To celebrate the fact that 2013 is the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, we are taking a look back at all of the episodes of the show which featured David Tennant as the Doctor. At the end of our look back we'll be asking you, the fans, to vote for what you think is the ultimate David Tennant episode of Doctor Who....
We continue with the next David Tennant episode.... Evolution Of The Daleks
Read our previous Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Countdown posts here.
20. Evolution Of The Daleks
First Broadcast on 28th April 2007. Running Time: 45 Minutes. Viewing Figures: 6.97million.
Written By Helen Raynor.
Directed By James Strong.
Executive Producers Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner.
David-Tennant.com Rating: 7/10.
Synopsis:
Dalek Sec is reborn in human form and plans to build a Dalek empire in Thirties New York. While Martha fights for her life at the top of the Empire State Building, the Doctor must enter into an unholy alliance in order to change Dalek history for ever.
Extras: Promotional Photos | Videos | Articles |
Production Notes:
The title of this episode, Evolution Of The Daleks, follows an old school formula - previous episodes have been called Remembrance Of The Daleks (1988) and The Power Of The Daleks (1966)
This episode saw the first reference to the Dalek's creator Davros since the show returned in 2005. Though we weren't destined to meet him until the 2008 episodes The Stolen Earth and Journey's End.
The Hooverville scenes were filmed in Cardiff's Bute Park. The front of house scenes in The Laurenzi Theatre scenes were filmed at the Parc & Dare Hall in Treorchy and the backstage scenes were filmed at Headlands School in Penarth.
We Meet Again:
Daleks In Manhattan and Evolution Of The Daleks, mark the first time that the Doctor has come face to face with his lendary foe since the epic series 2 finale Doomsday.
The Cult were appointed by the Emperor during the Time War to think and plan, each having a degree of individuality and emotion denied in most rank and file Daleks. They gave themselves names, Caan, Jast, Thay and their leader, a Black Dalek, was Sec. They fled the Time War, a limited time travel capacity built into each of them, unaware that the Emperor had survived, and they hid, along with the Genesis Ark containing millions of Daleks prisoners, in the void, waiting for the chance to escape back into reality.Once this had been achieved , Sec released the Dalek prisoners and began the war against the humans and the Cybermen. However, when the Doctor reopened the Void, all the Daleks were in danger of being drawn back in. Ultimately every Dalek, plus the empty Ark, was returned to the Void apart from the four members of the Cult, who used an emergency temporal shift to escape the carnage.
The Doctor had assumed that all the Daleks had been drawn back in to the Void when he reopened the rift bewteen the realities. However The Cult Of Skaro has escaped The Doctor's trap, and relocated themselves to 1930s New York, draining their power cells in the process. Trapped in 1930, with no supplie and little energy, they realised their future might lie in genetic experimentation to create a new race of Daleks, they oversaw the construction of the Empire State Building, intending to use it as a conductor for gamma radiation caused by a solar flare. The radiation would then carry the Dalek Factor into nearly a thousand specially prepared unconscious humans.
This final experiment would provide the Cult with a new army. However, they had not foreseen that Dalek Sec's desire to merge his consciousness with a human body, creating Dalek Sec Hybrid, would in turn give him a conscience and a degree of humanity.
Sec turned against his fellow Daleks and they exterminated him. Not long after, their Dalek-Human army, influenced by the addition of Time Lord DNA courtesy of The Doctor, turned on the Cult - both Thay and Jast were destroyed before Caan exterminated all of the Dalek-Humans.
The Doctor tried to appeal to Caan, now the last Dalek in the universe, but Caan activated an emergency temporal shift and vanished...
A Friend In Frank:
Frank was an 18 year old from Tennessee who took the railroad to find enough work in New York to feed his family after his father died. He ended up living in Hooverville and joined the Doctor, Martha Jones and Hoverville's de facto leader Solomon in their exploration of the Manhattan sewers. Frank was captured by Pig Slaves and, along with Martha, selected to become part of the Final Experiment but, due to the Doctor's interference, they were able to escape back to Hooverville. The Daleks pursued them, and Frank was traumatised when Solomon, brokering peace, was murdered.
Frank later helped Martha defend the Empire State Building against the Pig Slaves and was present in the Laurenzi Theatre when the Dalek-Human army destroyed the Cult of Skaro there.
Frank stayed on in Hooverville, negotiating with the survivors for semi-pig man Laszlo to live with them.
Quotes:
Dalek Sec: You... have betrayed me!
Dalek Thay: You told us to imagine and we imagined your irrelevance.
The Doctor: Daleks are bad enough at any time, but right now they're vulnerable. And that makes them more dangerous than ever.
Martha Jones: Do you reckon it's gonna work, those two?
The Doctor: I don't know. Anywhere else in the universe I might worry about them, but New York- it's what this city's good at. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses and maybe the odd pig-slave-Dalek-mutant-hybrid, too.
Martha Jones: The pig and the showgirl.
Facts:
- Happy Days Are Here Again, heard on the radio at the start of the episode, was written in 1929 by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen. It was a hugely popular song in the 1930s and remains well known to this day.
- On average, the Empire State Building is struck by lightning a hundred times each year. Due to efficient lighting conductors and other precautionary measures, the vast majority of strikes occur without incident - unless, of course, there's additional solar flare activity and a Time Lord clutching onto the mast.
- Solar flares are violent explosions in the atmosphere of the sun. They travel at a million kilometres an hour and have energy equivalent to a billion megatons.
- Although this is the first time Daleks have appeared on stage in the TV series, the metal mutants are no strangers to trundling the boards. Three major theatre productions have featured the Daleks over the years: Curse of the Daleks (1965), Seven Keys to Doomsday (1974) and The Ultimate Adventure (1989).
- We first learned about Dalekanium, the powerful metal from which Dalek cases are formed, in the classic 1964 story The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
- Daleks measure time in Rels. The term was first heard in the Peter Cushing Doctor Who films of the 1960s. It was not until Doomsday that Daleks used Rels in the TV series. One Rel appears to last just over a second.
- Daleks acknowledged the advantage of defining the 'Human Factor' in The Evil of the Daleks. One human, Theodore Maxtible, was converted to think and act like a Dalek. Dalek Sec's experiments took the process far further, changing the very nature of the human DNA.
- The destruction of Skaro was engineered by the Doctor in Remembrance of the Daleks. He tricked the Daleks and their creator into using an ancient Time Lord weapon to trigger the obliteration of their world.
- Remembrance of the Daleks featured a Dalek battle computer, similar to the one that Dalek They became the heart of. In Remembrance of the Daleks, the core of the device was a young human girl.
- Daleks abhor anything that is genetically different from themselves; so much so, that variations in Dalek DNA have been known to cause civil war to break out between differing Dalek factions (see Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks).
- David Tennant - The Doctor
- Freema Agyeman - Martha Jones
- Miranda Raison – Tallulah
- Hugh Quarshie – Solomon
- Ryan Carnes – Laszlo
- Andrew Garfield – Frank
- Eric Loren – Dalek Sec
- Flik Swan – Myrna
- Alexis Caley – Lois
- Earl Perkins – Man #1
- Peter Brooke – Man #2
- Ian Porter – Hybrid
- Nicholas Briggs – Dalek Voice
- Paul Kasey – Hero Pig
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