Alien Heart by Stephen Cole
In the TARDIS, the Doctor and Nyssa stumble across a trail of ten destroyed worlds, all of them obliterated by means of some utterly monstrous but utterly unknown device. The planet Traxana would seem to be next in line to suffer the same fate. But when the TARDIS lands on an outpost on Traxana’s moon, Nyssa is carried away by a tide of giant green arachnoids, leaving the Doctor behind…
And the coming menace is closer than he thinks.
Dalek Soul by Guy Adams
On the Dalek-occupied world of Mojox, a group of rebels is engaged in a futile fightback against the invaders – but at last they they’ve found an ally, in the form of the mysterious Doctor. Elsewhere, however, the Daleks’ Chief Virologist is seeking to perfect a biological weapon to wipe out the Mojoxalli, once and for all.
Her name… is Nyssa.
ALIEN HEART
Big Finish has settled into an annual format for the monthly range: one trilogy for each of the fifth, sixth, and seventh Doctors, one anthology release, and one trilogy featuring multiple Doctors with some sort of linking plot element or gimmick. We’re heading into that “gimmick” trilogy, and this year the selling point is that each release is actually two linked two-episode stories. The first story this month is “Alien Heart,” by Stephen Cole, and it’s rather bland and uninspiring.
As the cover blurb says, the Doctor and Nyssa stumble across a trail of destroyed planets and, with no explanation evident, decide to investigate. This leads them to a secret human installation on the moon of Traxana, which appears to be the next planet in line. But the humans aren’t responsible – they’re also investigating – and nobody knows why the planets are being destroyed. This is a reasonably mysterious setup, but Cole immediately goes all in on a group of giant spiders with incredibly sticky skin running around the base and on the planet. Nyssa gets carried off, of course, and that splits up the TARDIS crew, leaving the Doctor with the human crew and Nyssa with a Traxanan in an underground mine. The Doctor then spends the rest of the story going from room to room in the base, while Nyssa spends the rest of the story going from tunnel to tunnel in the mine.
My reviews say this a lot, but there’s not much that’s particularly wrong with “Alien Heart.” I’m sure Stephen Cole can write Doctor Who stories in his sleep by now and he’s always been a reliable, consistent voice in the spinoff media. But there isn’t much going on here: it’s an utterly generic Doctor Who plot surrounded by some irrelevant detail. Sure, I suppose it’s interesting to know the political and strategic reasons that the humans have a secret base on the moon, but when they’re not relevant to the story, why should I care? The best revelation in the story is the mysterious heartbeat – and it’s hardly a spoiler to say it’s actually a distorted form of the famous Dalek base “heartbeat” effect since the Daleks are all over the cover. The Dalek scheme is almost incomprehensible – though “needlessly convoluted” seems to be an implicit part of Dalek schemes – and it’s unclear how much of it was intended from the start and how much of it is lunacy from a disconnected Dalek science group.
Basically, if you really want to listen to a generic Doctor Who romp with Daleks, this is as good a choice as any. If you want something that’ll stimulate your mind, well, skip to disc 2, because that one is much better.
5/10
DALEK SOUL
I imagine it’s difficult to write Dalek stories these days. They’re the most common villains in Doctor Who and many utterly fantastic writers have tackled the Daleks over the years. It has to be intimidating to attempt to write something unique involving a monster that has already been tackled by luminaries like Whitaker, Davies, and Shearman. And yet that’s exactly what Guy Adams does in “Dalek Soul,” which is one of the best Dalek stories in years.
“Dalek Soul,” as the name implies, is about what it means to think like a Dalek and how that differs from what we consider normal. When “Alien Heart” ended, the Daleks took the Doctor and Nyssa prisoner, and when “Dalek Soul” opens, Nyssa is working with them as a virologist and the Doctor is aiding a rebel group. Clearly, we’ve just skipped ahead in the story: the Doctor must have escaped, and Nyssa is surely doing what she can to hamstring the Dalek plans from within. But events rapidly become uneasy as we hear Nyssa oversee a biological weapons test on defenseless prisoners, something we know she would never countenance. Our suspicions that something is wrong are confirmed when the Doctor betrays his rebel group and turns them over to the Daleks – in fact, that ruins the drama of the rest of the story, because we know that nobody would ever write (or be allowed to write) the Doctor as a willing Dalek collaborator, so we therefore know that these aren’t the real Doctor and Nyssa.
Fortunately, Adams’ story doesn’t rely on this revelation to succeed. Rather, it’s a device to explore how the Doctor and Nyssa would behave were they possessed of Dalek “souls.” The most interesting outcome is that the Doctor is a ruthless, heartless collaborator, while Nyssa still retains much of her essential decency. It’s never spelled out, but one imagines that the Daleks were very careful to stamp out the Doctor’s positive qualities, knowing how much of a threat he posed in the past. I’d also speculate that they didn’t do the same with Nyssa, as they probably viewed her as just another weak-willed, inferior species. So while the Doctor is the lead villain, Nyssa is the anti-hero: she’s responsible for terrible things, but a part of her knows that and works to stop those things from happening. As with many stories in this vein, when they discover their true identities, everything melts down, which is predictable but satisfying. Lastly, the device of a faceless rebel leader talking Nyssa through her identity crisis is a bit clunky but effective enough to drive the plot.
Ken Bentley directs both stories and the sound design and music come from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason, and all are to Big Finish’s usual high production standards. Despite a few flaws here and there, “Dalek Soul” is an excellent story, one that actually attempts a different type of storytelling with meaning to boot. “Alien Heart” you can take or leave; this release is worth the purchase for “Dalek Soul” alone.
9/10