The Fact of Fiction

Revealing the secrets of the Doctor’s adventures – scene by scene.

ALANBARNES wonders which is better: Daleks or Cybermen? There’s only one way to find out: fight!

Dalek Sec in Doomsday (2006).

The spherical Void Ship, as seen in Army of Ghosts (2006).

L astissue, we saw how Army of Ghosts (2006) ended with four Daleks emerging from the mystery sphere held by Torchwood for decades, ever since it first emerged from a breach in the sky above London. But what was their spherical Void Ship doing there in the first place?

In the online Doomsday commentary, writer Russell T Davies suggested that the Daleks believed they’d be likely to find a recent time traveller there and then, whom they could use to reactivate the Genesis Ark – ie, the Doctor. This wasn’t expanded on, since the Doctor’s consequent guilt would have weighed down the narrative. Then again: the Daleks are “scared” when their ‘Enemy’ upstairs is identified (at 08m 40s); it doesn’t look like they were expecting to encounter a Doctor at all!

So what if they’d been targeting somebody else…?

Towards Doomsday’s end, black Dalek Sec will escape the scene by performing an “Emergency temporal shift” – relocating itself to New York in 1930, in the vicinity of the underconstruction Empire State Building (as seen in Daleks in Manhattan/ Evolution of the Daleks, 2007). But the seed of Sec’s scheme seems to have been sown in the third episode of The Chase (1965) – in which the Daleks’ Doctor-tailing time machine briefly landed on the observatory floor of the Empire State, missing the TARDIS by moments. On the Manhattan-dedicated episode of Doctor Who Confidential, Davies theorised that “the Dalek memory banks made a little record of this building” – so that Sec went somewhere “that he knew would be useful…”

Barbara (Jacqueline Hill) and Ian (William Russell) with the Dalek time machine in The Chase (1965).

It’s reasonable to think those same repositories would also document how The Chase ended – with the Daleks’ time machine being stolen from the jungle of planet Mechanus and used to transport the Doctor’s then-companions Ian and Barbara back home… to London, 1965!

Sec would know to set the Sphere to emerge from the Void close to where the machine was due to materialise – meaning Ian and Barbara could be used to reactivate the Ark, when they exited the ship! But the Sphere missed them – late by a few years, or months, or maybe just minutes (as at the Empire State) – and so it simply hovered above London, creating a radar black spot, until Torchwood took notice. QED.

FIRST BROADCAST: Saturday 8 July 2006

The four Daleks that emerged from the Sphere advance, threatening extermination…

01m 27s … but Rose (Billie Piper) steps forward to address them, introducing herself as a human who knows not only about them, but also the Time War. As written, she shoved Mickey’s gun aside while stepping forward, beginning: “It won’t work –”

With the revelation of the sarcophagus-like Genesis Ark, also held in the Sphere, the action cuts to Yvonne’s office. In the script, this was preceded by a shot of the tower, with Torchwood boss Yvonne Hartman (Tracy-Ann Oberman) heard instructing all personnel to down weapons: “I repeat, down weapons. The Institute surrenders.” But this was cut in post-production, along with a shot of the Cyber Leader declaring: “The breach has been closed. The upgrading process will now begin.”

04m 28s While the army attempts to hold back oncoming Cybermen at a roadblock, Dr Rajesh Singh (Raji James) tells the Daleks he can give them some intelligence – “but nothing that will compromise homeland security.” Which is odd, because the phrase is derived specifically from the US Homeland Security Act of 2002, passed in response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001… so it would seem to have no relevance to the British-only Torchwood. Unless Rajesh really is referring to US Homeland Security – ie, he’s an American agent, secretly embedded within Torchwood? The Daleks will find out, since three of them then encase his head in their ‘sucker’ attachments, in order to extract his brainwaves. (Alas, they don’t subsequently confirm or deny any such information.)

Meanwhile, the Leader informs his troops that scans have detected an unknown technology active within the sphere chamber… in a shot that was clearly ‘flipped’ in editing, as the reversed C (for ‘Cybus’) on its chest-plate proves.

Soon, bronze Dalek ‘Thay’ (labelled ‘Dalek 3’ in stage directions) exits the sphere chamber to investigate the report of a second species of Earth invaders extracted from Rajesh’s mind. Last issue, The Fact of Fiction speculated that a Torchwood maintenance crew must have upgraded the signage in the corridor outside during the course of Army of Ghosts, explaining why said signage appears in two different configurations in two different scenes. But here we see that the pointers indicating Reception, the Lever Room and the Canteen, which were present when Rose entered the chamber, have now vanished – hurriedly removed by the same maintenance crew in the hope of confusing the Cyber-intruders, obviously.