Doctor Who: Into The Dalek

Well then. Episode two. Um, again, I feel like we’ve seen this before…when it was called Dalek, and it was much, much better.

Although Capaldi is still brilliant, and I LOVE Danny Pink, I gotta say this is another fail for me. But I have very, very high hopes that things will go up from here!

On with the recap!

In space, a small ship is being attacked by a huge Dalek ship. A man appears dead in one seat, as a woman navigates in another. Just as the small ship explodes, the woman wakes on the TARDIS. The Doctor, holding a tray of coffee, explains that he saved her life.

The woman introduces herself as Journey Blue (yeah, there’s a note about THAT in the thoughts below!), and points her gun at him. She demands that she be taken back to her command ship, but the Doctor makes her ask nicely. She eventually does.

Once on the Aristotle, Journey’s superiors are going to kill the Doctor because he ‘might be a duplicate’. Journey talks them out of it by telling them that the Doctor is a doctor. Apparently they have a patient…

While walking to meet the patient, the Doctor sees that they have a machine that shrinks surgeons so that they can enter the patient and fix them from the inside. Do you guys see where this is going now? Interesting!

The Doctor finally meets his patient….and it’s a Dalek.

At Coal Hill School, which is a wonderful homage to classic Who, a handsome man is teaching a phys ed class. After the class is dismissed, he walks into the office where a very strange receptionist has a very strange conversation with him. That was a really pointless scene…but did anyone else notice that the student in the scene is the same student in Clara’s memories in the last episode? I’m thinking she might be important…

Later in a classroom, a student asks if the teacher has ever killed anyone. The teacher explains that he used to be a soldier, and talks around the answer. The student then asks if the teacher has ever killed anyone who wasn’t a soldier. The teacher doesn’t answer, but a single tear rolls down his cheek. WTF is that all about?!

In the staff room, Clara and Danny Pink are introduced, and after beating around the bush for like, hours, they make a date to go for a drink that night.

Clara leaves Danny’s classroom and enters a closet, where the Doctor is waiting with coffee. Apparently he left to get it 3 weeks ago, but got distracted.

They enter the TARDIS and bicker a bit. The Doctor then gets serious and asks her if he’s a good man. Clara says she doesn’t know. He then takes her to the Aristotle.

Flashing back to the Doctor meeting his patient, the Dalek, the soldiers explain that they thought it was deactivated until it started screaming. The Dalek is very much broken, as the Doctor realizes when it says that, “Daleks must be destroyed.”

The Doctor explains this to Clara, and emphasizes that there’s no such thing as a good Dalek.

The Doctor, Clara, Journey and two other soldiers are shrunk and put inside the Dalek.

To get where they need to go, one of the soldiers fires grappling hooks into the Dalek. This, of course, causes the Dalek pain, which in turn, sends antibodies to fight the thing that’s making the pain.

This Doctor—this much colder and meaner Doctor—doesn’t even try to save the soldier since, “he was dead already”. Instead, he ensures that they can track the dead…um…body?

They all jump down into the people-goo, which is the safest place inside a Dalek because, "nobody guards the dead.”

As they continue through the Dalek, the Doctor discovers that it has a radiation leak, and it’s being poisoned.

The Doctor asks the Dalek what made it change, and it replies, “I saw beauty.” It explains that it saw a star being born, and it realized that resistance to life is futile.

The Doctor seals the leak with his sonic screwdriver, and, surprise, surprise, the Dalek once again turns evil. It rolls through the Aristotle, exterminating and destroying everything in its way. It contacts the Dalek fleet and the rest of the Daleks begin to arrive on the ship.

Inside the Dalek, the Doctor gloats about being right. There are no good Daleks. Clara slaps the Doctor….WHAT THE HELL?! NOT OKAY.

She’s angry with him for gloating, and explains that they’ve learned something. It takes a moment, but the Doctor understands what she’s trying to teach him.

Journey has orders to destroy the Dalek, but she allows the Doctor the chance to do what he needs to do.

The Doctor realizes that a good Dalek is possible, and that it only needs to see and feel what it saw and felt before to be good again. Clara is volunteered, and she figures out that she has to crawl through the Dalek’s memory and relight anything that’s suppressed.

To get to the memories, the soldier that’s not Journey sacrifices herself to the antibodies, and asks that something good be named after her in turn. I bet that’ll happen in future episode. And it’ll be cool. And I’ll probably cry.

When Gretchen dies, she ends up in heaven, with Missy….WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?! WHO THE HELL IS MISSY?! WHAT IS THIS PLOT?!

Clara succeeds in turning on all of the memories, and the Dalek remembers beauty. When the Doctor connects himself with the Dalek, he hopes that it’ll help the Dalek see more beauty. Instead, the Dalek sees the Doctor’s hatred of the Daleks, and it latches on to that. It once again believes that the Daleks are evil and must be destroyed, but this time it’s through hatred and not beauty. The Doctor hasn’t succeeded in making a good Dalek.  It 

exterminates all of the other Daleks on the Aristotle and makes the Dalek ship believe that the Aristotle has issued a self-destruct sequence.

The Dalek returns to the Dalek ship to finish his new job.

The Doctor and Clara are about to leave, when Journey asks him to take her with them. He tells her that he’s sure she’s an okay person…but she’s still a soldier. They leave without her.

Clara changes her clothes and the Doctor drops her off in the closet, ten seconds after she left. Danny sees her exiting, and, of course, notices her clothes.

So, yeah. Another not-great episode, in my opinion. Bad writing, the plot was all over the place, some scenes weren’t needed, others didn’t make sense. This isn’t the Doctor Who I love, that’s for sure.

I have really high hopes for episode 3, and I hear AMAZING things about episode 4. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Thoughts and theories:

-Why does this Doctor have an issue with soldiers?
-Will he have an issue with Danny, a former soldier?
-Danny Pink/Journey Blue. Pink and Blue. Could Danny be Journey’s dead brother?
-What the heck is happening with Missy and heaven?! Why are all these people going there? And Why THESE people?
-Who did Danny kill?

Best Lines:

“Fantastic idea for a movie. Terrible idea for a proctologist.”
“This is gun-girl. She’s got a gun and she’s a girl.”
“She’s my carer. She cares so I don’t have to.”
“I am not a good Dalek. YOU are a good Dalek.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts and theories!

See everyone next week!