President Romana has been missing for twenty years, the Daleks invade Gallifrey and there’s nothing the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn can do about it.
President Romana has been missing for twenty years, the Daleks invade Gallifrey and there’s nothing the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn can do about it.
THE APOCALYPSE ELEMENT
Despite the traditional nature of most of the first series of BF audios, none, save The Sirens of Time, came across as “fannish” in concept — but the eleventh release would change all that, as Stephen Cole’s The Apocalypse Element featured not only the return of Romana to the series but also a Dalek invasion of Gallifrey. Unfortunately, the simple fact that such a scenario took place seems like enough for many reviewers to condemn The Apocalypse Element, but, despite some utterly ludicrous plot elements, it stands up well enough on its own as an enjoyable action blockbuster.
Unfortunately, The Apocalypse Element attempts to do far too much in terms of its plot. The opening episodes which take place on Archetryx stand up very well, conveying a sense of impending doom, but by the time the action moves to Gallifrey, things have simply gotten out of hand. In order to allow the Daleks onto Gallifrey, Cole is forced to make the Time Lords behave in exceptionally stupid fashion, something which Vansell’s ambition really doesn’t justify. The Dalek plan, in ultimate form, is just silly, requiring them to touch off the destruction of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE in order to convince the Time Lords to open their shields to stop it. Isn’t there a better way to accomplish that? In my opinion, any plan which threatens the entire universe is idiotic, as it’s very difficult to write something which convincingly offers such a threat and it’s also very difficult to come with a race insane enough to actually threaten it. Even the Daleks aren’t that insane, as we see them scrambling to stop the effect once they see that the Time Lords failing to act in time.
The pace of the play, however, allows the listener to overlook some of the failings of the plot. There is very little obvious padding, as the plot is so complicated that it encompasses 137 minutes. It seems that a new revelation is brought to the listener’s ear every five minutes or so, revelations which only become ludicrous when taken as a whole rather than one at a time. The use of continuity, meanwhile, is entertaining, as we see many of the same Time Lords seen in The Sirens of Time while Romana is established as the Lord President and left to continue in that regard at the play’s conclusion. There’s nothing unwelcome about the use of continuity here — compare to Sirens, where every Gallifreyan word seemingly in existence was thrown at us in the opening scene. The retcon of the TV movie might qualify as an unnecessary inclusion, but to my mind, given the stupidity of that production, any attempt to explain it away is a good one.
Colin Baker’s role in this play matches perfectly with its tone. His Doctor is allowed to retake much of his old bombast, as the situations call for a dramatic, angry Doctor — instead of his anger being directed at Peri, it’s directed at the Daleks and the threat they pose to the entire universe. His angry speech to Evelyn in the face of her sarcasm is brilliant as well — this is a Doctor who, through this point in BF, hasn’t had anything even approaching a poor performance.
Evelyn Smythe, however, does much less well, as her character is reduced to little more than a series of wisecracks as a talking, mobile door opener. She takes everything here a bit too much in stride, as she sees arguably much worse here than that which reduced her to a tired wreck in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor. I can see from here where the dislike some hold for the character arises — her comments that bring about Baker’s speech are completely unwarranted and mostly unbelievable. This is not to say that Maggie Stables performs poorly, but Cole would do well to remember that Evelyn is more than an elderly Benny with a chocolate fetish.
The Apocalypse Element marks the return of Lalla Ward to Doctor Who. The Inside Story tells us of how Cole originally intended to write Romana in more of her cheery, season 17 persona, but was reminded that twenty years in a Dalek prison camp tends to grind one down somewhat. Unfortunately, he decided to push things in the extreme opposite direction: Romana spends the entire play sounding morose and out of breath, whining and crying her way through endless linkups with the Dalek mental network. She sounds neither familiar nor presidential, giving a commanding tone only when pretending to sell out the Doctor. Lalla Ward plays this character very well — and, indeed, I’ll grant that it may be a realistic portrayal — but this had to be disappointing to anyone expecting to see the character as remembered.
The supporting cast is decent, with Michael Wade’s President probably turning in the best performance. Anthony Keetch is slimy as ever as Vansell, and Karen Henson is good as Trinkett — but who decided to name the character Trinkett? Hilarious, and not in a good way. Nicholas Briggs’ sound design is, in a word, loud. I’m not sure I even noticed the score over the endless explosions and screaming, but it was probably good. Briggs does a better job with his actors than he did in The Genocide Machine — there’s hardly a poor performance on display.
Loud, brash, and incoherent, The Apocalypse Element is Big Finish’s version of a summer blockbuster. As with most summer blockbusters, it’s not the most intelligent thing in the world but it’s enjoyable if you switch off your brain at the door. Quite why this has been abused in fan circles is beyond me; there’s certainly nothing offensively bad about it.
6/10
“Knowledge like this, can blow your twisted, filthy little minds.”
The chief problem with The Apocalypse Element is, of course that it seems written for television rather than audio. In many ways it feels like it could have been a pilot for a rebooted series, if they were going to make a Doctor Who revival more suited towards the Babylon 5 sci-fi model, with the main players established immediately, and lots of action spectacle to hook the newcomers. Some of the action has a real visceral power, such as the scenes in the gravity wells with the flying Dalek mutants. But overall it’s a long way from mastering how to make action scenes work on audio, and certainly bites off more excesses than it can chew.
It’s a noisy listening experience, incomprehensibly so in places which diminishes the vividness they were going for, but it in many ways it does a far better job of rebooting the Daleks than The Genocide Machine did. Genesis of the Daleks was always the benchmark for the Dalek renaissance and opened up avenues that were since neglected as the Dalek stories degenerated into a repetitive soap opera of the Daleks being undone by constant infighting and an overbearing bore of a dad. Here it’s all about immediately getting to where Genesis should have gone next. The Daleks are here as we always imagined them to be, a race of invincible conquerors systematically decimating every world in their path towards Gallifrey. Genesis had seen the Time Lords trying to retroactively destroy the Daleks. This was the Daleks striking back, and the Doctor helpless against them, just like he was helpless to prevent their birthing.
Apart from the odd overearnest attempt to blow its own trumpet as a Dalek renaissance, such as the Black Dalek’s rather blatant line ‘we have manipulated you all’, the Daleks here are never less than at their most evil, (at least outside their own spin-off) and Nicholas Briggs is clearly relishing every moment of Dalek spite, which makes the story’s concept work so well. A device that can ignite the fabric of space and create an inferno that can consume entire galaxies may be just another latest doomsday weapon that the Daleks are planning to use, but here the story really makes that James Bond-style absurdity deeply frightening, of such a devastating weapon being in the hands of unrelenting metal psychopaths. The horror comes from the fact that the Daleks aren’t bluffing! As with the eventual Dalek Empire spin-off, its not the exterminations and massacres that make the Daleks frightening, it’s the outstanding scenes of screen to screen communications with the distinctively nasty lead Dalek letting you know just how deep they’ll stick the knife in, which leave you in no doubt of their relentless, unswayable evil and that they’ll never stop being what they are and that they’ll go to any lengths or lows to get what they want.
With the Daleks being this unerringly evil and psychotic, the presence of the ruthless black sheep of Doctors is most appropriate, or should be. When the Daleks spy the Tardis in the vortex, it’s a beautifully hopeful moment, on par with the Tardis first landing on the loathsome Varos, sending a clear message to the bad guys that they’re in for a major ass-kicking. But ultimately it doesn’t quite happen that way. The Doctor doesn’t really get to do the damage to the enemy that we want him to, and if anything the Dalek invasion is defeated in a cop-out as the whole invasion force willingly self destructs. For some listeners this cop-out was a really sore point given the excessive violence that preceeded the conclusion, and how this anticlimax rendered the violence pointless and gratuitous. However there’s very little of the violence that isn’t justified in narrative terms. Even in the infamous eye-removal scene, the Daleks are doing it as a means to an end as opposed to Battlestar Pedantica’s more pointless and sadistic eye-gouging of poor Conoel Tigh (typical of the show’s sensationalism).
It’s also elevated by its sense of heroism. Colin really gives it his all here, pulling off one of his more intense performances as the Doctor. His raw fury at the Dalek Supreme is a great punch the air moment, but likewise his musing horror at the invasion of his homeworld is quietly powerful. Indeed such quiet pondering scenes, the calm at the centre of the storm as it were, are what makes The Apocalypse Element work at all, amidst its excess noisy action. Lalla Ward as Romana works wonderfully in her return as companion, making it clear just how short sighted John Nathan Turner was back in 1981 when he had her replaced with Adric. However as the situation gets grim, Evelyn should be the needed levity and light relief for the story, but instead she’s simply annoying and always gets in the way, and gets given the worst dialogue ever in any context, least of all this one. One can only sympathise with the Doctor’s irritation with her. Indeed the story is very much plagued by one note, one dimensional characters who never change from situation to situation, in a manner that usually hurts the credibility of the drama. But just this once it works in the story’s favour and generates real dramatic friction in showing Time Lords at their most pompous and lethargic and the Daleks at their most base and unrelenting. It’s just a shame Evelyn only manages to be a stubborn cog in the machine.
In some ways this is an exercise in revisiting Logopolis, except with Daleks as the principle villains. In that regard it is more fitting since the Daleks’ unchanging nature bears a better poetic link with the concept of entropy. It also shows a Doctor who’s truly fallible, without making him criminally negligent or detestable in the way Eric Saward used to. The fact that his first concern is chiefly to his home planet and his friends, even whilst a whole galaxy is burning shows a rather selfish side to him, but in a manner that’s beautifully human too. The kind of humanness and fallibility that always made Doctor Who a cut above the more clinically done and cynical sci-fi shows. His final words on the horrors that have happened are oddly optimistic in a way that somehow wins over the listener, as if the Doctor has become a stoic, beautiful symbol of endurance and hope, despite his failures. A bleak story like this needs that kind of charm and hope (again something that mid-80’s Doctor Who sorely lacked).
Indeed the actual legend of Seraphia was based on the endurance and hope of a Christian woman who’s faith protected her from the flames when she was sentenced to be burned, which are of course themes that will become prominent in the Dalek Empire series. The Doctor’s ultimate failure to prevent the Daleks destroying the Seriphia Galaxy is a brilliant upping of the stakes concerning the Daleks, one that somehow seemed inevitable all along. The Daleks seem like they could win every time now (Journey’s End was all it took to undo that). Infact the attrocities that the Daleks commit in this story makes the Doctor’s controversial actions in Remembrance of the Daleks suddenly seem severely provoked and justified, which was perhaps the author’s intention.
Whilst the horrors of Logopolis got undone by the worst ultimate collective character reset switch, Big Finish will actually take this idea of an almost demonically violated and transformed evil neighbouring galaxy and expand on its sense of cosmic horror and hellspawn in the Dalek Empire series. Not to mention the creepy paranoia angle of the Dalek duplicates.
It’s afflicted by hackneyed sci-fi dialogue, but the energy and pace of it all compensates for it, in not letting you pause long enough to cringe. Basically as a piece of controlled chaos, it’s remarkable how serendipitously it all cancels its own faults out, and manages to launch two spin-offs in the bargain.