| DALEKS IN MANHATTAN/EVOLUTION OF THE DALEKS by Helen Raynor |
| Story 26 Synopsis: The Doctor brings Martha to New York, 1930, where people are going missing from Hooverville, a small community for those who have lost all their livelihoods. When prominent businessman Mr Diagoras seeks volunteers to go down the sewers, the Doctor and Martha go along. Down there, they find men mutated into pig men, and the presence of Daleks. They are taken along to the Daleks' laboratory, to witness Dalek Sec's final experiment - merging with Diagoras to become a hybrid. Sec has been experimenting on humans to try and find a way forward for the Dalek race. He has hundreds of subjects waiting in storage for an imminent lightning strike, which will hit the Empire State Building and give life to his new race of Dalekised humans. But the other Daleks don't like it, and rebel, usurping Sec's leadership. The Doctor sabotages the strike by absorbing most of the lightning and turning the new hybrids into part-Time Lords. Sec is exterminated trying to save the Doctor. When the hybrids destroy two of the other Daleks, the last Dalek, Caan, destroys them all, and then engages an emergency Temporal Shift. New York can return to normal. |
| Review:- The meanest bunch of wiseguys you ever saw just rolled into town... and New York ain't just any old town, as the Daleks plot their new foul scheme... Well, after their hi-jinks over the two previous series, where can the Daleks go next? Into experimentation, it turns out, as Sec thinks he has the way forward. But the best laid plans of mice and Daleks gang aft agley, etc... New York in 1930 provides the chance for a less familiar pseudo-historical than is usually the case. The mysterious disapperances from Hooverville gives an easy way in to the story, and it's soon clear where the poor volunteers have been going. The Pig Men prove a halfway house for the big drama of the story, when we learn that the Dalek experiment involves thinking the unthinkable - that maybe racial purity ain't the way to go. But Sec is soon outvoted and the chase is on... At least Martha's race isn't glibly glossed over here, and Hugh Quarshie thesps his socks off as Solomon, who is brutally cut down by a Dalek in the second half of the story. Amidst the silliness of whether human Daleks or Dalek humans is the answer to the Daleks' problems, we have the side issue of Lazlo and Tallulah, two young lovers caught in a war that ain't their own etc. It's perhaps rather poor that after witnessing the unexpected deaths of the hybrids, and the feeble exit for Caan, that Lazlo is cheated of the chance to go out in a blaze of glory. Instead, he's rehabilitated and given hope. Well, it was a depressing time all round. The Doctor comes out well, leading the search from Hooverville into the sewer, and then trying to help Sec with his plans, for the greater good. His valiant absorbtion of the lightning is rather crazy, but not so crazy as the idea that this act could have changed the hybrids still further. Plot device from the bottom of the barrel, there. It does fit a story which strives for the stars but hits the skids instead. Experimentation on the links between humans and Daleks has been tackled before, in Evil of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks, to name but two, but it doesn't work nearly so well here. So the big experiment fails, but one Dalek lives to fight another day. It's an American tale, y'all. |
| Disclaimer: I have watched this story. |