Evolution of the Daleks

182b – "Evolution of the Daleks"
Doctor Who episode
Cast
Doctor David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companion Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones)
Others 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
Production
Writer	Helen Raynor
Director	James Strong
Script editor	Lindsey Alford
Producer	Phil Collinson
Executive producer(s)	Russell T Davies Julie Gardner
Production code	3.5
Series	Series 3
Length	2nd of 2-part story, 45 minutes
Originally broadcast	28 April 2007
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by → "Daleks in Manhattan" "The Lazarus Experiment"

"Evolution of the Daleks" is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was first broadcast on BBC One on 28 April 2007, and is the fifth episode of Series 3 of the revived Doctor Who series. It is the conclusion of the two-part story begun in "Daleks in Manhattan".

The Cult of Skaro's plan is in full force. Dalek Sec is reborn in a half-human form, and the Pig Slaves launch an enormous assault upon the Central Park Hooverville along with the remaining pure Daleks. The Doctor, Martha Jones, Solomon and the others must fight for their lives, while the future of humans and Daleks alike is being decided underneath the Empire State Building.

According to the BARB figures this episode was seen by 6.97 million viewers and was the seventeenth most popular broadcast on British television in that week. The story is set in New York City in 1930.

Plot

After the creation of the hybrid Human-Dalek Sec, The Doctor, Martha, Frank and the other human captives manage to escape when the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to cause a nearby radio to emit a high-pitched frequency. Daleks Jast and Caan give chase, and discover in each other a concern over Sec's plan. The Doctor and Martha meet up later with Tallulah and Frank, and make their way back to Hooverville. The Doctor warns Solomon that the Daleks are seeking out more human subjects, but Solomon believes he can reason with them. The Daleks and their Pig Slaves attack, but Solomon initiates a conference with the hovering Daleks. He pleads his case for shared values and compassion, then says, "Well, what do you say?" The Daleks, naturally, say "Exterminate," and Solomon is killed in front of the other humans. The Doctor, angered by Solomon's death, tells Caan to kill him as well, but Sec orders them to bring the Doctor in. Martha tries to go as well, but the Doctor makes her stay behind, giving her his psychic paper as he leaves with the Daleks.

At the Dalek lab at the Empire State Building, the Doctor learns that Dalek Sec's plan is to continue the Dalek race by injecting humans of high intelligence with a mix of human and Dalek DNA, allowing their minds to be programmed as Daleks. However, as the task requires more energy than the human technology of 1930 can produce, Dalek Sec plans to use gamma strike energy from a solar flare that will occur within minutes, and forces the Doctor to help him finalise the energy system. These new beings won't, Sec says, be the emotionless beings Daleks have heretofore been; instead, they will combine human ability to evolve and survive with Dalek intelligence. Caan, Thay and Jast rebel; they see Sec as a traitor to their race, no longer even a real Dalek ("You told us to imagine... and we imagined your irrelevance.") They stage a mutiny, changing the DNA mix being fed into the humans into that of pure Dalek. The Doctor and Laszlo escape during the chaos, heading for the top floors of the building. They meet Martha, Tallulah, and Frank, who have used the psychic paper to gain entry past the building's human guards. Martha, who has already analyzed the building plans, tells the Doctor he must remove the "Dalekanium" panels on the mast of the Empire State Building. The Doctor quickly climbs up, telling Martha to stay behind and fight. As the Doctor struggles to remove the panels, Martha, with the help of the others, lays out pieces of metal from the framework of the building to connect with the elevator, which, they hope, will conduct electricity when the gamma strike hits. The Pig Slaves are electrocuted in the elevator, but the Doctor drops his sonic screwdriver and so fails to remove the panels in time; as he holds onto the mast, the strike hits and the energy transfers into the human-Dalek shells: the Dalek's new army begins to awaken.

Martha and the others recover the Doctor, then flee to Tallulah's theater, with the human Dalek army following them in the sewers. As they are surrounded by the human Dalek army, they find that Dalek Thay and Jast have Sec in chains. As the two prepare to kill the Doctor, Sec tries to reason with them and then steps in the way of their blaster fire, sacrificing himself to save the Doctor. The Daleks order their army to kill the Doctor, but find that the humans are resisting; the Doctor, by exposing himself to the gamma strike, caused some of his Time Lord DNA to transfer to the human shells and give them freedom from Dalek control. The human Dalek army turn on Thay and Jast, killing them, but Dalek Caan, watching from the Empire State Building, activates a termination sequence and kills the rest of the army. The Doctor returns to the Dalek lab to face Caan, offering mercy and aid, but instead the Dalek escapes once again via his emergency temporal shift. As the Doctor regroups with the others, Laszlo begins to die, due to his partial transformation as a Pig Slave. The Doctor, however, finds a way to stabilise his condition, although it will not restore his human appearance. Laszlo and Tallulah are reunited, and learn from Frank that the people of Hooverville will take Laszlo in despite his looks. The Doctor and Martha finally return to Liberty Island and the TARDIS, where the Doctor muses that there is to be yet another confrontation with the Daleks in their future.

Continuity

• The Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver in conjunction with a wireless radio to emit a high-pitched shriek that temporarily paralyses the Daleks and the Pig Slaves, facilitating an escape. Previously, in The Runaway Bride, he used the screwdriver in conjunction with a wedding DJ's sound system to deactivate the Robot Santas.
• In "Smith and Jones", the Doctor referred to his having received an electric shock when helping Benjamin Franklin fly his kite. In this episode, he again proves resilient to high levels of electrical current. This ability was also demonstrated in Terror of the Zygons, World War Three, Genesis of the Daleks, The Idiot's Lantern and the audio stories Spare Parts and Blood of the Daleks.
• When hurrying to the vaudeville theatre, The Doctor says "Allons-y"; the second time he uses the catchphrase after Army of Ghosts.
• The idea of humans being the "great survivors" re-surfaced in "Utopia".

Daleks

• This is the first episode to use the familiar "_____ of the Daleks" titling scheme since 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks. The scheme was started on screen with The Power of the Daleks in 1966, although the earlier The Dalek Invasion of Earth (which had no onscreen title) had The Return of the Daleks as a working title.
• The Daleks measure time in rels, the Dalek unit of time, about equal to one second. The measurement was first introduced in the non-canonical movie Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965), then introduced to the TV continuity in "Doomsday" (2006).
• Several other Doctor Who stories have featured Daleks and human beings being combined in different ways. These include:
  • The Evil of the Daleks: humans are infused with the "Dalek Factor", and Daleks infused with the "Human Factor"
  • Revelation of the Daleks: human beings kept in suspended animation, pending the discovery of disease cures, are instead converted into Daleks
  • "Dalek": a Dalek extracts human DNA to regenerate itself, and is altered in the process
  • "The Parting of the Ways": the Daleks in this story are all created from humans by the Dalek Emperor
  • The Doctor Who Quick Reads book I am a Dalek: The Dalek Factor is added to humans in the Roman era
• At the climax of this story, the Daleks are defeated when the human/Dalek hybrids turn on them. The Daleks are similarly overthrown by their creations in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, in which the Doctor's companions turn the Robomen, humans conditioned to serve the Daleks, against their masters.
• The Daleks once again show a weakness to their own weapons, as previously seen in The Evil of the Daleks, Planet of the Daleks and The Five Doctors. Daleks Thay and Jast are destroyed by a constant barrage of fire from the variant Dalek energy weapons wielded by the hybrids.
• The Daleks' creator (Davros) is mentioned for the second time since the show's return in 2005 (the first having been in "Dalek").
• Dalek Sec refers to the "emergency temporal shift" that it activated in "Doomsday", explaining that all of the Cult of Skaro escaped being sucked into the Void by this method. Dalek Caan also initiates a similar shift at the end of this episode.
• Dalekanium, referenced in this episode and "Daleks in Manhattan", was first referred to in The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
• Once again, the Daleks use a 'battle computer' to direct mass operations on Earth, as in Remembrance of the Daleks. On that occasion, it was controlled by an altered human girl; here, it is operated by a direct link to Dalek Caan.
• The Daleks state that they first attempted to reproduce themselves in New York by creating Dalek "embryos". Dalek embryo technology and an "embryo room" were previously seen in Genesis of the Daleks. The idea of Daleks being genetically replicated was previously seen in Power of the Daleks.

Outside references

• "Happy Days Are Here Again" by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen is heard on the radio.
• Martha makes a reference to the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl starring Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, adapting it to Laszlo and Tallulah's situation as "The pig and showgirl".
• When the Doctor arrives in the lift, he says "First Floor, Perfumery", in the manner of a department store lift attendant. This method of announcing both floor and departments found thereon is also used as the basis of the theme music to the BBC situation comedy "Are You Being Served?". Since Britons typically use the phrase "ground floor" to describe what Americans would call "the first floor", the line is an ostensible Americanisation of the "Are You Being Served?" theme's first verse, which begins with the words, "Ground Floor, Perfumery".

Production

• The theatre sequence was filmed at the Parc Dare & Theatre, Treorchy.
• Scenes set at the Hooverville shanty town were filmed at Bute Park, Cardiff.
• Some second unit filming for this story was done in New York City. It primarily consisted of static shots of landmarks and landscape views, many of which were digitally altered to remove architecture created since the story's setting. This constitutes the second time any filming for Doctor Who has been conducted in America. (The 1996 TV movie, although produced in Vancouver, Canada, included establishing shots of San Francisco filmed by a second unit; an earlier story, The Two Doctors, was originally to have been filmed in New Orleans, but the budget of the time would not allow it.)
• The presence of the Daleks in this story was reported by the News of the World on 12 November 2006, and confirmed by the BBC in late December.

External links

• Evolution of the Daleks on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki
• "Evolution of the Daleks" at the BBC Doctor Who homepage
• "Daleks in Manhattan" / "Evolution of the Daleks" at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• "Daleks in Manhattan" / "Evolution of the Daleks" at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
• "it's started"—episode trailer
• "Evolution of the Daleks" at the Internet Movie Database

Reviews

• "Evolution of the Daleks" reviews at Outpost Gallifrey