Month: August 2021

Episode 21: Aliens In London + World War 3

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Jumping back to 2005 (or 2006, depending on your point of view) the Daleks Aren’t Robots crew meets the Slitheen for the first time.

How do Kari and Justin react to the fat, flatulating family of felons? Find out! (Badly. We react badly. It’s bad.)

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Doctor takes Rose back to visit her mom, but it’s been 12 months and not the 12 years they thought it was. Rose has been missing 12 months, and her mom is glad to see her but very worried, and unimpressed with the much-older Doctor. Mickey has been under suspicion of murdering Rose, too. Why can’t they just pop back in the Tardis and go back a year? Anyway, an alien ship crashed into Big Ben and then into the Thames in London. We see three fat politicians meet in 10 Downing Street, one of whom is farting, and they all laugh evilly over the briefcase with the alien invasion emergency plans for Britain in it.

It turns out that the fat people in these two episodes are the Slitheen, a family of evil exhibitionist fat gay incestuous hunter capitalists who want to, get this, irradiate the earth with our own nuclear weapons and sell the radioactive bits as spaceship fuel. The farting is because they have to compress down to get into even fat human skins, and Mickey saves the day by launching a missile, stopping others from intercepting it and blowing up 10 Downing Street with the aliens in it. After so many “farts.” So. Very. Many.

OUR TEAM

The Doctor is right most of the time in this one, which is annoying, but he does have some good moments. At one point the Slitheen vivisect a pig into a bipedal creature to fake an alien crash landing, and the Doctor legitimately tries to help the pig, by just bossing Unit around like a King Karen. It works but ultimately he’s unable to save the pig from the gun-happy UNIT. He does care.

He also does legitimately have concerns about putting Rose in danger. REMEMBERING ADRIC ARE WE. He calls Mickey Ricky whenever he’s around and Mickey when he isn’t, but in the end he does invite Mickey to come with and help keep Rose safe (Mickey says he can’t). He also is kind of a brat about taking Rose with him in a few hours rather than waiting a day after the crisis is over.

Rose is OK in this one but unfortunately, she’s more of a sexy lamp than anything. Her return influences the plot a lot more than she does–Jackie was devastated by her disappearance, Mickey was accused of murder and had a very difficult time. Rose is brave, though.

Mickey shines the brightest in this episode. Last time we saw him he was having an anxiety reaction of exaggerated cowardice. In the past year he’s done extensive research on the Doctor and UNIT, and he’s become very level-headed and good in a crisis. He’s the one who successfully bombs 10 Downing Street to kill the aliens. He’s upset about the Doctor but he does not hesitate to work with him, or to save Jackie’s life even though she hated him. When the Slitheen come for Jackie and him he grabs a baseball bat and gets ready to fight.

It’s a shame about the actor. >.<

Jackie is also great. She slaps the daylights out of the Doctor at one point, which is well-deserved, and she consistently expresses concern about Rose throughout the episode, worries about her relationship with the clearly older Doctor and then about the safety of her journeys with him. She’s clearly compassionate, but opinionated and fierce too. Jackie is the one who gathers the vinegar solution to throw on the alien. Which explodes with a fart sound. Siiiiiiiiiigh.

THE OTHERS

Harriet Jones is the principle one, a politician from a British backwater who gets caught up in events. She figures out that there’s something off about the Slitheen politicians and approaches Rose about it. She’s very upset but keeps a cool enough head to reach out to Rose and the Doctor for help. She even distracts the Slitheen away from Rose in a pinch. The Doctor says she becomes Prime Minister and ushers in a golden age for Britain.

The Slitheen: A family of evil aliens who can wear human skins as a suit, provided they’re the skins of fat humans. They’re evil and stuff. With extra evil, fat and farting. They’re capitalists and want to irradiate the earth so they can sell the radioactive bits. They’re all evil. That’s it. This is definitely a downward trend from previous NuWho and previous Classic Who where a lot of aliens have good and bad people in their groups. The Slitheen are the worst.

A bunch of boring politicians and others we don’t care about.

THE SETTING

  1. Earth in 2006. Why did they put in an alien invasion attempt in 2006? They had to know that would make the show out of date in a year.
  2. It’s London and some of it is in Downing Street. Is it filmed on location? It looks good but I don’t know how close it is to the real Downing Street. At the end it gets blown up.
  3. Obviously nuke access doesn’t work that way.
  4. Pretty sure British elections don’t work that way either.
  5. The Slitheen plan is a very underpants gnome plan. That’s not how nuclear fuel works normally, I guess they could have some sort of magic alien tech, but it’s dudmb.
  6. THe Doctor has a corded phone.
  7. There were a couple of good comedic beats, like when the cop evacuating the building opens the door to see a bunch of the Slitheen and then just apologizes and closes it again.

THE PRODUCTION

  1. The special effects on the Slitheen are… not great. The zipper on their foreheads are stupid looking. The babydoll faces are icky but not as creepy as the original autons were, or in fact, as actual baby dolls. The discrepancy between the men in suits and the CG aliens is vast and awful.
  2. Evil fat gay people who fart constantly, huh. Thanks. 😦 And the main actor had an eating disorder at this point.

General

From Davies’s Book – The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter

Eccelston and Boak

Contemporary reviews and news articles

Reviews

Muriel Frost

Girl’s Aloud Influence

Homophobia Analysis

Interviews

The Noel Clarke Situation

Locations

The Whoopie Cushion

The Original Slitheen Design (?)

Episode 20: The Rescue

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Welcoming special guest Blue aboard the Daleks Aren’t Robots TARDIS (DARDIS, if you will), we look at the first episode with the First Doctor’s new companion, Vicki.

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Tardis lands on Dido (so I guess a woman immolating herself for a man DOES feature). There Barbara and the boys (Ian and the Doctor) are separated when a spiky looking alien fires a weaponlike object at Barbara. There is a crashed ship on Dido with a girl named Vicki and a man named Beckett in it; both of them fear someone named Koquillian, who sounds like he might be a native to the planet. Barbara meets Vicki, who tells her the Didoans killed ALL the other people on the ship who didn’t die in the crash. Barbara accidentally kills Vicki’s pet, Sandy, mistaking it for a monster.

The Doctor has been to Dido before and knows the people there, a small population that’s friendly and cool. It turns out that Bennett is Koquillian and he murdered a guy on the ship, and killed all the other survivors AND a bunch of Didoans to cover it up. Vicki didn’t know about it because she was a kid. Bennett has been using a Didoan temple and their holy gear in his masquerade; the Doctor confronts him there and almost dies, but two surviving Didoans intimidate Koquillian off a cliff. They take Vicki with them when they leave.

OUR TEAM

The Doctor: He’s a bit sad in this episode, clearly missing Susan. He’s a lot gentler to Barbara and Ian than usual, and he’s also super kind to Vicki. He might be seeking to fill the granddaughter-shaped hole in his heart. At one point he’s about to order Susan to open the door, says her name and then gets this sad look on his face. He’s very sweet with Vicki.

He figures out Koquillian isn’t who he seems. He also has a near-fatal moment of overconfidence when he confronts Bennett in the Didoan temple and Bennett kicks the crap out of him, until two Didoans come and save the day.

Ian: Ian is JOVIAL and cheerful in this episode. Maybe it’s just an effect of the Doctor being nicer, but he’s really grown a lot and removed the stick from his ass over the past season and a half.

Barbara: Barbara makes a rare mistake in this one, and kills Vicki’s pet monster when she mistakes it for, well, an actual monster. She grabs a flare gun and straight up murders the thing. She isn’t as apologetic as I would have expected, when she finds out it was a pet, which seems out of character for Barbara.

Vicki: The new girl! She seems more childish than Susan–is the actress younger as well? She’s also kind of… well, it was SUPER obvious that Bennett was Koquillian almost immediately. She seems kind of gullible.
She’s mad at Barbara for killing her pet, but that’s totally reasonable (even if the show doesn’t seem to think so). She does immediately have a rapport with the Doctor, and she’s pretty brave–she helped Barbara and hid her from Koquillian, and helped treat her wounds. She’s apparently an orphan (her father was in the wreck) and she’s from the future (she left earth in 2493 after her mom died).

She’s independent minded and doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her. She does have kind of a hysterical crying fit at one point, but it IS right after her pet was killed, so…

THE OTHERS

Bennett: The bad guy. He’s a murderer who killed the crash survivors AND did a genocide in order to hide his murder. He is not as scary as Reegan, but I was legitimately worried for the Doctor when he was trying to kill him at the end. His monster suit is pretty good, and for once there’s a damn good reason it looks like a guy in a suit!

Two Didoans: They don’t say anything, they just stop Bennett from murdering the Doctor and intimidate him off the cliff. They’re just wearing white coveralls with capelets and boots.

A couple of ADORABLE monsters who are obviously just a guy in a lobster/lizard suit lying on the ground. I’m sure there are no toys of it for STUPID reasons. The monster-pet that Barbara kills is named Sandy and it appears to have light-up eyes.

THE SETTING

  1. There are some adorable miniatures of the broken spaceship.
  2. There are some rad Indiana Jones style traps in the cave where the Tardis lands, and they are escaped very sensibly too. There’s kind of a neatly-made wall that looks like a monster’s face–the monsters we see, maybe.
  3. The spaceship wreck interiors look good; the planet Dido looks OK too. I didn’t notice anything all that unusual or special about them.
  4. The temple set at the end looks cool, with some pillars and a chest I think?

THE PRODUCTION

  1. Why Vicki? Why did they choose that actress? Why did they choose that character? How old is the actress? How will she be different from Susan? What did fans think of Vicki?
  2. Was it meant to be obvious that Bennett was Koko?
  3. The mini spaceship was adorable, is this from the same miniaturist that made the other minis? It’s so charming and cute.
  4. They have kind of a large, cool looking flashlight at one point, is it a normal flashlight?

General

Vicki

Contemporary Articles

Sean Connery (no, really)