The Randomiser: Resurrection of the Daleks

[purplecat]

It has become moderately fashionable to criticise Eric Saward stories and, indeed, they exhibit a number of features that seem questionable when viewed from the general sweep of Doctor Who history: they tend to be graphically violent, feature plot lines that resolve in pointless deaths, are more interested in their supporting cast than the Doctor and his companions, and show a disturbing fondness for ruthless space mercenaries being ruthless. On the other hand, one can argue that they are also Doctor Who's first attempts to at high octane action stories. I'm sort of in two minds about that last claim since I think a lot of the UNIT era was reaching for the same thing just in the context of the 1970s rather than the 1980s but it's certainly true that Saward's stories tend to involve ambitious action set-pieces and their large supporting casts tend to be in service to a sweeping vision of squads of soldiers caught up in various kinds of war with a clear intention to both provide action-filled excitement and depict the horrors of war and the reality of violence.

When we watched Earthshock I thought it had an exceptionally good first episode and went downhill after that. I think there is lots to be said for the first episode of Resurrection of the Daleks (as shown, so 45 minutes) and while the second episode isn't as strong as the first, it actually remains pretty solid. You do need to allow for Saward's quirks - the effects of the poison gas deployed by the Daleks to take over the space station are unnecessarily unpleasant and this isn't a story many people get out of alive. That said the deaths of the supporting cast mostly are not pointless, as they edge the story closer to the final solution where Stein manages to blow up the space station. Even poor old Chloe Ashcroft's somewhat pointless death of her, frankly, somewhat pointless character Professor Laird is at least in service of a traditional Doctor Who capture-escape sequence. The Doctor and companions are also somewhat sidelined- the interesting action is happening on the space station and the Doctor doesn't even get there until the start of episode 2, promptly gets captured and then, in a moment that is not his finest hour by any means, decides he needs to kill Davros (as Tame Layman pointed out, this wasn't a good plan, or at least not if he was going to wimp out of it once he actually got there).

However, from the perspective of a 1980s take on a base-under-siege story Resurrection of the Daleks works pretty well. The story's characters mostly are not as unpleasant and nihilistic as they can be in Saward's work. I was genuinely rooting for the small group of survivors creeping around trying to get to the self-destruct console. Lytton's increasing frustration with the way the Daleks are bowing to Davros' whims is well-drawn and the factionalism and politics within the Dalek forces are an interesting (and at this point novel) twist - though it is odd that, after a story in which the Daleks repeatedly over-rule Lytton's advice to get away from the space station as quickly as possible because Davros is so important to them, they more or less turn around and say "stuff Davros, someone go hill him".

One can't help feeling that if Saward's sense of humour had not been quite so dark and his outlook at little less nihilistic (or at least his seeming tendency to get bored of characters and bump them off had been a bit better controlled) then his reputation would have survived the test of time better. Doctor Who needs its exciting action tales with fights and explosions as well as its more gentle and whimsical fare and when Saward was on form he was better at delivering this kind of thing than anyone else writing for Doctor Who in the early 1980s.

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

I think he's also suffered from his attitude on many DVD interviews of "let me explain how my brilliant stories were let down by the useless clods I had to work with". And the lingering effect of him slagging off JNT to fandom publications after his resignation.

I'm personally also very annoyed by an interview quote I saw about the unpleasant relationship between Six and Peri in S22 being because, he said, too many writers independently took the easy way of making the early scenes in the story between them interesting with character conflict. Because I thought it was his job as a script editor to prevent that kind of thing...

[purplecat]

Yes, he doesn't strike one personally as being particularly easy to work with and I'm certainly not sure I'd trust his opinions on what makes good Doctor Who or at least when I look at the run of stories he script-edited then I see a lot of recurring elements I think don't really work in Doctor Who. On the other hand most people get a bit defensive when their work is criticised and we all understand that 1980s Who was made with no time and little budget so some things that were theoretically fixable may not have been practically so.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

Maybe Saward needed a script editor of his own? Something he really only had on The Visitation.

[purplecat]

Yes, I think a decent script editor would have made a lot of difference. While it most often manifests as killing characters when he's tired of them, I think Saward more generally had a tendency to lose interest in plot threads and then get rid of them in rather sloppy ways - the Daleks just turning around and deciding to kill Davros here being a case in point.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

Whoops, hit enter forgetting I was in quick comment.

What I meant to add was that I like this, albeit for the wrong reasons. It was my first Doctor Who video, an eleventh birthday present. By that stage I had a couple of novelisations and maybe a missing story audio or two, but this was the first story I could actually see whenever I wanted, as transmitted (well, nearly as transmitted, as the video, like the DVD, is split into four parts rather than two). It definitely has its moments, for all its flaws, certainly if you can accept gratuitous violence in the programme.

[purplecat]

I think it's easy to be blasé about Saward's ability to create tension, excitement and atmosphere but many surrounding stories struggle to do that well particularly on 1980s Doctor Who budgets.