Genesis of the Overrated?

According to the DWM "Mighty 200", Genesis of the Daleks is currently considered the third greatest Who story of all time, behind only The Caves of Androzani and new series flagship Blink. I had the pleasure of rewatching it a few days ago, and while it's certainly great Doctor Who, can it really be said to live up to its hype?

Yes, it has some incredible features. Davros is one of the greatest villains in Who history, perhaps the only one that can give the Master a run for his money. He is visually almost as much of a triumph as the Daleks were back in 1963, a genuinely repulsive living corpse in a wheelchair, immobile but for one greenish, dessicated claw. He's the original and best half-human half-Dalek, eons before modern pretenders like Dalek Sec. His dialogue too is phenomenal, the highlight being his musing over whether, given a virus that would wipe out every lifeform in the universe, he would unleash it: "Such power would set me up above the gods!"

The atmosphere is pretty strong as well, with gas-masked figures stalking a devastated warzone, or even more creepily, their dead bodies propped up in the trenches to give the illusion of armed resistance to the enemy. The bunker too is effectively grim and claustrophobic, and for once the bare minimalism of Doctor Who corridors seems appropriate to the setting, rather than a budgetary limitation.

But it seems to me that things fall off pretty quickly beyond this. The script is standard Terry Nation boilerplate, with cardboard cutout characters doing idiotic things, which don't seem to have logical repercussions. Only Davros has the remotest shred of actual character: the rest might as well be mannequins with "goodie" or "baddie" felt-tipped onto their foreheads. Even Nyder, majestically played by Peter Miles as the apotheosis of thin-lipped, bureaucratic evil, has no scripted features other than his loyalty to Davros. Even one line hinting at why he thinks it a good idea to help an obvious megalomaniac psychopath destroy all other life on the planet would have been welcome, but no. (One of the dissenting Kaled soldiers towards the end of the story has a Davros-designed pacemaker keeping his heart ticking, but even that's not enough to keep him on Team Let's Create An Amoral Killing Machine; so what's the story with Nyder?)

I won't bother getting TOO worked up about the Giant Cave Clams, which are well up there in the Monster Hall of Shame with the rat from Talons and the magma beast from Caves, since the occasionally really dodgy costume or prop is part of the fun of old Who; but the scene in which the Doctor and companions jump over these sad, completely motionless bits of polystyrene and then utter some immortal line to the effect of "lucky they're not very fast" is a bit of a low point. Likewise let's not dwell on any of the duff cliffhangers, for example Sarah free-falling from the rocket to certain death, and then being a little bit dazed on a miraculous ledge the following week. No, the problem with Genesis is that it's all classic capture-and-escape nonsense, with nothing to differentiate itself from any other Terry Nation script... until Davros blazes into view.

How much of Davros' dialogue is Terry Nation's and how much was cunningly interpolated by script editor extraordinaire Robert Holmes is, I think, open to some debate. Certainly great speeches such as "Have I the right?" have a Holmesian feel, but there's plenty of typically wooden Nation dialogue doing the rounds too, and for my money there is nowhere as near much sparkle on display here as we got in, say, The Ark In Space a few weeks earlier.

And indeed it does feel that the great moments are constantly being dragged back down to the bog-standard business. The Doctor may agonize over the morality of suffocating the Daleks in their crib at first, but five minutes later he's striding back, without a qualm in his mind, to finish the job. A great letdown in my opinion. Couldn't he have shown himself nobler than the Time Lords, the Kaleds and Thals, the audience? Instead of just temporarily (and disastrously) indecisive?

So why, if there's a lot to be ambivalent about in Genesis, is it destined to be in the top 10 Who stories of all time for ages to come? Well, not wishing to belabor the point, but Davros really is fantastic, so much so that we won't another Dalek story without him center stage for the next 30 years. And even Russell T Davies eventually caved and brought him back to New Who, despite that not really making an awful lot of sense. (But hey, "Journey's End" was one big Whovian carnival parade, sense wasn't at the top of the agenda.) If I had to vote for the best villain of all time, I think it would be the deranged Kaled scientist. Genesis is so much "Davros's story" that it's hard to separate the two things out.

By introducing Davros, Genesis really did change the course of Doctor Who history. Probably no other story has had such an influence on the 2005 show: in it, we see the first salvo fired in the Time War, and the first manifesto, I suspect, for the Daleks being the ultimate force for evil in the universe, as opposed to just another (literally) tinpot race of conquering aliens. I think Davros's fruitless plea "Have pity!" to his creations in Genesis is as unsubtle as a brick through the television, and completely out of character too; but I couldn't help shivering when it resonated down the ages in Rob Shearman's episode Dalek, as the captive Metaltron pleads to the Doctor with the very same words.

Dalek, yeah, I think that's a better Dalek story than Genesis. I think Remembrance is too, and I could well go with Master Plan, the White Album of Dalek stories, uneven though it may be. But are any of them more important than Genesis? Hell no. And that's why I think it's great that these six episodes of riveting Davros showcase (shame about the rest of the plot) can still be found amongst all authoritative lists of the ten greatest Who stories of all time. Long may it stay there.