Doctor Who: Tension, Stakes and Bad Aim

In the most recent episode of Doctor Who, Eve of the Daleks, it would be an understatement to say that the Daleks were not shooting straight, and fans across the internet definitely noticed. However, this was met with pushback with others claiming that this criticism of the episode was just nitpicking. While this may seem to be an aesthetic or surface level criticism it actually has significant impact on the enjoyment of the story for a very fundemental story telling reason - the establishment of stakes and tension.

Firstly, this isn't meant to be a roast of the episode, I thought that a lot of the story was enjoyable and this isn't an issue solely with this episode. However, it does serve as a very obvious case study of the problem. So what actually happened?

During the episode a small team of Daleks is sent to assassinate the Doctor but they get stuck in a time loop with the TARDIS team and two hapless bystanders which resets upon the deaths of the characters. The trouble was that the Daleks, when attempting to exterminate the Doctor, quite obviously miss every shot despite being in close range, with the shots inexplicably hitting everything in the surroundings of the characters, until the point in the plot where the loops needed to reset at which point their accuracy became pinpoint.

A further problem is that the Daleks are a new executioner class of Daleks with a rotary canon style laser in place of the classic death ray. This is a really interesting addition to the Daleks adding to the replacement of the sucker with a claw from a few years back. But this just meant that there where even more shots to miss. They seemed to have even made this problem worse in the editing as between the frames that showed the practical effects on set and the CGI of the Daleks firing the number of shots increases drastically, probably to make the rate of fire seem more like a classic rotary machine gun and this just serves to highlight the problem further.

But isn't this just a TV show? It doesn't need to be realistic, right? Well yes, but the problem here isn't about realism but the establishing stakes in a plot. In order to care what is happening to the characters on screen and remain engaged with the story there needs to be tension, and this requires an establishment and maintenance of consistent stakes. If the characters are not in any consistent danger by the presence of the antagonists then there are no stakes in the plot.

This is not just a problem for this episode because, although Doctor Who has always has a bit of a love-hate relationship with consistent canon, the Daleks have always been a deadly and imposing force and portraying them this way damages the stakes for future stories. But this is where this is not just the fault of this particular story, the stakes of the return of the Daleks has been eroded since as early as Victory of the Daleks all the way back in 2010. This is a problem over a decade old. So how can this problem be fixed?

To see how stakes were established well for the Daleks we need look no further than the Series 1 episode Dalek. The lone Dalek in this episode is methodical and ruthless, and relating to the issues of the episode in question here, has pinpoint accuracy. Not one shot is wasted. This is the threat that is built up and maintained during the tenure of Russel T Davies as showrunner. This is not to say that there were not a few goofy moments involving the Daleks during the first 4 series - the resolution to Journey's End comes to mind - but every time that the Daleks returned it was a terrifying prospect for the characters, the stakes were solidly established and the tension was nailbiting.

The second way in which the stakes were maintained during the RTD era of Doctor Who was by the Daleks always being an immediate threat in the stories they featured in. The time war reset the board with the Daleks advancing to a point more technologically developed than ever before but also seemingly extinct. Whenever the daleks featured in a story it was because they had managed to escape the time war and their very existence was a threat to the universe. Contrast this with how the Victory of the Daleks changes the playing field for Series 5-12 where the Daleks are always out there but the Doctor only deals with them when he/she stumbles across them. Through this they appear to be less of a threat and thus the stakes are implicitly lower making it that much harder for tension to be built throughout their stories.

Maybe my thoughts on this are marred by my preference for Doctor Who being more serialised but I think that it is reasonable to expect a show that has at least some sort of continuity and a reuse of the same enemies should maintain some kind of consistency with their principal villains. The silver lining could be in the return of Davies as showrunner in 2023, his solidification as the Daleks as an existential threat and the maintenance of this when he first revived the show give me hope that he will do it again.

But back to Eve of the Daleks, how could this problem have been averted? Well one way would have been to change the plot to have the characters come into contact less often with the Daleks but I think that the better solution would have been to have a different enemy entirely for the episode. Maybe an enemy that is more slow moving having to come into direct contact to be a threat or one that doesn't need to maintain such a high threat level? Perhaps the Cybus style Cybermen or the Judoon.

All in all, the Daleks need to regain their sense of threat but I wouldn't mind if they kept the cool gatling guns.