N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
Even if you didn’t know this week’s episode was entitled Judith Krantz’s The Daleks Take Manhattan (or something like that), you’d know from all the Nu Yoik accents in the opening scene just exactly where you supposed to be — that version of New York you only hear on British TV shows. (Having recently re-watched the Fry and Laurie Jeeves and Wooster, I’d gotten a dose of this early this year when Bertie and Jeeves snuck off to 20’s Manhattan to avoid Bertie’s Aunt Agatha.)
“Time was, four Daleks could have conquered the world …”
Doctor, Evolution of the Daleks
My Andrew Garfield-fan daughter sat in with me this one and called it correctly when she said Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks was ‘chaos’. It’s certainly best not to concentrate too closely on the plot, or the Daleks’ plot, or indeed anyone else’s involvement in either.
Why didn’t Martha go behind the stage curtain? my daughter asked. And what’s with the all the pig-men in Doctor Who these days?, I commented around the same time.
You can probably tell we didn’t take it all very seriously. I suggested that Dalek Sec absolutely should have burped when he first consumed Diagoras. And I’ve always thought the Dalek Sec / human hybrid sounded a bit like Liberace and should have appended his “I am a human Dalek” with an ‘… and I feel fabulous!’
Similarly, my fantasy dialogue for Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks extended to Laszlo’s responding to Tallulah’s “What’s wrong?” with an ‘I’m a frikkin’ mutant pig-man, yer dumb broad, whaddy think’s wrong?’
Elsewhere, when confronted with the Daleks, the worthy Soloman first goes all Cartman — “You will respect my authority!” — then all Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks. True, he doesn’t quite say “Why can’t we all just get along?” to the Daleks but the sentiment of his “meet with us and stop this fight” isn’t far off. Like Nicholson’s US President, Soloman gets short shrift from the Daleks, although they do stop short of taunting him with a ‘Yak yak!’ before exterminating him.
Admittedly, it’s not all terrible. In fact, Martha is actually very good and the afore-mentioned Andrew Garfield is not bad either, although thankfully he wasn’t required to do a Nu Yoik accent, given Frank was from Tennessese. The boy Tennant is on charming form too, at least in the first episode: he goes all shouty in episode two.
The die was probably cast from the moment they put the Dalek Sec / Diagoras hybrid on the cover of the Radio Times, looking all Scaroth with his nice suit and tentacley face! It was always going to be tricky to enjoy Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks once you’d seen such a whopper of a spoiler.
These are my potential Target Library titles for Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks:
— Doctor Who and the Evolution of the Daleks
— Doctor Who and the Daleks in Manhattan
— Doctor Who and the Daleks in Judith Krantz’s I’ll Take Manhattan
