this is a bit of a Pertwee era throwback story. The director assigned to this adventure is none other than Barry Letts, who produced all but one of the Pertwee stories. The Brigadier has an office at Devesham's space defence station, but he is not present. He's off in Geneva, as Courtney had accepted a lengthy stage role. Quite how the alien Kraals know this, and so fail to create an android replica of him, remains a mystery. Perhaps astronaut Guy Crayford's memory of the Brigadier was that he was always in Geneva and never at Devesham. We do get to see the return of Warrant Officer Benton (nee Sergeant), and Lt-Surgeon Harry Sullivan. They are android duplicates for two of the episodes, and only appear as the real Benton and Harry in the final episode. It's the final appearance for both of them, and their departures are nothing special. We last see Benton lying on the floor, having been attacked by his duplicate - so could have been dead for all we knew. A very sad way for such a well-loved character to go out.

The villains of the piece are the Kraals who, long before Russell T Davies started doing animal-headed aliens like the Judoon, are inspired by rhinoceroses. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe was dissatisfied with the creature design, as he did not think it likely that such brutish beings could be masters of intricate android electronics. They seem to follow their chief scientist Styggron, rather than their military commander Chedaki. The Kraals have rescued the aforementioned astronaut Guy Crayford after his spaceship foundered near Jupiter - the story which Sarah had been following when she first came to Devesham. You'll recall that, according to the Pertwee era especially, Britain had a flourishing space programme in the 1970's, what with the first manned missions to Mars and all. It seems it wasn't just Daleks and Cyberkings which disappeared through the crack in Amy Pond's wall. A whole lot of 1970's stories seem to have gone as well.
Crayford thinks that the Kraals saved him, whilst his colleagues back at Devesham abandoned him, so he's quite happy to help them invade Earth. They've told him it will be a nice invasion, with the Kraals settling in uninhabited regions, but Styggron plans to spread a lethal virus that will kill everyone within a couple of weeks. To prepare for the invasion, they have built a fake Devesham and its environs on their home planet of Oseidon, in order to test out the androids who will infiltrate the area and spread the plague. Terry Nation loved plagues and viruses. They have featured in a number of his Dalek stories, and earlier in the year in which The Android Invasion was first broadcast (1975) we were shown the first season of his BBC TV series Survivors, which told of the aftermath of a global plague.

Deadly doubles have featured in the series before, and are nothing new in Science Fiction. The Star Trek franchise had the whole Mirror Universe set of episodes across its various series, for instance.
Hartnell played the wicked Abbot of Amboise back in The Massacre, as well as a Dalek duplicate of himself in The Chase, whilst Troughton gave us the would-be dictator Salamander in Enemy of the World. Inferno had given us nastier versions of the whole UNIT contingent, plus most of the Project Inferno personnel. The Nestenes made Auton replicas of people like General Scobie. The Doctor encounters a lethal android copy of Sarah, before she then encounters an android version of him, and we've already mentioned that Benton and Harry are also copied.
Naturally, the Doctor uses the android duplicate of himself to help resolve the whole invasion scheme - pretending to be his android to get past android Benton and then to confront Styggron.

But first he manages to convince Crayford that his Kraal friends have been less than honest. And so we come to what is probably the most notorious bit of plotting in the entire classic era of the programme. Crayford thinks that the Kraals weren't able to replace one of his eyes, lost when his ship was wrecked. The Doctor points out that he still has it, under his eye-patch. Yes, Crayford hasn't ever noticed that he has a perfectly good eye under the patch. This ludicrous bit of plotting could have easily been got round by the Kraals simply telling him they had given him an artificial one. They're building precise android duplicates of people, for goodness sake...
This being a Terry Nation script, he has the TARDIS have something which no other writer has shown it to have, or ever will later on. Apparently if you leave the key in the door, a defence mechanism makes it travel on to its intended destination - whether the Doctor is on board or not. As safety features go, it's a crazy one. Presumably it only deploys when the TARDIS has landed in an alien replica of the place the ship was supposed to be going to, and the writer has only realised at the last minute that there's a gaping plot hole and he needs a way of getting the TARDIS off the planet when he's got the Doctor travelling on by other means...
Next time: H Rider Haggard meets Mary Shelley. Sarah can't see what the fuss is about, as the Doctor goes head to head with another rogue Time Lord...

Resolution - A Review

Resolution, the New Year's Day Special, provided us with the finale that we were denied back in December. An enjoyable episode, though not without its faults.
Chris Chibnall assured us that there would be no old monsters in Series 11, and he was right if only up to a point. From the production pictures I have seen on-line, parts of this episode were recorded during the making of Series 11, so the return of the Daleks was always part of the plan. (Some people actually seem to think that this story was produced in response to the negativity with which the last season was met. Patently not the case).
Let's get the negatives out of the way first, and there weren't too many. The main problem I had was with the Ryan / Aaron, Graham / Aaron interludes. Bringing Ryan's dad into a one hour episode was a big mistake. The story was about the Dalek, and what the Doctor was going to do about the Dalek. The Sinclair family dynamic scenes killed the momentum and wasted valuable screen time - leading to yet another rather rushed conclusion. Don't get me wrong - the scenes were well written, and superbly played, but but they should have been used somewhere else - perhaps in an ordinary episode which had relevant themes and where they would have fitted better in context. The Special episodes tend to be watched by people who don't necessarily follow the regular series, so I'm sure many casual viewers were left wondering what was going on as they had no idea about Ryan's daddy issues.
Aaron did at least help provide the means to destroy the Dalek - which brings me to another negative. The Doctor herself was once again shown to be impotent. She had no plan herself how to defeat the Skarosian. The 13th Doctor did at least confront the Dalek on her own, but she acted as though she were not the same person who had first encountered the Daleks 55 years ago, and who raged at them in her 9th and 10th incarnations. Chibnall just had to have the Doctor be "nice" and offer the Dalek a chance to stand down. A far cry from 2005's Dalek, from which this story borrowed heavily.
Here was a chance to show the darker side to the new Doctor, and the opportunity was wasted.

The Special episodes tend to be a little more whimsical than standard ones, and usually feature less death. This was not the case, as we saw the Dalek exterminate various individuals and squads of soldiers. There was some humour - namely the Brexit / Trump reference when the Doctor found out that UNIT operations had been suspended, and the family having to face a world without Wi-Fi and social media and so actually have to speak to each other. The latter joke would have worked better had this been a Christmas episode, however. New Year's Day in the UK is just like a normal Sunday.
I was worried about what the homemade Dalek might look like, but I think it was realised very well. Loved the missile launchers behind the bumps. Special mention should be made for Nick Briggs giving the Dalek a more interesting characterisation - both once it was in its new shell, and especially when it was inhabiting the mind of archaeologist Lin. She and Mitch worked well, and I'm sure there are some who would have liked to see them run off in the TARDIS at the conclusion rather than Ryan and the ever under-utilised Yaz.
The Reconnaissance Dalek did throw up some continuity problems (but since when have Daleks not muddied continuity?). Some questions about plot logic were also thrown up by it - such as how such a powerful creature could have been captured and destroyed by a bunch of Anglo-Saxon peasant-soldiers in the first place? The Dalek mutant was chopped into three bits, yet a bit of ultra-violet light managed to reanimate one of these pieces after 1100 years, magically teleport the other bits towards it, despite no way of knowing where they were buried, then it reanimated them and joined itself up. The Witch's Familiar had told us that Daleks were essentially immortal, but in that story it was shown that they still physically decomposed. It has to be asked, also, how such powerful Daleks - capable of remotely stopping TARDISes - did not feature heavily in the Time War.
One other plot point that made no sense was the two Custodians, in Siberia and the South Pacific, not knowing that the British colleague had been killed and left exactly where he fell. Dead people left beside roads would still be be buried even in the 9th Century, or at least have their remains scattered by animals if not found.
I am not too worried about the apparent closing down of UNIT. It will simply be brought back when a future episode needs it. A trick was missed when Chibnall failed to have the Doctor call on Torchwood instead. We could have had a nice cameo from Captain Jack, too busy dealing with an alien menace of his own to come and help out.
A very good first third, and an excellent last third. When I buy the DVD in February I will probably be fast forwarding the middle third, however. Hopefully Chibnall will take on board the criticisms of the recent series and give us more action-adventure and less soap when the show returns in 2020.