The Doctor and Charley find themselves caught in the crossfire of a Dalek war that threatens the very nature of reality.
The Doctor and Charley find themselves caught in the crossfire of a Dalek war that threatens the very nature of reality.
“Your overriding urge is to consider the needs of your species. You feel only irritation when a Dalek battlefleet is lost. But humans and Thals, they’d imagine a hundred thousand souls in agony.”
Coming fast on the heels of the excellent Time Reef, Brotherhood of the Daleks provides another promising indication that things are starting to look up a bit for Big Finish. Mind you at this point in the range it’s a nice change to get something that actually prompts repeat listens. On those grounds alone Brotherhood of the Daleks just may be the best main line release of 2008. Indeed it’s one of the few recent scripts to make us wish Big Finish was still releasing script anthologies so we could savour this properly. But still there’s a nagging sense of how much better it could have been.
It certainly seems that Alan Barnes hasn’t renounced his fannish tendencies since Neverland, which is good really because it means he’s one of the few Big Finish writers who’s holding nothing back and has no insecurities about appearing too nerdish and uncool, should any New Who fans be listening. The story takes heavy cues from classic Doctor Who. From Dalek lore, this revisits Spiridon and the stranded Thal platoon from Planet of the Daleks, the experiments to find the human factor and the Dalek’s counterculture workers’ revolution from Evil of the Daleks, and the human duplicate paranoia angle from Resurrection of the Daleks. It also takes the fabricated environment and shared hallucinations of The War Games, The Deadly Assassin and Time-Flight, the botanical warfare and body horror of The Seeds of Doom, and the agromophobia psychology and character tropes of Kinda. So it takes a lot of old school inspirations, mixes them nicely and milks them well for all their mileage. Unlike The Condemned, Assassin in the Limelight or the overstretched joke that was The Dark Husband, there’s actually enough material to fill a four part story, more than enough actually and perhaps where it falls down is that since so much is going on, the plot sometimes trips over itself, and ultimately everything gets rather rushed at the climax. Once the sky opens and the real threat is unveiled in part four, it barely gets a chance to impact the story before being all too quickly vanquished.
But that aside, what perhaps makes this story strong is that in some ways it gets back to what Big Finish did best in putting plasters over the mistakes of the old show. Big Finish doesn’t really do this anymore since the show has now been redeemed in the public light anyway, but before then Big Finish’s reparations to the 80’s were part of the heart and creativity of many stories. This made them into beautiful stories of redemption and hope, taking great care to salvage something precious and veritable from the ugly mess, and in a way making sense of the disillusioning, violent, chaotic mid-80s period of the show became a means of making sense of the wider disillusioning, violent and chaotic modern world we live in.
Brotherhood of the Daleks manages to hark back to that. Particularly in the way it seems to make the closing argument for the defence concerning the rehabilitation of Colin Baker’s Doctor. Not only does this revisit the world of Spiridon, but there’s a lot of Pertwee’s characteristics resurfacing in this Doctor. His moral condemnation of the Thals for their brutality in bitch-slapping Charley (but oh how we laughed) and the sadism of their experiments on the Daleks is particularly Pertwee-esque and very refreshing. But there are also inevitably aspects of his more aggressive TV persona, but applied with justification in this situation which calls for the Doctor’s most reckless and ruthless incarnation. His loutish heckling of the ‘traitor’ Murgat is a delight, whilst his nasty taunting of the enlightened Daleks to bring out their true nature is uncomfortable listening, and it’s hard to imagine any other Doctor doing the same, or at least not with the same infamous bull in a china shop methods. That scene would have made strong evidence for the prosecution if the Valeyard had done his research properly, but again it’s justified later when the Doctor is proved right. It’s possible to imagine the other audio Doctors actually being convinced by the redemption of the Daleks at the end and all in favour of such progress, but this Doctor is not going to give them any chances and he vows to destroy them even whilst they’re at their most placid. This is of course how we like to see the Sixth Doctor, as a missionary crusader figure who is ruthlessly shrewd and pragmatic but never acts out of cruelty.
Given the apparent apathy of Colin’s performances lately, particularly in Assassin in the Limelight, it seems that now he’s back on form and all it needed was a compelling script for him to get his teeth into. His performance here is one of his best and rawest in a while. The scene where he tears into the Daleks for killing Nyaiad should be another one of those transparently obligatory moral outrage moments that became particularly contrived in Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, but he lifts it off the page wonderfully with such raw venom that’s straight from the gut, and even manages to spit the word “Daleks” and make it sound like a swearword.
We’re onto the third story between Charley and the Sixth Doctor, and whilst it begs the question of how long they can keep up Charley’s secret before it gets old, it does present a nice opportunity to really contrast the two different Doctors that Charley has been with. As with River Song in the sublime Silence of the Library, Charley has to bear the heartbreaking fact that this isn’t yet the man she loves, and he’s incapable of loving her back. Whilst Paul McGann’s Doctor was warm, trusting and romantic, Colin’s Doctor couldn’t be more hard-hearted and treats her with cold suspicion. The scene where she confesses everything to his replicant is beautiful in its tender vulnerability. It helps of course that this is written by the same man who created Charley. The scene is particularly notable since we’re dealing with the only incarnation of the Doctor who could feasibly be mistaken for his own cold, homicidal Dalek replicant, and Charley speaks for a generation of fans who lived through the 80’s when she demands “what have you done with the real Doctor?” The moment where the replicant Doctor becomes a broken record and keeps repeating “kill you!” to Charley is far more unnerving and subtly effective than the vulgar scene from the Twin Dilemma that it homages, managing to be at once poignant and menacing and absurdly comical in its juxtaposition. In a way the replicant scene is a beautiful and effective exorcism of the Sixth Doctor’s nastier Hyde side, and oddly enough it’s a quite tragic one that makes us almost sad to hear his nastier side being left alone to his own confused, looped insanity and isolation.
Speaking of replicants, Brotherhood of the Daleks has other reparations to the 80’s to make. It utilises the more potentially interesting ideas from the messes that were Time-Flight and Resurrection of the Daleks. It uses a similar first cliffhanger to Time Flight, where the Doctor breaks them all out of their shared hallucination, but it doesn’t give the game away beforehand so it actually works as a twist. Likewise Resurrection of the Daleks had all the potential to be a real primal, paranoia survival horror story, but this was undermined by both its violent excesses, and by the typical Sawardian contrived, defeatist nature of the deaths that required characters to behave with forced and suicidal ineptness or recklessness, which undermined any tension or genuine sense of the characters sharing a primal survival instinct with the audience which is what horror needs in order to work. That’s why Maximum Overdrive is such a bad film.
Actually in one regard Resurrection of the Daleks deserves some slack. At its noblest, it was an attempt to reflect the violent, chaotic war torn and unjust state of the world at that time with unflinching brutal honesty and no real moral centre because morally speaking we were all lost at sea. However a reflection of life and the world at its most messy does not good drama make, unless through well crafted narrative and characterisation it manages to make some kind of cathartic sense out of that mess, and Resurrection just had none of the writing discipline it needed to do that. In theory the Dalek replicants were a good idea though, and the way that Resurrection depicted unstable killer replicants in policemen’s uniforms and within the higher political echelons, suggests that Eric had strong aspirations towards doing Doctor Who in the style of surreal political fringe theatre, as does his seeking out of Philip Martin. Since narrative depends on a sense of cause and effect and palpable motivations, it’s very hard to reflect the kind of predatory violence and abuse that often takes place in our society, such as domestic violence, which is seemingly unprovoked and out of the blue and is just as quickly ‘forgotten’ by the volatile, manipulative perpetrator who in Jekyll and Hyde fashion acts completely innocent or disaffected afterwards so that even their victim half believes it didn’t happen. This kind of senseless, unmitigated cruelty is hard to get across in a narrative form so the concept of the replicants makes a fitting allegory for that. The idea of calculating, pitiless evil hidden by a mask of personality, void of empathy and waiting to strike at the most vulnerable moment, of their true nature being something they can simply switch on and off, of someone being ‘badly wired’ in the most literal sense of the term is instantly nailed.
So this story follows in the footsteps of Resurrection of the Daleks in proscribing a pessimistic future that’s almost a natural evolution from the state of our world today. We’re shown a nightmarish militaristic future of perpetual war with a mechanised fascistic enemy, where human endurance is tested to its limits by constant fear and paranoia. The scene where Nyaiad is being tortured by the Daleks conveys it all in one go, this monolithic inescapable future of mechanical, technological evil that will keep cutting deeper and will not stop for mercy- the future seen in tunnel vision. Human screams of pain and terror echoing through metal walls amidst the relentless barking of psychotic monotone machines. And it’s this succinctness that makes the story far sharper than Resurrection, and brings this environment and future vision into vivid, believable clarity and which still leaves enough room for moments of charm and frenetic plot developments. Basically once it establishes the horror, it doesn’t need to dwell on it.
But as I said, there’s a nagging sense that it all could have been better. There is an irritatingly smug tendency in the latest audios towards stretching a running gag and general smart arsery, with The Dark Husband and Assassin in the Limelight being the worst offenders. This of course runs with the idea of Daleks going communist and predictably the script can’t resist turning it into a joke, with Daleks bleating rhetoric about common ownership of the means of production and even singing ‘The Red Flag’, which in its own way is quite utopian and poignant but it’s nowhere near as funny as hearing ‘I Will Survive’ being sung in Bang-Bang-A-Boom. There’s nothing particularly offensive about this (infact we’d much have preferred the full length version of ‘The Dalek Flag’ as a bonus track, instead of those tiresome, mood-spoiling ‘making of’ extras) but there’s a nagging sense that when Alan Barnes wrote the idea, he wanted to actually say something. He wanted to conjure a vision- in the words of Murgat, ‘a dream worth having.’ But if so, very little of it survives the humorous dilution. Some of it does though. Charley expresses an earlier cynicism about the Communists, and how it’s just another form of ‘you’re either with us or against us’ totalitarianism and brutal conformity wrapped up in naïve ideals of equality. It seems that this is the point the story was trying to make, where the Daleks’ becoming communist doesn’t make them any less fascist, and where the stranded Thal soldiers are so unified and collectively fixated on the evils of the enemy and the ’us against them’ mentality that they don’t even realise they’ve become just as bad, as paranoid and as uniformed as the Daleks. In a way the group hallucination is commenting on the dangerous, delusional power of group think. This is meant to be a story about the bad seed at the heart of idealism (in much the same way that Greatest Show in the Galaxy was) and about the dangers of trusting seemingly innocent political groups that always have bullies and megalomaniacs in there somewhere who usually go unaccountable and can manipulate the group into closing ranks by drawing on their collective naivety and their sense of having the world against them. Same as how The Settling presented us with the real Oliver Cromwell in all his nasty, tyrannical, genocidal glory and provided a proper historically accurate dose of reality to any listeners who heralded Cromwell as the first true socialist hero (I’m guilty as charged there, actually). Thus it’s a story perfectly suited to the more morally disillusioned mid-80’s period of the show. This gets to another nagging issue that’s been bugging me ever since the once humanistic Dalek Empire spin-off turned all mean-spirited recently. It seems that nowadays Big Finish is not only reluctant to come across to any new fans as being humourless or pretentious, but it seems they don’t want to really tackle moral issues anymore. They don’t come across as though they’re using the audios as a springboard to vent their own generational issues and complaints with the modern world, lest they come across as curmudgeons or as ‘uncool’ parental figures trying to lecture them with outdated values. Again it’s the way that Big Finish is now selling an image, and is no longer selling us the writer’s nobility, beliefs or values. In that regard, Brotherhood of the Daleks is something of a compromise where the moral lesson is hidden but it is there for those with the inclination to see it.
The other area where the story is somewhat lacking is in characterisation. The Daleks come across as evil enough, but in many of the Dalek audios, the commander Dalek usually stands out from the ranks, not merely because of their hierarchy but because they’re characterised as being that bit nastier and spiteful than their minions. Here the Black Dalek arrives too late and gets too little chance to make any impression before being blasted to pieces. Of course that’s the problem with having a twist heavy story, in how it dwarfs the characters and leaves little room for character development.
Murgat, as the architect of the communist dream is perhaps the most realised and memorable of the Thal characters, and this is largely down to Michael Cochrane’s superlative performance as the eloquent, caddish scientist. He actually makes a good case for his experiments, despite the Doctor’s condemnation. He proscribes to integrate his revolutionary Daleks into the Dalek Empire and use them to cause chaos from within. The story has shown us the evil of the Daleks and the torture and death that they have brought onto millions, and conveys them as a nebulous, expansive threat to whole galaxies, so any potential final solution to the Dalek race seems laudable. By contrast the Doctor seems initially like a moral nuisance, protesting that the experiments are cruel to the Daleks, until we get to the later scene where the Thal-Daleks finally see their own reflections and beg the Doctor to destroy them, which proves the Doctor’s earlier words to be right. But of course the writer then has to give Murgat villainous actions to dent his credibility. The moment where he orders Tamarus to terminate Nyaiad and then coldly observes her being eaten by the Atilodi and then records a scientific observation about it just about escapes being contrived villainy by being justified by the ongoing events with Nyaiad reverting to her Dalek conditioning and becoming a threat. It also fits with the theme of the military and the bad seed at the heart of this ‘brotherhood’ with the leader of the group ordering his young follower/grunt to make their first kill or do something equally unpleasant to prove their loyalty to the cause. Murgat is a supposed pragmatist but in truth he is a coward who renounces any moral responsibility, and predictably when trouble arrives he either runs away or sells his allies out to save his own skin.
Other than that, the Thal soldiers unfortunately rather blur into one with very few of them standing out as individual characters, partly because there’s too many of them to keep track of. Nyaiad is perhaps the only other character who stands out simply because she’s the other antagonist and of course because the story takes the ‘pain builds character’ approach to her torture scenes, and also because it sounds like she’s trying to figure out her performance on the spot which actually comliments the naivety of her character beautifully. Indeed when Jesic becomes the Doctor’s temporary companion in a hallucination, it reads as a rather cynical and unfunny in-joke about the Doctor’s companions having no proper character or personality anyway. But we can afford to be forgiving on the rather trepid grounds that since this is a story about military uniformity and shellshock trauma and how this leads to identity issues and personality disintegration, such lax characterisation just about fits. Although to be fair this would hold more water if No Man’s Land hadn’t dealt with the same issues but been a far greater success of memorable characterisation. Actually no, this does convey very succinctly the experiences of war, specifically the never ending days of hoping this madness will be over soon and they can go home, only to find themselves trapped in a never ending cycle, as the war never ends, like a nightmare that they keep thinking they’ve woken up from only to realise they’re still dreaming each time. Or to push the Vietnam metaphor further, this could be about the former soldiers who’ve come home, but are still fighting the war in their own minds years later. Hell if we’re judging this story by its source material then the characters are at least more realistic and substantial than in Planet of the Daleks.
In a sense though the heart of the story isn’t the characters, it’s that long running thematic conflict running through the audio Dalek stories from The Genocide Machine onwards- the war between technology and nature, and really this is the best applied theme of the story. Even before the Kyropite are revealed, their insidious and fast spreading effect is aluded to early on when Charley falls foul of one of Spiridon’s fungal infections. The Doctor even conjures an imaginary rose to sniff to break the spell of the shared illusion. The Daleks use technology to pervert nature in cloning humans and Thals, and by using the Kyropites as a weapon of conquest. The Daleks represent technology as something heartless, aggressive and driven by the need to conquer, as if this degeneration in morality and empathy are natural consequences of technological existence. The Thals represent humanity, brotherhood, camaraderie and the ability to empathise with their fellows and mourn their dead in a way the Daleks never could. The Kyropites, whilst being an aggressive form of plant life, represent something pacifying and hopeful in a manner that is galvanising. The question at the heart of the story is whether the Kyropites can succeed in pacifying the Daleks? Will nature win against technology?
Brotherhood of the Daleks is essentially about the duality of man- a recurring theme in Alan Barnes’ stories, from Storm Warning onwards. With Murgat being liteally half-man, half Kyropite, and experimental Daleks housing the humanitarian consciousness of Thals, and the Doctor himself veering between his nice and nasty TV personas, it all comes down to a flip of a coin whether the Daleks will be finally redeemed or ultimately revert to their old nature, or whether characters will follow their better angels when the time comes for them to say ‘the word’ that could safeguard the galaxy.
So in a way the greater themes of empathy and humanity against Dalek nature just about compensate for any character shortcomings and make the story work very well. For all these complaints and the occasional nagging plot hole and changed premise, Brotherhood of the Daleks is a very entertaining and involving story. It’s a layer cake of intrigue and developments that continues to delight in repeat listens. Or maybe not so much a layer cake, as a raspberry ripple with a chewing gum ball at the bottom. As with The Juggernauts though, it’s a shame that this project that could have expanded and waged war on the Daleks doesn’t come to fruition and is instead lost to a reset button. It really could have left imponderables and been the beginning of a historic chapter in the canon that we’d have to leave to our imagination. But all things considered, the ending we get is a natural and inevitable one which has a certain poignancy about a utopia lost. Indeed it’s easy to miss but the conclusion of the story is actually an appropriate allegory for Chernobyl. Although this story perhaps could have been better, it feels a little rude to fault it for what it is, and it shows how even an above average effort by Big Finish like this one has infinitely more freshness, charm and wit than a whole season of any given modern portentous American sci-fi series. For instance, Battlestar Pedantica frequently gave us storylines featuring sleepless, war weary soldiers stranded on enemy occupied worlds, awaiting rescue, and constantly fearful that any one of their number could be an enemy clone, and on the side they tackled issues about military endurance and the treatment of prisoners of war. Brotherhood of the Daleks does all that, and even gives us a cowardly amoral scientist much like Baltar, but in a manner that’s succinctly crammed into a satisfying two hour runtime and with charm, humour, a playful script and likeable characters too. There is no contest.
BROTHERHOOD OF THE DALEKS
Despite my general dislike of Alan Barnes’s writing, I finally saw some potential in his last release, “The Girl Who Never Was” — it actually moved along at a decent pace, abandoning his usual reams of exposition in lieu of actual events, which made it easier to overlook some of the usual flaws. Barnes’s latest play to cross my desk, “Brotherhood of the Daleks,” is a regression in some ways and a progression in others: it’s nowhere near as gripping as “Girl,” but for the first time it actually aspires to be something thought-provoking, rather than incoherent nonsense. Does it succeed? Mostly, but then I always appreciate attempts like this.
To begin with, I’m entirely unsure what point Barnes is trying to make about Marxism. “Brotherhood” seems, in part, to be a criticism of naïve undergraduates who discover the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital and have the epiphany that communism is the way to utopia. Murgat (Michael Cochrane), half-Thal half-plant scientist, does exactly this: he deduces that the way to tempt the Daleks away from their policy of extermination is to introduce them to the concept of collectivism, and uses hallucinogenic plants (last seen in the solid but forgettable “The Mind’s Eye”) to corrupt the Daleks to this end. Of course, the Daleks never completely overcome their nature: they know something is missing, a single word which has been lost to them through the brainwashing. Indeed, the Daleks are shown as seeking this word as the key to complete their philosophy and restore their beliefs. While credit must be given to Barnes for presenting a scenario that’s so whacked-out it’s fascinating — Daleks singing “The Red Flag” in unison is almost indescribable — I’ve seen this described as a brilliant, new look at the Daleks, and I can’t figure out why. We don’t learn anything about them that we don’t already know. The Doctor insists throughout the play that every race in the universe is capable of changing its spots except the Daleks — and of course he’s absolutely right! The use of “the word” the Daleks struggle to rediscover is the most intelligent part of the play — so of course it’s completely spoiled by the post-credits ending, which spells everything out in fifty-foot-high flaming letters for those who struggle with the concept of subtlety.
I’m also confused by the structure of the narrative. For the most part, the play is presented as a straightforward Doctor Who adventure, but occasionally it becomes needlessly self-referential. The cliffhanger to part 2 is only dramatic if you’re a long-time listener: it has no relevance to the play itself. Then there’s the second credits sequence in the fourth episode — why is this here? Are we suddenly to think that we’ve been listening to a narrator the entire time? There’s no reason to think there’s anything metatextual going on until the fourth wall is broken here — and then it’s never referenced again. This strikes me as a writer trying to be clever for no reason.
Lastly, there’s the persistent issue of Charley traveling with the sixth Doctor instead of the eighth. I still don’t like this idea, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it — so why can’t Big Finish just get on with it? Instead, Barnes drags out the “drama” of Charley’s secrecy, even going so far as to have her admit her situation to a Dalek replicant posing as the Doctor! This is a great scene, but it begs the question of what they’re going to do when she actually does admit it. Colin Baker’s Doctor also looks like a complete idiot: there are explicit references to Charley’s appearance in “Terror Firma,” and yet the Doctor still can’t or won’t put two and two together.
I will say, however, that Barnes’s usual unconvincing dialogue is much more effective here, simply because the sixth Doctor is more prone to stilted, bombastic monologues. His banter with Charley is the usual sub-noir unconvincing rubbish, of course, and Charley is as smug and unlikable as she is in every other Alan Barnes play — but finally, finally her obnoxious attitude results in negative consequences, and this time she doesn’t shrug them off. The supporting actors are fine, but the script does nothing to distinguish the individual “Thaleks” from one another. Loved Colin Baker as the replicant, though — “KILL! KILL!” And Nicholas Briggs is excellent as ever as the Daleks; I don’t know why people complain about him doing so.
The production front sees Steve Foxon tasked with recreating the sounds of Spiridon from Planet of the Daleks, and to his credit it sounds a great deal like the TV episode. These Daleks seem to have more new series effects, including the whirring noises when they move, and this is effective as well. I can’t say the same about the score, though — can’t remember a note, and I finished listening a few hours ago. Briggs directs, and keeps the pace high — episode 2 is almost all exposition, and yet it flows very well, a credit both to Barnes and Briggs.
Overall, “Brotherhood of the Daleks” is a flawed release with much to recommend it. If you enjoy Alan Barnes’s work, you should love this; if you don’t, the wacky assortment of ideas on display should keep your attention. Yes, it tries too hard, and yes, it’s too clever for its own good, but finally Barnes appears to be harnessing his boundless imagination into something interesting.
Recommended, with reservations.
7/10