The Cult of Skaro were introduced in the Series 2 finale - Army of Ghosts / Doomsday - which concluded with the quartet fleeing the Battle of Canary Wharf via an emergency temporal shift.
Daleks in Manhattan is the sequel - showing us where that time shift took them. In hindsight, it can also be considered the middle section of a Dalek Caan Trilogy.
This story is set in November 1930 (unless it is a very old newspaper which Martha finds). The location is New York City, centring on Central Park and the Empire State Building.
1931 is the actual year of the completion of the famous skyscraper, and is also the year in which Universal's film adaptation of Frankenstein was released. This proves to be one of the inspirations for this story.
Of course there was one one earlier Doctor Who story, which featured the Empire State Building and in which Frankenstein's monster made an appearance. This was 1965's The Chase.
After showing Daleks in the future and in the present day, Russell T Davies wanted to see them in a story set in the past. He felt they had a bit of an art deco look to their design, so the period between the wars automatically came to mind.
A principal location is the city's Hooverville. Named after Herbert Hoover, President of the United States between 1929 - 1933. His term in office coincided with the Great Depression, when the economy failed and tens of thousands of men found themselves out of a job. This had the knock-on effect of rising homelessness, outstripping the cheap hostels and lodging houses, and many took to living in shanty-style temporary communities which sprang up in most of the cities. The unemployed would travel across the country to the larger urban areas to seek work. It wasn't just men but women and children as well who made up the population. Seattle's Hooverville had its own elected mayor and a governing body.
The one depicted in this story is set up in a corner of Central Park, on the site of a defunct reservoir known as the Great Lawn. New York had a second homeless community at Riverside Park.
In a leadership role in the story we have a man named Solomon. He is obviously inspired by the biblical figure who famously threatened to cut a child in half in order to identify its real mother - who would rather relinquish it than see it come to harm. The Bible story is referenced in his halving a loaf of bread and giving it to both men who have claimed it.
(This episode of King Solomon's life almost featured in Doctor Who back in 1987, as Pip & Jane Baker intended him to be one of the people abducted by the Rani in Time and the Rani).
Construction on the Empire State Building commenced in March 1930, and it was completed in May the following year. New York is known as the "Empire State", hence the name. It was the tallest building in the world until 1970 when the World Trade Centre's twin towers were completed. It has its own ZIP code.
It gained international fame and became a cultural icon thanks to its prominent role in the conclusion of the RKO film King Kong, which opened in 1933.
In The Chase, the TARDIS arrives on a viewing platform on the 102nd floor, where the travellers meet Alabama tourist Morton Dill. The Daleks are in close pursuit and arrive moments after the TARDIS has departed. It may well be that the Cult of Skaro were aware of this visit from their history computers, though their main reason for intervening in the building of the skyscraper is its great height. They want to use the lightning rod to capture a gamma radiation strike.
The imagery of a lightning strike bringing an experiment to life is where Frankenstein comes in. The 1931 Universal version, directed by James Whale and starring Colin Clive as the scientist and Boris Karloff as his creation, remains the most popular adaptation, despite its diversion from the original Mary Shelley text. Think of the Frankenstein Monster and the image that usually comes to mind first is that of the giant flat-headed figure with bolts through the neck. The make-up, originally created by Jack Pierce who devised all the classic Universal monster designs, remains trademarked to the studio (which the BBC seem to have ignored but gotten away with).
It was this version of the monster which featured in the "House of Horrors" funfair sequence in The Chase.
In the film the monster is brought to life when it is sent on a table up into the air, to be deliberately struck by lightning. This shocks the body into life. In the Daleks' laboratory we see the captured humans who are to be turned into mental Daleks lying on tables suspended in the air, and the gamma strike takes the form of a lightning strike.
The genetic experiments were also inspired by HG Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). This had been adapted for the screen, starring Charles Laughton, as Island of Lost Souls in 1932.
The Daleks employ human-pig hybrids as servants. They have a history of using inferior species as servants and guards, going back to the Ogrons (Day of the Daleks and Frontier in Space).
RTD regularly created new monsters simply by giving humanoids the head of an animal. As well as Pig-men we had Cat People, Fly People, Fish People and Rhino People.
One other location which is significant to the story is the Majestic Theatre, where Laszlo and Tallulah work. This appears to be an off-Broadway establishment judging by its size. Any professional theatre with a capacity of between 100 - 499 seats qualified for off-Broadway status. Historically they were the larger theatres on the streets which intersected with Broadway, but did not lie on the "Great White Way" itself. (Smaller, more distant theatres are known as off-off-Broadway).
The story's director James Strong elects to film part of the song and dance routine from above. Despite the fact that there would be no camera over the stage, or anyone other than stage-hands able to look down, we see Tallulah looking upwards. This is all a homage to the Hollywood musicals of the 1930's, often based on Broadway shows - especially those choreographed by director Busby Berkeley (1895 - 1976). Among his most famous movies are 42 Street and the Gold Diggers... series (of 1933, 1935, 1937, in Paris).
His trademark was to choreograph dance routines that could be appreciated by complex moves and kaleidoscopic patterns when seen from above - something a real theatre audience would never have been able to see. The whole point of these films was to provide some fantasy and escapism in the gloomy days of the Great Depression.
Laszlo's haunting of the theatre after his conversion, leaving gifts for his beloved, is reminiscent of Gaston Laroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1910) and first filmed by Universal with Lon Chaney in 1925.
Tallulah was named after the speakeasy singer played by Jodie Foster in Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone (1976). Future companion Bonnie Langford was also amongst the cast.
Behind the scenes, RTD wanted Steven Moffat to write this story, but he declined. To appease the showrunner he agreed to write the single-part Doctor-lite story - which is how we got Blink.
Next time: Quatermass meets The League of Gentlemen...
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