The Daleks have devised a plan that will deliver a decisive victory.
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Tanlee
on May 7, 2016 at 8:33 PM
Review of Series 4
“Fearless my arse!”
This is where we must discuss Nick’s ability to push a story’s tone that far that it almost transcends from fiction to having a tangible edge in reality, something that made Creatures of Beauty and the early Dalek Empires into something special. In many ways Doctor Who’s potency at capturing the imagination came from the very things it was mocked for, in presenting quarries as alien worlds and domestic household tools as alien weapons (including Ace’s baseball bat). Some viewers laughed at it, but others found themselves charmed by the way the show played ‘lets pretend’ with the ordinary, and suspended their disbelief when playing in quarries to imagine they really were on some alien world. The same is true of the revived Doctor Who in showing statues and gas masks turned into harbingers of evil and even giving us Blon Slitheen’s intergalactic surfboard. Dalek Empire had the same charm and ability to suspend disbelief while listening, because the listener is looking for their own visual props and metaphors in their surroundings. The future has caught up with us in such a way that Manchester Piccadilly train station could be imagined as some metallic and wired up Dalek headquarters, right down to the PA systems. A shopping trip to Dixon’s for a flat screen could be imagined as the Daleks’ hyperbeam communications room. Likewise any nearby sand dunes or nature reserves could be imagined as Vega 6 or Graxis Major, and the listener could pretend this was once the debris from the Great Catastrophe. In a society that’s becoming increasingly aggressive, mechanised, chaotic, intimidating and marked by anxieties, rocky friendships, betrayals and power games, where life can literally become a perpetuating cycle of panic followed by hollow reassurance followed by panic, there’s something comfortingly abstract yet almost morbidly realist about Dalek Empire, which is what can make the suspension of disbelief complete, even despite the occasional surreal lapses into cartoonish violence, i.e. Dr. Johnson fishing through Mirana’s brain for the control implants, Morli being right out of The Viz, or the Demons subplot playing out like Manga’s Dirty Pair versus the Daleks.
In that regard, it’s a shame to admit that this comes closest of the four series to capturing a realistic vision of what a Dalek war would be like in the real world. The Military actually would be recruiting the dregs and mad dogs of society to fight it, and anyone placed in a claustrophobic spacer suit for that long would exhibit an extreme bout of road rage. But like the new Battlestar Pedantica, trying too hard and self-consciously for depressing realism and the series simply becomes charmless and miserable, without anything to make it sympathetic or entertaining.
Even taking Torchwood into account, Doctor Who hasn’t produced something this mean spirited since Mindwarp dropped a bridge on Peri. This is a return to the dark days of the mid 80’s, where there’s no heroism, no utilitarianism and no middle ground between bullies and victims, oh and no story. The emotional focal point is the death of Kade’s wife and child, and it’s also one of the most contrived and nasty ways of killing off a character since poor Oscar bit the dust in The Two Doctors. Even for a series as bleak as Dalek Empire, which especially speaks to the pessimistic and morbid (in other words, a series that’s best appreciated during the worst period of your life), it needlessly crosses a line here. It goes too far the other way. With the month long forewarnings of a huge Dalek invasion fleet approaching the planet, Kade’s family shouldn’t have been anywhere near there when the Daleks arrived. Furthermore it shows the Daleks demonstrating the kind of instantaneous planet busting capabilities that are completely at odds with this supposed ‘slow’ war, and hence it’s at odds with the whole premise of the series (if there’s a point where Dalek Empire goes too far the other way and makes the Daleks too powerful, this is it). Then when a later twist reveals that the military actually conspired in letting it happen, the audience would be forgiven for feeling insulted by such a deceptive cheat. There was nothing in that scene to hint that it was even plausible that the military were deliberately letting it happen and it was offensively out of character for Landen.
Indeed there’s a horrible whiff of misogyny to The Fearless, which is disheartening after the headstrong female heroes of the previous series, particularly the first series which was effectively Tenko with Daleks (even down to the undercurrents of Stockholm syndrome). Now the female characters are reduced to all being victims or villains of ludicrous extremes, never displaying the dignity or guts that elevated them above that. The death of Kade’s wife just sums up the story’s attitude to women. Seemingly women are only there to be killed off so the macho man can go on a revenge mission and have an excuse to bully and terrorise other women.
Dalek Empire IV does actually manage to get back the horror of the Daleks, their sense of volatile evil, mechanised pathology and the presence of them breathing down the necks of anyone in the room with them, which Dalek Empire III sorely lacked. In particular the tense scenes in the Amorist (which seem heavily inspired by Shakedown) really place the listener in that survival horror situation, and convey how fragile our mortal coil is. Particularly the scene where the escapee slaves are hiding in a ventilator shaft and fear that if they’re discovered they’ll be instantly electrocuted and ‘barbecued’, and its Nick Briggs’ vivid way with words that really makes that scene. But it only makes the story’s unforgiving scorn on those characters for their servility to the enemy even more warped and unfathomable- like the so called ‘savage’ humans in Warriors of the Deep, exactly what else were they supposed to do in a life or death situation?
Dalek Empire, rather like Buffy The Vampire Slayer had made a believable effort to humanise the superhuman, but by this point the series is so entrenched in the idea that superhuman characters are the benchmark for ordinary, that it’s effectively sneering at anyone who doesn’t measure up to its ludicrous standards. So unfortunately the story’s answer seems to be articulated in Kade’s rant at the slaves for not choosing the fight or die option when the Daleks first came to their worlds. It’s disgustingly similar to anti-immigration reactionaries who say that asylum seekers should deal with their homegrown problems and tyrannies as a people, rather than come over to burden us. So it’s at least as offensive as anything people may have pointed to in Flip-Flop, though as with the mid-80’s period of the show, what makes its vindictive mean spiritedness feel far more offensive than any earlier precedents of the same, is the deadly serious, forceful heavy handedness, and the way plot logic and character common sense is wilfully sacrificed to get it across, the sense that this time the writers really mean it. All the signs are though that if anything, Nick Briggs meant quite the opposite. The overall story shows that Susan’s co-operative, socialist method of galvanising the people against the Daleks is far more effective than the military’s divisive ‘us versus them’ mentality and trigger happy quickness to kill potential allies.
But the fact remains that we’re meant to follow this loathsome, sadistic, whiney little bully and his self-interested petty agendas for four CDs, which is made worse by the fact that all other viewpoints are ignorantly obfuscated. An antihero has to have something likeable or sympathetic about them to get the audience behind them, something that gives the audience a voice and articulates the unsayable for us (for instance, Siy Tarkov confessing to his Dalek interrogators everything he hates about the human government, in a manner somewhat inspired by Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence), but Kade stands only for himself, and he doesn’t have the kind of dimension or genuine self-will and ability to acknowledge doubts that make a Shakespearian tragic figure worth caring about. At least when Kalendorf did terrible things, he was doing it for some kind of greater good. And that is essentially what is missing from this Dalek Empire series- the sense of utilitarianism and empiricism, of people united in a common goal for the sake of the greater masses and the greater good. Infact there’s no sense of an ensemble here like there was in the previous Dalek Empire series’. This is star-led in the worst kind of way, and seems pitched at the same sensationalist, individualist, self-involved modern society that New Who and the new Battlestar Pedantica is geared towards. It just sums up everything nasty, selfish, petty, spoilt and manipulative about modern society. Infact like New Who, it’s so self-involved that it doesn’t feel even remotely adventurous. This story seems to presuppose that the audience will sympathise if Kade whines long enough to twist their arm into it. For long term fans of Dalek Empire, this is especially offensive given that when Alby or Siy Tarkov lost everything they held dear, they didn’t use it as an excuse to behave so reprehensibly. Infact like all the worst, most pretentious examples of the Tenth Doctor’s tough guy shouting, it feels like a poor imitation of Rob Shearman’s Dalek and its savagely beautiful presentation of a Doctor blinded by unthinking rage- a vulgar imitation without soul, insight or affirmation.
It’s disheartening to see Dalek Empire reduced to being a follower in its genre rather than a leader. Dalek Empire was always compatible with the style of New Who, given that it was a far more action, overkill based series with a little something for the shippers, and with an agenda to actively make Doctor Who ‘cool’ again, bearing in mind that the last time the show was ‘cool’ was probably Earthshock. But it’s only here that Dalek Empire has really caught up with New Who’s live action computer game approach. Stories like Voyage of the Damned and Planet of the Dead are as vacuous as live action computer games get. New Who is a very intense, frenetic, fast paced, provocative, explosive flash of colours, with a hyperactive, belligerent, sociopathic and impatiently quick to judge Doctor with unlimited extra lives at its centre. This is of course the central issue for many, with some preferring the way that New Who is faster paced and cuts to the chase, whilst others feel that its betrays the ethos of actually learning about and understanding things. So viewing the series can provoke the same power trip high and agitated temper as playing a violent playstation game, which perhaps accounts for the raw, angry reactions that New Who tends to provoke, both amongst its unforgiving critics and its fanatical defenders. Season 21 was as action-orientated, angry, vulgar and cruel-hearted as classic Doctor Who ever got, and it’s the only classic season that could come close to provoking such raging tempers as New Who can. Now Dalek Empire is following the mode of New Who completely, with Kade himself placed into the ultimate interactive games console controller suit complete with its own Wii, and as you can expect, the result is one of the most furious, nasty spewings of rage ever to come from the franchise. Dalek Empire was always a raw, angry, borderline psychotic series with a real primal scream approach to its characters and issues, but it used to be angry in an exorcising, uplifting, cathartic way. This couldn’t be more negative. This is just angry in a one-note, aimless, indiscriminate, utterly hostile, and really quite poisonous way.
It would have been semi-bearable if Kade ultimately got his comeuppance or achieved some redemption from the monster he is. Instead he just blames everyone else for making him the way he is, and worse still, the plot valorises his self-centred, ‘everyone’s-against-me’ view in the most contrived and unbelievable way possible.
It feels rather like Nick unintentionally wrote a military-glorifying story, then realised his mistake three quarters of the way through and quickly tried to undo this and negate and demonise the military in the most crassly contrived and cheaply sensationalist way possible. Really the third chapter of Dalek War did a far better portrayal of how the military turns ordinary people into psychotic killers, and did it through metaphor rather than heavy labouring of the point and forcing it down the listener’s throat. Granted the idea makes the spacer suits resonate with the same evil as the Dalek machines, to the point where when Kade forces Landen at gunpoint to put one on, it feels like a fate worse than death for her. The final battle on the asteroid belt is everything that Dalek Empire III’s climax should have been- a depiction of how war quite literally is a descent into hell, and Kade’s confrontation with the Emperor Dalek makes a subtle ironic point that the Dalek war machine is just as deceitful and secretive with its grunts as the human military is. But apart from that, it leaves a sour taste in the mouth, mainly concerning how it’s the most vile character who’s trying to moralise about the evils of the military.
And so we see that even if Twin Dilemma was given better dialogue, appealing visuals and more action and excitement, it’d still be awful because we’d actually still be rooting for the bad guys to just kill the detestable, self-centred, woman-beating ‘hero’ and end this nauseating, scornful display of self-aggrandisement, cheap shock tactics, immature nastiness and misogyny. Sure some might praise the ‘bravery’ of its approach, but as with Twin Dilemma there’s a world of difference between bravery and reckless stupidity.
Indeed Dalek Empire IV’s failure is the culmination of backlashes, not unlike the backlashes and counter-backlashes that led the classic series to ruin. It takes the organic plotting and characterisation of the previous series’, and flushes it completely down the toilet in favour of the contrived and artificial. It feels like a response to complaints about Dalek Empire III being overlong and too talky. But succeeds only in making the action feel brutally forced and trimming the runtime so ruthlessly that there’s zero characterisation, simply brutal action without thought and no charm left whatsoever, and charm was utterly essential to making this bleak series durable.
Put it another way, the reason Dalek Empire worked despite its excessive killings and morbid fascination with all things psychotic, is that like an audio painting it took time to craft and show all the finer details that made the characters and their worlds beautiful and worth caring about when they are destroyed, and made the destruction meaningful, but Dalek Empire IV doesn’t bother. Everything is so set out, inevitable and pointless and one-track minded that there’s no sense of potential or possibilities and thus no sense of anything lost except precious hours of our time.
As a result Kade is nothing but a macho stereotype, scarcely different from any 80’s action anti-hero cop on a revenge mission. Though there’s a conscious, New Who inspired effort to give his character more background than the protagonists before him (like the references to Kade’s bacto-hunting grandfather and the caves he used to play in as a child), it does nothing to sell the idea that Kade is a good man corrupted by tragedy- i.e. the listener has no reason to believe he wasn’t already a nasty piece of work in the first place. Landen’s off screen decision to kill Kade’s family is offensively out of character, which just goes to show how little work went into making her character credible. Kade’s wife Lajitta is especially annoying and gets some atrocious dialogue to deliver, and from her first appearance she obviously has ‘dead meat’ written all over her. Even the reappearance of Susan Mendes leaves us feeling like we’ve been sold a pup, conveying no sense of the spontaneous, firey, blinkered, determined workaholic Susan with her stage fright and weakness for co-dependency we fell in love with in the beginning (well provided you could see past the ‘despicable two bit quisling’ part), making us wonder why they bothered with this whole prequel retcon to revisit the Angel of Mercy if they weren’t even going to be faithful to the character. Infact the most fleshed out character eventually turns out to be a Dalek agent, which undoes all that work instantly and leaves the listener feeling even more cheated. In the previous series, it was usually the bland, autonomous character that turned out to have a disc in their head all along and thus actually became more interesting for it, not less. The rest of the military characters like Baxter, Fisk and Kennedy are killed off so pointlessly that it only reinforces that this petulantly bored story just plain isn’t about anything.
Which is a shame because it all adds up to a huge waste of talent. Noel Clarke is clearly really going for the character of Kade and in selected bursts either goads the listener into sharing his glee (like when he’s cutting into the Dalek saucer’s hull) or makes the character’s rage palpable enough to give the listener a panic attack. Maureen O’Brien does a commendable job with her nothing character, and special praise must go to Esther Ruth Elliot whose exemplary performance really does transcend ‘acting’ into ‘being’ and thus becomes the only character to gain our sympathies, so much so that I found myself really dreading the outcome for her. And of course Tanlee’s return is most welcome (let’s face it, if Tanlee was in the new Battlestar Pedantica it would improve the series immensely, infact I’m convinced that Torchwood: Children of Earth is only the masterpiece it is because it’s got Tanlee in it).
Dalek Empire was of course pitched at the demographic that wanted for a Doctor Who that was modelled on the darker, morally murky intergalactic war style of modern space opera, and yet Dalek Empire managed to do this cynicism in a way that wasn’t antithetical to a bit of old fashioned imagination, and was still a deeply sincere expression of the author’s soul and conscience that reckons with a plethora of personal demons. It didn’t feel dark or cavalier in a forced or contrived way or in any way that wasn’t completely natural and organic, till now. But we beg the question of what was the point of making Dalek Empire IV. By being a prequel it does nothing to further the story or to leave the fate of the galaxy in any doubt at all, and simply leeches off its past successes, and ultimately it feels like the most corporate and soulless cash in vehicle that Big Finish has ever produced. It’s all atitude and no soul, all action and no heart, and it’s all a Noel Clarke star vehicle sales pitch rather than a story worth telling. We would much rather have seen a followup to Dalek Empire III’s open ended conclusion, but Nick now regarded that thread as a dead end, meaning he had to do a prequel series which had to compensate for its pre-determined outcome by piling on the surprises and shocks. It has to be said that the ‘making of’ extras seem to be encouraging a rather self-congratulatory approach to the writing, and here the twists and moral ambiguities are being treated as worthy ends in themselves. So far from giving us clever turns in the screw that defined a series that was all about crucial character decisions and moral responsibility, Dalek Empire is now instead giving us cheap insulting deceptions for the sake of it. Just like with the similarly poisonous and repellent Night Thoughts, there’s something indescribably nasty and insideously sickening about the deceptive, confusing, obfuscational, pointless, vacuous mind games it plays with the listener. Adding so many twists that eventually the story ends up simply twisted. As with the JNT years, the pile up of backlashes just feel increasingly forced, cynical, soulless and borderline hostile, to the point where it just feels like a deranged, loathsome mutation of its former self.
And this is what a once superlative audio series has been reduced to- indulgent navelgazing of a particularly sadistic kind. They really didn’t know when to quit.
So what is “The Fearless” at heart? It’s primarily an action epic, for one thing: every episode features extended action sequences which rank among the best Big Finish has produced. Nicholas Briggs usually wields total creative control over his stories, but sound design has been handled here by Chris Snyder and Briggs for Part One, and Jamie Robertson for Parts Two, Three, and Four. It’s incredibly difficult to capture an action sequence on audio without reducing it to a series of incomprehensible explosion noises, but the action in “The Fearless” is always clear and easy to understand. “The Fearless” is also the story of two people: Agnes Landen and Salus Kade, and how the Dalek War has irreversibly changed them. Landen has lost everything, and approaches the war with a single-minded devotion to her duty: there is no goal greater than defeating the Daleks. We learn here, in the final part, that her motive behind creating the Fearless was simple: to create soldiers like herself, lacking in distractions or moral concerns. But this never works out like it should, and while Landen engineered Kade into a merciless Dalek hunter, she also created an enemy who didn’t share her vision of the so-called big picture. The final argument between Kade and Landen is the greatest moment of the entire “The Fearless” serial — and by the end, Landen is just arguing with herself, trying to convince herself that her actions have been justified. She doesn’t really change, in the end, but then that’s the point: just like Kade, she’s been shaped, and it’s difficult to change back. None of this is particularly insightful, but like any good action movie, it doesn’t have to be — it’s enough that the writer approaches the script intelligently, and Briggs has done that and more in the final part.
8/10
Average rating, The Fearless: 6.8
Average rating, Dalek Empire: 6.6
Review of Series 4
“Fearless my arse!”
This is where we must discuss Nick’s ability to push a story’s tone that far that it almost transcends from fiction to having a tangible edge in reality, something that made Creatures of Beauty and the early Dalek Empires into something special. In many ways Doctor Who’s potency at capturing the imagination came from the very things it was mocked for, in presenting quarries as alien worlds and domestic household tools as alien weapons (including Ace’s baseball bat). Some viewers laughed at it, but others found themselves charmed by the way the show played ‘lets pretend’ with the ordinary, and suspended their disbelief when playing in quarries to imagine they really were on some alien world. The same is true of the revived Doctor Who in showing statues and gas masks turned into harbingers of evil and even giving us Blon Slitheen’s intergalactic surfboard. Dalek Empire had the same charm and ability to suspend disbelief while listening, because the listener is looking for their own visual props and metaphors in their surroundings. The future has caught up with us in such a way that Manchester Piccadilly train station could be imagined as some metallic and wired up Dalek headquarters, right down to the PA systems. A shopping trip to Dixon’s for a flat screen could be imagined as the Daleks’ hyperbeam communications room. Likewise any nearby sand dunes or nature reserves could be imagined as Vega 6 or Graxis Major, and the listener could pretend this was once the debris from the Great Catastrophe. In a society that’s becoming increasingly aggressive, mechanised, chaotic, intimidating and marked by anxieties, rocky friendships, betrayals and power games, where life can literally become a perpetuating cycle of panic followed by hollow reassurance followed by panic, there’s something comfortingly abstract yet almost morbidly realist about Dalek Empire, which is what can make the suspension of disbelief complete, even despite the occasional surreal lapses into cartoonish violence, i.e. Dr. Johnson fishing through Mirana’s brain for the control implants, Morli being right out of The Viz, or the Demons subplot playing out like Manga’s Dirty Pair versus the Daleks.
In that regard, it’s a shame to admit that this comes closest of the four series to capturing a realistic vision of what a Dalek war would be like in the real world. The Military actually would be recruiting the dregs and mad dogs of society to fight it, and anyone placed in a claustrophobic spacer suit for that long would exhibit an extreme bout of road rage. But like the new Battlestar Pedantica, trying too hard and self-consciously for depressing realism and the series simply becomes charmless and miserable, without anything to make it sympathetic or entertaining.
Even taking Torchwood into account, Doctor Who hasn’t produced something this mean spirited since Mindwarp dropped a bridge on Peri. This is a return to the dark days of the mid 80’s, where there’s no heroism, no utilitarianism and no middle ground between bullies and victims, oh and no story. The emotional focal point is the death of Kade’s wife and child, and it’s also one of the most contrived and nasty ways of killing off a character since poor Oscar bit the dust in The Two Doctors. Even for a series as bleak as Dalek Empire, which especially speaks to the pessimistic and morbid (in other words, a series that’s best appreciated during the worst period of your life), it needlessly crosses a line here. It goes too far the other way. With the month long forewarnings of a huge Dalek invasion fleet approaching the planet, Kade’s family shouldn’t have been anywhere near there when the Daleks arrived. Furthermore it shows the Daleks demonstrating the kind of instantaneous planet busting capabilities that are completely at odds with this supposed ‘slow’ war, and hence it’s at odds with the whole premise of the series (if there’s a point where Dalek Empire goes too far the other way and makes the Daleks too powerful, this is it). Then when a later twist reveals that the military actually conspired in letting it happen, the audience would be forgiven for feeling insulted by such a deceptive cheat. There was nothing in that scene to hint that it was even plausible that the military were deliberately letting it happen and it was offensively out of character for Landen.
Indeed there’s a horrible whiff of misogyny to The Fearless, which is disheartening after the headstrong female heroes of the previous series, particularly the first series which was effectively Tenko with Daleks (even down to the undercurrents of Stockholm syndrome). Now the female characters are reduced to all being victims or villains of ludicrous extremes, never displaying the dignity or guts that elevated them above that. The death of Kade’s wife just sums up the story’s attitude to women. Seemingly women are only there to be killed off so the macho man can go on a revenge mission and have an excuse to bully and terrorise other women.
Dalek Empire IV does actually manage to get back the horror of the Daleks, their sense of volatile evil, mechanised pathology and the presence of them breathing down the necks of anyone in the room with them, which Dalek Empire III sorely lacked. In particular the tense scenes in the Amorist (which seem heavily inspired by Shakedown) really place the listener in that survival horror situation, and convey how fragile our mortal coil is. Particularly the scene where the escapee slaves are hiding in a ventilator shaft and fear that if they’re discovered they’ll be instantly electrocuted and ‘barbecued’, and its Nick Briggs’ vivid way with words that really makes that scene. But it only makes the story’s unforgiving scorn on those characters for their servility to the enemy even more warped and unfathomable- like the so called ‘savage’ humans in Warriors of the Deep, exactly what else were they supposed to do in a life or death situation?
Dalek Empire, rather like Buffy The Vampire Slayer had made a believable effort to humanise the superhuman, but by this point the series is so entrenched in the idea that superhuman characters are the benchmark for ordinary, that it’s effectively sneering at anyone who doesn’t measure up to its ludicrous standards. So unfortunately the story’s answer seems to be articulated in Kade’s rant at the slaves for not choosing the fight or die option when the Daleks first came to their worlds. It’s disgustingly similar to anti-immigration reactionaries who say that asylum seekers should deal with their homegrown problems and tyrannies as a people, rather than come over to burden us. So it’s at least as offensive as anything people may have pointed to in Flip-Flop, though as with the mid-80’s period of the show, what makes its vindictive mean spiritedness feel far more offensive than any earlier precedents of the same, is the deadly serious, forceful heavy handedness, and the way plot logic and character common sense is wilfully sacrificed to get it across, the sense that this time the writers really mean it. All the signs are though that if anything, Nick Briggs meant quite the opposite. The overall story shows that Susan’s co-operative, socialist method of galvanising the people against the Daleks is far more effective than the military’s divisive ‘us versus them’ mentality and trigger happy quickness to kill potential allies.
But the fact remains that we’re meant to follow this loathsome, sadistic, whiney little bully and his self-interested petty agendas for four CDs, which is made worse by the fact that all other viewpoints are ignorantly obfuscated. An antihero has to have something likeable or sympathetic about them to get the audience behind them, something that gives the audience a voice and articulates the unsayable for us (for instance, Siy Tarkov confessing to his Dalek interrogators everything he hates about the human government, in a manner somewhat inspired by Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence), but Kade stands only for himself, and he doesn’t have the kind of dimension or genuine self-will and ability to acknowledge doubts that make a Shakespearian tragic figure worth caring about. At least when Kalendorf did terrible things, he was doing it for some kind of greater good. And that is essentially what is missing from this Dalek Empire series- the sense of utilitarianism and empiricism, of people united in a common goal for the sake of the greater masses and the greater good. Infact there’s no sense of an ensemble here like there was in the previous Dalek Empire series’. This is star-led in the worst kind of way, and seems pitched at the same sensationalist, individualist, self-involved modern society that New Who and the new Battlestar Pedantica is geared towards. It just sums up everything nasty, selfish, petty, spoilt and manipulative about modern society. Infact like New Who, it’s so self-involved that it doesn’t feel even remotely adventurous. This story seems to presuppose that the audience will sympathise if Kade whines long enough to twist their arm into it. For long term fans of Dalek Empire, this is especially offensive given that when Alby or Siy Tarkov lost everything they held dear, they didn’t use it as an excuse to behave so reprehensibly. Infact like all the worst, most pretentious examples of the Tenth Doctor’s tough guy shouting, it feels like a poor imitation of Rob Shearman’s Dalek and its savagely beautiful presentation of a Doctor blinded by unthinking rage- a vulgar imitation without soul, insight or affirmation.
It’s disheartening to see Dalek Empire reduced to being a follower in its genre rather than a leader. Dalek Empire was always compatible with the style of New Who, given that it was a far more action, overkill based series with a little something for the shippers, and with an agenda to actively make Doctor Who ‘cool’ again, bearing in mind that the last time the show was ‘cool’ was probably Earthshock. But it’s only here that Dalek Empire has really caught up with New Who’s live action computer game approach. Stories like Voyage of the Damned and Planet of the Dead are as vacuous as live action computer games get. New Who is a very intense, frenetic, fast paced, provocative, explosive flash of colours, with a hyperactive, belligerent, sociopathic and impatiently quick to judge Doctor with unlimited extra lives at its centre. This is of course the central issue for many, with some preferring the way that New Who is faster paced and cuts to the chase, whilst others feel that its betrays the ethos of actually learning about and understanding things. So viewing the series can provoke the same power trip high and agitated temper as playing a violent playstation game, which perhaps accounts for the raw, angry reactions that New Who tends to provoke, both amongst its unforgiving critics and its fanatical defenders. Season 21 was as action-orientated, angry, vulgar and cruel-hearted as classic Doctor Who ever got, and it’s the only classic season that could come close to provoking such raging tempers as New Who can. Now Dalek Empire is following the mode of New Who completely, with Kade himself placed into the ultimate interactive games console controller suit complete with its own Wii, and as you can expect, the result is one of the most furious, nasty spewings of rage ever to come from the franchise. Dalek Empire was always a raw, angry, borderline psychotic series with a real primal scream approach to its characters and issues, but it used to be angry in an exorcising, uplifting, cathartic way. This couldn’t be more negative. This is just angry in a one-note, aimless, indiscriminate, utterly hostile, and really quite poisonous way.
It would have been semi-bearable if Kade ultimately got his comeuppance or achieved some redemption from the monster he is. Instead he just blames everyone else for making him the way he is, and worse still, the plot valorises his self-centred, ‘everyone’s-against-me’ view in the most contrived and unbelievable way possible.
It feels rather like Nick unintentionally wrote a military-glorifying story, then realised his mistake three quarters of the way through and quickly tried to undo this and negate and demonise the military in the most crassly contrived and cheaply sensationalist way possible. Really the third chapter of Dalek War did a far better portrayal of how the military turns ordinary people into psychotic killers, and did it through metaphor rather than heavy labouring of the point and forcing it down the listener’s throat. Granted the idea makes the spacer suits resonate with the same evil as the Dalek machines, to the point where when Kade forces Landen at gunpoint to put one on, it feels like a fate worse than death for her. The final battle on the asteroid belt is everything that Dalek Empire III’s climax should have been- a depiction of how war quite literally is a descent into hell, and Kade’s confrontation with the Emperor Dalek makes a subtle ironic point that the Dalek war machine is just as deceitful and secretive with its grunts as the human military is. But apart from that, it leaves a sour taste in the mouth, mainly concerning how it’s the most vile character who’s trying to moralise about the evils of the military.
And so we see that even if Twin Dilemma was given better dialogue, appealing visuals and more action and excitement, it’d still be awful because we’d actually still be rooting for the bad guys to just kill the detestable, self-centred, woman-beating ‘hero’ and end this nauseating, scornful display of self-aggrandisement, cheap shock tactics, immature nastiness and misogyny. Sure some might praise the ‘bravery’ of its approach, but as with Twin Dilemma there’s a world of difference between bravery and reckless stupidity.
Indeed Dalek Empire IV’s failure is the culmination of backlashes, not unlike the backlashes and counter-backlashes that led the classic series to ruin. It takes the organic plotting and characterisation of the previous series’, and flushes it completely down the toilet in favour of the contrived and artificial. It feels like a response to complaints about Dalek Empire III being overlong and too talky. But succeeds only in making the action feel brutally forced and trimming the runtime so ruthlessly that there’s zero characterisation, simply brutal action without thought and no charm left whatsoever, and charm was utterly essential to making this bleak series durable.
Put it another way, the reason Dalek Empire worked despite its excessive killings and morbid fascination with all things psychotic, is that like an audio painting it took time to craft and show all the finer details that made the characters and their worlds beautiful and worth caring about when they are destroyed, and made the destruction meaningful, but Dalek Empire IV doesn’t bother. Everything is so set out, inevitable and pointless and one-track minded that there’s no sense of potential or possibilities and thus no sense of anything lost except precious hours of our time.
As a result Kade is nothing but a macho stereotype, scarcely different from any 80’s action anti-hero cop on a revenge mission. Though there’s a conscious, New Who inspired effort to give his character more background than the protagonists before him (like the references to Kade’s bacto-hunting grandfather and the caves he used to play in as a child), it does nothing to sell the idea that Kade is a good man corrupted by tragedy- i.e. the listener has no reason to believe he wasn’t already a nasty piece of work in the first place. Landen’s off screen decision to kill Kade’s family is offensively out of character, which just goes to show how little work went into making her character credible. Kade’s wife Lajitta is especially annoying and gets some atrocious dialogue to deliver, and from her first appearance she obviously has ‘dead meat’ written all over her. Even the reappearance of Susan Mendes leaves us feeling like we’ve been sold a pup, conveying no sense of the spontaneous, firey, blinkered, determined workaholic Susan with her stage fright and weakness for co-dependency we fell in love with in the beginning (well provided you could see past the ‘despicable two bit quisling’ part), making us wonder why they bothered with this whole prequel retcon to revisit the Angel of Mercy if they weren’t even going to be faithful to the character. Infact the most fleshed out character eventually turns out to be a Dalek agent, which undoes all that work instantly and leaves the listener feeling even more cheated. In the previous series, it was usually the bland, autonomous character that turned out to have a disc in their head all along and thus actually became more interesting for it, not less. The rest of the military characters like Baxter, Fisk and Kennedy are killed off so pointlessly that it only reinforces that this petulantly bored story just plain isn’t about anything.
Which is a shame because it all adds up to a huge waste of talent. Noel Clarke is clearly really going for the character of Kade and in selected bursts either goads the listener into sharing his glee (like when he’s cutting into the Dalek saucer’s hull) or makes the character’s rage palpable enough to give the listener a panic attack. Maureen O’Brien does a commendable job with her nothing character, and special praise must go to Esther Ruth Elliot whose exemplary performance really does transcend ‘acting’ into ‘being’ and thus becomes the only character to gain our sympathies, so much so that I found myself really dreading the outcome for her. And of course Tanlee’s return is most welcome (let’s face it, if Tanlee was in the new Battlestar Pedantica it would improve the series immensely, infact I’m convinced that Torchwood: Children of Earth is only the masterpiece it is because it’s got Tanlee in it).
Dalek Empire was of course pitched at the demographic that wanted for a Doctor Who that was modelled on the darker, morally murky intergalactic war style of modern space opera, and yet Dalek Empire managed to do this cynicism in a way that wasn’t antithetical to a bit of old fashioned imagination, and was still a deeply sincere expression of the author’s soul and conscience that reckons with a plethora of personal demons. It didn’t feel dark or cavalier in a forced or contrived way or in any way that wasn’t completely natural and organic, till now. But we beg the question of what was the point of making Dalek Empire IV. By being a prequel it does nothing to further the story or to leave the fate of the galaxy in any doubt at all, and simply leeches off its past successes, and ultimately it feels like the most corporate and soulless cash in vehicle that Big Finish has ever produced. It’s all atitude and no soul, all action and no heart, and it’s all a Noel Clarke star vehicle sales pitch rather than a story worth telling. We would much rather have seen a followup to Dalek Empire III’s open ended conclusion, but Nick now regarded that thread as a dead end, meaning he had to do a prequel series which had to compensate for its pre-determined outcome by piling on the surprises and shocks. It has to be said that the ‘making of’ extras seem to be encouraging a rather self-congratulatory approach to the writing, and here the twists and moral ambiguities are being treated as worthy ends in themselves. So far from giving us clever turns in the screw that defined a series that was all about crucial character decisions and moral responsibility, Dalek Empire is now instead giving us cheap insulting deceptions for the sake of it. Just like with the similarly poisonous and repellent Night Thoughts, there’s something indescribably nasty and insideously sickening about the deceptive, confusing, obfuscational, pointless, vacuous mind games it plays with the listener. Adding so many twists that eventually the story ends up simply twisted. As with the JNT years, the pile up of backlashes just feel increasingly forced, cynical, soulless and borderline hostile, to the point where it just feels like a deranged, loathsome mutation of its former self.
And this is what a once superlative audio series has been reduced to- indulgent navelgazing of a particularly sadistic kind. They really didn’t know when to quit.
DALEK EMPIRE: THE FEARLESS
PART FOUR
So what is “The Fearless” at heart? It’s primarily an action epic, for one thing: every episode features extended action sequences which rank among the best Big Finish has produced. Nicholas Briggs usually wields total creative control over his stories, but sound design has been handled here by Chris Snyder and Briggs for Part One, and Jamie Robertson for Parts Two, Three, and Four. It’s incredibly difficult to capture an action sequence on audio without reducing it to a series of incomprehensible explosion noises, but the action in “The Fearless” is always clear and easy to understand. “The Fearless” is also the story of two people: Agnes Landen and Salus Kade, and how the Dalek War has irreversibly changed them. Landen has lost everything, and approaches the war with a single-minded devotion to her duty: there is no goal greater than defeating the Daleks. We learn here, in the final part, that her motive behind creating the Fearless was simple: to create soldiers like herself, lacking in distractions or moral concerns. But this never works out like it should, and while Landen engineered Kade into a merciless Dalek hunter, she also created an enemy who didn’t share her vision of the so-called big picture. The final argument between Kade and Landen is the greatest moment of the entire “The Fearless” serial — and by the end, Landen is just arguing with herself, trying to convince herself that her actions have been justified. She doesn’t really change, in the end, but then that’s the point: just like Kade, she’s been shaped, and it’s difficult to change back. None of this is particularly insightful, but like any good action movie, it doesn’t have to be — it’s enough that the writer approaches the script intelligently, and Briggs has done that and more in the final part.
8/10
Average rating, The Fearless: 6.8
Average rating, Dalek Empire: 6.6