Revelation of the Daleks
Story 142, Episodes 638-639, Season 22 Episodes 11-12
Doctor: Sixth Doctor
Companions: Peri Brown
Little new ground is trod in this story featuring Davros and the Daleks yet again.
The Review
Compared to Eric Saward’s previous dreadful Resurrection of the Daleks, this is a decided step up. Still, that previous tale was so awful, this one is still pretty mediocre. Both the Doctor and Peri actually don’t have much to do, spending the first 45 minutes not meeting anybody else. The Doctor insults Peri’s weight and eating habits, which is just simply rude. Davros under the moniker ‘Great Healer’ has situated himself in Tranquil Repose, a mortuary home on Necros. There, he is building an army of Daleks recycling dead bodies, though that plan doesn’t get very far. Tranquil Repose isn’t devoid of colorful characters, most notably an 80s DJ who is a fun presence and then of course gets brutally exterminated. Still, the amount of needless carnage is cut back from Resurrection, but this story does rather little to expand on Davros or the Daleks in any meaningful way.
In the station we have Jobel, one of the high-ranking scientists who is a complete creep hitting on every woman in sight until one kills him. Eleanor Bronte plays the place’s leader who hires two assassins to kill Davros. The lead assassin Orcini is from the ‘Greater Order of Oberon’, something we’re supposed to care about. He wants to kill Davros to have done something honorable in his profession, but has to settle for a suicide bomb destroying the newly generating Daleks. William Gaunt gives a great performance as Orcini, who is portrayed as an honorable knight figure. A main problem with this story is without the Doctor and Peri, everything would’ve played out essentially the same with the renegade Daleks capturing Davros. There is one amusing bit where Davros says he’s also solved famine by turning bodies into food, but says disclosing that would lead to ‘consumer resistance’. Following this story, it’s no surprise that there instead was consumer apathy.
The Sixth Doctor/Peri dynamic just sucks, the Twelfth Doctor/Clara interaction in Series 8 is an actually successful take at this but here the Doctor is just cruel.
7/10 Doing another season-ending Dalek/Davros story is a snoozer, even if it’s a step up.
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