First broadcast 17 April 2010.

The Doctor (Matt Smith) is summoned to war-time London by Winston Churchill (Ian McNeice), who presents his latest weapon to fight the Nazi menace: the Daleks. Can the Doctor convince Churchill of the error of his ways and discover the Daleks’ true motives before it’s too late?

Now where should we begin? Let us not muck about: “Victory of the Daleks” is a dreadful episode of Doctor Who. The basic ideas at its foundation are terrible ones. The execution of those terrible ideas is actively awful. This is as bad as Doctor Who‘s 5th modern season gets; 15 years on and I still cringe at its worst aspects.

It is almost a requirement of a new Doctor to face the Daleks – almost as if they are not fully legitimate until they have defeated the psychotic pepperpots at least once. Patrick Troughton got to debut opposite them in the peerless “The Power of the Daleks”. Jon Pertwee got the time-travelling shenanigans of “Day of the Daleks”. Even Colin Baker, whose tenure was cursed with poor script writing, managed to get the superbly satirical “Revelation of the Daleks”. Poor Matt Smith got saddled with this: Spitfires in space and caricature Prime Ministers. It makes me think that recent Doctor Ncuti Gatwa got off lightly by not encountering Daleks at all: better that than this.

Here is the thing about Daleks: they are actually pretty difficult to write. They may be visually iconic, and they may have a brilliant catchphrase, they may carry the momentum of six decades of pop culture behind them, but they are maddeningly difficult to make interesting and threatening. Writer Mark Gatiss fails completely with this episode. In fact he breaks a cardinal rule of script writing: show, don’t tell. He tells us repeatedly, via the Doctor, just how evil the Daleks are, but we don’t actually see them be that evil. In the end, apart from killing a few soldiers and making a half-hearted attempt at detonating a bomb all they do is shout a bit and trick the Doctor into resurrecting their species. As far as Dalek master-plans go, it is the most sedate they’ve ever been.

The resurrected Daleks, grandly calling themselves “the new Dalek paradigm”, are an infamous let-down. One can appreciate the effort to reinvigorate them for a new era of the series, but their colourful new bumper-car look is gone within a season or two. It is an undignified, poorly conceived re-design. The colours might have worked, but their distorted shape ruins their iconic silhouette and their size somehow makes them less threatening rather than more.

There is also little reason to set the episode in World War II London. It allows the episode to pointlessly feature Winston Churchill, then the latest in a long and mostly tedious line of celebrity historical figures, but it doesn’t actually contribute to the storyline in any meaningful fashion. Churchill also seems a very odd person to be a close, ongoing friend of the Doctor’s, and it fails to ring true throughout the episode.

To be honest, shoe-horning the Daleks into World War II is the more problematic issue. For years people have gone on about how they were created as a fictionalised representation of Nazis – although honestly I suspect that was something creator Terry Nation only really came up with for 1975’s “Genesis of the Daleks”. When you start to move those closer to actually Nazis – and here they have never been closer – it suddenly becomes very clear just how asinine and crude those comparisons are. Nazis killed millions; the Daleks are bug-eyed monsters from a family television programme.

Surely one of the greatest faults of this episode was contracting Mark Gatiss to write it. He is, all things considered, a man of notable creative talent, however it must be said that his weakest work tends to be in Doctor Who. He is big on nostalgia in these things, and this leads to a very superficial ‘stiff upper lip’ representation of the Blitz – compare it to Steven Moffat’s “The Empty Child” just five years earlier – as well as the overly hagiographical representation of Churchill. It also sees him crib shamelessly from David Whitaker’s “The Power of the Daleks”, usually my pick for Doctor Who‘s finest episodes ever made.

The episode is hobbled by structural issues. There are a lot of ideas to play around with here: Daleks masquerading as human servants, Britain attempting to use future technology to win the war, Spitfires in space, Dalek resurrections, a Dalek-created android that believes he’s human, and so on. 20th century Who would have played these concepts out over four half-hour episodes. “Victory of the Daleks” gets 45 minutes. There is simply no time to play out each idea sufficiently to make it worth its while. Even when they are used they are often misjudged. Professor Bracewell (Bill Paterson) discovers he’s a robot quite early into the episode, leaving his character with nowhere else to emotionally go.

The Daleks introduce their upgraded form relatively late in the day, with no real opportunity to show why these “new paradigm” Daleks are superior. “The Power of the Daleks” was a masterpiece of the slow burn. It began with a single Dalek gliding around a human colony pretending to be a meek servant, and ended with Daleks storming through the colony exterminating humans en masse until the floor is literally littered with corpses. “Victory of the Daleks” denies them that horrifying climax, and that renders the earlier scenes fairly pointless.

“Victory of the Daleks” is the worst kind of Doctor Who: the kind where you can see potentially workable ideas, but are forced to stare dumbfounded at the dreadfully sloppy and poorly developed execution. The best I can say about the episode is that Matt Smith gets a nice moment with a jam biscuit.