Product Description

"Remembrance of the Daleks," the final Doctor Who story to feature the titular mutant cyborgs, is a particularly notable adventure for the way it ties the plot into the very first story, "An Unearthly Child," made 25 years before. It is 1963, and the seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, arrives in London with new companion Ace (Sophie Aldred), where two Dalek factions are engaged in a deadly search for the Hand of Omega. Ace quickly proves herself adept with high explosives, and while there are references to the history of the show, including some nice in-jokes, the drama is played much straighter than in McCoy's first season as the time traveler. This is Doctor Who with a decent budget; the period setting is surprisingly lavish and there are some fairly intense action sequences. The Daleks remain as menacing as ever, the plotting has an intriguing air of mystery, and McCoy injects some steel into his characterization.

DVD Features:
Audio Commentary:by actors Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred
Deleted Scenes
Multiple video angles
Outtakes
Production Notes:Optional caption stream

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17994 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2002-04-02
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 93 minutes

Amazon.com
"Remembrance of the Daleks," the final Doctor Who story to feature the titular mutant cyborgs, is a particularly notable adventure for the way it ties the plot into the very first story, "An Unearthly Child," made 25 years before. It is 1963, and the seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, arrives in London with new companion Ace (Sophie Aldred), where two Dalek factions are engaged in a deadly search for the Hand of Omega. Ace quickly proves herself adept with high explosives, and while there are references to the history of the show, including some nice in-jokes, the drama is played much straighter than in McCoy's first season as the time traveler. This is Doctor Who with a decent budget; the period setting is surprisingly lavish and there are some fairly intense action sequences. The Daleks remain as menacing as ever, the plotting has an intriguing air of mystery, and McCoy injects some steel into his characterization. Aldred serves an ace as a heroine with attitude (very much post-Sarah Connor from The Terminator), and if this really does prove to be the Daleks' swan song, at least they go out with a bang. --Gary S. Dalkin

DVD features
Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred provide a warm and friendly DVD commentary track. There are also trailers for two episodes, an isolated music track, a collection of outtakes, 13 deleted or extended scenes, and the raw footage from two different camera angles for two major scenes. Optional onscreen production notes complete a package that, with animated menus and very good 4:3 picture quality, puts many Hollywood releases to shame. --Gary S. Dalkin

Customer Reviews

Sly Mckoy versus the Daleks on DVD
Remembrance of the Daleks is the only Sylvester Mcoy Dalek story and it's the best 7th Doctor they made. It involves the Doctor returning to the very Junk Yard where the program began in 1963 just a few days after his first incarnation left. For some reason, two warring factions of Daleks have traveled back to this time as well. Why are they there and what do they want... and what exactly was the Doctor doing in 1963 London back in the first episode anyway? All these questions will be answered.
It is so cool that Dr. Who is coming out on DVD with all the extras you could want. It's a pity other show DVDs such as the recent Farscape episode don't have such extras. Hopefully the forthcoming Star Trek DVDs will. Here's a list of the extras you'll get...
commentary by Sylvester McCoy & Sophie Aldred, deleted scenes, out-takes, on screen production note subtitles, multi-angle scenes, the original trailers, photo gallery
Ths commentary is pretty good. More consistent and informative than the Robots of Death Commentary but not quite as entertaining as The Five Doctors Commentary or the Caves of androzani Commentary. Sophi and Sylvester talk a lot about things that happened on the set and the careers of some of their costars in the story. Pretty interesting stuff...

On another note... if you're looking for new Dr. Who material. Look for the audio releases of the missing episodes. Look for my list "Missing Dr. Who's on Audio and Video" to find out about this. [....]Look for "The Web of Fear" for starters. "The Dalek's Master Plan" Audio Release is awsome too. Also check out Big Finnish productions for the new audio adventures of Dr. Who featuring Doctors ranging from Peter Davison to Paul Mcgann. Was this review helpful? Did you learn something new from it? Please vote Yes.

They hate each other's chromosomes...
Even the very title, REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS, suggest that nostalgia is going to play a big part in the story. This breakthrough 1988 episode by Ben Aaronovitch once again pits the Doctor against his oldest enemies, and for a Doctor Who serial, the scripting is unusually fast-paced, with not only an inordinate amount of action and better-than-average visual effects, but also some very well-developed characters and unexpected surprises.

Sylvester McCoy has by now very firmly established himself as the Doctor and kicks off his second season by re-introducing an air of mystery to the role. Just when the fans thought they knew everything there was to know about their hero, along come some new plot twists and hushed moments of dialogue to turn the Almighty God Of Plot Continuity on its head. New companion Ace (Sophie Aldred) wastes no time in establishing her rapport with "The Professor," and the two of them are already forging a partnership that will be the best-loved duo since the days of Tom Baker's Doctor and Elisabeth Sladen's Sarah Jane Smith.

More than a mere hat-tip to the series' own pilot episode, REMEMBRANCE actually returns to 1963 London and familiar settings last seen haunted by William Hartnell's incarnation of the first Doctor: to include Coal Hill School (including some prominent scenes in the Chemistry lab), and Foreman's junkyard in Totter's Lane. The long-standing question of just exactly what the Doctor was originally DOING here is finally answered as two warring schisms of Daleks emerge out of space-time and begin the all-out battle that viewers have been waiting for since 1984's REVELATION OF THE DALEKS. The Daleks somehow don't quite come off as terrifying as audiences may remember them; despite their murderous ways and their unending grating screams of "Exterminate," they present more like long-absent friends than the ultimate threat to the universe. Even the "Emperor" Dalek, last seen in 1967's EVIL OF THE DALEKS, has undergone a makeover in the style of the old Dalek cereal box comics.

More central to the story, however, is the wonderful character development and the repeated emphasis on racism. Sophie Aldred's 1990's teen spirit is justifiably thrown off by the ways of the early 1960's --besides being baffled by the old English monetary system, she runs up against harsher realities such as the "No Coloureds" sign in the window of the boarding house run by Mike's mother. From this we can guess where Mike (Durslet McClinton, in a tragically handsome romantic foil for Ace) soaked up his "look out for your own" attitude, and how that idealism in turn caught fire with Ratcliffe (George Sewell) who once found himself at the wrong ideological end of what passed for "patriotism" in World War II. Ratcliffe's resentment has brought him into a reckless partnership with the renegade Dalek faction, who are themselves in turn despised by the "racially pure" Imperial Daleks. (Ace's deep revulsion to racist attitudes will be more fully explored in the later episode GHOST LIGHT.)

REMEMBRANCE launches Doctor Who into its final triumphant run on BBC --Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred shepherded the series through its two final seasons with some of its best-ever writing and production values (which, alas, would not be enough to save the series from its ultimate cancellation by the Beeb in 1990). McCoy's unreadable "man of mystery" performance is first glimpsed in this episode, mostly in form of hints and verbal slips that do not go unnoticed by Ace. The grander backstory of the Time Lords is widened out as well, and there are quite a few references to past episodes that longtime fans will enjoy. The script even manages a couple of gags at the series' own expense, as well as providing a plausible "early origins" basis for the secret military agency that will later be known as U.N.I.T. Simon Williams' Captain Gilmore appears to be played mostly for comic effect in a kind of exaggerated foreshadowing of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. The performances by Pamela Salem as Rachel and Karen Gledhill as Alison go a long way towards solidifying the "peacetime chaos" that was English society in the early 60's. The opening pre-credits shot of the Dalek mothership looming over an unsuspecting Earth is brilliantly accented by a background babble of 1960's media sound bytes, to include speeches by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Besides some hilarious commentary by McCoy and Aldred that demonstrates just how closely the two worked together during their time in the series, the DVD has cleaned up the eternal problem of Doctor Who background music dampening out the dialogue. Special Features are little more than the obligatory biographies, blooper outtakes, and alternate camera angles of two effects sequences --not all it's cracked up to be. Aaronovitch clearly has some big shoes to fill (this being the first Dalek serial in the series NOT directed by Dalek creator Terry Nation), and he carries it off very well. No character (least of all Ace) is left standing around looking for something to do, the story's pacing proceeds at a comfortable rate with very little filler, there are a number of total surprises (even to hardcore fans who think they already know all about Doctor Who), and of course plenty of action scenes with lots of Daleks going kerboom. Definitely one of McCoy's best outings as the Doctor, as well as the best Dalek serial ever (with the possible exception of 1974's GENESIS OF THE DALEKS). This episode occupies a place in my own personal Top Ten list of Greatest Doctor Who Stories Ever.

ONE OF THE BEST 7TH DOCTOR EPISODES
This review is based on the VHS release. The region 1 DVD includes extras such as commentry and deleted scenes.

By the time Sylvester McCoy took over the role of the Doctor, the BBC had practically killed the series by imposing restrictions on the producers with regards to what type of scripts they could use, what level of violence they could display, what target audience they should aim at and a reduced budget to boot. It was commented in a lot of newspapers that the most evil villan the doctor had to face was not the Daleks or Cybermen, but rather the controller of BBC 1!!!

The first few McCoy episodes were awful and it seemed as if there was no hope for the series, but Rememberance of the Daleks proved that McCoy's Doctor could have some truely "classic" episodes along with "Ghostlight" and "Curse of Fendrick".

The Doctor takes Ace back in time to Earth in the early 1960's and seems to stumble across a lone Dalek in a junk yard (looking for cleap parts for it's spaceship perhaps?). He assists the military in destroying it and, with the help of their scientific adviser from the British Rocket Group (does the name "Professor Quatermass" mean anything to you?), he tracks another souce of alien activity to the local school - Coal Hill School.
As the plot unfolds we discover that the Doctor has been planning these events for some time and wants to use a secret Time Lord device called the Hand of Omega as bait to attract and destroy the Daleks. Unfortunately, two rival groups of Daleks show up looking for the device and a war breaks out between the Imperial and Regular Dalek forces...

A good storyline, breath-taking cliffhangers and excellent effects help to turn this story into one of the all-time greats and should have been the tenplate for all further episodes. We see the return of the "white" Dalek design from "Revelation of the Daleks", along with a new "Special Weapons Dalek" and the "Emperor Dalek". The Dalek shuttlecraft is looks convincing when landing, the Dalek weapons now fire "bolts" that pass through objects rather than the old "static line", and when a bolt hits someone we get a decent "kill" effect instead of that awful "negative" effect of the past. Even better is the visual proof that Daleks CAN go up and down stairs!!!

Doctor Who fans will have a blast as they notice subtile links and references to first Doctor Who story. For those who havn't followed the series from the beginning, Coal Hill school is where Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter attended classes and where Ian and Barbara (his first companions) taught English and Science. The classroom where Ace battles a Dalek is Ian's science classroom and the copy of the French Revolution that Ace picks up is the one that Barbara loaned Susan and which Susan was horrified to discover was full of errors. The junk yard where the lone Dalek is destroyed is the same junkyard where we first see the TARDIS... I could go on, but see how many you can find ;)