On the planet Kar-Charrat, the Seventh Doctor and Ace must defend an ancient library from the Doctor’s oldest enemies – the Daleks!
On the planet Kar-Charrat, the Seventh Doctor and Ace must defend an ancient library from the Doctor’s oldest enemies – the Daleks!
THE GENOCIDE MACHINE
After a stunning debut solo offering for Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, Big Finish was poised at the cusp of a revolution: in retrospect, a few more audios along the line of The Fearmonger may have prompted a grand reevaluation of McCoy along the same lines as that which acted upon Colin Baker. And with the Daleks due to make their premiere appearance in the range, the stars were aligned for another home run-hitting performance.
Unfortunately, Mike Tucker wrote the script.
I’ve never been a fan of the novels of Tucker and frequent co-author Robert Perry, finding them to range from competent (Illegal Alien) to silly (Companion Piece) to utter garbage (Loving the Alien) — and the prospect of listening to a Tucker script for the second time did not appeal. My expectations, sadly, were met: an ultratraditional script with terrible characterization and poor attempts at humor. The presence of the Daleks helped to ease the pain, but at heart this is a poor script which brings down an otherwise average production.
One of the aims of the play — to free the Daleks from their ties to Davros — is accomplished well, as no time is spent talking about the creator nor is any script space spent establishing the independence of the Daleks. These are the ruthless killers remembered from the ‘60s, and their plan is suitably devious: give a Dalek the knowledge of the universe and use him as a battle computer to give the Daleks the tactical advantage in any conceivable war. However, the mere use of the words “entire universe” tends to raise flags reading “silly” — that’s an awful lot of power to be condensed into one location. That the Daleks are waiting outside the library for a time-sensitive to arrive is reasonable; that the Cybermen and six million other ambitious races aren’t out there with them is not.
The concept of the library itself, though overblown, is fine, and the wetworks facility is an intriguing creation. The Kar-Charratans are another fascinating invention — any time an author can create a unique addition to the Doctor Who bestiary marks an achievement to be applauded. However, Tucker’s attempt to add depth to the play by turning the wetworks facility into a Kar-Charratan gulag doesn’t carry any emotional depth whatsoever, appearing instead to be inserted into the plot to generate an extra fifteen minutes’ worth of material.
Tucker’s characterizations are woeful, and the actors’ performances suffer as a result. This is a terrible seventh Doctor: he is neither his latter-day quiet, manipulative self nor his comical early self. Instead, McCoy is forced to play a generic Doctor-by-numbers, one who stumbles into situations and says lines indistinguishable from any of his predecessors. Consequentially, McCoy’s performance sounds very bored, and his attempt to convey anger at Elgin’s horrible actions just fails to convince.
Things go from bad to worse with Ace, who is written exactly as seen on television — in Dragonfire. There is no maturity whatsoever to this character, and her bitchy departure from the library upon first arrival is absolutely infuriating to hear. Sophie Aldred sounds as bored as McCoy — except, of course, when she’s playing her own Dalek duplicate. Unfortunately, this play serves as much more of a marker for the direction of her performance in later productions — which is a shame, due to her stellar performance in The Fearmonger.
As for the secondary characters, this many planks together could easily make a house. Bruce Montague’s performance as Elgin is acceptable, but the character is utterly boring, failing even to become interesting at the revelation that he’s committed genocide. The Prink-doesn’t-talk joke was marginally funny the first two or three times, but by the sixtieth repetition in episode four it’s simply infuriating. When Prink finally does speak, Nicholas Briggs’ performance makes one wish he’d go back into the Dalek casing. And then there’s Bev Tarrant, the one-note Benny replacement that does nothing but sit around and complain for four episodes. Accurate though Louise Faulkner’s performance may have been, I still wanted to slap her after ten minutes.
If it wasn’t for the Daleks, there wouldn’t be a reason to listen to this. Fortunately, the legendary monsters are brought to the audio stage with amazing skill, recapturing their old menace with very little effort. True, the new voices are strange to hear, but after an episode they feel natural — and the Emperor Dalek is captivating from his first line. Everything is here — the speech patterns, the cries of anguish of the deranged Dalek, the needless exclamations like “My vision is impaired!” — and it brings a giddy thrill to hear the Daleks terrorizing the Doctor once again. Indeed, their mere presence elevates this play from any true depths of embarrassment.
I am forced to question Nicholas Briggs’ skill with directing actors — both this and The Sirens of Time are rife with questionable performances from otherwise talented actors — but on the whole, this is a good production. Briggs’ own sound design never lets the listener forget that Kar-Charrat is a very wet planet, while his work on the Daleks’ sound effects is letter-perfect. Ultimately, it is the strong production values — and the excellent work done with the Daleks — which save this play from total indignity. Mike Tucker’s script is simply lacking in too many areas and the actors fail to rise to the occasion to save it. This should be classed as a missed opportunity — but it could have been much, much worse.
5/10
“Humans are impatient. Daleks have no such weakness”
The Daleks make their (official) audio debut here, and looking back on it now, it’s hard to see much else special about it. But it establishes the remit to show the Daleks as a far more formidable power in their own right, by jettisoning the troublesome, divisive Davros from the equation. In redefining the Daleks it also takes the uncharacteristic route of showing the possibility of redemption for the Daleks. That the Daleks are effectively drones until they are enlightened and taught compassion by knowledge outside of their jurisdiction, and since this is effectively a new pilot for the Daleks, it gets to make its own rules and can get away with going down this controversial route, and lays the way for other stories to do the same. It’s a theme that will be revisited repeatedly in Dalek audio stories to come, but sadly never in a way that will escape being undone by a reset switch at the end. Jubilee and Masters of War are perhaps as close as it gets.
Also as a Dalek pilot it can get away with the deliciously cheeky moment at the end where the Emperor Dalek, having destroyed his subordinate, then addresses the fourth wall with his propaganda. Infact they could have kept up this badass tradition- how about if at the end of The Apocalypse Element, after the pile-up of deaths, the Emperor Dalek unrepentantly taunts the listener with the challenge “Was that unforgivable?!”
Essentially The Genocide Machine is a shopping list story, and it never stops feeling like one. Bear in mind that shopping list stories very rarely come off as any more than mediocre at best. Helen Raynor’s much maligned Dalek story for New Who was a shopping list story, but her Torchwood story, Ghost Machine allowed her to demonstrate her talents at writing free reign and to actually produce one of Torchwood’s few unpredictable and outstanding highlights (indeed we might have declared it Torchwood’s finest hour, before we saw the Children of Earth five part masterpiece and became a bit spoilt for choice). Even Robert Holmes struggled to write a decent story when given the constraining shopping list brief, which is what led to The Two Doctors.
Basically the story feels like its simply ticking off items on a list. The Special Weapons Dalek is brought in to fit with the McCoy era, but it doesn’t actually do anything special, aside from bitch-slapping Ace. Chief Librarian Elgin and his own silent Bob are brought in for comic relief which simply becomes repetitive and asinine. Neither characters exorcising their annoying quirks no matter what the context of the situation. Which is a frequent problem with the early releases’ reliance on one dimensional characters with one note jokes. Basically it shows how the range has a long way to go before it escapes the stifling approach and arrested characterisation of the JNT era and its cynical belief that the companions are meant to be two dimensional trademarks, and that the Doctor’s heroism and aversion to violence are a rigid rule rather than the character’s personal choice.
Indeed the angle with the unethical Wetworks is simply there so that the Doctor gets an obligatory moment of moral outrage which calls upon Sylvester to do the more blustery anger of the Sixth Doctor rather than his more trademark and effective quiet simmering anger and as such it’s a weaker scene for it, and yet it is also shown up as pretentious a few scenes later when suddenly all is forgiven. Likewise the redeemed, enlightened Dalek is brought in without much thought to making its enlightenment seem credible. Why would the datastore Dalek make the absurd leap of judgement that the aquatic lifeforms are non-hostile, after they’ve just drowned a helpless Dalek? It’s a shame really because ideally this should all be cohesive and quite radical and subversive in its treatment of the Daleks. This is meant to be a story which proves the Fourth Doctor’s whimsical philosophy that ‘out of their evil must come something good’, where by decimating the Library that holds the aquatic lifeforms captive, the Daleks unwittingly become the unlikely liberators of the imprisoned, which in a way justifies the fact that it’s the Doctor and Ace’s presence here that directly provokes the arrival of the Daleks.
Ultimately as with the witless shopping list stories of the 80’s, it all simply ends with a bomb explosion, as if the writer doesn’t know what else to do with the shopping list elements except blow them up, which is even less satisfying on audio.
And since the writing is so…. academic and the ending is an anticlimax, it leaves the whole thing being even more frustrating for its academic failings. Its nitpicky flaws which stand out because there’s not really any more substance or meaning to it. Sophie’s performance as Ace is commendable and she really comes across like the character never left. However when she plays the Dalek duplicate, her performance is absolutely rotten and really ruins a potentially disturbing paranoia angle. Then there’s the changed premise of data acquisition which turns from apparently being as easy as reading a bus ticket to a laborious, painful process that can cause brain damage and death. It seems simply done so that the Daleks’ plan can be prolongued enough to justify the runtime, and that the misfires can lead to violent dramatic intensity. But it simply makes for bumpy, queasy listening. It also leaves the intervening periods feeling simply dull and unengaging.
It feels a bit rude to criticise the story in hindsight for not being up to the greater calibre of the Dalek audio stories that came after, when it didn’t have them to compete with. But given that it follows after the punchy, firing on all cylinders confidence of something like The Fearmonger it’s a bit harder to forgive the comedown. This is simply mediocre.
If anything though, the lightweight nature of The Genocide Machine feels disconcertingly innocent given the disturbing horrors and unrelenting grimness that will follow in the later chapters of the Dalek Empire series. As such it feels like a suspiciously surreal false sunny dawn before things got really dark.