Story 206 - Victory of the Daleks

In which the Doctor and Amy visit London during the height of the Battle of Britain, in response to a call for assistance received from wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Amy discovers that the Doctor and Churchill are old friends, and the PM would love to get his hands on the TARDIS. Churchill explains that the Doctor has arrived many weeks after he sent the call, and without the Doctor's advice he had gone ahead and agreed to Professor Bracewell's new invention. The Doctor is taken to the roof where he meets Bracewell and sees his weapon in action - shooting down German aircraft with an energy ray. The weapon proves to be a Dalek, in khaki livery. Bracewell insists that he is the inventor of the machine, which he has called an "Ironside". There are two Ironsides working in the Cabinet War Office, pretending to be helpful servants as well as weapons against the Nazis. Neither Churchill nor Amy can understand why the Doctor hates them so much. The Doctor is surprised to learn that Amy does not know about the Daleks, considering that they moved the Earth across space and invaded the planet only a year or so ago, and had previously been involved in the battle around Canary Wharf.

The Doctor urges Churchill not to trust the Ironsides and confronts Bracewell. He shows him the blueprints for his creations, and tells the Doctor that he has other ideas about space travel and advanced weaponry. The Doctor attempts to force an Ironside to admit that it is really a Dalek, hitting it with a metal bar. In a rage he accuses it of being a Dalek, at which point it and its companion declare that they have got what they came for. They show their true nature as they attack some soldiers. Bracewell insists that he created them, but they reveal that it was they who had created him. One of them blasts off his hand to reveal that he is really an advanced android, programmed with a complete personality and life story. The Daleks teleport away, and the Doctor rushes to the TARDIS where he manages to detect a Dalek saucer hidden in orbit near the Moon. He travels to the spaceship alone. He finds that there are only three Daleks remaining of the crew, holding them back by pretending that a Jammie Dodger biscuit is the button for a powerful bomb. The Daleks reveal that they have been searching the cosmos for a Progenitor - a device which contains pure Dalek DNA from which more Daleks can be created. However, their cells have been mutated, and the Progenitor no longer recognised them as Daleks. The Doctor has now identified them, and his outburst has been recorded. The Progenitor is activated, and soon after a group of new Daleks are created.

They are much larger, with coloured casings. A white one identifies itself as a Supreme Dalek. Others are identified as a Strategist, a Drone, an Eternal and a Scientist. They represent the new Dalek Paradigm. They immediately view the existing Daleks who created them as inferior and exterminate them. The Supreme tells the Doctor that they plan to travel to the future and create a whole new Dalek race. They realise that the Doctor is tricking them with the biscuit, forcing him to retreat to the TARDIS. In order to stop the Doctor from attacking them, they threaten to destroy London. Their spaceship is damaged and has limited weaponry, so they instead fire an electrical charge at the city which turns all the lights on - just as a German air-raid approaches. The Doctor contacts Bracewell and urges him to help them. One of his inventions is a device which enables aircraft to go into space. A squadron of RAF Spitfires is rapidly outfitted and sent to attack the saucer.

The aircraft succeed in damaging the Dalek device and the lights of London go out. However, the Daleks have another scheme to stop the Doctor. Bracewell has a powerful bomb capable of destroying the entire planet built into him, which the Daleks activate. The Doctor is forced to return to Earth to deal with this new threat, allowing the New Dalek Paradigm to escape by travelling into the future. The Daleks had programmed Bracewell so well that he has really come to believe in the memories they implanted into him, and Amy is able to tap into these to make him override the bomb.
A short while later he expects to be dismantled, but the Doctor and Amy realise that he is now just as human as anyone else so should have a chance to live. He can escape if he wants to.
Amy manages to stop Churchill from stealing the TARDIS key. They depart, with the Doctor still pondering how it is that Amy did not know anything about the Daleks. As the TARDIS dematerialises a crack on the wall, shaped like a crooked smile, is revealed...

Victory of the Daleks was written by Mark Gatiss, and was first broadcast on 17th April, 2010.
It was the first Dalek story since The Stolen Earth / Journey's End at the close of the fourth series. A solitary Dalek had been seen in one of the 2009 Specials - The Waters of Mars - but Russell T  Davies had considered featuring them in The End of Time, when they would have been in an alliance with the Time Lords to end the Time War. Davies contacted Steven Moffat to check if he was going to be doing a Dalek story for Series 5, and might want a gap so that they would have more of an impact. Moffat explained that he was indeed going to have the 11th Doctor meet the Daleks, so Davies omitted them from his finale.
Moffat was inheriting a clean sweep as far as the programme was concerned, able to have his own new TARDIS (inside and out) and new companions, as well as his new Doctor. He decided on a new design for the Daleks to go along with all these changes. The basic shape would be retained, but he was a big fan of the Peter Cushing Dalek movies and liked the size of the film ones, and their more colourful appearance. The movies had already influenced the design for the new TARDIS exterior.
The new Daleks would have colourful shells denoting different functions and a much bigger appearance - with thicker bumpers to increase their height. An organic eyeball was added to the eye-stalk.
The designers intended that the new props would have interchangeable utility arms, which would emerge from a unit on the back and slide round the mid-section. This idea was never put into practice, and unfortunately the tool store on the rear of the casings gave the new Daleks a humpbacked appearance.
The colour finish also gave them a plastic look, which made many people think of rubbish / recycling bins.
Moffat and Gatiss raved about the design upgrade. Fans generally hated the new Daleks, although kids seemed to like them well enough to buy a shed load of merchandise.

The story was also Moffat's first celebrity-historical, as it featured Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill. He is played by Ian McNeice, who had performed the role in a number of different stage productions. A prolific actor, he was already featuring in the popular ITV comedy drama Doc Martin, having previously been seen in the HBO drama Rome. He was in the pilot of Game of Thrones, but the part was recast when it went to series due to McNeice having other filming commitments.
The only other guest artist of note is Bill Patterson, who played Professor Bracewell. Patterson first came to prominence in the Glasgow ice-cream wars movie Comfort and Joy, and the BBC adaptation of Iain Banks' The Crow Road, which also featured Peter Capaldi. More recently he had starred in the Phil Collinson produced BBC supernatural drama Sea of Souls.
Writer Mark Gatiss cameos as the voice of the lead Spitfire pilot.
As far as story arc elements go, we have another glimpse of the crack from Amy's bedroom, this time revealed on a wall as the TARDIS dematerialises. There is also the mystery of her not knowing about the Daleks when they have staged two recent very public attacks on the planet.

Overall, probably the worst Dalek story going in my opinion. The New Paradigm aren't stupid. They can see this isn't very good and so do a runner with quarter of an hour still to run, leaving us with the prolonged Bracewell bomb section, where the weapon is somehow defused because of his faked memories. The new saucer interior isn't a patch on the RTD ones. A really annoying aspect is the speed with which Bracewell gets a device which only exists on a blueprint built and fitted to the Spitfires in a matter of minutes. The story is just dreadfully plotted. The only good thing going here are the Ironsides, but they get bumped off far too soon. Voted the second worst Dalek story in DWM's 50th Anniversary poll at 193rd place (beaten only by the Daleks in Manhattan two-parter).
Things you might like to know:

• The first appearance of the Daleks in the revived series coincided with the 2005 General Election in the UK - leading to the famous recreation of the Daleks on Westminster Bridge image on the cover of that week's Radio Times. This story coincided with the 2010 elections, so the public got to see the new Daleks on Westminster Bridge on a new Radio Times cover, before they were revealed on screen. Or rather on three covers, as there was a choice of a red Dalek, representing the Labour Party, a blue Dalek representing the Conservatives, and an orange Dalek representing the Liberal-Democrats - Britain's three main political parties.
• Clearly a fan of classic war movies, Gatiss' call signs for the Spitfires include "Broadsword" and "Danny Boy". These derive from radio call signs in the 1968 movie Where Eagles Dare, which had starred Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton.
• It's never specified where the trio of Dalek survivors come from. Where they left over from Davros' Reality Bomb scheme, or from some earlier Dalek story? If they came from The Stolen Earth story then they were created from Davros' body, and so would have been pure Kaled - which begs the question: what does the Progenitor regard as pure Dalek?
• On the morning after the climactic air-raid we see some ARP men raise the Union Jack - an homage to the famous image of US Army soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes during the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945.
• If the Air Raid Warden looks familiar, it's because he is played by Colin Prockter, who had featured as the foodstall holder in 2005's The Long Game.
• The yellow Dalek is the one called the "Eternal". Moffat and Gatiss have both stated that they have no idea what this means - only that it sounded good.
• For the Ironsides' subservient behaviour, Gatiss was inspired by Power of the Daleks, adapting the Daleks' "I am your servant" in the earlier story to "I am your soldier" here.
• Churchill states that the Doctor has changed his appearance again, so has met him in at least one previous incarnation. This was never seen on screen, although the Doctor has met him in his second and sixth incarnations in novels.
• Some of the locations used for the Cabinet War Rooms did not allow smoking, so Ian McNeice couldn't light his cigars. The cigar smoke you see in the episode had to be added by CGI.
• The real Cabinet War Rooms never had one of those big map tables where you push models about. They were used in RAF command stations.