After the fantastic reception of "Caves of Androzani", Season 22 is a constant effort to repeat the success of Robert Holmes' triumphant to Doctor Who. Sadly, Eric Saward never really grasped quite what made "Caves" so fantastic, instead filling the season with superficial features of that story such as mercenaries, machine guns and violence. He also missed that the magic of "Caves" was that The Doctor didn't stoop to the level of the other characters, whereas Season 22 sees him kill all sorts of people (including suffocating Shockeye when he could have simply incapacitating him, and then there's the general treatment of guards on Varos). To be fair, though, Saward isn't a particularly bad writer; he's just a bit of a smothering script editor, when what he really needed was someone editing his scripts.

Saward's admiration for Holmes reached its' zenith with "Revelation of the Daleks", a pastiche of the writer's style. First of all, there's the explosion of double-acts (Orcini and Bostock; Kara and Vogel; Takis and Lilt; Jobel and Tasambeker; Grigory and Natasha) - counting The Doctor and Peri, and later Peri and the DJ/The Doctor and Davros, no major character is left without a direct foil, which makes the story feel a little cluttered. There's also Saward's interpretation of Holmes' archetypes - the Holmes dodgy-but-basically decent rogue (Garron, Vorg, Jago) is grafted to the Saward soldier of fortune (Mace, Lytton) to produce noble assassin Orcini, while the Holmes instinctive hero (Hal, Rogin, even Unstoffe at a stretch) and the Saward doomed naïve would-be hero (Russell, Mercer, Adric in "Earthshock") merges to form Grigory. There are also the direct lifts - Kara is descended from devious bureaucrats like Kalik or Morgus, while Vogel owes something to sycophantic underlings such as the Gatherer Hade.

There's not a lot of screentime to fit this lot into, so the quality of the scripting, acting and direction needs to be good. And to be fair to Eric Saward, there's not much wrong. Only Natasha's a bit wet and faceless, and there are nice touches to all of the characters - Grigory's hip flask; Jobel's toupé; Takis' interest in flowers; Lilt's saddhism. The characters are all memorable, helped by an utterly superlative cast. They're all really good, but William Gaunt as the glorious Orcini, Jenny Tomasin as the downtrodden Tasambeker and Clive Swift as the preening Jobel. Alexei Sayle deserves a notice, too. His early scenes are wince-inducing, but when we get to see the unnamed man behind the DJ persona he's sweet and enthusiastic, nicely sending up the cult of the disc jockey by suggesting there's just a nice, ordinary little bloke behind all the flamboyance.

With all this crammed in there's not really a huge amount of time for either The Doctor and Peri, or the Daleks. The former are kept out of the main plot for around half of the story, and while the interplay between the leads is great fun, with Nicola Bryant finally playing Peri against the sixth Doctor nicely, and Colin Baker getting the right mix or petty irritation into his performance, it really does feel like padding - that it's an unavoidable formality that The Doctor and Peri have to be involved in the first episode, but Saward doesn't really have anything much for them to do. The interaction of the characters with The Doctor is often quite limited (he doesn't even meet the DJ or Vogel, or Kara properly), and he only really gets extended scenes with Orcini and Davros.

This is much more of a Davros story than a Dalek story. His creations spend most of the storyline simply being a device (the reason why he's based at Tranquil Repose) and acting as glorified security guards. Going back to the Holmes thing, it seems to be inspired by "Genesis of the Daleks" in that respect. That said, the arrival of the Imperial Daleks towards the end to arrest him is an excellent twist, superbly converting a lose thread from "Resurrection of the Daleks". To have The Doctor saved by Daleks has a wonderful perversity to it.

Visually, the story is gorgeous. For the first time Nicola Bryant gets to wear clothes suited to someone of her age, rather than dressing like a horny Spandau Ballet groupie; the Tranquil Repose guards look rather good (it's a shame they're kept in the background) and the white Daleks look very stylish indeed. The sets are all fantastic, with the intentional tackiness of Tranquil Repose captured perfectly, contrasting nicely with the cold, austere and genuinely reverent snow-covered location footage. The glass Dalek is a splendid little visual, especially when it contains the deformed Stengos. Best of all is the terrific decoy Davros, in the life-support system. It looks absolutely fabulous.

All of this is enhanced by Graeme Harper's dazzling direction. It's really not that often that direction in Who really makes you take notice, but there are some terrific shots in here - the cutaway pan down three floors of Tranquil Repose, the excellent use of the tight corridors during the Dalek battles, and the stunning firefight as Orcini and Bostock fall for Davros' chicanery. He also adds all sorts of deft touches to the characters - Jobel's wig falling off as he dies, Kara's look of indifference as Vogel dies, Orcini's instinctive shot at the Dalek guard outside the complex. Best of all, though, is the series of glances and nuances as Orcini and The Doctor form an impromptu, unspoken alliance when held prisoner by Davros. It's a brilliant little sequence, featuring two fine actors under the control of a superb director.

Sadly, there is a downside to the story, and it is a pretty big one. The main thread is rather disjointed and incoherent. The basic plot can be summed up as Davros is using the bodies at Tranquil Repose to make new Daleks, and Orcini is hired to kill him. Just about everything else is really subplot. While it's the norm for The Doctor to stumble into some villainous plan or other, it's rarely been so oblique as it is in this story, and his involvment is peripheral... He doesn't really dovetail with it until he teams up with Orcini late in the second episode. There are also just so many characters, and that they all cross paths briefly with The Doctor and/or Peri fails to tie the story together. Orcini is really the star of this one, and his adverary is Davros, rather than the Daleks. The main body of the plot stutters as we float between excellent vignettes and razor-sharp black comedy, with the obligatory Saward massacre as the characters are killed off in the final episode. There's also a slightly uneasy ending - Takis and Lilt are quite a horrible little pair, and basically get away with it.

"Revelation of the Daleks" is still a great story to watch. It's an interesting divergence from being another Dalek story, and is certainly Eric Saward's finest work on the show. It looks and sounds great, but lacks the discipline to be truly classic.

Review written: 21/07/2006
"Revelation of the Daleks" DVD @ Amazon.co.uk