Dalek or Cold War?
Guest contributor James Annis compares the two scarily similar episodes.
A story that reintroduces a classic era villain by showing off how dangerous only a single member of the species can be. The weakened monster gets chained up below the surface but after a short discussion with the companion, they escape and proceed to kill the crew. The creature believes they are the last of their kind and this makes them particularly dangerous. They reach the point where they are capable of wiping out millions of people but the companion stirs up an emotional response in the monster and the world is saved. We also get to see what’s underneath the metal at the end, revealing the creature’s real face. This paragraph works as the summary for two stories that have aired since 2005, Mark Gatiss’ Cold War and the standard by which all Dalek stories are measured, Dalek.
The latter story reintroduced the Doctor’s most fearsome enemy back in 2005 and has ensured that Robert Shearman is a name that often crops up on lists of writers we want to see return. The former aired in the second half of Series 7 and was met with mixed reviews. In this article I intend to show why I think that Cold War was a very successful episode and what, I think, is the reason why Dalek is so much more popular. This is despite the fact that there is, narratively, little difference between them.
What worked?
As we know from Dalek, when it comes to reintroducing classic aliens, less really can be more. Mark Gatiss clearly had this in mind in Cold War and I think that Skaldak showed off the Ice Warriors really well. Most people seem to want to see the Ice Warriors again, even those that didn’t really like their reintroduction episode. I think we saw just enough of what the creatures can do to wet our appetites for future stories, but not enough to make us think we’ve seen it all.
We were shown that the Ice Warriors are inventive. Skaldak didn’t have the fire power to wipe out humanity himself but he quickly worked out that he could manipulate the humans into wiping each other off the face of the planet. Gatiss has shown that he enjoys writing pseudo-historicals and the Cold War was the perfect event to keep the threat levels unsettlingly high. This serves as quite the contrast to Dalek where the eponymous villain did have the fire power and needed only to break out of the base to kill millions. I’m glad that this contrast exists because it shows off the different monsters’ individual talents and doesn’t end up showing us that they are essentially the same monster in different skins.
We got to see the Doctor’s fear. When the Doctor sees Skaldak he utters possibly my favourite Eleventh Doctor line: “It never rains but it pours.” In this one line we see that despite the Doctor’s calm façade, he is afraid of the Ice Warriors. If the Doctor isn’t scared then you can be certain that we won’t be. We see the Doctor explaining to the crew why they should be so afraid of the Grand Marshal and we know that it shouldn’t be taken lightly.
In 2005 we saw the Doctor become terrified when he realised that he was locked in the cage with a Dalek and that fear stayed with me. The Autons, Lady Cassandra, The Gelth and The Slitheen had all faced the Doctor and he had taken them all on without an ounce of the terror he had in that scene. I knew, from that moment on that that Dalek was not going down without a fight. Mark Gatiss, less successfully perhaps, tried to show that Ice Warriors are a similarly difficult threat to vanquish.
Unlike in Dalek, Skaldak isn’t really defeated. He is convinced not to fire the missile but that is it. Skaldak lives on to fight another day and there are no negative consequences for him and his people. I think this works in the episode’s favour because when the Doctor inevitably faces an army of Ice Warriors in the future we still haven’t seen the Doctor defeat them since 1969’s The Seeds of Death. As an audience, we will have no idea how the Doctor will stop them. That’s quite a strong way to start a story.
So why do people like Dalek so much more?
Having spent a while pondering this thought, I think I have reached the answer. The Doctor is an empathetic man. We have seen the Doctor show empathy for almost every creature in the universe at some point. Even the emotionless, metal Cybermen have been shown pity. It’s important that we see this, because Doctor Who would get boring quickly if every week we had a two dimensional villain that wanted to take over the world just for the sake of it.
Mark Gatiss uses Skaldak’s daughter to make the Ice Warrior a character that we can relate too. His daughter had died in the 5000 years that Skaldak was frozen for. He becomes devastated by the news and it, ultimately, becomes the reason why Clara convinces him to show mercy. As an audience, we can use his pain to empathise with him and we see the Doctor do it too.
Normally, we can’t empathise with Daleks. They are characters that are so cold that we cannot possibly connect with them. Robert Shearman, however, gives his Dalek emotions. For the first time ever, we see a Dalek that has lost all its people and is alone in the universe. We see a creature that has been trapped in metal for its entire life. We see a creature that just wants to feel the sun. We see a Dalek that we can empathise with and Rose does too. So why is it more effectively used in Dalek?
The Doctor is the difference. He empathises with Skaldak. He feels the same way that the audience does and although he is still a threat, we understand him. We understand the Dalek, somewhat as well. The only difference is that the Doctor doesn’t. The man that can empathise with everything still hates the Dalek with every cell in his body. As an audience, we see the true extent of the evil of a Dalek, not through the Dalek’s actions but by the Doctor’s.
We see the Dalek kill all these people as it makes its way to the surface. We see Skaldak kill off the crew of the submarine as he makes his way to the nuclear missile controls. Rose and the Dalek have an emotional conversation and the Dalek reveals its fear and sadness. Clara and the Ice Warrior talk about how sad Skaldak is that his daughter and his people are dead. In both episodes we see their fearsome strength and then we connect with them emotionally. In Dalek we are left with the feeling that the Daleks are evil, ruthless killers that must be destroyed. In Cold War we are left with the feeling that, whilst they are a powerful fighting force, they are still capable of showing mercy and they are not evil, just aggressive.
The Doctor that we see in Dalek scares us. He is so angry but we realise he is only reflecting the Dalek. The Doctor in Cold War is his usual reassuring self and whilst we know that a bunch of angry Ice Warriors is bad news, we know that they are not just creatures full of hate and fear.
Did Mark Gatiss get it wrong?
No. I don’t think he did. The Daleks share a history with the Doctor that the Ice Warriors simply don’t. Hatred of that scale from the Doctor would be unjustified (and rather out of character for Matt’s Doctor) and would have made the Doctor seem unrelatable to the audience.
Dalek has probably done enough to earn it self the status of being an iconic episode. It works brilliantly in so many ways. It’s unfortunate for Mark Gatiss that Dalek both showed writers how to write an effective reintroduction episode but also set a standard so high that any other episode that tries a similar tactic will never quite reach. Perhaps it’s time we stop seeing Dalek as the standard and start seeing it as the apotheosis.
Conclusion
So, to finish off, I ask you to pretend you have never seen Dalek and then go and rewatch Cold War. I hope that you will then see that Mark Gatiss took a concept that he knew worked and made it into an excellent reintroduction episode for the fiercest warriors this solar system has ever produced. Because, deep down, I feel that any episode judged next to Dalek will be judged to harshly.
