Davros, creator of the Daleks, has turned over a new leaf. Or has he? The Doctor doesn’t think so. But is the Doctor always right?
Davros, creator of the Daleks, has turned over a new leaf. Or has he? The Doctor doesn’t think so. But is the Doctor always right?
DAVROS
With the somewhat surprising (but ultimately successful) decision to explore Omega with the first release of the villains trilogy behind them, Big Finish turned to Lance Parkin to provide a new perspective on a much more famous villain: Davros, creator of the Daleks. Parkin’s script shows an unexpected level of depth to the previously one-dimensional ranting megalomaniac, and the excellent writing, superior performances, and high-quality production values combine to produce a legendary BF release.
Much of Davros is told in flashback, as the listener is allowed to witness Davros’s life leading up to and immediately after the Thal attack which left him crippled. Parkin’s characterization here is astonishing: Davros is clearly insane, but his obvious love for Shan leads him to do things for what he honestly believes are good reasons; it’s hard to tell who should be the subject of sympathy. The scenes set after the attack are equally powerful, as Davros comes to terms with his injuries and, in the best pre-credits sequence in Doctor Who history (against admittedly small competition), decides not to commit suicide but rather to emerge as a new, stronger being at the head of a new race.
Of course, the main plot is just as strong. Davros’s awakening and first exclamation of “DOC-TOR!” is absolutely terrifying, but the scene to follow quickly shifts to a humorous tone as Davros and the Doctor are hired to work for a large corporation. From here, the tone generally remains light (except for the flashback sequences) as Davros carefully involves himself in corporate affairs and positions himself for a takeover. Some have read anticapitalist messages in this play; I don’t see them — the only real alternative offered is Davros’s concept of a military economy, and the play clearly isn’t advocating that! The idea of solving the stock market has been done before (Aronofsky’s ?) but I love Parkin’s twist on it: using that solution to bring down the entire economy. This is a much more believable conquer-the-galaxy scheme than most, given that money tends to be more powerful than weapons.
Colin Baker shines in this play, as he returns to his abrasive season 22 persona. His breaking of cover early in episode 1 is hilarious, but throughout you can clearly sense his character’s utter disdain for Davros. The Doctor knows what will happen eventually — and he’s proven right — but until that happens, his interactions with Davros provide no end of amusement. This might be the least central to the plot the sixth Doctor has ever been, but it’s understandable given the subject matter.
Terry Molloy returns to the role of Davros for the first time since 1989, and I have to think some people questioned the wisdom of bringing him back. After all, he wasn’t anywhere near as good as his predecessors on television — but if Davros proves anything, it’s that this was the fault of the scripts. Molloy is brilliant in this play, managing to give Davros a full range of believable emotions and even generating sympathy for one of the most evil characters in Doctor Who history. Not only that, but he’s *scary* — his insane laughter as he prepares to detonate the nuclear weapon is absolutely terrifying. It’s very difficult to make a character seem frighteningly insane rather than merely over the top, and Molloy carries it off perfectly. And his performance as the younger Davros are just as good, again combining insanity with sympathy. This is the sort of performance that should win awards.
Davros also sees the return of two former Doctor Who stalwarts: Wendy Padbury, who starred as Zoe in Patrick Troughton’s final season, and Bernard Horsfall, who was all over the series in various guest roles in the 1970s. Padbury’s turn as Lorraine Baynes is solid, though the historian-blind-to-reality aspects of the character are somewhat overdone. Horsfall, meanwhile, is wonderfully understated as Arnold Baynes — he could have played the character much louder and domineering but this portrayal appropriately allows Davros to dominate proceedings. The remainder of the supporting cast is decent but unmemorable, though Katarina Olsson is quite good as Shan.
Jim Mortimore handles the sound design with Jane Elphinstone composing the music, and they make an interesting yet amazingly effective decision: Davros must be one of the quietest plays ever released by Big Finish. Often, rooms are left in almost complete silence as the characters interact, and the music is reduced mostly to bizarre background effects between scenes. This style allows the central characters to take over, and it works remarkably well. I’m sure some of that is down to Gary Russell’s direction, which is again excellent — I’d never have expected this kind of performance from Terry Molloy, but there it is. My only complaint with the play regards its length: like Omega, Davros is too long, clocking in at over 150 minutes. However, it fills out its length better than its predecessor and only has one or two seriously dry spells.
Davros is unquestionably the highlight of the villains trilogy. With one of the best “bad guy” performances ever from Terry Molloy, a strong turn from Colin Baker, an intelligent and capable script, and the usual excellent production values, Davros is a true classic that should reside in every fan’s library.
A must-buy.
10/10
“I believe you journalists would call it a ‘smoking gun’”
It’s Colin’s personal favourite and is often recommended as the best choice to play for the uninitiated. After all it’s familiar territory to fans of the TV series, fitting snugly between Eric Saward’s Dalek stories and presenting the Doctor with temporary companions who are conveniently killed off at the end. More importantly it would demonstrate to a newbie how Big Finish has redeemed both the Sixth Doctor and the overused, ranting Davros, and demonstrated their unfulfilled potential for greater things. Whilst on TV, both Davros and the Sixth Doctor were one dimensional engines of hollow sound and fury, here they are reinterpreted as titanic idealist figures representing flip sides of the same coin in a way the Doctor/Master rivalry never quite did. It’s been said that the Sixth Doctor’s refusal to kill Davros is out of character for this particular incarnation, but for the purposes of this story, the Sixth Doctor is drawn as the antithesis of Davros- mild mannered, compassionate, incorruptible and incapable of killing. Someone who refuses Arnold Baines’ bribery, and will only fire a gun at a computer terminal.
There have been times in the TV series where the writers have taken the Doctor’s ‘sanctity of life’ angle too far, in a manner that makes him truly a tyrant and a monster who will forcibly revive the grateful or deserving dead against their will and thus cause far more death, indignity and suffering- namely in Warriors of the Deep, Love & Monsters and Last of the Time Lords. This story doesn’t go that far and has more respect for the character, infact it goes the whole hog to have the Doctor renouncing the hypocratic oath and refusing to revive the doormant Davros when asked to. But still this story asks the daring question of whether the mercy that separates the Doctor from Davros actually makes him just as monstrous for allowing such an evil creature to go on living so that they can kill again. Infact that is what the play is about, in how the philosophies and ideals that keep us going are the ones that become a cyclical prison.
Whilst the Doctor of the 70’s was never this emancipated, this is firmly taking the show back to its 70’s roots as a morality play where each character represents an idea and the follies that go with it, and showing how idealism is not enough by itself, and thus manages to show rather than tell and to avoid sermonising. It’s getting back to Genesis of the Daleks as a story about playing God and one man’s ambition bringing about the fall of empires, when Doctor Who really could capture the whole spectrum of history and humanity.
To all intents and purposes, in such a morality play, Davros should have remained dead after the end of Genesis of the Daleks. There’s much of 70’s Doctor Who that left an astonishing legacy that sadly only we fans know about, because that legacy was itself outlived, cheapened and disgraced from the 80’s onwards by the continuation and decline of the show itself as it resorted to sensationalism and garish style over substance whilst eating its own tail. Doctor Who as a long running TV show, unfortunately never heeded the advice of ‘leave the party before you’re asked to’. Much the same is true of Davros himself, and there’s been nothing that really justified bringing him back for all the remaining TV Dalek stories, and after War of the Daleks we were really sick of him and glad to see him finally killed off for good. When the character has become this redundant, doing an audio story centrally about him should be a non-starter. I expected to learn nothing new about Davros from this story, or if I did, it would be something out of character that couldn’t be reconciled with what was on TV. On that basis, this story couldn’t afford to get it wrong, and I was pleasantly surprised by its quality and how unmissable this audio was.
As an add-on exercise to the TV stories with Davros, it really adds a lot and retroactively improves the lesser stories. Genesis of the Daleks has its world expanded upon, simply by introducing us to female Kaleds, and the tragedy of that lost civilisation is conveyed by the dimming ember of memories. Destiny of the Daleks, in reviving the character by means of cock and bull, really could have done with this kind of take on Davros’ immortality, defining him as a force of will, preserved by hate, clinging to life like a grudge – something complimented by the notion of Davros as a grave-robber. And of course it’s nice to have the incoherent set pieces of Resurrection and Revelation of the Daleks retconned as being bookends to an actual plot between them. Actually I’ll take some of that back, the set pieces in Revelation of the Daleks have a climactic payoff by presenting the whole story as a journey into the centre of the labyrinth, and unlike Resurrection, it ends in an explosion of violence that isn’t made to look like an anticlimax by a dozen other massacres that preceded it. Revelation of the Daleks was Eric Saward’s best story and proof that he was a decent writer even if he was a menace of a script editor. Revelation was the point where he finally grasped moral ambiguity strengthened by thematic content. It presented us with characters who were shades of grey, rather than nasty ciphers. Keeping the Doctor apart from the action for once worked in allowing conventional moral roles to be subverted and questioned with Davros becoming a medical missionary, and an assassin taking on the Doctor’s hero role by doing things the Doctor couldn’t. With such diversity it managed to present a vision of the future that was both dark and yet hopeful, and thus achieving Eric’s most optimistic and forward looking story. It’s only real precedent was Warrior’s Gate.
This story really builds on that. It also provides a prequel to Revelation of the Daleks’ allegory for the Ethiopia famine, and with its vision of capitalist conglomerates, its providing representation of that cruel absurdity of people dying of want in a world of surplus. It manages to take the best elements of Season 22, such as its monstrous allegories of the corporate monstrosities, and ruthless social Darwinism of the 80’s – where the Saward era’s scorn on humanity was briefly directed at the right targets.
Actually in some ways Season 22 did a far better job of representing the yuppie culture of the times. The conglomerate bad guy figure here, Arnold Baines as played by Bernard Horsfall isn’t the most inspired or well rounded of characters, infact he’s pretty bland and shows a general apathy to events around him, like one of those poor Star Trek movie villains of the 90’s who spends most of the film just standing around trying to look menacing. The nature of morality plays sometimes means that characters are defined strictly by ideals, but Arnold Baines is simply a talking advert for capitalism. As other astute listeners have pointed out, he does very little to sell the message that ‘capitalism is bad’, and the only time he does is when he kills someone which comes across as both out of character and a contrived cop-out. Still at least having him do the dirty deed at both bookends of the story just about makes it consistent enough for the writing to get away with it.
In some ways looking at Bernard Horsfall play the role of Goth in The Deadly Assassin, made him seem ideal for the role of playing Arnold Baines- a villain with a dignified gentlemanly manner in public but showing his true savage nature emerge later, but it just doesn’t happen. Unlike the great vitriolic performance that Bernard gave whilst drowning the Fourth Doctor, here the character and the actor just never break form. The Deadly Assassin is of course the perfect template for this story, with the Doctor travelling alone, but assisted by temporary companions, a theme about the serpent in paradise, about an advanced civilisation failing to reckon with the barbarism of its past, and of course the use of media spin to sell a sanitised version of the ugly truth and to use a narrative approach to news to make false heroes out of the worst people. What’s interesting here is that we are shown the methodology of underground counter-spin, with both Mr. Willis’ right-on left wing news reporting, and Lorraine Baines’ promotion of the ‘cult of Davros’ as something new age and progressive, and how both forms of spin are both restricted by agenda and trying to out-sell and out-sensationalise each other, and both are incapable of thinking outside the box and both are ultimately proved wrong. Mr. Willis in particular is so driven to prove a point about anti-consumerism and how Arnold Baines is a bogeyman than it blinds him to the evils of Davros.
Davros’ success has been put down to the same success of Big Finish’ Dalek audios, in having Davros segregated from the Daleks so that neither upstages the other. But really the beauty of this story is in having Davros taken completely out of his environment and context and asking if he could change, if given a different life. As with Jubilee, this isn’t just some twee tale of redemption, of a villain changing their ways. This is a full blooded psychological introspective story that really gets inside Davros’ mind. As I said above, the two problematic issues with characterising Davros are best represented by Eric Saward’s stories. Resurrection shows up how madness is less a characterisation and more a cop-out, whilst Revelation tried to give Davros a more noble side in a manner that was interesting but ultimately rang false (Eric’s writing does that to established characters).
This story is the answer to both those problems, where all the contradictory faucets of Davros’ character are reduced to the authentic symptoms of manic depression or depressive psychosis. For a long, fascinating runtime Davros seems to be expressing sincere guilt and deep, revealing introspection. So authentic that the listener believes it, and for a moment the Doctor looks like the villain of the piece, vindictively determined to not give the poor man a chance and to sabotage him at every turn (much like in City of Death). Only at the end do we realise that this wasn’t a journey of discovery to redemption at all, but simply part of the neverending cycle of depression, where for him guilt and self-pity always gives way to persecution complex followed inevitably by renewed warped conviction and unshakeable evangelical self-righteousness. Thus it achieves something beautiful in ending as required with nothing changed for the character but making that inability for him to change into something deeply tragic.
It’s a very talky audio story but the quality of dialogue always justifies its length. Plus Terry Molloy puts in an exemplary gripping performance that makes each monologue shine. Besides, having recently treated us to a second season of an action packed Dalek spin-off, there’s nothing wrong with Big Finish giving us something more cerebral- especially when this story is so well written that nearly every line is quotable, and each next scene of intellectual discussion and catharsis trounces the one before. As with the Dalek Empire series, and The Sandman, there’s a focus on the importance of learning the right lessons of history, which in turn leads to a conscious effort to give this setting a history, one that’s deeply personal and which makes the story feel both authentic and epic. Davros’ monologues about his past, his formative years on Skaro, and his experiences of consciousness in suspended animation give this story a wonderful sense of temporal vertigo. It’s a wonderfully expansive environment, from its vision of galactic trade routes to thesis books you wish you could read, like Lorraine Baines’ “The Dark Side of Skaro”. It’s a grand view that is at once optimistic in its scope and beautiful details, but also conveys how far reaching Davros’ power could be and how the greater galaxy is at stake. All aided by its excellent space age musical score which conveys a sense of viewing past memories through polished, stainless windows in a towering Perspex glass building.
Davros’ flashbacks to Skaro convey a very realist sense of the Kaled/Thal war, and the scenes between him prior to his accident and his protégé/love interest Shan feel very reminiscent of the romance between Winston and Julia in George Orwell’s 1984. This is particularly fitting in his story of Davros’ own emotional repression making him the monster he is and how he plans to implement the communist ‘year zero’ idea by destroying the economy, making Davros here far closer to Stalin than to Hitler. Davros has Shan killed both to deny his affection for her, and to eliminate any competition, and justifies it based on social Darwinism. What’s more disturbing is how he also declares that any guilt he feels abut his actions is something he now seems to savour as something ecstatic that gave him his purpose and drive. It’s also poignant and chilling how Shan’s statement that ‘life on Skaro is doomed’ sounds like she’s having a Shakesperian premonition of her own death. It’s a thread that at once captures a lost age when British television tried to encompass the entire human experience and when literature on love and romance wasn’t so toothless as to ignore the terrifying and cruel side to love, the furious passions and the way love can bring out the unreasoning tyrant in all of us. This isn’t a twee story about a woman’s love teaching a man how to acknowledge his repressed emotions; it’s about the cold blooded mechanised monster that such repression creates. It’s also quite interesting that given the drawing of the Doctor and Davros as flip sides of the same coin, that Davros’ relationship with Shan somewhat mirrors the borderline abusive relationship between the Sixth Doctor and Peri, even though she’s absent here. Actually the flashback scene where Davros is quizzing Shan on her knowledge of Skaro’s food chain is like the kind of mental exercises that the Seventh Doctor would frequently test Ace with.
Davros starts out seeming like a tale of the redemption of a villain who was a product of his violent environment but is given a chance to start again in a safe, civilised and prosperous new life. But eventually its message becomes clear about the dangers of recovering relics and regressing to the barbarism of the past. In a manner reminiscent of Brain of Morbius, this is a tale of the evils of immortality. The preservation of the Sisterhood of Karn led to an entropic society that for generations never escaped the dark ages with a stagnant society maintaining the xenophobia, human sacrifices and witch hunts of the past. Likewise Davros’ immortality allows his tyranny to outlive his natural lifespan, and for him to embody the undying values of fascism, and as he gets older, so his ideals become more rigid. All things considered, given the above listed weaknesses of Arnold Baines as a villain, it’s a good thing he’s at the backdrop and that Davros is centre stage instead. Infact Arnold serves his purpose at laying the conglomerate, economic landscape for Davros to rule and manipulate at his leisure. Exposed to the world of economics, Davros almost predictably aims to use the stock market as a weapon of devastation.
This has brought an element of criticism too, in how the story has gone the whole length raleighing against the evils of capitalism and corporate rule, only to conclude that civilised society cannot function without them. This is an odd criticism since it misses the point of Doctor Who’s morality. The point of Doctor Who’s morality was in its grasp of narrative and depicting crossroads of difficult choices when faced with a problematic, and from there exploring and weighing up which is the morally and pragmatically right choice, and the consequences of said choice. This ranges from Ian preventing the first Doctor from bludgeoning a wounded caveman, to Tom Baker pondering whether the Daleks, as a unifying mutual threat might actually be a solution of sorts to a conflict-based universe. As such the show has sometimes grasped the nettle of having to choose between the lesser of two evils, like how the propaganda in The Deadly Assassin redefining Goth as a hero, actually demonstrates how sometimes there’s a good reason for media lies and spin. This is especially the case in this story where the crossroad choices of history are studied and Davros is fundamentally asked if he would live his life differently if he could go back in time.
And yet in some ways the final minutes of the play are still something of a disappointment. Whilst much of the story’s length has been dialogue heavy, and monologue heavy, having it all climax with violence and action sequences shouldn’t necessarily jar, but the torture of the innocent Kimberley is needlessly prolonged and nasty, an intense assault on the listener that comes out of nowhere to force a sense of urgency. Brotherhood of the Daleks was a good example for using torture sequences to bring a brutal, inescapeably monolithic vision of the future into sharp clarirty, but here it just feels unpleasant and out of place. It’s also a let down that having spent the whole story conveying a full blooded sense of authentic characterisation and realist experiences, the action scenes feature the most flippant lapses of logic about the laws of physics. Where the Doctor can survive a nearby nuclear explosion (though Davros’ gallows humour as the talking bomb in that scene is a gem) and a leap down a lift shaft in a multi storey complex, and where Davros can still use the earpieces as a weapon even after the Doctor destroys the computer console. It’s fitting that in a story about the scorpion and the frog, that the seemingly disabled Davros uses his poison injector as a weapon to hold Kimberley hostage. But her eventual act of martyrdom is at once unclearly directed and ludicrous in a pointless, mean way. Essentially she disarms her captor only to use his weapon to kill herself with it (well let’s face it she couldn’t kill Davros could she).
But that aside, the faults of the story’s end can be overlooked by the greater quality of its overall content. It’s clear why Colin Baker has picked this as his personal favourite, particularly for the role he gets in it. This is perhaps the definitive story for rehabilitating Colin’s Doctor, in his mission statement of over-compensating for both his own ruthlessness and his predecessors’ incompetence. It’s notable too that this is the first time Big Finish actually acknowledges the Sixth Doctor TV era. Prior to this point Colin’s audio adventures had been much like Paul McGann’s, pitched at fans who liked the idea of this particular actor playing the Doctor, but wished to pretend his actual TV stories never happened. By being a strict prequel to Revelation of the Daleks, namedropping the same Stella Stora incident that was mentioned in Terror of the Vervoids to reinforce that this Doctor has particular connections in this future era, and of course explaining Peri’s absence by means of an in joke reference to how The Two Doctors did the same to explain Victoria’s absence, this is where the Sixth Doctor era itself is brought out of the closet.
As I said in Jubilee, the trick is to take what was patchy, chaotic and schizophrenic about the era on TV and make it fully cohesive and with a proper sense of identity. There’s no gratuitous effort to overcomplicate or contradict the story at hand, or to have the Doctor do spontaneously out of character actions to shock the audience. Some may bemoan this being a prequel to Revelation of the Daleks, and thus a missed opportunity to do the audacious and have the Sixth Doctor meet a future Davros out of sequence, but it’s hard to see how that would be an interesting enough gimmick to justify going against simplicity. Besides the fact that the Doctor and Davros meet in sequence, really adds to the idea of these being drawn together by the forces of fate, like star-crossed foes. This compliments the notion that the Doctor and Davros adhere to a higher power and that each is essential to the other’s existence, hence why one can’t kill the other. Like in Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor’s presence itself seems to bring back to life the doormant Davros, as if giving him a purpose in being, and this time we’re left in no doubt that it certainly wasn’t coincidence.
The portrayal of the Doctor and Davros as titanic, all knowing figures means that Arnold Baines’ offer of conglomerate godhood to them seems both ironic and superfluous. When we see the Doctor sabotaging Davros’ work it’s an effective but restrained throwback to his nasty Season 22 persona, one that’s both comical and provocative. At once getting us behind Davros, but it also manages to make the Doctor’s spiteful behaviour speak volumes, particularly by showing up the Doctor’s limits as much as his lengths. The actual workside discussion they have is particularly compelling with some lovely asides from Colin.
Davros: “I thought I would go insane”
Doctor: “No comment”
The key thing is that as much as the Doctor is questionable and fallible, he’s also affirming. For all that we may pity Davros, all he stands for is self-pity and megalomania, and whilst he indulges us in that individualism and nearly sways us, the Doctor is there to reinforce the strict values of utilitarianism and is never swayed by Davros’ words. The Doctor’s firm belief that this society shouldn’t execute Davros isn’t based on pity so much as believing that utilitarianism requires the maintaining of humane ideals and a merciful justice system that gives everyone a chance of life. But ultimately the Doctor’s utilitarianism is proved to be correct, and Davros’ individualist position is proved to be evil and his promises of rehabilitation prove to be hollow words indeed. This is a story that makes a vital, affirming reminder that you can’t judge people by what they say, only by what they do. Twisted stories like Warriors of the Deep and Attack of the Cybermen which featured the worst kind of 80’s individualism that saw the Doctor become the worst apologist for mass murderers and doing more to save the lives of the ‘misunderstood’ villains than the many actual innocents, are so far from those ideals, it’s depressing.
But this story is firmly about building back the good Doctor’s image. Not only redeeming the Sixth Doctor, but it also pulls out all the stops to provide a full rebuttal of Eri-, sorry Davros’ contemptuous evaluation of the Fifth Doctor’s weakness and cowardice in Resurrection of the Daleks, something that the Doctor in that story never even had the courage to answer. For the most part it works admirably. Davros himself redresses his past words by building up the Doctor as his ‘equal’, which of course has sinister implications when we learn the story of Shan and find out what Davros does to his equals. What really stays in the memory is Davros’ theorising of how each of the Doctor’s incarnations is a mask of manners and quirks and his description of dreaming about seeing the Doctor’s ‘true’ face is something that really characterises the Doctor as God-like. It’s done with just enough conviction and poetry to not sound silly. However a later scene where Davros describes the Doctor as a cunning manipulator and setter of traps comes across as far too knowing, as if Davros has already watched Remembrance of the Daleks long before appearing in it.
To get back to the scene in Resurrection of the Daleks, there are Eric Saward defenders that point out that the Doctor’s refusal to pull the trigger is very moral and in character, which misses the point that the Doctor shouldn’t need a gun but the scene is essentially saying the Doctor is useless without one. Davros redresses this however, by reasserting the Doctor’s capability and competence by means of near overcompensation, where we really see the ideal notion of the Doctor winning against an armed enemy by using only his words and intelligence. Truth be told the TV series rarely ever showed the Doctor achieve this, with Ghostlight being the only exception that comes to mind. By drawing attention to Davros’ poison injector as a suicide weapon that Davros never had the courage to use, the Doctor renders Davros completely powerless and demolishes Davros’ belief that he has the power over life and death. So ultimately the Doctor wins, in a manner that fits so neatly with the continuity of Revelation of the Daleks. But it’s a hollow victory that comes at a cost of losing the most innocent characters that made up his temporary companions. We see this vindictive Doctor exacting rather harsh justice on Lorraine, making a citizen’s arrest on her and digging up evidence to ensure her imprisonment by the authorities, even though she’s learned her lesson, and it’s a great scene of moral ambiguity that emphasises the Doctor as a law unto himself. But it’s also poignant because we know he’s simply desperately holding onto his only consolation prize in this.
The Doctor’s final words of hollow victory are a condemnation of his own failings, of being just as powerless as Davros and just as cursed to survive whilst everyone else dies, and he seems to make an unspoken promise that he’ll never make the mistake of being merciful with Davros again, which rather disappointingly is undone and irretrievably forgotten the moment The Juggernauts gets penned. But just like how the exquisite ruthless streak the Doctor showed in Planet of Fire, Remembrance of the Daleks and Human Nature/Family of Blood will probably rarely surface again, much to our dismay, it’s something we fans will always have to grin and bear about this show that depends on reboots and reaffirmed innocence. We have to treasure the moment whilst it lasts, and ultimately Davros is a story well worth treasuring wholeheartedly.