Into the Dalek: Fact File
The read through for Into the Dalek began shortly after the read through for Deep Breath finished on the afternoon of Tuesday, 17 December, 2013.
The main shoot for the episode commenced on Saturday, 25 January, 2014 and wrapped on Tuesday, 18 February. Gretchen’s final scene, however, was recorded on Friday, 23 May, the same date that Half-Face Man’s moments with Missy were shot.
Several scenes involving the interior of the Dalek were filmed at Uskmouth Power Station, previously used in adventures including The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. Location filming for Into the Dalek also included stints in St Athan and Newport, South Wales.
Aside from mini-episodes, Into the Dalek is the first adventure since 2009’s The Waters of Mars not to feature Matt Smith as the Doctor. And as with The Waters of Mars this story was co-written by Phil Ford, no stranger to Dalek action: he wrote the Doctor Who Adventure Game, City of the Daleks, launched back in 2010.
Clara is working at Coal Hill School – the school that featured in the very first episode of Doctor Who. When the Doctor went there in the 1988 adventure Remembrance of the Daleks, he discovered his old enemies had created a secret transmat station in the school’s cellar… In fact the first time we saw the Daleks hover/fly was during a scene in that story where the Doctor was pursued up a flight of stairs leading from the cellar to the ground floor of Coal Hill.
The girl who jokes, ‘She wishes!’ when the School Secretary is trying to flirt with Danny, is Courtney, played by Ellis George. The character had a very brief cameo in Deep Breath during the scene where Clara recalls becoming flustered whilst teaching an unruly class.
The Doctor calls the idea of shrinking people and injecting them into a patient a ‘fantastic idea’. In The Invisible Enemy the Fourth Doctor was cloned and his duplicate shrunk and placed inside the Time Lord’s body in order to fight a virus. The Doctor and his companions were also miniaturised in Planet of the Giants but on that occasion the shrinkage was caused by the TARDIS malfunctioning.
Journey declares, ‘It’s smaller on the outside!’, unwittingly quoting Clara who said those exact words in The Snowmen when she realised the TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental. On that occasion the Doctor called the statement ‘a first’ as the standard response is usually, ‘It’s bigger on the inside!’
Clara is asked to wrestle with an apparently simple question: is the Doctor a good man? This brings to mind the first line of dialogue in The Day of the Doctor – Clara quoting Marcus Aurelius’ words: ‘Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.’ She also alluded to the Emperor in Deep Breath when talking with Vastra about the change the Doctor had undergone.
At one point, ‘Rusty’ grates, ‘Death to the Daleks!’ This was the title of a Third Doctor adventure that went out in 1974 and is one of several echoes of previous Dalek encounters. We see some memorable moments of Dalek destruction from Journey’s End when the Doctor is ‘eye to eye’ with ‘Rusty’ , for example, and when he says, ‘And then I went to Skaro and I met you…’ he’s recalling events depicted in The Daleks, only the second Doctor Who adventure and the very first to show the Time Lord exploring a planet other than our own.
We hear the distinctive Dalek heartbeat sound several times in this episode. It was originally used in the very first Dalek adventure and has featured in many subsequent stories including Destiny of the Daleks and Victory of the Daleks. In fact we heard the Dalek heartbeat before we heard their iconic battle cry of ‘Exterminate!’
Soldiers called Ross tend to be unlucky in Doctor Who. The last one encountered by the Doctor – Ross, the UNIT soldier from The Poison Sky - was killed by the Sontarans and the first solider to perish in the Dalek in this story is called Ross. Unlike Gretchen, we never see Ross reach what Missy calls Heaven…
