The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa discover a future where the Daleks are the dominant species. So why are the Daleks afraid?
2 Comments
Styre
on May 7, 2016 at 10:20 PM
THE MUTANT PHASE
With three Dalek releases in fifteen tries, Big Finish would eventually be forced to try something new with the classic Doctor Who villains. While nothing whatsoever was done in The Genocide Machine, and The Apocalypse Element followed the obvious fan wet dream of Daleks on Gallifrey, only The Mutant Phase tried something different — but abandoned that concept in the process.
Writer-director Nicholas Briggs’ script was written from a basic premise: what if the Daleks, horror of the universe that they are, were themselves terrified of something even deadlier and more ruthless? From this comes the Mutant Phase, a mutated strain of Dalek that, as far as I can tell, transforms into a giant spacefaring swarm of insects that drain the life from every planet they encounter. This is more than a little silly, but it is to Briggs’ credit that he writes convincing scared Daleks — their plaintive screams of “MUTANT PHAAAAAAAASE” are hilarious, yes, but also frightening in context. The image of a destroyed Earth is horrifying, but it is Briggs’ subsequent decision that severely undercuts the drama of the production.
The Mutant Phase is, of course, a paradox story, and it is upon this element of the story that Briggs chooses to focus to the exclusion of all else. The nature of the Mutant Phase itself is, for the most part, ignored, while its origins are explored in excruciating detail. While the concept of a self-sustaining paradox is interesting, and the image of a Dalek Emperor inhabiting a humanoid form and attempting to convince “real” Daleks of his identity is amusing, the fact remains that a paradoxical universe contains no real threats except for those presented to the main characters. We know from countless other Doctor Who adventures that Earth was not depopulated by the Mutant Phase, so we know that the status quo will be restored by the conclusion of the play. And the Doctor’s explanations at the play’s conclusion — punctuated by a laugh! — just serve to demonstrate further how unimportant the preceding two hours actually were.
That being said, Peter Davison’s performance is again strong, showing that he’s really starting to get back into the role after so much time away. Briggs gives him a weaker character than that seen in previous BF outings, so he’s forced to surrender from time to time and perform actions against his better judgement. Davison injects into the character the same degree of uncertainty seen on television, yet maintains the level of maturity seen in BF due to his age. This may be the most fallible Doctor of any of the first set of BF productions, but it’s fun to hear all the same.
Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa seems to have settled down, as well. After being misused in The Land of the Dead and mischaracterized in Winter for the Adept, here she is assertive yet understanding, all the while demonstrating her intelligence and even getting the opportunity to put her science background to use.
The supporting characters are entertaining as well, with Mark Gatiss stealing the show as Karl Hendryk. Christopher Blake and Jared Morgan do well as Ptolem and Ganatus, though it is Morgan whose performance as the irate Dalek emperor serves as the highlight of the fourth episode. Andrew Ryan and Sara Wakefield, though, are basically just “there” as residents of the paradoxical Earth, and sudden exterminations do little to pique the emotions.
Production on The Mutant Phase is of the usual excellent quality expected from Big Finish. Briggs handled almost every era of the production, and his sound design matches perfectly with his direction, as one might expect. I especially enjoyed the sound of wasps — or should I say I hated it, as I have a paralyzing fear of the things? Either way, it was quite convincing. Of course, the stars of the production were the Dalek voices, which were the most convincing of the three pre-McGann Dalek efforts. The Emperor in particular was excellent, sounding very close to the Troughton-era Emperor — or at least what I’ve heard of him.
Had Briggs decided to simply tell a story about what scares the Daleks, he might have had a hit on his hands. However, he decided to entangle everything in a paradox and erase the threat from existence. It’s not that The Mutant Phase is badly written but simply that it’s carelessly written: instead of a gripping, dramatic story we have a boring, perfunctory yarn with a nightmare of an ending. Briggs always seems to write the details well, but the overarching story? Swing and a miss.
A remake of the 1985 Audio Visual play of the same name. It’s obvious that at the time, this was far superior in quality, substance and morality to nearly everything that the actual TV show was producing then. Mind you that’s almost damning with faint praise.
The Doctor’s morality is in proper swing here. He refuses to let Karl kill the Dalek agent, even though ultimately it’s a mercy that leads to his downfall. But at the same time he knows when to be ruthless if the situation demands it. He’s the alien Doctor we always imagined who would pragmatically sacrifice one life if it would save billions more. His belief that the Mutant Phase should wipe out the Daleks is very much in line with the Seventh Doctor’s darker, omnipotent persona who knows the universe would be better off. It actually takes a lot to convince him that he should help the Daleks, as opposed to the same Doctor’s sudden, inexplicable and reprehensible turncoat behaviour in Warriors of the Deep. But again it achieves one of the TV show’s missed opportunities, in following up the Doctor’s speculation in Genesis of the Daleks that ‘out of their evil must come something good’. With the Doctor and Daleks working together to destroy a far greater threat to the universe out of a mutual cause of survival, the Doctor comes to recognise that even the Daleks have their place in the universe. Unfortunately this achievement is all lost as the story presses the ultimate reset switch at the end, which is very hard to forgive.
In an age where twist endings have become obligatory, this is the first of several times where a late twist in the tale will only serve to make it less interesting if not an all out copout that leaves the listener feeling cheated. See also The Reaping and Dalek Empire IV.
Nick Briggs themes get a real spurt on here. In many ways this is like Logopolis, with the Doctor teamed up with his greatest enemy in an uneasy alliance to help defeat a mutual threat. Incidentally the scenes of Thals and Daleks working together and irritating each other and becoming strangely used to each other are a gem. It is also, like Logopolis, about the clumsy breaking of the delicate chain that holds the universe together. As with Nick’s earlier Sirens of Time, the Doctor’s interference in the timeline is shown to be a real minefield where history swings on the simplest of pivots. It also hones Nick’s eco-concerns, the belief that nature’s delicate balance and food chain is essential to our survival and that changing nature’s delicate balance by genetic tampering, hunting species to extinction or our environmental recklessness could create a chain reaction of catastrophic consequences that rebound vengefully on us. In this case genetically modified crops lead ultimately to a galactic disaster that even the Daleks can’t withstand.
It helps that Nick has a real talent for conveying the apocalyptic, and gives us the human race stuck in one room like a bunch of students in a house share having to make do, whilst desolate wilderness surrounds them. You can tell that when this was first written in the mid-80’s, Threads was the main inspiration on Nick’s mind, with a bit of The Young Ones and David Cronenberg’s more AIDS-conscious remake of The Fly thrown in for good measure. He also in the early scenes on the Thal ship, manages to capture the haunting, uninviting coldness of space, in such a way that makes the galactic scale of the threat really tangible, in terms of both the Dalek expansion and the spread of the mutant swarm. Had one of these environments been the consistent focus of the play, rather than quickly discarded for somewhere new, then it might have been a more stolid achievement.
It’s the paradox story that Nick seems to have major trouble making into something credible and plausible. Just as it begins to make logical sense, Nick adds a misjudged twist that reduces it to even greater illogical nonsense and renders the whole story inconsequential and pointless, and furthermore makes the dramatic emphasis and urgency put on whether Ganatus will smash the antidote, seem simply forced, laughably over-earnest and pretentious, much like the contrived lengths the story goes to cast ridiculous suspicion onto Ganatus, and indeed him turning out to be a traitor feels like just a forced development. Infact the scene where the Doctor is grilling Ganatus over the ’suspicious’ act of passing out during in-flight turbulence comes across as a desperate over-compensation for the gullibility of the Fifth Doctor on TV who gladly invited Turlough aboard without getting suspicious, and one that doesn’t feel genuinely natural on Davison’s part, infact it makes the Doctor seem outright neurotic. It’s the same way that when Red Dwarf replaced Rimmer with Kochanski, they tried to force the same antagonistic dynamic between Kryten and Kochanski as with Lister and Rimmer, but in a way that never felt like the relatable, natural character friction of old, but only served to make Kryten seem uncharacteristically picky and petty and mean spirited in his attempts to find and highlight fault with Kochanski.
The thing about Nicholas Briggs as a writer is that he tends to go for a certain tone, and tends to do it relentlessly, with little in the way of levity or contrast. Just like the later Dalek Empires, it suffers from Nick’s lapses into pretension with twists that detract from rather than enhance the story, and a desperate, laboured attempt to have something to say. Case in point; the Doctor’s stick in the mud moral stance with the Emperor Dalek when he hasn’t a leg to stand on and is obviously just the writer trying to fill the runtime because there’s no story here (rather like in Warriors of the Deep).
It quickly becomes clear that this is all gimmick and no story, and its running quickly out of mileage, and the results simply feel heavy handed, and slightly repellent, and with the final cop-out it’s all proved to have been empty sound and fury all along. Given the ‘knowing’ flippancy of its final word that it wasn’t meant to make sense, some listeners would rightly feel insulted and cheated by the ending and would perhaps even have given up on the range. Which is a shame because it demonstrates Big Finish’s new found competency in really going for the cinematic, vivid and multi-textual. Incidentally it also drops subtle hints at the fragility of the web of time, which will become prominent in the McGann and Charley adventures. Greater things are ahead now.
THE MUTANT PHASE
With three Dalek releases in fifteen tries, Big Finish would eventually be forced to try something new with the classic Doctor Who villains. While nothing whatsoever was done in The Genocide Machine, and The Apocalypse Element followed the obvious fan wet dream of Daleks on Gallifrey, only The Mutant Phase tried something different — but abandoned that concept in the process.
Writer-director Nicholas Briggs’ script was written from a basic premise: what if the Daleks, horror of the universe that they are, were themselves terrified of something even deadlier and more ruthless? From this comes the Mutant Phase, a mutated strain of Dalek that, as far as I can tell, transforms into a giant spacefaring swarm of insects that drain the life from every planet they encounter. This is more than a little silly, but it is to Briggs’ credit that he writes convincing scared Daleks — their plaintive screams of “MUTANT PHAAAAAAAASE” are hilarious, yes, but also frightening in context. The image of a destroyed Earth is horrifying, but it is Briggs’ subsequent decision that severely undercuts the drama of the production.
The Mutant Phase is, of course, a paradox story, and it is upon this element of the story that Briggs chooses to focus to the exclusion of all else. The nature of the Mutant Phase itself is, for the most part, ignored, while its origins are explored in excruciating detail. While the concept of a self-sustaining paradox is interesting, and the image of a Dalek Emperor inhabiting a humanoid form and attempting to convince “real” Daleks of his identity is amusing, the fact remains that a paradoxical universe contains no real threats except for those presented to the main characters. We know from countless other Doctor Who adventures that Earth was not depopulated by the Mutant Phase, so we know that the status quo will be restored by the conclusion of the play. And the Doctor’s explanations at the play’s conclusion — punctuated by a laugh! — just serve to demonstrate further how unimportant the preceding two hours actually were.
That being said, Peter Davison’s performance is again strong, showing that he’s really starting to get back into the role after so much time away. Briggs gives him a weaker character than that seen in previous BF outings, so he’s forced to surrender from time to time and perform actions against his better judgement. Davison injects into the character the same degree of uncertainty seen on television, yet maintains the level of maturity seen in BF due to his age. This may be the most fallible Doctor of any of the first set of BF productions, but it’s fun to hear all the same.
Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa seems to have settled down, as well. After being misused in The Land of the Dead and mischaracterized in Winter for the Adept, here she is assertive yet understanding, all the while demonstrating her intelligence and even getting the opportunity to put her science background to use.
The supporting characters are entertaining as well, with Mark Gatiss stealing the show as Karl Hendryk. Christopher Blake and Jared Morgan do well as Ptolem and Ganatus, though it is Morgan whose performance as the irate Dalek emperor serves as the highlight of the fourth episode. Andrew Ryan and Sara Wakefield, though, are basically just “there” as residents of the paradoxical Earth, and sudden exterminations do little to pique the emotions.
Production on The Mutant Phase is of the usual excellent quality expected from Big Finish. Briggs handled almost every era of the production, and his sound design matches perfectly with his direction, as one might expect. I especially enjoyed the sound of wasps — or should I say I hated it, as I have a paralyzing fear of the things? Either way, it was quite convincing. Of course, the stars of the production were the Dalek voices, which were the most convincing of the three pre-McGann Dalek efforts. The Emperor in particular was excellent, sounding very close to the Troughton-era Emperor — or at least what I’ve heard of him.
Had Briggs decided to simply tell a story about what scares the Daleks, he might have had a hit on his hands. However, he decided to entangle everything in a paradox and erase the threat from existence. It’s not that The Mutant Phase is badly written but simply that it’s carelessly written: instead of a gripping, dramatic story we have a boring, perfunctory yarn with a nightmare of an ending. Briggs always seems to write the details well, but the overarching story? Swing and a miss.
5/10
“History swings on the simplest of pivots”
A remake of the 1985 Audio Visual play of the same name. It’s obvious that at the time, this was far superior in quality, substance and morality to nearly everything that the actual TV show was producing then. Mind you that’s almost damning with faint praise.
The Doctor’s morality is in proper swing here. He refuses to let Karl kill the Dalek agent, even though ultimately it’s a mercy that leads to his downfall. But at the same time he knows when to be ruthless if the situation demands it. He’s the alien Doctor we always imagined who would pragmatically sacrifice one life if it would save billions more. His belief that the Mutant Phase should wipe out the Daleks is very much in line with the Seventh Doctor’s darker, omnipotent persona who knows the universe would be better off. It actually takes a lot to convince him that he should help the Daleks, as opposed to the same Doctor’s sudden, inexplicable and reprehensible turncoat behaviour in Warriors of the Deep. But again it achieves one of the TV show’s missed opportunities, in following up the Doctor’s speculation in Genesis of the Daleks that ‘out of their evil must come something good’. With the Doctor and Daleks working together to destroy a far greater threat to the universe out of a mutual cause of survival, the Doctor comes to recognise that even the Daleks have their place in the universe. Unfortunately this achievement is all lost as the story presses the ultimate reset switch at the end, which is very hard to forgive.
In an age where twist endings have become obligatory, this is the first of several times where a late twist in the tale will only serve to make it less interesting if not an all out copout that leaves the listener feeling cheated. See also The Reaping and Dalek Empire IV.
Nick Briggs themes get a real spurt on here. In many ways this is like Logopolis, with the Doctor teamed up with his greatest enemy in an uneasy alliance to help defeat a mutual threat. Incidentally the scenes of Thals and Daleks working together and irritating each other and becoming strangely used to each other are a gem. It is also, like Logopolis, about the clumsy breaking of the delicate chain that holds the universe together. As with Nick’s earlier Sirens of Time, the Doctor’s interference in the timeline is shown to be a real minefield where history swings on the simplest of pivots. It also hones Nick’s eco-concerns, the belief that nature’s delicate balance and food chain is essential to our survival and that changing nature’s delicate balance by genetic tampering, hunting species to extinction or our environmental recklessness could create a chain reaction of catastrophic consequences that rebound vengefully on us. In this case genetically modified crops lead ultimately to a galactic disaster that even the Daleks can’t withstand.
It helps that Nick has a real talent for conveying the apocalyptic, and gives us the human race stuck in one room like a bunch of students in a house share having to make do, whilst desolate wilderness surrounds them. You can tell that when this was first written in the mid-80’s, Threads was the main inspiration on Nick’s mind, with a bit of The Young Ones and David Cronenberg’s more AIDS-conscious remake of The Fly thrown in for good measure. He also in the early scenes on the Thal ship, manages to capture the haunting, uninviting coldness of space, in such a way that makes the galactic scale of the threat really tangible, in terms of both the Dalek expansion and the spread of the mutant swarm. Had one of these environments been the consistent focus of the play, rather than quickly discarded for somewhere new, then it might have been a more stolid achievement.
It’s the paradox story that Nick seems to have major trouble making into something credible and plausible. Just as it begins to make logical sense, Nick adds a misjudged twist that reduces it to even greater illogical nonsense and renders the whole story inconsequential and pointless, and furthermore makes the dramatic emphasis and urgency put on whether Ganatus will smash the antidote, seem simply forced, laughably over-earnest and pretentious, much like the contrived lengths the story goes to cast ridiculous suspicion onto Ganatus, and indeed him turning out to be a traitor feels like just a forced development. Infact the scene where the Doctor is grilling Ganatus over the ’suspicious’ act of passing out during in-flight turbulence comes across as a desperate over-compensation for the gullibility of the Fifth Doctor on TV who gladly invited Turlough aboard without getting suspicious, and one that doesn’t feel genuinely natural on Davison’s part, infact it makes the Doctor seem outright neurotic. It’s the same way that when Red Dwarf replaced Rimmer with Kochanski, they tried to force the same antagonistic dynamic between Kryten and Kochanski as with Lister and Rimmer, but in a way that never felt like the relatable, natural character friction of old, but only served to make Kryten seem uncharacteristically picky and petty and mean spirited in his attempts to find and highlight fault with Kochanski.
The thing about Nicholas Briggs as a writer is that he tends to go for a certain tone, and tends to do it relentlessly, with little in the way of levity or contrast. Just like the later Dalek Empires, it suffers from Nick’s lapses into pretension with twists that detract from rather than enhance the story, and a desperate, laboured attempt to have something to say. Case in point; the Doctor’s stick in the mud moral stance with the Emperor Dalek when he hasn’t a leg to stand on and is obviously just the writer trying to fill the runtime because there’s no story here (rather like in Warriors of the Deep).
It quickly becomes clear that this is all gimmick and no story, and its running quickly out of mileage, and the results simply feel heavy handed, and slightly repellent, and with the final cop-out it’s all proved to have been empty sound and fury all along. Given the ‘knowing’ flippancy of its final word that it wasn’t meant to make sense, some listeners would rightly feel insulted and cheated by the ending and would perhaps even have given up on the range. Which is a shame because it demonstrates Big Finish’s new found competency in really going for the cinematic, vivid and multi-textual. Incidentally it also drops subtle hints at the fragility of the web of time, which will become prominent in the McGann and Charley adventures. Greater things are ahead now.