Mike runs to Mr Ratcliffe's base and gets captured by the Renegade Daleks who are there. The little manny has managed to get their Time Controller working again, so they are about to exterminate Mike and Mr Ratcliffe before leaving with the Hand of Omega when the Imperial Daleks attack the base.
This acts as a distraction allowing Mr Ratcliffe to steal the Time Controller and run away, but then the little manny turns out to have Evil Emperor-style lightning powers... somehow... and she electrics Mr Ratcliffe. Mike takes the Time Controller and runs away, pursued by the little manny.
The Doctor and Ace see Mike has the Time Controller and the Doctor tells Ace to follow Mike. By now all the Renegade Daleks' base are belong to the Imperial Daleks, so they take the Hand of Omega coffin back to their shuttle and fly away.
The Doctor repurposes the borked Dalek teleporter to turn it into a TV that he can use to speak to the Imperial Daleks in their spaceship. He sees the Dalek Emperor on TV, and then it opens up to reveal...
Davros!
I do like the way the Emperor's voice changes from Dalek to Davros before we see him. We are now poised for a classic confrontation scene between the Doctor and Davros, the dramatic climax of the whole story. But first there is a short cut to where Mike has a gun and captures Ace.
Davros looks and sounds so silly on the Doctor's TV set, in crackly black and white, but yet strangely menacing at the same time. This is an effective conclusion for the story arc of Group Captain Gilmore, Professor Jensen and Allison, who are present to witness the confrontation. They know the Doctor is an alien, and have wondered if they can trust him, but now they see in Davros what a genuinely alien alien is like and so the Doctor seems benign by comparison.
Davros looks scary, but the Doctor is not scared. He provokes Davros into threatening to use the Hand of Omega at once. Then the Doctor pretends to be afraid of this and so Davros immediately switches to gloating before ordering
"Activate the Omega device!"
The Hand of Omega does not do what Davros wants it to, and instead it blows up Skaro (unless you believe the events of the novel
Retcon of the Daleks, which you shouldn't because it is one of the worst books known to cats). In terms of characterisation, this scene is a highlight of the story - the Doctor knows Davros is a megalomaniac and so psychologically manipulates him into using the Hand of Omega prematurely, defeating the baddy using words alone.
Davros, too late, realises he has been tricked by the Doctor and as soon as the Doctor switches off his TV set, Davros abandons the bridge of his spaceship to get to an escape pod, which you can just make out leaving the spaceship model before the Hand of Omega comes back to blow it up as well.
The little manny comes and electrics Mike who goes
and then she tries to electric Ace. The only Dalek left now is the Black Dalek, leader of the Renegades. The Doctor comes and talks it to death, which is inevitably an anticlimax after he has already dealt with Davros.
The Black Dalek vanishing frees the little manny from its control, illustrated very nicely by the scene transition from the disappearing Dalek to the screaming manny, both spinning around out of control. This bit makes no sense, but does look cool - which basically sums up most of the problems with
Remembrance Day of the Daleks right there.
Remembrance of the Daleks is a flawed classic. It was once voted the sixth best Doctor Who story of all time (
Doctor Who Magazine #265, June 1998), and while I wouldn't go that far (that same poll put
Timelash 157th, and that's over 150 places too low, mew!) I would say it is one of the most
cinematic Doctor Who stories of all time, in both positive and negative senses of the word.
It looks great. Not only the Daleks themselves, which have always been Doctor Who's most iconic monster for good reason, but all of the SFX from the spaceship in the pre-credits sequence through to the Black Dalek's technicolour demise, not to mention the fact they got in a genuine Time Controller for the Renegade Daleks to use! These all add up to make this story one of the most visually memorable of all Doctor Who stories.
But looks aren't everything and so there was a tendency, as I have noted, for things to be included just because they looked cool, even if they didn't make sense or, at the most charitable reading, weren't fully explained to us. The plot then exists as a device to link one "cinematic" set piece scene to the next, and so on. In those terms it is very successful, but the result is that Remembrance of the Daleks is left as the Doctor Who equivalent of a superficial Hollywood blockbuster action movie, rather than working as something deeper like, for example,
Star Trek 2 Wrath of Khan (my best evar film).
The Doctor's character has also continued in the questionable direction it started taking in
Dragonfire, particularly with regards to his relationship towards Ace. I don't mind the attempt to make him seem more mysterious, to put a distance between him and us the viewers, but what I do mind is the muddying of his morality - the Doctor should, must, always be a goody, and Doctor Who ceases to be Doctor Who when that fails to be the case. It is a fine line and I think they manage to just about stay on the right side of it in this story, but we are seeing the beginnings of a path that leads inexorably to
times in the New Series when they have crossed it.
By setting his trap for the Daleks on Earth, it is arguably the Doctor's fault that so many mannys are placed in danger of being exterminated. But the Doctor does spend a lot of the story trying to keep as many of them safe as he can, which seems to me like a step back in the right direction compared to his characterisation in
Dragonfire.
And then there is the retrofitting of the reason the Doctor was on Earth in 1963 in
An Unearthly Child, apparently to give the Hand of Omega a decent burial. This is another aspect to the plot that doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it - or at the very least it raises more questions than it answers - the Doctor certainly cannot have been planning to use it as a trap for the Daleks back then, as he hadn't even met them yet. But it works in a superficial way because it ties the story to the origins of Doctor Who, and feels right because it is marking the TV show's 25th anniversary.
Why do mannys think the 25th anniversary is special anyway? Is it because 25 is half of 50, which itself is half of 100, which is special because it is the biggest, longest number known to today's cat science? That would mean that half of 25 must also be a special anniversary, but what is that in Doctor Who terms?
I have consulted with a leading cat Professor of my acquaintance, and he says the answer is that it would be the 12½th anniversary (oh noes, this means we need
fractions). The first half of season 12 consists of
Robot,
The Ark in Space and
The Sontaran Experiment, and the second half (less stories but the same total number of episodes) is
Revenge of the Cybermannys and...
Genesis of the Daleks!
Appropriately enough, Remembrance of the Daleks is not only in the 25th anniversary of Doctor Who and the Daleks, it is also in the 12½th anniversary of the first appearance of Davros.
