Doctor Who’s movie got the Daleks badly wrong, even though they never appear

The 1996 Doctor Who TV movie got the Daleks badly wrong, even though they don’t appear. The BBC cancelled Doctor Who in 1989, but the world’s longest-running science-fiction television show still has so many fans—including those in the industry itself. Philip Segal successfully negotiated a partnership between Fox and the BBC that led to the release of a TV movie in 1996, intended as a backdoor pilot for a relaunch. The Doctor Who TV movie is unfortunately a failure, but it is not due to lack of effort or ambition.

The Doctor Who TV movie featured Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and Eric Roberts as the newest iteration of the Lord. Naturally, though, The Daleks simply appeared in some capacity – Although the negotiation of the right to use the Daleks was fiendishly complicated. They are ultimately woven into the introduction of the story, which reveals the Master was put on trial for his crimes against the Daleks and executed. They are heard but never seen – and even that causes a massive problem.

The Daleks granting the last wish of the master Doctor Who movie doesn’t make sense

Modern viewers will immediately notice that There is something off about the Daleks in this opening scene. Even their voices sound strange; The traditional tones were felt to be difficult to understand, and they were slightly modified in a way that just didn’t quite work (Segal would later comment that he wished he had hired veteran Doctor Who voice actor Nicholas Briggs). But the biggest problem lies in the fact that the Daleks apparently agreed to return the Master’s remains to the Time Lords.

This was positioned as an act of mercy, but it just doesn’t make sense. The Daleks are the most evil race in the universe, modeled after the Nazis themselves, and Doctor Who was quite clear: Mercy is alien to their nature. As far as the Doctor was concerned, the Daleks didn’t even have a word for mercy, so the idea they would show this to a defeated enemy was staggeringly out of character.

The plot hole is usually clear for the width Doctor Who fanbase, and it was addressed in a couple of different ways. Gary Russell’s novelization added some important context, with the Master making the request to the Doctor telepathically as it actually originated with the Daleks. It was a smart fix, because it meant it The Doctor was the one showing mercy rather than the DaleksAnd it even positioned the Doctor’s mission to retrieve the Master’s remains as an untold adventure.

market plat Longbarrow was the last of Virgin New Adventures series with the Seventh Doctor (Virgin would go on to publish one novel featuring McGann’s Eighth Doctor before the rights reverted to the BBC). This too subtly addressed the issue of the TV movie’s merciless Daleks. It revealed The Daleks have a treaty with the Time LordsAnd they had to return the master as part of this step.

The problem, however, is that none of these explanations are mentioned in the Doctor Who TV movie itself. The latter no longer makes any sense, in the light of the time war; It’s hard to believe the Time Lords and the Daleks ever had a treaty. All in all, therefore, this undoubtedly goes down as one of the great mysteries of Doctor Who Study.

What Doctor Who canon says about Daleks shows compassion

The story “The Witch’s Familiar” by Peter Capaldi featured a striking scene in which Missy trapped Clara Oswald in a Dalek shell, and tried to manipulate the Doctor into killing her. There, the Doctor realized the Dalek’s true identity when he uttered the word “mercy” – one he believed to be completely foreign to dialect vocabulary. He was not entirely correct; Daleks on one occasion appealed to River Song for mercy. Still, the point is illustrative, and indicates the scale of the problem.

There is, however, one potential explanation based on the Dalek timeline. In “The Evil of the Daleks,” the Second Doctor effectively created a new race of aliens by introducing the human factor, triggering a civil war on the Dalek homeworld of Skaro. It is possible that the Daleks who put the Master on trial are in fact a colony of the Humanized DaleksFurther developed (so with different voices), with a treaty with Gallifrey and a desire to put the Master on trial rather than just wipe him out on sight. This is almost certainly not the case Doctor Whos intention, but it fits.