The Doctor and Evelyn find themselves in the glorious English Empire and discover that they and the Daleks are well known there.
The Doctor and Evelyn find themselves in the glorious English Empire and discover that they and the Daleks are well known there.
JUBILEE
Returning to Jubilee after seeing Robert Shearman’s TV episode Dalek is a difficult proposition: while Jubilee is able to explore its themes over 2+ hours of running time, Dalek has the advantages of a better cast, better production values, and, most importantly, a visual element. However, these are not comparison pieces, even though Dalek was an adaptation — and disassociated from its TV remake, Jubilee still stands tall as one of the most thought-provoking dramas ever released by Big Finish.
There are two primary themes explored by Jubilee, the first of which is the devaluation of Daleks as threats in the minds of the population of Rochester’s England. This is another use of Daleks-as-Nazis, though it’s a rather unique perspective on the issue, very pointedly reminding us that history will repeat itself if it is not respected. The evil perpetrated by the Daleks was so awful that the people of this play cannot imagine it ever happening again — but in doing so they ignore their personal reenactment of this evil every waking minute of their lives. The image of a lone Dalek standing before an angry mob of thousands, all chanting “Exterminate,” is terrifying — and rightly it should be. This is also the most manipulative we have ever seen a Dalek, with its definition of power — the ability to do what one orders others to do — used to shocking effect.
But even as the first theme compares human nature to that of the Daleks, the second deconstructs the nature of the Daleks themselves as Shearman contemplates the extension of their ultimate mission to its natural conclusion. Terry Nation’s concept of the Daleks as ruthless, paranoid killers, hell-bent on exterminating all other forms of life, is brilliantly simplistic and effective — but it is not until Jubilee that anyone bothers to ask what happens if the Daleks actually win. The answer? They begin to destroy each other until only one Dalek is left, alone in the universe and totally insane. This is explained to the lone Dalek, and predictably it does go insane, reaching the only logical conclusion: in order to be the supreme beings of the universe, the Daleks must never become the supreme beings of the universe. Bang go the Daleks in a Douglas Adams-ian puff of logic.
And with all of this going on, Shearman still finds time to include some of the most effective set pieces ever seen in Doctor Who. The prisoner in the Tower, hinted so obviously to be Davros, is revealed to be a tortured parallel sixth Doctor — and the scene in which the Dalek approaches him for orders is horrifying. There’s also more than a small amount of dark humor — the idea of Rochester collecting dwarves and forcing them to drive around in Dalek costumes is hilariously gruesome — almost as much as their mass extermination by a real Dalek, appalled at the idea of Dalek song.
Colin Baker stars as the sixth Doctor, and his turn in the role is once again magnificent — he’s forced to run the entire range of emotions, including playing a parallel version of his own character, and acquits himself very well. Unfortunately he approaches the jubilee speech scene improperly, and quite frankly sounds terrible rather than pointed, but aside from that flaw this is a fine performance. Shearman knows this Doctor, and it is difficult to imagine any of his counterparts coping in this larger-than-life environment that is the English Empire.
Maggie Stables, however, steals the show as Evelyn, as Shearman allows her to explore her character in ways that haven’t been seen since Project: Twilight. Her career as a history professor is actually incorporated into the plot, while her natural sympathy comes to the fore in her confrontations with the Dalek. Remember, unlike Rose in Dalek, Evelyn has encountered the Daleks before (The Apocalypse Element), and her ability to show sympathy for the lone Dalek despite her history makes her scenes with it all the more effective.
Many have criticized Jubilee for making Rochester and Miriam utter cliches, but I disagree with this condemnation: as they are the leaders of the Dalek-influenced English Empire, they represent the Empire to the listeners, and as such it’s necessary for them to be over the top and melodramatic to get the point across. After all, the story isn’t about the Rochesters at all, it’s about humanity v. Daleks. Despite this, though, Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres turn in excellent performances, at once terrifying and hilarious. The star supporting cast member, though, much like in Dalek, is Nicholas Briggs, who brings a shocking amount of sympathy to the lone Dalek despite retaining its cruel, manipulative nature.
Nicholas Briggs took on a huge responsibility with the sound design for this play, given its scope, but as he clearly worked closely with Shearman himself everything turns out well. The score is menacing and every locale is captured convincingly — as Briggs often designs his own productions, the direction works exceptionally well. Granted, the play may overrun to a small extent, but there isn’t a scene present which doesn’t work in one way or another — to cut it down would be to make it smoother but would also lose an effective element of the atmosphere. Shearman directed the Dalek scenes so that Briggs could perform opposite the actors, and the fact that these scenes are among the play’s most effective points to his ability in this role.
Jubilee isn’t a perfect production and doesn’t feel quite as polished as Shearman’s first two Big Finish scripts. However, the sheer quantity of ideas on display coupled with the author’s knack for creating effective set pieces makes this arguably the most thought-provoking Doctor Who audio to date. For that reason alone it achieves must-own status; that it is strongly effective as a piece of drama as well simply elevates it to that elusive 10 rating.
10/10
“Just one Dalek survivor. All on its own. Quite without purpose…. quite insane”
When discussing the failings of the show in its final declining years, what frequently comes up is the changing nature of society and politics in the 1980’s that saw idealism being cheapened, crushed and even demonised. At this backdrop the shallower understanding of the show, the creeping defeatist tone and the crippling emancipation of its main character in the 80’s suddenly make more sense (see the graphic novel Watchmen for more on this).
Robert Shearman however has always professed a fondness for this troubled era and saw potential for the show at this point to do real uncompromising, unpredictable provocative punk art that dissected and questioned the very nature of narrative. This, more than any other story he’s written is in tune with those ambitions. He’s shaking off the writing discipline, letting himself off the leash and going for the rough cut.
It helps that Robert is a fan of this era. The 80’s very much simplified the Doctor, in the same way it simplified a lot of idealist characters. The Doctor stopped being a complex, adaptable character and became instead a trademark (at least until Sylvester McCoy came along). With Peter Davison the understanding of the Doctor’s peacemaker role had become so shallow that he became an inept appeaser. With Colin Baker, attempts to make the Doctor feel dangerous and unpredictable were based around another shallow and superficial approach of making him simply insane. The depth of philosophy was no longer there. But if you believed in the character, then you brought your own understanding of the Doctor’s depth of philosophy to fill in the gaps and make the erraticness consistent with a well rounded character. By all indications, that’s what Robert Shearman did as a viewer, and he brings that extra bit of work to his rendering of the character now. Just compare Robert Shearman’s full blooded portrayal of the psychotic, volatile Doctor in the 2005 story Dalek, with the artificial, childish and desperate precedent in Twin Dilemma.
Likewise here we have the Doctor being ineffectual, but he retains a complexity and rich idealism that the Saward era Doctors never had. Effectively its using the conception of the 80’s Doctor as an anti-hero or reluctant hero to really demonstrate all that’s wrong with the idea of the conventional hero or the modernist ‘might is right’ way of thinking and how limiting, conformist and perjorative it all is. The Doctor colludes with Rochester’s tyranny, in the hope of influencing and changing this fascist Britain from within, only to realise that Rochester is beyond all reason and hope. Evelyn takes him to task over his prejudice of the Daleks and proves him wrong, and ultimately the Doctor has to stand back and let a Dalek of all people save the day. Meanwhile, hints at an alternative timeline where the Doctor helped the Britains to defeat the Daleks are like heartbreaking memories of the reliable hero the Doctor once was.
Evelyn has grown into a wonderful companion by now, and in this story she gets to be on an equal footing to the Doctor and to divide our viewpoint in much the same way as Leela did back in the 70’s. It truly is a shame that the horrendous ageism of New Who would prevent us from having such a companion on screen right now. She displays both courage and heart, and stands as the only character in this story with the capacity for empathy. She gets to really stand up to the most arrogant of Doctors, but crucially she does it at the climax of spending the whole story dividing our viewpoint so that her perspective already has the greater validity.
This is a story where the Doctor’s noble role is sorely challenged. What made the Doctor the perfect left wing hero was that in refusing to become an executioner or the next leader after toppling the previous regime, he was refusing to let himself become the very tyrant he once railed against. After all, the Doctor by nature does frequently force his moral views onto others, so perhaps he knows it’d be wrong for him to have long term power over a populace. But in this story he makes a return visit to find that even in his absence, his legacy and legend has become a fascism and tyranny in and of themselves.
In this way the presentation of the ineffectual Doctor isn’t simply the parade of misery and defeatism it was in the 80’s, because here it actually is about the relationship between the Doctor and the reactionary, shallow society that crushed him. This is a world where consumerist culture has cheapened the Daleks, turning ideals into commodities; in much the same way as cinema of the time turns heroism into macho trash of big guns and one-liners. Jubilee really understands the paradox at the heart of the shallowing of society, as things become simplified, they become more confusing- more rule driven and society grows ever more petty and belligerent which leads to confusion, people not knowing where they stand, the crisis of masculinity, Generation X and post modernism. It would be easy for this story’s attack on our consumerist society to come across as mean-spirited and shaming towards the average consumer, but infact this is a story which sympathetically understands that we are an anxiety driven society and that we consume and buy ourselves a lifestyle as a form of aversion therapy, to feel secure. As with a lot of the stories of the 80’s, Jubilee emerges as a very schizophrenic one, but one that’s fully aware of the toll of issues its reckoning with, and has a symbiosis that most 80’s stories couldn’t even dream of.
Infact its one story that leaves a different impression with the listener every time it’s played. In one listening it may sound bogged down by the worst excesses of Season 24, where the comedy, caricatures and winks to the fourth wall threaten to erode all believability. In another, all the humorous moments do nothing to offset just how depressing and bleak the story is at heart. Infact its fluctuations in tone are genuinely terrifying in how it conveys a society gone mad which changes its own minefield of deathly rules of etiquette with the mood of the day. In that it is very close to the ethos of Genesis of the Daleks, where the more attentive of you may notice how the Daleks’ parameters of racial conformity narrowed as the serial went on. At first in Genesis of the Daleks it was only the Doctor that didn’t fit the mould, but by the end of that story even their own creator and blood relatives could no longer be accommodated, so conceivably from there the road to Dalek civil wars over minor mutations and genetic deviations were inevitable.
Whilst it may be a fan taboo to show a Dalek that has been degraded and has had its will broken by human society, Jubilee gives us the very society that could believably do that. Where stereotypes live and breathe as prisoners of convention, and even the Dalek’s nature is drawn as a tragic victim of obsessive compulsive disorder, and through the Dalek’s journey, we see the true horror of what it means to be made a pariah of. There’s some brilliant, distressing audio work from Nicholas Briggs as he gets across the creature’s soul being at war with its own mechanisation. Infact the portrayal of a Dalek as an introspective misfit having a personality crisis matches perfectly with what the Daleks are. Armoured, walled up creatures detached from the world outside, so having a Dalek become withdrawn in itself and going mute for half a century is a surprisingly logical extension of that. In such confusion, repression and isolation, anyone can lose their sense of purpose and become defeatist about everything they used to have convictions in.
As with Neverland, it puts a Dalek up for public execution amidst a lynch mob crowd and asks who the worse fascist of the two is. But it goes deeper than that. It goes deeper than the dangers of war nostalgia too. This is a sensationalist society that needs perpetual enemies to define itself against, where women only trust and seek oppressive husbands in the belief that their violence will protect them from themselves. It’s a nightmare world where humanity has overthrown its oppressors only to find itself unable to function without them. As such the Doctor’s final forgiveness of the Dalek doesn’t invalidate his later ruthlessness in Remembrance of the Daleks, so much as redefines his destruction of the Daleks as being something of a mercy killing, in the knowledge that if the Daleks ever did achieve universal supremacy it would become their own personal hell.
What’s really terrifying and discomforting though is that there’s so much about Jubilee’s society that’s true to our own. This is Doctor Who for a depressing modern world of Guantanamo Bay, Jeremy Kyle, and the most vindictive tyranny of manners that rules in all social situations. In that regard it’s amazing and cherishable that the story ends on any note of victory or hope at all.
So it’s an odd, intriguing beast, which can be best summed up as being Doctor Who as parodied by The Comic Strip Presents, where the show itself comes under attack for its traditional values and black and white morality, and homogenous portrayal of alien cultures. It’s savage and yet simultaneously vital and means every word of it. Coupled with Robert Shearman’s beautiful talent for conjuring imagery with audio, it has something that 80’s Doctor Who with its style over substance rarely achieved- an iconography that links images to ideals in much the same way as The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Green Death did.
Like The Mutant Phase, it ends on a paradox reset switch where none of it happened. In some ways it’s as if the story’s dissecting of narrative and character roles have finally unravelled the whole story, making the reset switch feel inevitable. But it isn’t necessarily a copout. Not if something is learned from all of this, not if characters are changed in the most unlikely way, and certainly not if it hangs on a crucial decision, especially one made by a character who previously had no courage for making decisions. It feels like we’ve seen an alternate world where so many things were possible that the human characters could become their worst enemy and a Dalek could perversely become the most heroic and honourable of them all, and so the deletion of these possibilities feels honestly like a sacrifice. Making it overall less a dream and more a warning, which was always the point of its Orwellian source material.
It’s often said that this is a great story for highlighting the dark side of humanity, which does Jubilee an injustice. It’s actually about decoding the dark side of humanity and the dehumanising nature of modern Western society, and does so exhaustively. Sure it’s occasionally didactic and verbose and heavily overstated, but the intrigue and broken taboos add up to being Robert Shearman’s most compelling and unpredictable story of all, which more than compensates for any didactism, and to make a Dalek story unpredictable is definitely no small feat. It is best thought of as an undisciplined, experimental run up to the more lean and accomplished Dalek. The Dalek story that Robert Shearman wrote for the New Series in 2005 was something populist, pacy and mainstream (though with a beautiful visual literacy to compensate for its less wordy script), but this, unlike Dalek is specifically pitched at speaking directly to the misfits and outsiders of society, and it’s arguably a better work of art for that reason, for being able to reach wider (and deeper) than mere demographics. When Rob Shearman reviewed The Sea Devils in DWM, he noted how the scene where the Doctor laments Trenchard is done two completely different ways in the TV story and the novelisation, but both are equally meaningful and both are amongst his favourite moments in Doctor Who. Likewise in giving us a more complex and pointed version of Dalek that can crack open mindsets and be honestly life changing, we can only say God bless him for giving us the rough cut as well.
Jubilee
The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe get pulled in alternative timeline of London 2003. The English Empire became a global power from winning the Great Dalek War of 1903. The Doctor and Evelyn are worshipped as heroes, and the Doctor has splintered memories of fighting in that war. Meanwhile, the last surviving Dalek is tortured in prison. Jubilee is dark, violent, and highly recommended. Spoilers below.
Jubilee is one of Big Finish’s most ambitious audios to date. Robert Shearman’s sci-fi mystery explores theme and character. It has the usual rants against politics, consumerism, and “humans make great Daleks.” What’s unique is how Shearman uses time travel to explore long term destruction from short term solutions. The 1903 versions of the Doctor and Dalek both got it wrong.
Willful submission is expressed here with surprising subtlety. The Dalek, President Rochester, his wife Miriam, and his thug Lamb behave like actual BDSM submissives. They each need orders and discipline from someone they respect.
The Dalek sounds like a victim at first, then tricks Evelyn with her own compassion, then falls victim to his own compassion. Like the Doctor, he’s undermined by his earlier actions. “You should have given me better orders,” is one of the story’s best lines. His feelings about being the last of his kind foreshadow the new Who era. Kudos to Nick Briggs for bringing nuance to his Dalek voices. His range is on display in the all-Dalek dialogues, which normally bring the show to a grinding halt.
President Rochester, on the other hand, is a 2-dimensional tyrant at best. Whether he’s abusing Miriam, whining about redemption, or committing atrocity, he always sounds like a James Bond villain. His defining moment is claiming to be a victim while dismembering a dwarf in a Dalek suit.
Nigel’s wife Miriam is equally cliche. Her duality as masochist fembot and sadistic schemer never makes sense. Miriam’s obsession about getting hit hard enough “to break the skin” makes her more cartoonish than mad. Together, their marital insanity is adventure television cliche.
Evelyn Smythe is a fantastic companion for Six. As a middle-aged woman who’s lead a full life, she’s gained more patience, maturity and intelligence than the Doctor…within a much shorter life span. Evelyn is a driving protagonist in Jubilee, paving the way for Rose Tyler in “Dalek.”
The fate of the 1903 Doctor is…wow. His utter defeat shatters the classic Doctor Who myth the hero can win just being clever. The Doctor’s final laugh is heartbreaking.
For a hundred years since winning the Great Dalek War, the British trivialized the Daleks into a Hogan’s Heroes punchline. The contrast between the story’s actual history and its Dalekmania version is highlighted when Miriam says, “The Doctor from the movies was so much better.”
My only major knock is that the physics of the 100-year time split are never fully explained. I had to play it a few times, then Google to understand. The story’s emphasis on drama makes us forget its lack of technical consistency. That absence is glaringly noticeable at the end, when the Doctor explains it all in a tsunami of Gallifreyan techno-babble. Colin Baker does what he can, but no living actor could make that sound natural. He’s being asked to compensate for the Robert Shearman’s laziness.
That said, I highly recommend Jubilee. It’s the most dramatic, mature, and politically interesting Six story I’ve heard so far.
Bottom Line: 10/10.
TARDIS Bits
The Doctor’s Jubilee speech is awful; blaming himself for our inhumanity is typical Time Lord arrogance.