As the Daleks invade, the Doctor and Lucie investigate the mysterious origins of the ‘new’ Daleks.
2 Comments
Styre
on May 7, 2016 at 9:38 PM
BLOOD OF THE DALEKS, PART TWO
The second part of Steve Lyons’ “Blood of the Daleks” served as more of a showcase for the new BBC7 series than its predecessor. With the necessary, if oftentimes awkward, introductory material out of the way, the second part allowed the Dalek story to take center stage. And it works, for the most part: it’s a solid, efficient Doctor Who story, with exciting action pieces and just enough material to keep the brain occupied as well.
Predictability is not a sin when it comes to storytelling, but nonetheless “Blood of the Daleks” stays to a very reliable course. Despite this, it provides possibly the most direct examination of the Daleks’ crazed devotion to racial purity yet seen in Doctor Who — while in “Dalek,” one individual Dalek committed suicide to eliminate its tainted bloodline, here a rag-tag batallion of Daleks stops fighting a devastating war so that they can destroy a planet on which the creation of other Daleks might be taking place. Indeed, this racial hatred is shown to be an essential part of the Dalek character — even Martez’s new Daleks, mere minutes from the “womb,” view the world in terms of superiority/inferiority. This also leads to a disturbingly effective scene in which Martez (Hayley Atwell) comforts one of “her” dying Daleks by assuring it that its blood is purest, and that it represents the future of the universe. It’s almost enough to make you sorry for the Dalek, until you understand the nature of the comforting.
I say, though, that the story is predictable, because we’re essentially presented with another competing-factions-of-Daleks story. The Doctor complicates matters somewhat by initially helping one side, but by the end we’re back into “Remembrance” territory with the two sides at open war and the Doctor waiting for the opportunity to strike both at once. The resolution is a little odd — the remaining Dalek force is defeated by… dropping rocks on them? Really? — but can be chalked up to pre-existing damage suffered in the war. None of this makes “Blood of the Daleks” a bad story — quite the opposite, as it is exciting and well-paced.
This is almost certainly Paul McGann’s most intense turn as the Doctor. He shows a remarkable streak of bloodlust when it comes to disposing of the Daleks. Shockingly, when the story attempts to use Klint’s moral arguments (Anita Dobson) to bring him up short, it immediately reverses course and demonstrates that the Doctor has been right all along. Not that I expect moral ambiguity when it comes to the Daleks, but usually the Doctor isn’t quite this ruthless. McGann plays it to the hilt, with the only humor coming from his bickering with Lucie. Sheridan Smith, for her part, is up to McGann’s challenge, as Lucie meets this grimmer Doctor halfway without giving any ground. The bickering gets a little old by the end of the play, but hopefully the relationship between the regulars will start to mellow. I loved hearing that the Doctor tried to leave at the end, though. As in Part 1, Dobson and Atwell give solid performances, though Dobson is shaky in some of her confrontation scenes — the ubiquitous “Can’t you do anything but kill??” line falls particularly flat. Kenneth Cranham is surprisingly heroic after his tin-foil-hat-lunatic turn in the first episode. And kudos to Nicholas Briggs for his voicing of the Martez Daleks, which do indeed sound more human than their traditional counterparts. The production is up to the same high standard as the first part — unsurprising considering the same people worked on both plays.
Overall, “Blood of the Daleks, Part 2” is good, solid Doctor Who, and a fine conclusion to the first part. We’re starting to see the evolution of the Doctor/Lucie relationship as well. It’s not mind-blowing, and certainly not up to the standard of the best Big Finish plays, but this is great for what it is: a quality Dalek story designed to draw in new listeners. I look forward to the rest of the range.
“I know the Daleks. I was there at their birth. I fought against them in countless wars. Seen their legacy in the burial pits of a hundred worlds.”
It was nice to get a BBC7 radio series, for no other reason than to hear what sounded like an alternative New Series comeback that was more true to the feel, the substance and tone of the classic series. At the time of this story’s airplay, we’d witnessed New Who indulging the Tenth Doctor-Rose love affair and making it out to be the most important thing in the world. To be fair though, what many commentators often missed was that there was a subtle questioning of whether Rose’s travels with the Doctor are actually healthy, in exposing her to alien wonders and emotional highs the human mind wasn’t designed to see or experience, resulting in her developing a power trip, an insatiable rush, deep insecurities and ultimately a death wish. A theme reflected and complimented by Rose seeing a parallel universe where her parents are married and rich and yet deeply unhappy, and by human astronauts surveying a black hole to find the sight of it driving them mad. But much of this was buried under schmaltz and vulgar sappiness and recently The Stolen Earth compounded the felony by undoing the final goodbye and thus made the whole show seem pitched exclusively at the shipper audience who wanted their favourite onscreen couple to get together so that all would be right with the world again. In that regard it was no longer ‘my’ Doctor Who which was actually once all about coming to terms with the fact that there’s a *lot* that’s not right with the world.
There’s some indication though that they’re pitching this story slightly towards the fans who’ve been less than happy with New Who’s populist and trashy traits. Infact the antagonism here between McGann’s Doctor and Lucie is refreshing, and a welcome relief and a reminder of a time before the Doctor and companion fawned over each other and acted like the most punchable, cliquey couple you’ll ever meet. And it must be said that Sheridan Smith shows a lot of spunk and attitude as Lucie. We’ll be complaining a lot about Big Finish’s growing tendency towards contrived and winceful humour, but the thing about Sheridan Smith is that she brings a real energy to even the most contrived dialogue and is a natural at making each gag sound genuinely spontaneous and sharp.
When it comes to the version of Blood of the Daleks that got radioplay, it should be stressed that on paper there are all the makings of an important morality play here. Steve Lyons is one of the few writers who isn’t at all enamoured with the New Series, and thus he’s the only one using Big Finish to rise up to the challenge of ‘if you think you can do better….’ and is aiming to prove exactly that, and he’ll prove it again with the superb Son of the Dragon which shows up how New Who would never dare to commission anything that’s remotely as challenging. Crucially what Steve Lyons is trying to get back to is the Doctor as a decisive, pro-active element of the plot and most importantly ‘a man with a plan’, not someone who ambles aimlessly through stories and is useless until his companion or a magic lever or token self-sacrifice turns up to save the day. It’s the same way that Steve’s Gallifrey stories mythologised the events of The Invasion of Time as the stuff of Greek legends, allowing us to remember the Doctor as a titanic giant of heroes and wipe from our memory the ineffectual cowardly eunuch that the Doctor was reduced to by JNT and Eric Saward. Mind you even I can’t help thinking that even the Fifth Doctor at his most neutered would probably have done more to sabotage the Daleks’ genocidal plans in Journey’s End than the current model did.
The Doctor is presented here as a fascist, but in a world of lynch mobs and alien hating, trigger happy rednecks, the Doctor is clearly the lesser of two evils. The Daleks describe the Doctor as a genocidal terrorist and from their perspective they’re not exactly lying. But the Doctor’s perspective of Dalek existence being like ‘a perpetual nightmare’ justifies his Dalek-destroying actions as that of a vet delivering a mercy killing. His final confrontation with two surviving Daleks from opposing factions blindly still trying to shoot each other is an inspired, missed opportunity from the many 80’s Dalek civil wars (just when we thought Remembrance of the Daleks was perfect the way it was). Furthermore it shows the Doctor’s conscience clearly playing on him. He has to face them and see them being compulsively evil right to the end, to prove to himself that he did the right thing in condemning the Daleks to death. Paul McGann is clearly relishing playing a spiky, darker Doctor and he really conveys the Doctor’s weary attitude in this scene, seemingly trying to appeal to the Daleks’ better nature simply because he’s bored of what they are. “Come on, just for once surprise me!”
Unlike the New Who season finales which just use the Daleks superficially as basic CGI action flick fodder, this doesn’t lose sight of what the Daleks represent. The story of Eileen Clint is a beautiful, poignant portrayal of the burden of leadership, and the humanity behind an unfairly scorned public figure. As a final poetic note, the Daleks shot down the evacuation ships, but were in turn destroyed when the mobs of humans poured the wreckage onto them.
Unfortunately though, as with Warriors of the Deep, it only takes a few misjudged rewrites and edits to turn the original author’s well-meaning morality play into something rather warped and twisted. For those not in the know, Johnny Byrne’s original script for Warriors of the Deep actually had worthy things to say about the stupidity of nuclear stockpiling without the kind of twisted scorn on humanity that ended up on screen. It didn’t portray the Doctor as an appeaser or have him scorning the humans for defending themselves, or reviving the Silurians so that they can kill more people (you know it’s an Eric Saward rewrite when the Doctor’s behaviour is so recklessly out of character and makes him such a liability that it almost seems like someone’s got a voodoo doll of him and is making him act involuntarily, and when the monsters are being gassed with something lethal and yet they’re refusing to retreat and are able bodied enough to kill off the last surviving guest characters, not to mention the inexcusably stupid and nasty scene where the Silurians only bother to send one Sea Devil to the chemical store, who clearly isn’t going to stand a chance alone and thus has only really been sent there to kill off a guest character). Those were additions made by Eric Saward on the petulant insistence of Ian Levine and JNT (so its not entirely surprising that it comes off so bitterly), which turned a potent tale of human folly into a vile tale where the Doctor’s pascifist ideas and sanctity of life makes him a petty tyrant who gets everyone else killed just to prove himself morally superior. And here history is repeating itself. Just like the humans in Warriors of the Deep, most of the violence the new stock of Daleks exhibited was in self-defence against a genocidal foe. One that they’d initially welcomed with open arms (or rather open plungers) before being attacked without provocation, yet we’re supposed to take their defensive violence as evidence of their scorn-worthy aggression and hostility that leads them to deserve their fate and justifies the turncoat Doctor’s loyalty to and assistance of that far worse enemy. It’s a nasty circular argument of ‘they’re clearly savages that deserve to be killed because they exhibited violence when we tried to kill them’.
It’s a shame because in its original script, there was meant to be more to the story that would have lent actual credence to the Doctor’s merciless judgement on the new Daleks. A thread where Martez gradually mutates herself into a Dalek, only to find her individuality and will being overtaken by the Daleks’ single minded megalomania, which had it made it to the final product, would have instantly ruled out the possibility of the Doctor being able to reason with this new stock, and would also have meant that Martez’ martyrdom and the Doctor’s all too eager willingness to let her die would have made more sense and seemed far less forced or cold blooded. Likewise the point where Eileen accuses the Doctor of being a fascist was clearly meant to go somewhere and lead to an actual moral debate where the Doctor really becomes questionable, but this is quickly forgotten and chickened out of and the listener is left with the impression that we’re meant to be on the Doctor’s side, simply because we must be.
And so the glory days of free reign for writers who want to write something raw and pure and from the heart without having their work being sullied, rewritten or interfered with by the mainline producer have ended, as Big Finish has itself sanitised for radioplay.
All this material that would have given the story more moral depth and, well… fairness was cut out to make way for more crowd pleasing action scenes, so it becomes just another fascistic action popcorn flick that’s all about attitude rather than soul (just like with the vile Dalek Empire IV), and so the dark days of Resurrection of the Daleks are upon us again.
But on those terms it’s very engaging and well paced, and as an audio action experience it’s impossible to fault. Sure the first half is reliant on a bit too much coincidence, much like The Awakening, but otherwise it holds the interest superbly, especially the gripping, all-bets-are-off moment where new companion Lucie, under threat of death from the Daleks, finally agrees to betray the Doctor and sounds like she really means it (this would never happen in New Who of course). The fact that there’s a more noble, but morally uncertain story trying to get out means that it bears relistening, and the fact that this moral angle is demonstrated by plot points rather than sermonised with a hammer makes it far more accessible than Warriors of the Deep was. The directing is cinematic and really conveys a volatile spiky mood, and vividly presents Red Rocket Rising’s nuclear winter of biting winds, pitch black skies and choking pollution, which was well suited for its winter broadcast.
It’s a serviceable pilot. The Doctor’s immediately alien, ambiguous and unpredictable. It’s pacier than Storm Warning, whilst still echoing its mandate as a pilot to show that the psychological adventure and the cosmic are one and the same thing, with the Daleks representing our own dark side, our autisms, rage and psychosis. Moreso it shows newcomers a second ‘genesis’ of the Daleks, in such a way that instantly presents the Daleks as an inevitable product of mankind’s ruthless ambitions, and thus makes Davros superfluous. It’d just be nice if it caught Doctor Who’s morality too.
BLOOD OF THE DALEKS, PART TWO
The second part of Steve Lyons’ “Blood of the Daleks” served as more of a showcase for the new BBC7 series than its predecessor. With the necessary, if oftentimes awkward, introductory material out of the way, the second part allowed the Dalek story to take center stage. And it works, for the most part: it’s a solid, efficient Doctor Who story, with exciting action pieces and just enough material to keep the brain occupied as well.
Predictability is not a sin when it comes to storytelling, but nonetheless “Blood of the Daleks” stays to a very reliable course. Despite this, it provides possibly the most direct examination of the Daleks’ crazed devotion to racial purity yet seen in Doctor Who — while in “Dalek,” one individual Dalek committed suicide to eliminate its tainted bloodline, here a rag-tag batallion of Daleks stops fighting a devastating war so that they can destroy a planet on which the creation of other Daleks might be taking place. Indeed, this racial hatred is shown to be an essential part of the Dalek character — even Martez’s new Daleks, mere minutes from the “womb,” view the world in terms of superiority/inferiority. This also leads to a disturbingly effective scene in which Martez (Hayley Atwell) comforts one of “her” dying Daleks by assuring it that its blood is purest, and that it represents the future of the universe. It’s almost enough to make you sorry for the Dalek, until you understand the nature of the comforting.
I say, though, that the story is predictable, because we’re essentially presented with another competing-factions-of-Daleks story. The Doctor complicates matters somewhat by initially helping one side, but by the end we’re back into “Remembrance” territory with the two sides at open war and the Doctor waiting for the opportunity to strike both at once. The resolution is a little odd — the remaining Dalek force is defeated by… dropping rocks on them? Really? — but can be chalked up to pre-existing damage suffered in the war. None of this makes “Blood of the Daleks” a bad story — quite the opposite, as it is exciting and well-paced.
This is almost certainly Paul McGann’s most intense turn as the Doctor. He shows a remarkable streak of bloodlust when it comes to disposing of the Daleks. Shockingly, when the story attempts to use Klint’s moral arguments (Anita Dobson) to bring him up short, it immediately reverses course and demonstrates that the Doctor has been right all along. Not that I expect moral ambiguity when it comes to the Daleks, but usually the Doctor isn’t quite this ruthless. McGann plays it to the hilt, with the only humor coming from his bickering with Lucie. Sheridan Smith, for her part, is up to McGann’s challenge, as Lucie meets this grimmer Doctor halfway without giving any ground. The bickering gets a little old by the end of the play, but hopefully the relationship between the regulars will start to mellow. I loved hearing that the Doctor tried to leave at the end, though. As in Part 1, Dobson and Atwell give solid performances, though Dobson is shaky in some of her confrontation scenes — the ubiquitous “Can’t you do anything but kill??” line falls particularly flat. Kenneth Cranham is surprisingly heroic after his tin-foil-hat-lunatic turn in the first episode. And kudos to Nicholas Briggs for his voicing of the Martez Daleks, which do indeed sound more human than their traditional counterparts. The production is up to the same high standard as the first part — unsurprising considering the same people worked on both plays.
Overall, “Blood of the Daleks, Part 2” is good, solid Doctor Who, and a fine conclusion to the first part. We’re starting to see the evolution of the Doctor/Lucie relationship as well. It’s not mind-blowing, and certainly not up to the standard of the best Big Finish plays, but this is great for what it is: a quality Dalek story designed to draw in new listeners. I look forward to the rest of the range.
Recommended.
7/10.
“I know the Daleks. I was there at their birth. I fought against them in countless wars. Seen their legacy in the burial pits of a hundred worlds.”
It was nice to get a BBC7 radio series, for no other reason than to hear what sounded like an alternative New Series comeback that was more true to the feel, the substance and tone of the classic series. At the time of this story’s airplay, we’d witnessed New Who indulging the Tenth Doctor-Rose love affair and making it out to be the most important thing in the world. To be fair though, what many commentators often missed was that there was a subtle questioning of whether Rose’s travels with the Doctor are actually healthy, in exposing her to alien wonders and emotional highs the human mind wasn’t designed to see or experience, resulting in her developing a power trip, an insatiable rush, deep insecurities and ultimately a death wish. A theme reflected and complimented by Rose seeing a parallel universe where her parents are married and rich and yet deeply unhappy, and by human astronauts surveying a black hole to find the sight of it driving them mad. But much of this was buried under schmaltz and vulgar sappiness and recently The Stolen Earth compounded the felony by undoing the final goodbye and thus made the whole show seem pitched exclusively at the shipper audience who wanted their favourite onscreen couple to get together so that all would be right with the world again. In that regard it was no longer ‘my’ Doctor Who which was actually once all about coming to terms with the fact that there’s a *lot* that’s not right with the world.
There’s some indication though that they’re pitching this story slightly towards the fans who’ve been less than happy with New Who’s populist and trashy traits. Infact the antagonism here between McGann’s Doctor and Lucie is refreshing, and a welcome relief and a reminder of a time before the Doctor and companion fawned over each other and acted like the most punchable, cliquey couple you’ll ever meet. And it must be said that Sheridan Smith shows a lot of spunk and attitude as Lucie. We’ll be complaining a lot about Big Finish’s growing tendency towards contrived and winceful humour, but the thing about Sheridan Smith is that she brings a real energy to even the most contrived dialogue and is a natural at making each gag sound genuinely spontaneous and sharp.
When it comes to the version of Blood of the Daleks that got radioplay, it should be stressed that on paper there are all the makings of an important morality play here. Steve Lyons is one of the few writers who isn’t at all enamoured with the New Series, and thus he’s the only one using Big Finish to rise up to the challenge of ‘if you think you can do better….’ and is aiming to prove exactly that, and he’ll prove it again with the superb Son of the Dragon which shows up how New Who would never dare to commission anything that’s remotely as challenging. Crucially what Steve Lyons is trying to get back to is the Doctor as a decisive, pro-active element of the plot and most importantly ‘a man with a plan’, not someone who ambles aimlessly through stories and is useless until his companion or a magic lever or token self-sacrifice turns up to save the day. It’s the same way that Steve’s Gallifrey stories mythologised the events of The Invasion of Time as the stuff of Greek legends, allowing us to remember the Doctor as a titanic giant of heroes and wipe from our memory the ineffectual cowardly eunuch that the Doctor was reduced to by JNT and Eric Saward. Mind you even I can’t help thinking that even the Fifth Doctor at his most neutered would probably have done more to sabotage the Daleks’ genocidal plans in Journey’s End than the current model did.
The Doctor is presented here as a fascist, but in a world of lynch mobs and alien hating, trigger happy rednecks, the Doctor is clearly the lesser of two evils. The Daleks describe the Doctor as a genocidal terrorist and from their perspective they’re not exactly lying. But the Doctor’s perspective of Dalek existence being like ‘a perpetual nightmare’ justifies his Dalek-destroying actions as that of a vet delivering a mercy killing. His final confrontation with two surviving Daleks from opposing factions blindly still trying to shoot each other is an inspired, missed opportunity from the many 80’s Dalek civil wars (just when we thought Remembrance of the Daleks was perfect the way it was). Furthermore it shows the Doctor’s conscience clearly playing on him. He has to face them and see them being compulsively evil right to the end, to prove to himself that he did the right thing in condemning the Daleks to death. Paul McGann is clearly relishing playing a spiky, darker Doctor and he really conveys the Doctor’s weary attitude in this scene, seemingly trying to appeal to the Daleks’ better nature simply because he’s bored of what they are. “Come on, just for once surprise me!”
Unlike the New Who season finales which just use the Daleks superficially as basic CGI action flick fodder, this doesn’t lose sight of what the Daleks represent. The story of Eileen Clint is a beautiful, poignant portrayal of the burden of leadership, and the humanity behind an unfairly scorned public figure. As a final poetic note, the Daleks shot down the evacuation ships, but were in turn destroyed when the mobs of humans poured the wreckage onto them.
Unfortunately though, as with Warriors of the Deep, it only takes a few misjudged rewrites and edits to turn the original author’s well-meaning morality play into something rather warped and twisted. For those not in the know, Johnny Byrne’s original script for Warriors of the Deep actually had worthy things to say about the stupidity of nuclear stockpiling without the kind of twisted scorn on humanity that ended up on screen. It didn’t portray the Doctor as an appeaser or have him scorning the humans for defending themselves, or reviving the Silurians so that they can kill more people (you know it’s an Eric Saward rewrite when the Doctor’s behaviour is so recklessly out of character and makes him such a liability that it almost seems like someone’s got a voodoo doll of him and is making him act involuntarily, and when the monsters are being gassed with something lethal and yet they’re refusing to retreat and are able bodied enough to kill off the last surviving guest characters, not to mention the inexcusably stupid and nasty scene where the Silurians only bother to send one Sea Devil to the chemical store, who clearly isn’t going to stand a chance alone and thus has only really been sent there to kill off a guest character). Those were additions made by Eric Saward on the petulant insistence of Ian Levine and JNT (so its not entirely surprising that it comes off so bitterly), which turned a potent tale of human folly into a vile tale where the Doctor’s pascifist ideas and sanctity of life makes him a petty tyrant who gets everyone else killed just to prove himself morally superior. And here history is repeating itself. Just like the humans in Warriors of the Deep, most of the violence the new stock of Daleks exhibited was in self-defence against a genocidal foe. One that they’d initially welcomed with open arms (or rather open plungers) before being attacked without provocation, yet we’re supposed to take their defensive violence as evidence of their scorn-worthy aggression and hostility that leads them to deserve their fate and justifies the turncoat Doctor’s loyalty to and assistance of that far worse enemy. It’s a nasty circular argument of ‘they’re clearly savages that deserve to be killed because they exhibited violence when we tried to kill them’.
It’s a shame because in its original script, there was meant to be more to the story that would have lent actual credence to the Doctor’s merciless judgement on the new Daleks. A thread where Martez gradually mutates herself into a Dalek, only to find her individuality and will being overtaken by the Daleks’ single minded megalomania, which had it made it to the final product, would have instantly ruled out the possibility of the Doctor being able to reason with this new stock, and would also have meant that Martez’ martyrdom and the Doctor’s all too eager willingness to let her die would have made more sense and seemed far less forced or cold blooded. Likewise the point where Eileen accuses the Doctor of being a fascist was clearly meant to go somewhere and lead to an actual moral debate where the Doctor really becomes questionable, but this is quickly forgotten and chickened out of and the listener is left with the impression that we’re meant to be on the Doctor’s side, simply because we must be.
And so the glory days of free reign for writers who want to write something raw and pure and from the heart without having their work being sullied, rewritten or interfered with by the mainline producer have ended, as Big Finish has itself sanitised for radioplay.
All this material that would have given the story more moral depth and, well… fairness was cut out to make way for more crowd pleasing action scenes, so it becomes just another fascistic action popcorn flick that’s all about attitude rather than soul (just like with the vile Dalek Empire IV), and so the dark days of Resurrection of the Daleks are upon us again.
But on those terms it’s very engaging and well paced, and as an audio action experience it’s impossible to fault. Sure the first half is reliant on a bit too much coincidence, much like The Awakening, but otherwise it holds the interest superbly, especially the gripping, all-bets-are-off moment where new companion Lucie, under threat of death from the Daleks, finally agrees to betray the Doctor and sounds like she really means it (this would never happen in New Who of course). The fact that there’s a more noble, but morally uncertain story trying to get out means that it bears relistening, and the fact that this moral angle is demonstrated by plot points rather than sermonised with a hammer makes it far more accessible than Warriors of the Deep was. The directing is cinematic and really conveys a volatile spiky mood, and vividly presents Red Rocket Rising’s nuclear winter of biting winds, pitch black skies and choking pollution, which was well suited for its winter broadcast.
It’s a serviceable pilot. The Doctor’s immediately alien, ambiguous and unpredictable. It’s pacier than Storm Warning, whilst still echoing its mandate as a pilot to show that the psychological adventure and the cosmic are one and the same thing, with the Daleks representing our own dark side, our autisms, rage and psychosis. Moreso it shows newcomers a second ‘genesis’ of the Daleks, in such a way that instantly presents the Daleks as an inevitable product of mankind’s ruthless ambitions, and thus makes Davros superfluous. It’d just be nice if it caught Doctor Who’s morality too.