The TARDIS travellers fall in with starship troopers struggling to defend a remote research facility from an all-out Dalek attack.
The TARDIS travellers fall in with starship troopers struggling to defend a remote research facility from an all-out Dalek attack.
“I’ve seen and heard more people die today than I have in my whole life and I’ve had enough!”
Now that Big Finish has pretty much jumped the shark, the Dalek stories are the last great hope, the one thing still worth looking forward to for fans and the one thing they can’t really afford to get wrong, much like the Robert Holmes stories were during the 80’s, and the Steven Moffat stories are today. So it’s unfortunate that Enemy of the Daleks is in so many ways an infuriating disappointment, although at the same time it seems to be a very marmite story.
At its best, Big Finish Dalek stories have tapped into all the neglected potential and dramatic mileage of the unseen Terran versus Dalek wars with the titanic galaxy spanning conflict between humanity and their mechanised, relentless foes, telling tales of hunters and prey, leaders and followers, and superhuman endurance and heroism during the darkest times. As this is Nick Briggs’ favourite storytelling topic, it has inevitably become more of a focus of late. Unfortunately of course Doctor Who as a franchise has long been a stranger to quality control, and can exhaust its freshest ideas or dynamics and run them into the dirt with remarkable speed. Dalek Empire prolonged its story far past its natural end point and the latest New Who Dalek stories tend nowadays to prompt despondent groans of impatience rather than the awe they initially did. To a long term follower of Big Finish, Enemy of the Daleks will probably sound deeply uninspired and lacking in anything really worthwhile to say.
Now fair enough that might sound like a snobbish criticism of something that doesn’t aspire to be too deep but is instead just content to be an action romp. There are plenty of stories that don’t really have high intellectual ambitions, but often the more worthwhile content comes about spontaneously more than anything. Dalek Empire was always a very outrageously cartoonish series and its moral themes seemed initially to come about as an accidental by product of the organic writing, and once the series had worked out what it was all about, it started restating and dumbing down its message more blatantly with each successively weaker season. It’s the same spontaneity that made for unpredictable and rich audio classics like Church and the Crown and Sympathy of the Devil, and which makes classic Doctor Who worth such plentiful repeat viewings, (well excluding the mostly drab period after Tom Baker left and before the show got its mojo back with Season 25). The trouble is, like many recent Big Finish stories, Enemy of the Daleks is deeply contrived and has all natural spontanaeity sucked out of it with no room for any heart or inspiration or even ambiguity. Even the cliffhangers feel deeply contrived.
For a lesson to see just how the Dalek wars story can be done so horribly wrong, then look no further. For this is simply an exercise in the ghastly excesses of vacuous action cinema, with a sickeningly self-destructive macho ethos, far too many pointless deaths and the worst, most pathetic melodramatic displays of emotional self-pity and self-aggrandisement- much like Dalek Empire IV really, but even that wasn’t as unimaginative as this.
More than that though, Enemy of the Daleks suffers from poor direction and appalling acting right from the very beginning (only Sylvester McCoy and Eiji Kusuhara seem to be putting in the real thespian effort). The opening attack on the Valkyrie ship suffers to shockingly amateurish acting and direction, and unlike The Council of Nicaea, it doesn’t recover from its shaky start into something good and worthwhile. Kate Ashfield never convinces as Lieutenant Beth Stokes, but part of that is down to the fact that none of her character motivations make any sense whether logical or emotional. Even in that introductory scene she goes from telling her unruly subordinate that the Daleks don’t take prisoners to signalling the Dalek fleet and asking them to show some mercy on the civilian ships and being shocked that the Daleks won’t listen.
On paper, the idea of Beth Stokes holds promise in showing how the Dalek war’s high turnover and forced conscriptions would see positions of command going to those who are perhaps incompetent and ill suited to the job and prone to either paralytic ineptitude or making the most panic-induced self-defeating decisions and inspiring nothing but insubordination (lets face it, it’s a story that Doctor Who is no stranger to, given its inexperienced producership during its declining years). It is a kind of counterpoint to how Dalek Empire depicted the war as an opportunity for ordinary people and misfits to suddenly become the heroes and leaders of the day. But there’s no real humanity to the portrayal of Beth Stokes, simply a horrid bombardment of self-pity. Like the worst episodes of New Who, it plops scenes of mawkish, melodramatic emoting at random into the story and thinks it has told an ‘emotional journey’. From shutting down the defence grid when no-one’s looking to her final pointless self-sacrifice, not a single thing the character does is remotely plausible, or even given the benefit of any tangible sense of emotional transition, its just contrived to the point of being involuntary. This is not a story interested in making believable narrative sense, or making its character’s actions believable or understandable, and that is a huge problem because it presents an enormous barrier to our empathy, the very empathy which all survival horror depends on. Beth’s descent into madness and childhood regression is totally forced and artificial, done in such ridiculous leaps and bounds that no thought or consideration seems to have gone into it at all, and Beth’s recounting of the death of her sister is not merely poorly scripted but has clearly been written without any genuine heart. Like New Who at its worst, this is a story that quite simply has no respect for itself.
Oh and the Ace and Hex companion team have never been so annoyingly immature, obvious and unconvincing. As we said before, the approach to comedy in the audios has changed since Gary Russell left. Whereas Bang-Bang-a-Boom gained humour that evolved naturally from the spontaneous, wild narrative and clash of ostentatious characters, here humour is something that the makers put in wherever they can to avoid scaring away new listeners with anything too solemn. God forbid a Big Finish story should actually mean anything these days. The worst example happens in the opening episode where the Doctor and company are trying to get into the shelter of the complex before they’re torn to pieces by flying piranha but the automated door system isn’t co-operating. At that juncture in the script it might have looked on paper like a cue for a ‘hip’ gag about Hex needing to show some ID because he doesn’t look 18, but when it comes to the scene itself, it’s tedious and it destroys the momentum and the tension in an instant because none of the characters seem to be taking their predicament seriously, so why should we? And it’s not like the gag was even funny.
Actually no, there’s a far worse gag earlier on where Hex cuts his hand on a thorn and behaves hysterically over it whilst at length -without any prompting from other characters- making a laboured asinine point of how sissy-like he is being. At this point the laughs cannot get more desperate. It’s a shame because the sound design of the botanical gardens environment itself is very good and very tactile, building a lovely sense of atmosphere and exotic audio scenery in a way I couldn’t in all fairness say about most other recent Big Finish releases.
Part of the problem seems to be that since Philip Oliver as Hex provides something of a connection to the mind bogglingly atrocious Hollyoaks, the writers seem to be pitching this at the Hollyoaks audience with the same kind of patronising ‘youth’ humour and pretentious cliché laid on with a melodramatic trowel, and they have an appaling cast to match. It doesn’t get any more Hollyoaks than Hex telling a threatening Dalek rather weakly to ‘stick it’ in the weakest display of moral outrage and one of the worst cliffhangers ever (even ‘go to hell’ would have sounded more realistic, but alas Big Finish has become really sanitised these days). It may have been an attempt to paint Hex as a stoic, defiant hero who stands by his principles but it makes him sound like an unruly and particularly stupid child who insists on lying in the road simply for a dare. It all seems to be trying to emulate a bit of scouse wit without the actual wit or quickness. Sophie Aldred’s performance is particularly awful, but to be fair to her she is being called upon to play the New Adventures heartless battle hardened Dalek killer version of Ace, which is so far removed from the comfy TV Ace role that Sophie is pretty much miscast. Which is a double blow because it means she’s playing a hardened, unsympathetic character, and not giving the character the humanity or dimension she needs to be sympathetic. When Ace observes Beth racing into the path of the Daleks, and in a disconcertingly chirpy tone marvels with pride at how the soldier woman is facing her fears, or telling Hex how Beth would be better off dead than in a Dalek labour camp, it almost makes it impossible to care for the character of Ace ever again. This is in many ways a New Adventures story, and the idea of a Valkyrie unit of all women soldiers is typical of the NA’s emancipating, self-hating misandry. The New Adventures writing crowd were of course impenetrably pretentious and sickeningly right-on and politically correct, despite being the most elitist and petty bunch of snobs you’ll ever meet. Its certainly typical of that mindset to consistently portray the human military as scum, unless they’re all women soldiers and are fighting the Daleks in which case it’s suddenly championed, and the more macho and steel hearted, the better, in much the same way as the obnoxious NA crowd pretentiously herald female and gay fans as being the only intelligent and worthy fans out there. Basically this is all so macho and rhetorical that it’s completely, hellishly void of any genuine compassion.
The music score, which usually underpins the Dalek’s audio presence doesn’t help here, infact it does nobody any favours, it’s just overblown ‘hip’ indie rock aural sludge that refuses to be background music and tries so ineptly to pump the adrenaline. The previous music scores on Dalek stories were evocative mood pieces or tortured compositions that conjured the vast distance of space, the heartbreaking passage of time and history, reality going sour and technological viral biomasses swallowing all in its path. This score just says ‘this is an exciting action scene, so be excited’. Lately it seems Big Finish just isn’t bothering with conveying evocative environments. The most the music does is to give the environment a grungy, dirty feel, but again there is just nothing sympathetic about the music. More to the point it compounds the problem that every other scene is contrived to try and be a big climactic dramatic moment and the music becomes so monotonous that it only compounds the meaningless blur that it all becomes.
The Daleks are unfortunately treated as nothing more than action film fodder and the relentless horror aspect is completely neglected, and they certainly never come across as a galactic technological virus. The scene where the Daleks despatch the piranha locusts should be the big game-raising moment of spectacle, but it’s just so limply done without any effort gone into making it frenetic or devastating. The main problem with the idea of doing this as an action story is that there are only three other members of the cast, so most of the fighting involves voiceless, nameless fodder who we don’t care about, being blasted. The big dramatic moment is of course meant to be Hex getting his first taste of the depths of Dalek cruelty when he witnesses the Daleks massacring his patients. But as we barely got to hear a single one of the patients say a word, let alone get to know any of them, and the massacre itself is so blatantly forewarned and repeatedly threatened that it has no shock value whatsoever when it happens, we can only rely on good directing that conveys the horror of the massacre in a straight for the jugular way, but instead we get the opposite, with the massacre almost sounding deliberately muffled and obscured as if listened to through a wall. Unfortunately Philip’s performance fails at selling Hex’s horrified reaction, not that the script does him any favours and as such we feel like we’re being heavy-handedly told to feel horrified when everything about its squeamish presentation has made it impossible to do so. Ideally what should have been done is to have the death toll escalate gradually around Hex so that we can absorb and digest each loss with him and thus feel closer to being able to share his anguish rather than bombarding it to us in one gulp, but again that’s not going to happen now that Big Finish has become so sanitised. There’s a rule of thumb that if a character in a film cries, then it takes away the audience’s ability to cry. Likewise the best examples of horror are muted works such as Ringu, The Quatermass Conclusion and Threads that take the audience to the peak of nightmarish, inescapable terror but never allow the emotional release of a horror movie scream. This is of course the complete opposite in that it’s all about laboured, melodramatic reaction with no substance to its source, or at least nothing that we can care about.
There’s much talk on the ever tiresome extras of this being a relentless action thriller, but its nothing of the kind. Every time the heroes get cornered by a Dalek, it’s predictable that the soldiers will simply turn up and attack them from behind and save the day, and after a while it becomes boring. Furthermore there’s a particularly clumsy scene jump where a Dalek is menacing a helpless Beth Stokes and causing her to break down, and then in her next scene, Beth is still distraught but the Dalek has gone, apparently having decided to let her go free. But more importantly it simply fails to work as a horror or a dramatic festival of death because its deaths are so predictable and contrived. As with Resurrection of the Daleks, it doesn’t show the Daleks at their most relentless and all conquering, it just shows the humans at their most defeatist, inept, reckless and suicidal, and therefore giving us no sense of struggle for survival at all since the only meaningful deaths that occur involve humans who were determined to get themselves killed for no other reason than so the writer can wash their hands of them in the most contrived and nasty fashion. As with Resurrection of the Daleks there’s no heart to it, so there’s no emotional connection to the character’s primal desire to survive. Beth’s ultimate self-sacrifice is sold as the completion of her character journey of accepting her fate with bravery, but the sacrifice itself is so needless and pointless, that like much of Season 21’s slaughter fests it simply makes the whole thing feel like nothing more than a pointless, senseless waste, and as is often the case, it pretty much blackens the whole story as a pointless and nasty exercise with the most unpleasant aftertaste. Worse still it ends with a final scene in the Tardis where Ace is already making cheerful quips in a manner which just feels utterly tasteless and calloused in light of all that’s happened.
The same is true of Professor Shimura’s ultimate self sacrifice, but let’s face it he didn’t have much character to take on a journey in the first place, he was simply a mad scientist, just about brought to life by actor Eiji Kusuhara’s charming way with broken English and occasional moments of parental tenderness, and for the first half of the story he at least has an intrigue and seems like he’s going to be a villain worth listening to. But otherwise he exhibits the same kind of overblown villainy that marred the kind of dark story of exploitation and addiction that Nightmare of Eden could have been. The mad scientist has kind of become a staple character in Dalek audio stories, acting as a surrogate Davros to provide a context of the Daleks’ origins from an almost inevitable collision of technology, genetic science and unscrupled human ambition. Basically all good sci-fi comes down to the relationship between humanity and its technology and how we use or abuse the tools we have. It’s something of a means of recreating the moral polarising dynamic between the Doctor and Davros from Genesis of the Daleks, except that this time the mad scientist’s aims are the same as the Doctors in wanting to destroy the Dalek menace forever and can therefore argue with credibility against the Doctor’s ‘do I have the right?’ position by proposing the final solution to the Dalek menace in a way that the Doctor never could.
But this story seems to conspire to rob Shimura of all credibility from the beginning, tuning him into just a clichéd mad scientist who bizarrely never even considered the obvious flaws and dangers in his creations. Surely having witnessed them birthed in human flesh for a long gestation period should give him some idea of how its breeding habits present a problem to humanity. The moral discussions between him and the Doctor couldn’t be more dull and uninspiring and there’s just no attempt to characterise Shimura as anything but a cipher. None of the Mentor’s tragic obsessive compulsive control freak personality or sincere belief in her own heart of gold, or Murgat’s communist dreams of utopia. There’s an attempt to have him share in Martez’ paternal love of her creations, but done in a blasé manner that gradually just treats the relationship almost like a poor joke, even at one cringeworthy point having Shimura try to pursue one of his unruly creations and declaring ‘Come back here, I would talk with you’.
Ah, the Kiseibyaa. In many ways they are almost the saving grace of the story. Mind you they’re the only side worth rooting for. Again, thanks to poor directing and sound production the creatures’ dialogue is often inaudible, and to be honest they never really say anything interesting anyway, but the idea of them being an artificial sentient creation that quickly, almost supersonically grows beyond anyone’s control comes off wonderfully, as does the idea of them being the Daleks’ only natural predator. The Kiseibyaa come across as effectively savage and repulsively slimy, with a supersonic speed and viciousness, and the scene where they make a meal of the Black Dalek like a school of piranhas is a gem. So too is the delicious moment where the so far utterly ineffectual Doctor gloats over the dying Black Dalek, challenging it over why the Daleks should be spared the horrors they’ve inflicted on other innocent species, and for one false dawn of a moment it looks like the story is going to finally become daring and for a moment it looks like the Doctor is going to let the Kiseibyaa breed after all and allow this pandora’s box to remain open because causality demands it, and maybe the Kiseibyaa will turn out to save humanity in the long run. For a moment it seems like there’s finally going to be a twist in the tale, or at last that this mediocre story is going to hint at an unseen greater story yet to come.
But alas, the story goes down the predictable route where the Doctor decides to destroy the Kiseibyaa and effectively commit genocide which turns out to be the great historical atrocity he was prophesising about at the beginning. It’s a final revelation that leaves us feeling both cheated and sermonised at. We’ve seen no great atrocity, simply a reset button being pressed, and one that destroys all evidence that the Kiseibyaa ever existed, which begs the question of how or why the Doctor even noticed it as a future history event, let alone the greatest atrocity of the vast Dalek wars. As such it simply makes the whole story feel like a pretentious and hollow excuse for itself.
It has to be said that this story is something of an unoriginal copy of Brotherhood of the Daleks where the Doctor and company land in a weapons research facility during the Dalek wars and encounter shell shocked soldiers and an amoral scientist working on a biological weapon against the Daleks, except without all the interesting bits. Actually no, to credit Enemy of the Daleks with noble intentions, it was an attempt to take the idea of Brotherhood of the Daleks but do it in a far less ‘knowing’ and more newbie-friendly way, with Hex being a fresh pair of eyes through which to see what’s effectively business as usual. But if it’s a backlash against the ‘knowingness’ of Big Finish’ previous Dalek stories then it’s a backlash too far that tries too hard and with too much overstatement to force a sense of awe, horror and excitement when we’ve seen it all before and are given nothing to surprise us. And that’s unfortunately the most generous thing I can say about it. Even treating the story as a lightweight, box-ticking, comfort food kind of Doctor Who romp, the pointless death of Beth still feels utterly wrong and sours the milk.
For a while it looked like Big Finish had become such bland product that it would never again plumb the depths of stories like Zagreus or The Rapture, but at least The Rapture and Zagreus tried for something original and different. Enemy of the Daleks simply amounts to little more than vulgar senseless noise. A story so disappointing, and so content to be nothing more than fluff that it initially made me wonder whether Big Finish was worth bothering with anymore.
Infact aside from the fan’s wet dream of Colin Baker’s ‘Lost Season’ stories and the next Dalek story Patient Zero (which has a trailer that sounds like an Emilie Autumn song), there’s nothing coming up that seems promising enough to suggest greater things to come. For a while Big Finish were the one good thing to emerge from the JNT disaster area and its car crash soulless nerd trap that always reeled us in but never satisfied us, particularly when the show ended. Big Finish provided the satisfying continuation and redemption of the show and its despot Doctors as was its raison d’etre, and in the process gave us the kind of underground creativity and mature intelligence that would never have been possible if the series had stayed on air. For many they were a welcome, dignified and mature alternative to the New Series approach which often amounted to little more than an advert for itself with its forced zaniness, fawning self-congratulation and proclivity for deliberate irritation. Now that’s come to an end and Big Finish now looks long past its best too. But we’re not bitter, honestly. How can we be when the Big Finish staff gave us such rich creativity and redemptive new adventures for the pariah Doctors for much of their lifespan? We’ll always remember them for their art and showing us just how great Doctor Who could be when stretched to its full potential, unfettered by visual limitations or the superficial. This is unfortunately as deep as a puddle.
ENEMY OF THE DALEKS
It’s difficult to bring a serious, action-movie feel to Doctor Who. Serious character pieces have been done successfully in the past, but hard-bitten, macho stories can too easily turn into the sort of overwrought nonsense normally reserved for fan fiction — and this is doubly true in a series that prides itself on a humorous sensibility. David Bishop came dangerously close to that line in his Unbound story “Full Fathom Five,” but here, in “Enemy of the Daleks,” he gets it almost exactly right.
My major criticism of “Enemy” is the incredibly straightforward nature of the script. Bishop ends the first episode with a great hook: the manipulative seventh Doctor has come to the planet Bliss because he knows he must perpetrate one of the greatest atrocities of the Dalek Wars. Unfortunately, the introduction of the Kiseibya — a ravenous, manufactured race powerful enough to overwhelm the Daleks — leaves a very predictable outcome, and that’s exactly the route Bishop takes, the Doctor responsible for eradicating this newer, greater threat to the universe. There are some fantastic small details — voracious locusts in forests of metal, for example — but generally this is standard action-movie fare: gritty, downbeat, and full of explosions. Credit to Bishop for recognizing the parallels between “Enemy” and “Genesis,” directly addressing this in the dialogue as the Doctor realizes he has faced this choice before. Here, he chooses differently — and the differences between this incarnation and the previous six have never been more apparent.
Ace and Hex — and, by extension, Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier — are at their best here. Bishop shows a different side to Ace than that usually displayed in the audios: while not the bitter, cynical “new Ace” of the NAs, she demonstrates extensive experience both with the Daleks and in combat, showing herself better-suited to the situation than the trained Valkyrie soldiers she encounters. It’s commonly accepted that Ace traveled with the Doctor longer than any other companion, and stories like this demonstrate why: this character has come so far even from the early days of Big Finish, never mind the TV series or novels. Compare to Hex, who is the only truly relatable character in the script: he has never encountered the Daleks before, and is horrified by their implacable cruelty. He recognizes that he is not — and likely can never be — the same sort of hero as the Doctor and Ace, yet still shows a noble streak when trying to defend helpless patients from the Daleks. He even exhibits a surprising pragmatism when he tries to save himself and Ace; clearly, groundwork is being laid for something significant.
I also enjoyed the defeatism of Beth Stokes (Kate Ashfield), the commander haunted throughout her life by Daleks and death. Finally succumbing to grief and hopelessness, she offers herself as a sacrifice to the Daleks — and they recognize this and refuse, intending to take her as a slave! It’s easy to show cruelty with exploitative scenes of torture; instead, Bishop opts for a subtler, more elegant approach that paints the Daleks in a truly disturbing light. Sadly, the entire story is not this unsettling — despite their horrific origins, the Kiseibya are rather one-note and unthreatening on audio, and the Daleks don’t seen as unstoppable as they probably should.
Sylvester McCoy follows his exceptional performance in “The Magic Mousetrap” with equally impressive work, quiet and commanding in equal measure. Aldred, too, is on top form, and Olivier genuinely pulls at the heartstrings with his conflicted performance. Sadly, and unusually for Big Finish, the supporting cast isn’t at the same level as the regulars: Ashfield in particular fails to convince, and Bindya Solanki sounds like an actor trying to sound tough rather than a trained, hardened soldier. The late Eiji Kusuhara delivers a good performance, but unfortunately I found his accent remarkably difficult to penetrate, a problem I almost never encounter. And yes, it’s almost a cliche at this point, but Nicholas Briggs once again demonstrates why he’s the best Dalek voice artist of them all. Steve Foxon’s sound design is of its usual quality, but the score deserves particular mention, delivering a much more action-oriented, exciting sound than often heard in Big Finish plays.
Overall, “Enemy of the Daleks” is a very good story, well-told. It’s not particularly deep or complex, but Bishop fills his script with enough effective, memorable moments to make this issue easy to overlook. Apart from some issues with the supporting cast, there’s very little to complain about.
Another strong McCoy story, and highly recommended.
8/10