Remembrance of the Daleks
The serial contains many references to the history of the show, featuring settings from the first Doctor Who episode, An Unearthly Child, such as Coal Hill School and the junkyard at 76 Totter's Lane.
They meet a military unit led by Group Captain Gilmore and Sergeant Smith, tracking abnormal local magnetic fluctuations, originating mainly from Coal Hill School where a transmat device in its basement is tied to a Dalek ship in geostationary orbit.
Smith is a secret associate of Ratcliffe, leader of a group of fascists, reporting to a Renegade battle computer, which uses a schoolgirl as its eyes and ears.
The Doctor establishes communication with the Dalek Emperor, who is really their creator, Davros, who means to destroy the Time Lords with the Hand.
Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel hired 25 year old Ben Aaronovitch to write the story, who had not written for television before.
[9] Remembrance of the Daleks, the first story in Doctor Who's twenty-fifth anniversary season,[10] contains many references to the series' past, something Aaronovitch felt was fun.
[9] It is set in the same time and place as the programme's first episode, "An Unearthly Child", where Coal Hill School employed original companions Ian and Barbara and the Doctor's granddaughter Susan was enrolled.
[7] In one of the classrooms, Ace picks up a book on the French Revolution just as Susan had in "An Unearthly Child"; Aldred studied the original to try to mimic Carole Ann Ford's stature.
[12] Also cut was the Doctor curing Ace's leg at the beginning of the third episode, and the issuing of instructions from the Dalek controller through an earpiece.
[14] The original script also had the Doctor blowing up a Dalek with the anti-tank missile in episode two, but McCoy felt this was out of character and suggested Ace should do it instead.
[8] To protect the secret of Davros' presence in the story, Terry Molloy was credited in part three under an anagram, "Roy Tromelly".
[8] Williams had trouble handling the character's gun and also misunderstood a stage direction in the script describing it, which earned him the nickname of "Chunky".
[8][7] Pamela Salem had roles in two Fourth Doctor serials, as one of the Xoanon voices in The Face of Evil, and as Toos in The Robots of Death (1977).
[7] Simon Williams, Karen Gledhill, and Pamela Salem reprised their roles in this serial in an audio spin-off series for Big Finish titled Counter-Measures, which details the adventures of the group after this story.
[8] For the final battle sequence between the Renegade and Imperial Daleks, the BBC Effects Department's pyrotechnics were so loud and the explosions so realistic that the London Fire Brigade was dispatched to the scene by local residents who feared that an IRA bomb had gone off.
McCoy recalled that after the first explosions, a number of car alarms in the neighbourhood went off, and the emergency services drivers were surprised when they arrived to see Daleks coming at them from out of the smoke.
[8] The junkyard gate was part of ITV's storage facility, and the pyrotechnics not only destroyed it for the effect of the Special Weapons Dalek blowing it up, but also smashed windows in the nearby building.
Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote in The Discontinuity Guide, "The best Doctor Who story in some considerable time, Remembrance of the Daleks reintroduced mystery and magic into the series with much intelligence and revisionist continuity".
Club reviewer Christopher Bahn, despite noting that the production had not aged well visually, called Remembrance of the Daleks "the Seventh Doctor era at its best".
He was positive towards how going back to An Unearthly Child allowed Aaronovitch and Cartmel to "showcase their new, more devious master-planner version of the Doctor", as well as the action and the character moments for Ace.
[22] Alasdair Wilkins of io9 called Remembrance "by a pretty wide margin the best anniversary special the show has ever done", praising the return to the 1960s and the various continuity references.
[10] Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times praised the serial for "attempting to honour the programme's roots, even if, sadly, the effect is more of the present clomping all over the past", and questioned how the Doctor could have known about the Daleks in 1963 if he did not meet them until he left.
Mulkern wrote that the action scenes were handled well, but some of the Daleks looked "fragile" and destroying Skaro was double genocide.
[26] In 2013, Den of Geek's Andrew Blair selected Remembrance of the Daleks as one of the ten Doctor Who stories that would make great musicals.
[1] Ten years later, the magazine conducted a poll of readers to find the most popular Doctor Who stories of all time for the programme's 35th anniversary; Remembrance of the Daleks was voted 6th.
[2] Remembrance of the Daleks placed 14th in the magazine's 2009 "Mighty 200" reader survey, which ranked the 200 Doctor Who stories made up to that point.
[5] The 2021 Channel 4 drama It's a Sin contains a mocked-up scene of a fictional Doctor Who serial involving a Dalek attack in tribute to the actor Dursley McLinden, who appeared in Remembrance of the Daleks and whose life and early death from AIDS partially inspired the drama's main character played by Olly Alexander.
This was an unforeseen consequence of the Restoration Team using earlier edits of these episodes to minimise generational quality loss, made before certain effects were added.
It includes the effects that were mistakenly left out and songs by The Beatles that weren't clearable for the original release but subsequently fell under a blanket music licensing agreement for the UK.
The two-disc Special Edition was delayed due to clearance issues and was held off until it was released in the United States and Canada on 2 March 2010.
