Receiving a call for help from his old friend Winston Churchill, the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond head for World War II to assist the Prime Minister. Once there, though, the Doctor reunites with his greatest enemies, the scum of the universe — the Daleks. But why are these survivors passing themselves off as man-made weapons? And why don’t they recognise the Doctor? What could these “Ironsides” have planned?
Rate and review below:
I found this one interesting. This one works so well because the Doctor is the only one that actually understands the threat the Dalek’s possess while they are pretending to actually be beneficial and helpful.
In all honesty it’s one of my least favorite of this season (I do like the episode, I think it’s just a really good season) and I like Amy as a companion but I really like the stories with her and Rory as companions together better than her individual run. The Daleks were interesting with the different colors too.
I think that this one is a bit underrated. I think that it works well as a modern take on Power of the Daleks. I think that there are two things that drag this episode down: the rest of the season is even better, and this is when the Daleks are a bit overused. But if you look at this one in a vacuum, I think that it is an hour of fun Doctor Who.
This one is ok, but nothing special. It’s probably my least favourite episode of S5, but I love S5 so that’s not the biggest of criticisms.
I think the biggest problem I have with this episode is that it’s tonally inconsistent with how it treats the Daleks. By this I mean that they’re here and to begin with the Doctor is going mad trying to tell everyone how dangerous they are (Matt Smith is great at showing how terrifying they are in the early parts of this episode btw). Then it all gets a bit too silly, with some wacky comedy stuff (the jammy dodger bit is amusing but I do think it undercuts the level of threat I should be feeling from the Daleks) and then this rebuilt Dalek empire which should be terrifying gets defeated by a handful of WW2 spitfires. Again spitfires in a space battle is a fun enough idea on it’s own, but if the point of this episode is to rebuild the Daleks and position them back as the most terrifying force in this universe, then they fail to achieve that for me by having some rickety old Earth planes (yes I know they have some not really explained sci-fi enhancements, but still) scare them off.
So yeah it’s perfectly watchable, and if this was just going to be a fun little adventure with Daleks in it then I’d likely think it was pretty good. But seeing as narratively the point of this episode also seems to be to bring the Daleks back in full (RTD1 generally had there being either just a handful of Daleks or even when they had their empire back they were still generally operating from the shadows. The Dalek Empire wasn’t really an active part of the universe post Time-War. Apart from in a couple of big finales where they had rebuilt off-screen and in secret) then I feel this episode doesn’t make them as threatening by the end as it should. But at least the parts that fail in this regard are entertaining, so not a complete failure as an episode by any means.
I don’t love this one or think it’s amazing, but I did watch it a lot in 2010 so I have a real fondness for it. It perfectly fills that necessary role of ‘Dr Who ep that’s basically fine so the really special ones can pop’ and it’s definitely not bad. And I don’t hate the skittle daleks…
I actually like this one and was shocked to hear it’s not highly rated. I mean cmon he threatens to blow up the daleks with a Jam ‘n’ Cream!!! (And that is what it is, that is NOT a jammy dodger Doctor)
I did actually review it when they first reran it on bbc3 last year (that’s still going btw they’re on Capaldi rn) but my only complaint really was that they glorify Churchill and the war a bit, and I found one of the guys a bit flat
But I’ll defend this one, I like it a lot 
For me, this is a game of two halves. I like the WW2 stuff but the Dalek ship stuff falls flat.
For some reason “Daleks pretending to be good” is one of my favourite DW tropes so I love this episode a lot
I think the fandom is a bit harsh to this episode, but it’s still only about a 6/10. It’s got some interesting ideas, and funny moments (I’m sorry, but Daleks serving tea is peak and I stand by that). Still, even leaning into the goofiness of the concept wasn’t enough to save it, and the episode as a whole suffers from some poor execution.
Last time I watched this I remember thinking it felt like it was written for 10, especially how The Doctor’s anger was written. The whole episode os just always felt really off to me. From that to the pacing to treating Churchill as a goopd guy in literally any way. I’ll usually defend a Gatis script, but not this time. At leaast the Ironsides look good.
A real stinker. I fondly remember the backlash the Daleks got, if only for the endless Power Rangers and Teletubbies mockery. But even if you take those Toytown Daleks aside, it’s a pretty ropey production. No wonder Moffat said in hindsight that block is the one he wishes he’d paid more attention to.
I don’t hate these Daleks, and in fact I like the voice change. I also like them more when they’re darker in tone, like in Asylum onwards
I enjoy this episode a lot. It was my introduction to the idea that Daleks even had the capacity to pretend to be good, something new to the Revival era, even though the concept is done better in Power of the Daleks.
I particularly enjoy how important Amy’s role is in this story, following on from The Beast Below where she ends up saving the day. In this episode it’s thanks to her humanity and ability to relate to Bracewell that he doesn’t explode. She, once again, is part of saving the day. I always appreciate it when the companions have a key moment like that in an episode. She gets to prove how good of a companion she is to this Doctor very early in her run.
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! TASTE THE RAINBOW!
This episode is just meh for me. I’m not a fan of “The Doctor loses but it doesn’t mean anything” conclusions, between the Paradigm escaping and how underutilised they’d be from here on. The stuff with Bracewell is alright, and I do chuckle at how the Daleks’ entire plan here boils down to “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”, but coming right after The Beast Below, the Androzani Effect is definitely in attendance here.
Victory of the Daleks is a rather middling episode. I guess I’ll start with the more controversial thing these days of its depiction of Churchill. Now, I’m an American, so I never really learned the details of who he was beyond the Prime Minister who was crucial in stopping the Nazis, helped get Britain through the Blitz. I didn’t really learn about him beyond that in school. But honestly, I don’t really care if that’s how Gatiss and this episode wants to remember him, a re-evaluation of the man is not what this episode set out to do, and I don’t think it should be expected to. I also don’t know how prevalent the revision[1] of the historical view of Winston Churchill was in 2010 when this came out, I’ve at least only seemed to encounter it later, when he started being more remembered for being an imperialist, racist, and such, and Gatiss was probably old enough that the war hero view of Churchill was, at a guess, what he was taught growing up. I’ll file it with things like the third Doctor being a friend of Mao that probably had little to nothing thought of it at the time it came out that is seen differently as perceptions change over time, a non-issue to me.
Matt Smith and Ian McNeice play off each other well. I like their banter over him trying to get the TARDIS key, and discussions of how if he had the Doctor’s technology, they could beat the Nazis and win the war so much quicker, and with so much less cost of life, with the Doctor having to preserve the web of time as always. If you were in such a desperate position like the Blitz, you’d probably be thinking along similar lines. And I think this stuff along with just the irony in the concept of using Daleks of all things to fight the fascists rather works, even if I don’t think they did quite enough with it. I like all the “if Hitler were invading Hell…” and other lines like that. But the World War Two setting and all that is definitely a strength of this episode.
The cliffhanger at the end of last episode felt like the Daleks were invading, and Churchill was concerned, but in actuality was it just Bracewell introducing him to his “inventions?” And sure, the Doctor is late by a month, so there’s been that much time for the Daleks’ plan to go through and for them to gain Churchill’s trust, but it feels like a bit of a disconnect that seems to ask more questions about that month than it answers. And honestly, I also find myself asking if Bracewell was even needed at all. The Daleks could just as easily have made up some BS about how they crashed down on Earth and then wanted to help with the war. They could have just given the other bits of tech knowledge themselves. And of course, the Daleks could have hidden an oblivion continuum anywhere, it didn’t have to be in a robot. So you could cut out Bracewell, just make it all the Daleks on their own, and very little would change.
Now obviously, Mark Gatiss knows The Power of the Daleks, and I do appreciate all the homages to it. Things like them saying “I am your soldier” instead of servant, and I think the Daleks were seen serving water to people in Power much like tea here. And of course the basic plot of the Daleks tricking some people into thinking they’re on their side with only the Doctor knowing their true nature. The difference to me is that Power does this to make a very suspenseful story full of tension, where this one seems to be doing it to reference the prior story, and once they got what they needed from the Doctor it was pretty much just business as usual.
Some good stuff with Amy here, setting up the ways in which the crack has affected her mind with how she doesn’t remember the Daleks. I like the way she convinces them to use “Bracewell’s” technology against the Daleks. And she does save the day in the end, all pretty cool. I will say though, she never calls Bracewell anything other than “Paisley,” except for one “Edwin.” No one does that, only calling someone by some nickname they made for them, they’ll use it sometimes, not every time. A bit silly. She also gets her first taste for the fact that the Doctor has enemies, which will of course have a lot of consequences as this season and the Smith era as a whole progresses.
The testimony plot is functional I guess, but not without issues. It’s a bit weird that the whole plan was just to get the Doctor to identify them and say it out loud, and that would somehow make the progenitor ship recognize them as truly Daleks since they’re not pure. I end up wondering why it mattered though, since the New Paradigm (no, they’re not just “Paradigm Daleks” like people commonly call them, if anything, without the “New” you’re referring to the previous Daleks, something that’s always annoyed me) just destroy the old ones anyway, and are already made from a sample of “pure” Dalek, and that’s before you even get to the issue of what “pure Dalek” even is. Somehow being made from Davros’s own Kaled cells (I think the bronze/Ironsides Daleks here are supposed to be survivors from the last Dalek story) isn’t pure enough when the Daleks are mutated Kaled in the first place, so I don’t know what is.
I don’t like the New Paradigm casing designs. They just look like plastic first of all, like a big plastic toy. And sure, I know the time they looked like painted wood and stuff, but those weren’t made in 2010, they looked fine for their time and screen resolution in a way that these do not. Then of course the way the back end of it sticks out so much looking like, for lack of a better description, they have big asses. It changes too much from the typical Dalek silhouette, which I really don’t think needs to be changed. I don’t have a problem with the different colors or the slight changes to the voices, that much is fine, and actually kind of cool that they have the colors for the different roles. But honestly, they just don’t look good, and I see why we hardly see them going forward. Asylum does improve the design when we see them there though. Really funny that the location doubling for the Dalek ship is just not tall enough to really fit them, but with all of its exposed metal I sort of liked the 60s Who aesthetic the ship seems to have as a result.
Aside from a few moments where he lays it on a little thick, like his testimony itself, or when he’s yelling at the Dalek, Matt Smith is quite good in this. I like the way he interacts with Winston, as said. I like how he gets very serious when trying to get them to see that the Daleks are evil. I like the bluff with a cookie being the TARDIS self-destruct. He’s just very strong in his performance as the Doctor even this early in his run, and probably elevates this episode a bit above its shortcomings.
The fight to take out the beam lighting up London was certainly exciting and fun, but bears little scrutiny when analyzed. Like, Bracewell has blueprints and such for getting these planes into space and stuff, and they aren’t depicted as much more than ideas earlier, but somehow is able to just get it up and running in a matter of minutes? And they have pilots who know how to use this new technology? And the planes are still flown by propellers in space? Yes, they have a bubble to keep air in for the pilots, but you need some actual thrust to achieve escape velocity and to even move in space. And even if it could somehow work, they’re not getting to the vicinity of the moon in a matter of minutes. Also the scaling of the visuals in space, not just this scene, are laughable. Like the moon looks simultaneously small and large when compared to the Earth a ridiculously close distance to it and to the Dalek progenitor ship that has a diameter nearly as large as the moon’s. Look at this:
And then we get Bracewell bomb. I don’t think it really works, honestly. He doesn’t blow up because he convinces himself with some help from Amy that he’s human and therefore can’t blow up? It’s a bit of a lame “love saves the day,” solution that is done other times and better. And why do the Daleks even use the countdown in that scene? I get that they used the countdown as part of the threat earlier to get the Doctor to back down, but they decide to go against their word anyway, so just get the time corridor going and just set the thing off right before you jump. It’s like they wanted the bomb to fail. It doesn’t seem to be depicted to need time to “warm up” or anything. Not to mention it’s just another “destroy the Daleks or save the Earth” decision but without the weight or impact that The Parting of the Ways had.
I do like that the Daleks kind of win here. Their mission was to get the New Paradigm going to restore the Dalek race, and that’s exactly what they did. Now, they don’t really establish any real consequence of this after this episode, but that’s hardly the fault of Victory itself. I’ve always assumed that the New Paradigm referred more to the genetic make-up of the creature within the casing, not the casing itself, so I’ve assumed that even though we see the bronze design again, the Dalek creatures are still New Paradigm, and that’s how they stay for the remainder of the modern series afterwards, though that’s all speculation.
Despite my issues I have in its details, especially when looking at it more critically, it’s still a reasonably watchable Doctor Who, just nothing particularly special either. I think at this point the Daleks really were getting overdone, when each of the first five seasons of the modern series had them, and it was a good decision by Steven Moffat to kinda put them to rest after this one, not giving them a full story until Series 7. I think their frequency of appearances was starting to dilute their impact. And I think when Moffat himself chose to bring the Daleks back for a full outing, he had a better plan of something unique or different to do with them, resulting in a product I like much more in Asylum, Into, and Apprentice/Familiar. This one is just one of the Dalek episodes of all time, 6/10, probably on the lower end there.
Not in the sense of a believed lying to make a historical figure look worse than they were, more like how one would revise a work with new information or different context ↩︎
I’ll be completely honest, that’s all we[1] learn in Britain. We only really cover him in Primary school when we do WW2, and at that stage, you don’t really need to cover all his nuances.
Or at least, all I learnt. Schools have a fair bit of leeway when it comes to historical education, and others might have learnt more ↩︎
Woah, another thread that has amazed me. Only two posts being strongly negative. This episode was DESPISED in 2010, and completely unfairly in my opinion. No, as many have said, it’s nothing wonderful or remarkable, but it’s really not bad. I believe the ending bothers me, but the skittle Daleks never did, I thought it was a great concept and have always been baffled by the outrage they sparked. I’ll see what I make of them this time…
Of course the portrayal of Churchill in this episode is problematic and I’m so relieved the world has finally woken up to what he was like. But there’s no denying Ian McNiece is perfect casting, it’s little wonder he’s played him so many times in his career (I’m also a rare supporter of the BF spin-off range.)
I also really like the fact that Churchill and the Doctor have a proper established relationship, including a familiarity with regeneration. It aids the pace but also is just refreshing after the structure of many celebrity historicals. Plus allows for endless fun in the EU (again, that BF range really isn’t bad!)
I had a poster of that Ironside blueprint up on my bedroom wall for years, loved it.
I’ve watched series five SO many times and I still get confused about Amy forgetting the Daleks. I know it’s all to do with the resolution to the forthcoming series finale but I can never remember how it all works.
I like the khaki design and it’s a shame nobody talked about them because of what comes at the end of the episode.
It’s a bit odd that the previous episode ends with Churchill asking for the Doctor’s help, but that doesn’t actually make sense with the episode so they throw in a month’s time jump for no good reason. Could have just not had the cliffhanger?
I want to give Matt Smith a cuddle, even when he’s angry.
I know there are issues with what follows but the initial ‘testimony accepted, progenitor activated’ stuff is a proper ‘oh shit’ moment.
I quite like the Bracewell android twist, never saw it coming.
The forced switch-on of all the energy so ‘the humans destroy each other’ is genius too.
Okay, so the new paradigm. I guess people felt they weren’t threatening anymore because they’re bright colours? But as a tween when this aired, it was the first time I’d ever been interested in the Daleks. Okay, bright blue and orange might be a bit far, but they’re HUGE in a way that I think works - you can’t imagine kicking one of those across the room - and the idea that each colour represents a different role within the paradigm I think makes for a really interesting concept and it’s a shame it was never continued. It’s what the Cult of Skaro was missing, and Time Lord Victorious has hinted at how effective it could have been. I like that they just obliterate the OG drones too.
Spitfires in space is quite cool.
I’m never big on the whole ‘love saves the day’ thing (eyyy the new trope!) and it’s my biggest gripe here, I don’t think it works at all, though I suppose it’s good Amy has one small something to do (classic Gatiss having as little female input as possible - is that random two-line subplot of the woman losing her lover just there to tick a box?)
Weird episode title isn’t it really, big fat spoiler?
Verdict - I generally really don’t get on with Gatiss but this is probably my second favourite of his episodes. It’s really not bad. I think its main issue other than the bomb resolution is its pacing, in that it crams too much in. I’m not saying it should be a two-parter, I think that would have been painful. But an extra ten minutes, had that been an option in those days, would have gone a long way to keep us wondering if the Daleks were good for just a little longer, and explore the new paradigm and the Doctor’s dilemma just a little bit deeper. Both of the first two acts are over in a flash before we’ve really got invested in what’s going on, and then we spend what feels like forever diffusing a bomb using nonsense and tying up loose ends in slightly odd and vaguely problematic ways. It ends up making the whole thing feel messy - the parts, I feel, are largely not too bad, and the excellent cast and decent design certainly help this - but the sum of these parts leaves a lot to be desired.
Reading my own, old, review of this episode just now (in which, interestingly, I didn’t like the Spitfires in space), I’m reminded that Nick Briggs actually tears Gatiss apart to his face on the DVD commentary for the Bracewell resolution. So that’s fun.
I like the colourful Daleks!
