The Sixth Doctor and Mel must prevent Davros from unleashing a new threat even more powerful than the Daleks.
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Styre
on May 8, 2016 at 12:24 AM
THE JUGGERNAUTS
So, a Doctor Who play that puts Davros in a corporate/scientific setting, earning the trust of those there, and arguing to the Doctor that he’s turned over a new leaf. Have I accidentally decided to review Lance Parkin’s sublime Davros a second time? Nope, it’s Scott Alan Woodard’s The Juggernauts, a play which, despite its high aims, doesn’t really provide anything new or interesting to the listener.
I have to question the motive behind this play. Apparently the decision to include the sixth Doctor, Mel, Davros, the Daleks, the Mechanoids, and an explanation of how Davros got from Revelation to Remembrance was made before a writer was even selected — isn’t this the sort of self-indulgent nonsense which built John Nathan-Turner’s “stellar” reputation within fandom? There is no need for the Mechanoids in this play, especially not in the way that they’re handled. If, for example, they had been called “Juggernauts” throughout, recognizable as Mechanoids only to those fans that had seen The Chase, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Think the Cyberman head at the start of Dalek. However, the script goes out of its way to show that the Doctor and the Daleks have met the Mechanoids before, but Davros hasn’t — and then this knowledge isn’t used to advance the plot. Some find this entertaining; I find it irritating.
Furthermore, the plot doesn’t make a great deal of sense. There’s nothing stopping the Daleks from invading Lethe, yet they shanghai the Doctor into doing their work for them — even though one of their other goals is to gain the secret of TARDIS travel from his brain. This is a far-future society — how has Mel gone from what must have been total ignorance to the role of lead programmer in three months? There are, however, fine scenes — the beginning, for example, plunges the listener straight into the action, something which Doctor Who doesn’t do very often. Many of the Davros-being-evil scenes are downright chilling, while others don’t ring true, but overall the character is handled well.
Despite this play taking place well into Mel’s tenure with the Doctor, here we see Colin Baker being asked to assume the mantle of his season 22 performance: spiky, sarcastic, and irritable. Though this leads to many funny scenes, the Doctor shows absolutely no respect for the Daleks, openly defying them and inviting his own death. Indeed, his initial conversation with the Black Dalek could have been reproduced from a million other Doctor Who stories, obvious as it is. Baker’s performance is solid, of course, but there’s virtually no depth to his character, something which is at odds with the Big Finish portrayals we’re used to.
Perhaps the most popular aspect of The Juggernauts is its portrayal of Mel: as Woodard actually tries to give her a personality, we’re allowed rare insight into her thought processes. However, this portrayal is inconsistent at best. Despite being separated for three months, she shows absolutely no sign of distancing or separation from the Doctor. Her relationship with Geoff is touching at times but just confusing at others. Her trust in Davros is shattered, but her extreme reaction just rings hollow because there hasn’t been nearly enough time spent building that relationship. An obvious course would have been to set her against the Doctor, but this never happens. And the scenes with the Doctor in which she almost breaks down are too close to those with Evelyn — rather than a new exploration of a previously shallow character, this seems hollow and rings untrue.
Terry Molloy’s Davros is as manipulative as ever, seen here using implants to trick the perceptions of those around him into thinking that he’s actually a nice old man. Much of Woodard’s characterization of Davros is excellent: this is a great ironic juxtaposition against Remembrance of the Daleks, as here Davros is desperate to retain his remaining humanity while exterminating the Daleks. And Molloy’s performance is excellent: he’s ruthless when necessary, but there’s a detectable resentment in his voice when he speaks of the Daleks. Though this isn’t as strong a script as that used for “Davros,” it still does more with the character than all three of Molloy’s television scripts put together.
The rest of the supporting cast is forgettable. Klaus White is very good as Geoff, but the character is inconsistent at best. Paul Grunert goes way over the top as Brauer as well. Not much to say about the other actors, but what on earth happened to Nicholas Briggs’ Dalek voices? Those heard in the Doctor’s initial confrontation are almost comical — fortunately he redeems himself with the broken Daleks from later episodes.
Thumbs up to Gary Russell’s direction, which uses some effective crosscutting and fades Molloy’s Davros voice in and out to excellent effect. Unfortunately, much of the last episode is full of running around and explosions, things which don’t really work on audio, but despite this the direction is solid. Steve Foxon’s sound design is excellent — he does a wonderful job with the Mechanoids — and the score is subtle in places and dominant in others, remaining effective throughout.
Overall, The Juggernauts is something of a disappointment. It’s an average play, but given its ingredients something greater was expected. Woodard’s script has ups and downs, but he shows great promise for future efforts. Still, this is inconsistent. For every great moment of insight, there’s a poor attempt at characterization. For every effective plot twist, there’s a massive plot hole around the next corner. It’s worth owning if you really like Daleks, but otherwise, take it or leave it.
“Juggernauts, Doctor. The name has been copyrighted!”
The Juggernauts is essentially Big Finish’s Greatest Hits. It’s a sequel to Davros that certainly suffers from sequelitis. Infact it’s a carbon copy of Davros, right down to the Bejeweled-style space age music score and Davros’ crocodile tears of faux guilt, but done with a more populist lean, taking out the talky monologue approach and replacing it with more elaborate, actioneering scenes and bringing the Daleks and Mechanoids to the party to spark fireworks. It’s basically a second, more polished go at the full-blown cinematic fanwank of The Apocalypse Element, and in that it’s more successful. Whilst Davros was mainly about ambience and reminiscence, this is altogether a more immediate and visceral beast.
Cinematic is perhaps the key word here. Colin Baker often spoke about doing American conventions leading up to the cancellation crisis, and how various TV network heads asked Colin if when he got back to Britain, he could maybe persuade the BBC to increase their run of episodes because there was a demand amongst American viewers for more Doctor Who. John Nathan Turner’s excessive promotion of the show was a double edged sword that the show ultimately fell onto, as the media tabloids that JNT believed he was so savvy with, predictably built up the show and then knocked it down. But making mid-80’s Doctor Who into something sellable to the Americans, given that it already had an American companion, and a more domineering, violent and retributive Doctor who was more in the mould of 80’s American TV heroes, could have held much promise. If America had bought the series there and then, and given it a decent budget, the show probably would have survived the 80’s and the Sixth Doctor would have gotten the chance to complete his journey, unstripping and mellowing the character as he’d hoped to do, and the members of rec.arts.drwho would have not had the ‘atrocious’ McCoy era to bitch about (more on this later).
In many ways this feels like wish fulfilment of what such an American 80’s take on the series would be like, with a beautiful idyllic colony world setting and credible corporate sci-fi environment that sounds like it looks like a million bucks (if that makes sense). It’s also got something of a frat party feel to its guest cast, which makes us wish for a world where 80’s Doctor Who actually got the youth element right. The teenage audience would much rather see the female companion be lusted after by some confident young hunk like Geoff, than slimy, balding creeps like Jobel. And to top it off, Davros gets his comeuppance early into his character journey, which really makes this feel like American television at its most gratifyingly retributive.
It doesn’t fair too badly as a sequel to Davros and manages to avoid being one long excuse for itself, but put all the Davros audio stories together and it’s the one that has the least intrigue or surprises to offer. It does also rather repeat some of the minor faults of the original Davros audio. Again it feels rather too knowing and as though the cast has already watched Remembrance of the Daleks before it’s meant to have happened. A nitpicky point but the Doctor describes the Daleks that are hunting for Davros as the ‘renegade faction’, even though Davros doesn’t yet have the imperial authority over the Daleks for them to even be called ‘renegade’. Furthermore Krisen’s death isn’t really justified beyond the fact that the bad guy has to kill someone to remind us he’s the bad guy and to demonstrate how dangerous the Mechanoids are, so it might as well be Krisen, even though Davros’ reasons for killing him are unusually petty even for him, and it requires the spineless Krisen to be uncharacteristically defiant and unruly in order to provoke Davros to do it.
That aside though it manages for the most part to avoid the mistake most sequels make (particularly in Doctor Who) of having established characters inexplicably changed and forced to act upon false or contrived motives. It never really feels insincere as a story. I’d highlighted before how the final moments of Davros seem to show the Doctor making an unspoken promise to destroy Davros the next time they encounter each other, and how the Doctor’s actions in The Juggernauts rather invalidate that, but since it was open to interpretation in the first place it hardly qualifies as a retcon, let alone an offensive one.
As with Davros’ previous audio outing, it places our villain in a corporate environment and displays just how well he fits in there with the other yuppie scum and narcissistic personality disorder types. For all that it felt unpleasant and wrong in Season 22 to see Peri being constantly lusted after, given the show’s increasing awareness of how corporate the world was becoming in the 80’s in stories like Vengeance on Varos and Revelation of the Daleks, perhaps the treatment of Peri was a fair reflection of that corporate, all-commodifying world where unfortunately such sexual harassment and abuse of power were depressingly common.
Davros is therefore just another workplace bully, namely the Jekyll and Hyde type bully who wears a mask of politeness but exploits and intimidates his co-workers whenever he has the opportunity to drop his guise. As with the political backbiting in the Gallifrey spin-off, only a fan writer who’s seen the elitist, business minded side to Doctor Who fandom could appreciate and capture so faithfully such a backstabbing and spiteful villain with such authenticity.
To make the metaphor more concrete, Davros adopts the moniker of Vaso to be his affable Jekyll side. Terry Molloy manages to make Vaso a character in his own right, like the witty and warm eccentric old University lecturer that was everyone’s favourite teacher and who we all wanted as a grandfather. And that’s the tragic beauty of the act, since we want the character to be real, just like the characters in this story want to see Vaso as the true side to Davros.
In many ways this does a far more credible job of showing how manipulative the Skarosian villain can be in winning the hearts and minds of the masses, than Dalek Empire III did. But essentially Doctor Who’s best monsters and villains define how villainy and evil intentions can be somehow shielded or masked, whether by a Dalek’s shell of armour, or the Master’s caddish charms or the Auton’s deceptive appearance as shop mannequins. That’s rather why Resurrection of the Daleks and The Two Doctors get such a bad rap from fandom for their unsubtle presentation of surface level nastiness, typical of the scab picking exploitation cinema (a la I Spit on your Grave) and any of the more gonzo style ultraviolent 80’s movies. By contrast this is closer to the more interesting and layered David Cronenberg, Aliens or Robocop notion of body horror in a corporate setting, of the sight of blood and organs placed incongruously inside a cleaning robot in a gleaming cream white office hub.
Actually for all that this may be Davros’ most mediocre entry in the audios, it’s still far more inspired than nearly all of Davros’ TV appearances sans Genesis of the Daleks, infact in terms of clever ideas it completely knocks spots off The Stolen Earth. If there’s one thing that’s felt wrong with the Davros saga, ever since Destiny of the Daleks, its how quickly the writers seem to have forgotten that in Davros’ last moments before being blasted in Genesis of the Daleks, he was actually about to destroy the Dalek project completely in a fit of disillusionment (though as character assassinations go, that is forgivable compared to what Season 21 did to the Doctor). The Juggernauts then is the belated follow-up of that character turn, where Davros regains that sense of purpose and in all sincerity proposes to use the Mechanoids to eradicate his own creations. To be honest, giving Davros something new to utilise in the Mechanoids is a particularly sad missed opportunity for the series.
Having said that, the Mechanoids never quite rise above being an item on a shopping list. The story tries to sell them as a potential intergalactic force to rival the Daleks but it never really happens, as it’s hard to imagine them in anything other than the domestic context they’re presented. In other words they’re simply there to do what’s required by the shopping list brief and they never really threaten to do anything more or expand beyond that. Nothing really subversive is done with them. More importantly the Doctor’s moral outrage over their fusion of machines and bodily organs achieves little except making Davros sound comparatively like nothing less than the voice of reason, and the story doesn’t do enough to justify the Doctor’s position of sabotaging something that could represent a solution to the Dalek menace. The Doctor protests how life is imprisoned and enslaved within the Mechanoids, but the story never really conveys this.
The inclusion of shopping list items almost always dwarf the story in such a way that the Doctor doesn’t get to come off well, and he is particularly ineffectual here, reduced to being pretty much everyone’s pawn and forcing Mel to fill the hero’s shoes for him. As highlighted above, the Sixth Doctor could potentially have become science fiction’s answer to the Equalizer, if only he was freed from the creative control of Eric Saward and John Nathan Turner who seemed determined to make sure the character could do no right. Instead the Doctor here is the usual ineffectual passive figure, but rather more matured and pensive and self-assured about his approach and his place in the grand scheme of things. It’s like revisiting the schizophrenic despot that JNT and Saward reduced the character to and having to count it as a victory that some twenty years on, the character finally gets who he is and what his purpose is. As with Davros, the ineffectual presentation of the Doctor is somewhat justified by presenting him in an omnipotent God-like manner. His divine intervention is slight because he believes in free will and in never taking life, and in not upsetting greater causality.
There’s a wonderfully haunting moment where Davros asks the Doctor if he’s witnessed a future where the Daleks are destroyed forever, which the Doctor doesn’t answer- a subtle hint that the Doctor always knew the outcome of the Time War perhaps? The basic idea is that the Doctor does little in the story because he places his faith in the journey of fate and natural come-uppance, and in the better angels of the humans around him.
Since the aim of a greatest hits package is to be as agreeable as possible, then The Juggernauts is morally speaking a halfway house between Jubilee and Flip-Flop. Flip-Flop was about whether political correctness has gone too far and The Juggernauts wanders into similar waters, even though it avoids the ‘rivers of blood’ territory. We all have different views and agendas as to why, whether it’s down to political correctness, nanny state, or simply the way that our modern society is defined by self-involvement and an emphasis on womanly virtues of sanitisation and empathy, but the fact is that modern society is made up of the most spoilt masses, and in our ‘me, me, me’ society based on an insatiable sense of entitlement, it seems it’s never been easier for the nastiest, most manipulative bullies and predators to get a long way ahead and gain a hold over people, simply by playing the victim. The recent episode Midnight (which was Russell T. Davies’ most intelligent script for the series) also highlighted this.
Doctor Who’s values can be attributed to left-wing ideals, tolerance and empathy, and occasionally it’s wandered into the trash of such ideologies but at its core Doctor Who was always crucially about personal moral responsibility, and this story is applying that value to attack a modern age that’s based on selfish hedonism and irresponsibility.
Davros is the perfect villain who takes no responsibility for his actions as he indulges in self-pity and blames the Doctor for everything. Ideally speaking, the Sixth Doctor’s journey has perhaps always been leading up to this. This Doctor has been successfully redeemed and rehabilitated, but because he started life as the monstrous figure in The Twin Dilemma, he knows better than anyone when other people’s claims of guilt, victimhood or redemption are insincere, and he knows all about how the minds of self-pitying bullies work because he once was one himself.
This story balances the depressing realism of the modern world and the optimism of the show. The Doctor is out of his depth since everyone else sees Davros simply as a crippled innocent victim. Even Mel has been got to, and the Doctor can’t convince her to see Davros for what he really is, in much the same way that we often have to respect the right of our close friends to associate with the most loathsome people if they so choose to be friends with them, and just hope that they learn the hard way.
So the Doctor has to play the waiting game, to see if Davros ever gets careless and shows his true colours, or gets his come-uppance, but the Doctor’s faith in natural justice and how Davros’ black and cyclical nature makes his exposure and deathly demise self-fulfilling and inevitable is eventually rewarded. And so to press home the theme of responsibility, the Doctor refuses to be instrumental in Davros’ death, when he’d have a much cleaner conscience by letting fate deliver the inevitable killing blow. So whilst this story renders the Doctor ineffectual, it makes him seem more dignified for it, the perfect restrained gentleman and stoic moral model.
Maybe this is an unjust world where the villains do go unaccountable and get undue privilege and adulation, but resorting to violence and brutality only weakens the hero’s position. As Full Fathom Five demonstrated, if the Doctor were to commit violence against the enemy, it would instantly alienate and betray the trust of those around him and leave him without a leg to stand on, particularly since Davros holds most of the cards of trust, victimhood and sympathy here. But of course the divide between the Doctor and Mel isn’t so easily resolved, and infact this story ultimately becomes a counterweight to Full Fathom Five in which it’s the Doctor’s pascifism and mercy that horrifies and alienates his companion.
As I said above, the main characters manage to stay true to their basic founding principles. That’s quite an achievement when homageing a TV era that cared little for consistent characterisation and certainly wasn’t below forcing contrived actions and insincere motivations onto said characters. But this is a story that’s all about conscience, and about how beneath all the shades of grey of a person, there is a true dominating personality trait that firmly decides whether they’re fundamentally good or bad.
This is a strong entry for Mel- she’s still the TV companion we remember, who’s thankfully toned down and more seasoned, but still has the spontanaeity and enthusiasm of being the first 80’s companion who seemed to actually like travelling with the Doctor. Certain reminders of her appearances in Childrens’ TV manage to be wonderfully charming against such a dark backdrop, such as her leaving a music box on the Dalek ship or her christening of the Mechanoids as Sooty, Sweep and Sue. This story takes Mel into rather dark territory, but revealing a firey, vengeful side to the brash redhead is fairly in character. It takes the scene in Terror of the Vervoids where Mel is angry and horrified by both the Vervoid’s body mounds and by the Doctor’s rather warped empathising with the killer Vervoids, and expands on that rift between the intelligent man of peace who sees too much complexity and consequences to ever be able to act in good conscience, and the angry compassionate woman who can’t understand why the Doctor doesn’t just destroy Davros and the Daleks to prevent any more innocent deaths.
In other words Mel’s ultimate actions as executioner are made plausible by getting us completely behind her, emotionally. But of course once she does the vengeful deed, she realises she wasn’t prepared to live with the consequences of taking a life, and the guilt is immediately overwhelming and she finally realises why the Doctor holds the principles he does, and that she will have to live with what she’s done forever. Again this emphasises the theme of responsibility. It’s made all the more poignant by being the sour ending to three months of what looked to be an idyllic life for Mel amidst new friends and new possibilities, and her budding romance with Geoff, and there’s something genuinely tearful about her goodbye to Sonali, having to leave behind that now tainted life.
So inevitably we must address the question of how Davros is meant to survive this particularly nasty fate. Well maybe it was another clone decoy as in Revelation of the Daleks, or the Daleks managed to transmat Davros’s head to safety at the last moment, or maybe Davros had some other elaborate escape plan. We don’t get any explanation for how Davros survived and how he’s meant to be able to return for Remembrance of the Daleks, but then again it fits with the TV Colin Baker era’s unreliable grasp on continuity, where the Master could return unscratched from being burned to a crisp in Planet of Fire without any explanation (although the audio story Master finds a rather inspired and succinct way to explain away every time the bearded one returned from the grave), or where the Doctor could leave the Trial with Mel, even though he hasn’t met her yet. It also fits with the ruthlessly retributive ethos of its era, so maybe continuity had to be put aside to make sure Davros got what he deserved at the end. The fact is that Davros’ death here is so harrowing and disturbing and manages to finally tug sympathy for the evil scientist and press home why the Doctor could never do something like this, that it’s a shame it couldn’t be the real end for the character as a sharp and horrifying symbol of why the show’s values of non-violence and compassion matter.
For some listeners this may be wish fulfilment of contradicting Remembrance of the Daleks and thus disavowing the McCoy era from the canon, and setting up the Sixth Doctor audios as what we should have got instead after Trial of a Time Lord. For Doctor Who to have remained an adult, hard sci-fi show with a credible bold, cinematic and futuristic feel, rather than a magic based children’s pantomime show filmed on crude video. For the show to have built on Revelation of the Daleks (to many McCoy-bashers, Revelation was the last time the classic show was ‘cool’), in all its corporate satire, gruesome glory, right down to the tasteless innuendo of Geoff instantly recognising a woman’s headless body as one of his past conquests. For Davros to have suffered a different ultimate fate, allowing the Daleks to take centre stage, for Skaro to have not been blown up, for the Sixth Dctor to get his chance at redemption, and for Mel’s character to have been taken in a darker, edgier direction, that would be unsustainable in Season 24.
Personally we would always defend Remembrance of the Daleks as bringing a real renaissance to the show, and one 80’s story that John Nathan Turner should be proud to have his name on. But this can’t really be proved as an overt trashing of Remembrance, and even if it is, it’s hardly as obnoxious or snidey as War of the Daleks. But all this is immaterial, since as much as The Juggernauts is probably a fugue and a spanner in the canon, it’s really been too easily forgotten as a story to give anyone sleepless nights, unfortunately.
If The Juggernauts is less successful than the rest of the Davros audios, it’s mainly because it’s essentially a character piece- one that addresses the self-involved modern world but does so by becoming part of its media. Unlike the other Davros audios, it doesn’t really do anything monumental with the character of Davros, it’s never really building personal ambitions into something that really threatens to overthrow life as we know it or bring empires to rise or ruin. As such it never really feels like an ‘event’ story. Essentially this is just a futuristic soap opera with a new girl to the colony becoming a high flyer and developing sparks of romance, and the evil business tycoon plotting to ruin a rival company whilst an old enemy arrives to expose his dirty past. The Daleks and Mechanoids are really just there on sufferance to fill the action quota. This is of course exactly how American sci-fi would have done Doctor Who.
But on those terms it’s hard to fault. It is at least a soap opera we’d like to watch because it’s firmly in line with the right ideals about what’s wrong with our society, and because the characters are irrepressibly appealing strong personalities (even the initially annoying Geoff gets under the listener’s skin with his persistence eventually), and Bonnie Langford as Mel is perfectly in her element and given a real opportunity to show how good she could be. We all wish Mel had been given a story and performance like this in the TV years.
Another reason why this story perhaps makes little impact is that despite Big Finish’ initial best intentions when it comes to the Daleks, this actually is a Dalek story where Davros’ presence demeans the Daleks. Even though the effort has been made to keep the Daleks and Davros largely separated, it has to be said that this particular squad of Daleks sent to capture Davros must comprise of their most useless members, and it seems ridiculous that they should even need the Doctor to go in as their agent, let alone wait so long to act when they could have stormed the colony any time and destroyed the Mechanoid program long before it even reached prototype stage. And it has to be said that the Doctor and Mel’s final escape into an unguarded Tardis is rather too easy.
But overall the inept Daleks can perhaps be excused as being a faithful homage to the era at hand. Furthermore, Geoff’s heroic one man fight with the battered Daleks to save the rest of the colonists fares far better and is actually a great punch the air, poignant sequence that’s in tune with the story’s optimism and theme of better angels. Standing as a vital, affirming presentation of the human capacity for brave nobility in times of evil.
The final verdict on The Juggernauts is that it’s satisfying if not monumental, it’s somewhat indulgent but enjoyably so, and any routine academic tick boxing is made up for by the spontanaeity that the characters bring to the story, and indeed it shows the TV characters at their best and gives them some brief, treasurable moments that would make any fan proud.
THE JUGGERNAUTS
So, a Doctor Who play that puts Davros in a corporate/scientific setting, earning the trust of those there, and arguing to the Doctor that he’s turned over a new leaf. Have I accidentally decided to review Lance Parkin’s sublime Davros a second time? Nope, it’s Scott Alan Woodard’s The Juggernauts, a play which, despite its high aims, doesn’t really provide anything new or interesting to the listener.
I have to question the motive behind this play. Apparently the decision to include the sixth Doctor, Mel, Davros, the Daleks, the Mechanoids, and an explanation of how Davros got from Revelation to Remembrance was made before a writer was even selected — isn’t this the sort of self-indulgent nonsense which built John Nathan-Turner’s “stellar” reputation within fandom? There is no need for the Mechanoids in this play, especially not in the way that they’re handled. If, for example, they had been called “Juggernauts” throughout, recognizable as Mechanoids only to those fans that had seen The Chase, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Think the Cyberman head at the start of Dalek. However, the script goes out of its way to show that the Doctor and the Daleks have met the Mechanoids before, but Davros hasn’t — and then this knowledge isn’t used to advance the plot. Some find this entertaining; I find it irritating.
Furthermore, the plot doesn’t make a great deal of sense. There’s nothing stopping the Daleks from invading Lethe, yet they shanghai the Doctor into doing their work for them — even though one of their other goals is to gain the secret of TARDIS travel from his brain. This is a far-future society — how has Mel gone from what must have been total ignorance to the role of lead programmer in three months? There are, however, fine scenes — the beginning, for example, plunges the listener straight into the action, something which Doctor Who doesn’t do very often. Many of the Davros-being-evil scenes are downright chilling, while others don’t ring true, but overall the character is handled well.
Despite this play taking place well into Mel’s tenure with the Doctor, here we see Colin Baker being asked to assume the mantle of his season 22 performance: spiky, sarcastic, and irritable. Though this leads to many funny scenes, the Doctor shows absolutely no respect for the Daleks, openly defying them and inviting his own death. Indeed, his initial conversation with the Black Dalek could have been reproduced from a million other Doctor Who stories, obvious as it is. Baker’s performance is solid, of course, but there’s virtually no depth to his character, something which is at odds with the Big Finish portrayals we’re used to.
Perhaps the most popular aspect of The Juggernauts is its portrayal of Mel: as Woodard actually tries to give her a personality, we’re allowed rare insight into her thought processes. However, this portrayal is inconsistent at best. Despite being separated for three months, she shows absolutely no sign of distancing or separation from the Doctor. Her relationship with Geoff is touching at times but just confusing at others. Her trust in Davros is shattered, but her extreme reaction just rings hollow because there hasn’t been nearly enough time spent building that relationship. An obvious course would have been to set her against the Doctor, but this never happens. And the scenes with the Doctor in which she almost breaks down are too close to those with Evelyn — rather than a new exploration of a previously shallow character, this seems hollow and rings untrue.
Terry Molloy’s Davros is as manipulative as ever, seen here using implants to trick the perceptions of those around him into thinking that he’s actually a nice old man. Much of Woodard’s characterization of Davros is excellent: this is a great ironic juxtaposition against Remembrance of the Daleks, as here Davros is desperate to retain his remaining humanity while exterminating the Daleks. And Molloy’s performance is excellent: he’s ruthless when necessary, but there’s a detectable resentment in his voice when he speaks of the Daleks. Though this isn’t as strong a script as that used for “Davros,” it still does more with the character than all three of Molloy’s television scripts put together.
The rest of the supporting cast is forgettable. Klaus White is very good as Geoff, but the character is inconsistent at best. Paul Grunert goes way over the top as Brauer as well. Not much to say about the other actors, but what on earth happened to Nicholas Briggs’ Dalek voices? Those heard in the Doctor’s initial confrontation are almost comical — fortunately he redeems himself with the broken Daleks from later episodes.
Thumbs up to Gary Russell’s direction, which uses some effective crosscutting and fades Molloy’s Davros voice in and out to excellent effect. Unfortunately, much of the last episode is full of running around and explosions, things which don’t really work on audio, but despite this the direction is solid. Steve Foxon’s sound design is excellent — he does a wonderful job with the Mechanoids — and the score is subtle in places and dominant in others, remaining effective throughout.
Overall, The Juggernauts is something of a disappointment. It’s an average play, but given its ingredients something greater was expected. Woodard’s script has ups and downs, but he shows great promise for future efforts. Still, this is inconsistent. For every great moment of insight, there’s a poor attempt at characterization. For every effective plot twist, there’s a massive plot hole around the next corner. It’s worth owning if you really like Daleks, but otherwise, take it or leave it.
5/10
“Juggernauts, Doctor. The name has been copyrighted!”
The Juggernauts is essentially Big Finish’s Greatest Hits. It’s a sequel to Davros that certainly suffers from sequelitis. Infact it’s a carbon copy of Davros, right down to the Bejeweled-style space age music score and Davros’ crocodile tears of faux guilt, but done with a more populist lean, taking out the talky monologue approach and replacing it with more elaborate, actioneering scenes and bringing the Daleks and Mechanoids to the party to spark fireworks. It’s basically a second, more polished go at the full-blown cinematic fanwank of The Apocalypse Element, and in that it’s more successful. Whilst Davros was mainly about ambience and reminiscence, this is altogether a more immediate and visceral beast.
Cinematic is perhaps the key word here. Colin Baker often spoke about doing American conventions leading up to the cancellation crisis, and how various TV network heads asked Colin if when he got back to Britain, he could maybe persuade the BBC to increase their run of episodes because there was a demand amongst American viewers for more Doctor Who. John Nathan Turner’s excessive promotion of the show was a double edged sword that the show ultimately fell onto, as the media tabloids that JNT believed he was so savvy with, predictably built up the show and then knocked it down. But making mid-80’s Doctor Who into something sellable to the Americans, given that it already had an American companion, and a more domineering, violent and retributive Doctor who was more in the mould of 80’s American TV heroes, could have held much promise. If America had bought the series there and then, and given it a decent budget, the show probably would have survived the 80’s and the Sixth Doctor would have gotten the chance to complete his journey, unstripping and mellowing the character as he’d hoped to do, and the members of rec.arts.drwho would have not had the ‘atrocious’ McCoy era to bitch about (more on this later).
In many ways this feels like wish fulfilment of what such an American 80’s take on the series would be like, with a beautiful idyllic colony world setting and credible corporate sci-fi environment that sounds like it looks like a million bucks (if that makes sense). It’s also got something of a frat party feel to its guest cast, which makes us wish for a world where 80’s Doctor Who actually got the youth element right. The teenage audience would much rather see the female companion be lusted after by some confident young hunk like Geoff, than slimy, balding creeps like Jobel. And to top it off, Davros gets his comeuppance early into his character journey, which really makes this feel like American television at its most gratifyingly retributive.
It doesn’t fair too badly as a sequel to Davros and manages to avoid being one long excuse for itself, but put all the Davros audio stories together and it’s the one that has the least intrigue or surprises to offer. It does also rather repeat some of the minor faults of the original Davros audio. Again it feels rather too knowing and as though the cast has already watched Remembrance of the Daleks before it’s meant to have happened. A nitpicky point but the Doctor describes the Daleks that are hunting for Davros as the ‘renegade faction’, even though Davros doesn’t yet have the imperial authority over the Daleks for them to even be called ‘renegade’. Furthermore Krisen’s death isn’t really justified beyond the fact that the bad guy has to kill someone to remind us he’s the bad guy and to demonstrate how dangerous the Mechanoids are, so it might as well be Krisen, even though Davros’ reasons for killing him are unusually petty even for him, and it requires the spineless Krisen to be uncharacteristically defiant and unruly in order to provoke Davros to do it.
That aside though it manages for the most part to avoid the mistake most sequels make (particularly in Doctor Who) of having established characters inexplicably changed and forced to act upon false or contrived motives. It never really feels insincere as a story. I’d highlighted before how the final moments of Davros seem to show the Doctor making an unspoken promise to destroy Davros the next time they encounter each other, and how the Doctor’s actions in The Juggernauts rather invalidate that, but since it was open to interpretation in the first place it hardly qualifies as a retcon, let alone an offensive one.
As with Davros’ previous audio outing, it places our villain in a corporate environment and displays just how well he fits in there with the other yuppie scum and narcissistic personality disorder types. For all that it felt unpleasant and wrong in Season 22 to see Peri being constantly lusted after, given the show’s increasing awareness of how corporate the world was becoming in the 80’s in stories like Vengeance on Varos and Revelation of the Daleks, perhaps the treatment of Peri was a fair reflection of that corporate, all-commodifying world where unfortunately such sexual harassment and abuse of power were depressingly common.
Davros is therefore just another workplace bully, namely the Jekyll and Hyde type bully who wears a mask of politeness but exploits and intimidates his co-workers whenever he has the opportunity to drop his guise. As with the political backbiting in the Gallifrey spin-off, only a fan writer who’s seen the elitist, business minded side to Doctor Who fandom could appreciate and capture so faithfully such a backstabbing and spiteful villain with such authenticity.
To make the metaphor more concrete, Davros adopts the moniker of Vaso to be his affable Jekyll side. Terry Molloy manages to make Vaso a character in his own right, like the witty and warm eccentric old University lecturer that was everyone’s favourite teacher and who we all wanted as a grandfather. And that’s the tragic beauty of the act, since we want the character to be real, just like the characters in this story want to see Vaso as the true side to Davros.
In many ways this does a far more credible job of showing how manipulative the Skarosian villain can be in winning the hearts and minds of the masses, than Dalek Empire III did. But essentially Doctor Who’s best monsters and villains define how villainy and evil intentions can be somehow shielded or masked, whether by a Dalek’s shell of armour, or the Master’s caddish charms or the Auton’s deceptive appearance as shop mannequins. That’s rather why Resurrection of the Daleks and The Two Doctors get such a bad rap from fandom for their unsubtle presentation of surface level nastiness, typical of the scab picking exploitation cinema (a la I Spit on your Grave) and any of the more gonzo style ultraviolent 80’s movies. By contrast this is closer to the more interesting and layered David Cronenberg, Aliens or Robocop notion of body horror in a corporate setting, of the sight of blood and organs placed incongruously inside a cleaning robot in a gleaming cream white office hub.
Actually for all that this may be Davros’ most mediocre entry in the audios, it’s still far more inspired than nearly all of Davros’ TV appearances sans Genesis of the Daleks, infact in terms of clever ideas it completely knocks spots off The Stolen Earth. If there’s one thing that’s felt wrong with the Davros saga, ever since Destiny of the Daleks, its how quickly the writers seem to have forgotten that in Davros’ last moments before being blasted in Genesis of the Daleks, he was actually about to destroy the Dalek project completely in a fit of disillusionment (though as character assassinations go, that is forgivable compared to what Season 21 did to the Doctor). The Juggernauts then is the belated follow-up of that character turn, where Davros regains that sense of purpose and in all sincerity proposes to use the Mechanoids to eradicate his own creations. To be honest, giving Davros something new to utilise in the Mechanoids is a particularly sad missed opportunity for the series.
Having said that, the Mechanoids never quite rise above being an item on a shopping list. The story tries to sell them as a potential intergalactic force to rival the Daleks but it never really happens, as it’s hard to imagine them in anything other than the domestic context they’re presented. In other words they’re simply there to do what’s required by the shopping list brief and they never really threaten to do anything more or expand beyond that. Nothing really subversive is done with them. More importantly the Doctor’s moral outrage over their fusion of machines and bodily organs achieves little except making Davros sound comparatively like nothing less than the voice of reason, and the story doesn’t do enough to justify the Doctor’s position of sabotaging something that could represent a solution to the Dalek menace. The Doctor protests how life is imprisoned and enslaved within the Mechanoids, but the story never really conveys this.
The inclusion of shopping list items almost always dwarf the story in such a way that the Doctor doesn’t get to come off well, and he is particularly ineffectual here, reduced to being pretty much everyone’s pawn and forcing Mel to fill the hero’s shoes for him. As highlighted above, the Sixth Doctor could potentially have become science fiction’s answer to the Equalizer, if only he was freed from the creative control of Eric Saward and John Nathan Turner who seemed determined to make sure the character could do no right. Instead the Doctor here is the usual ineffectual passive figure, but rather more matured and pensive and self-assured about his approach and his place in the grand scheme of things. It’s like revisiting the schizophrenic despot that JNT and Saward reduced the character to and having to count it as a victory that some twenty years on, the character finally gets who he is and what his purpose is. As with Davros, the ineffectual presentation of the Doctor is somewhat justified by presenting him in an omnipotent God-like manner. His divine intervention is slight because he believes in free will and in never taking life, and in not upsetting greater causality.
There’s a wonderfully haunting moment where Davros asks the Doctor if he’s witnessed a future where the Daleks are destroyed forever, which the Doctor doesn’t answer- a subtle hint that the Doctor always knew the outcome of the Time War perhaps? The basic idea is that the Doctor does little in the story because he places his faith in the journey of fate and natural come-uppance, and in the better angels of the humans around him.
Since the aim of a greatest hits package is to be as agreeable as possible, then The Juggernauts is morally speaking a halfway house between Jubilee and Flip-Flop. Flip-Flop was about whether political correctness has gone too far and The Juggernauts wanders into similar waters, even though it avoids the ‘rivers of blood’ territory. We all have different views and agendas as to why, whether it’s down to political correctness, nanny state, or simply the way that our modern society is defined by self-involvement and an emphasis on womanly virtues of sanitisation and empathy, but the fact is that modern society is made up of the most spoilt masses, and in our ‘me, me, me’ society based on an insatiable sense of entitlement, it seems it’s never been easier for the nastiest, most manipulative bullies and predators to get a long way ahead and gain a hold over people, simply by playing the victim. The recent episode Midnight (which was Russell T. Davies’ most intelligent script for the series) also highlighted this.
Doctor Who’s values can be attributed to left-wing ideals, tolerance and empathy, and occasionally it’s wandered into the trash of such ideologies but at its core Doctor Who was always crucially about personal moral responsibility, and this story is applying that value to attack a modern age that’s based on selfish hedonism and irresponsibility.
Davros is the perfect villain who takes no responsibility for his actions as he indulges in self-pity and blames the Doctor for everything. Ideally speaking, the Sixth Doctor’s journey has perhaps always been leading up to this. This Doctor has been successfully redeemed and rehabilitated, but because he started life as the monstrous figure in The Twin Dilemma, he knows better than anyone when other people’s claims of guilt, victimhood or redemption are insincere, and he knows all about how the minds of self-pitying bullies work because he once was one himself.
This story balances the depressing realism of the modern world and the optimism of the show. The Doctor is out of his depth since everyone else sees Davros simply as a crippled innocent victim. Even Mel has been got to, and the Doctor can’t convince her to see Davros for what he really is, in much the same way that we often have to respect the right of our close friends to associate with the most loathsome people if they so choose to be friends with them, and just hope that they learn the hard way.
So the Doctor has to play the waiting game, to see if Davros ever gets careless and shows his true colours, or gets his come-uppance, but the Doctor’s faith in natural justice and how Davros’ black and cyclical nature makes his exposure and deathly demise self-fulfilling and inevitable is eventually rewarded. And so to press home the theme of responsibility, the Doctor refuses to be instrumental in Davros’ death, when he’d have a much cleaner conscience by letting fate deliver the inevitable killing blow. So whilst this story renders the Doctor ineffectual, it makes him seem more dignified for it, the perfect restrained gentleman and stoic moral model.
Maybe this is an unjust world where the villains do go unaccountable and get undue privilege and adulation, but resorting to violence and brutality only weakens the hero’s position. As Full Fathom Five demonstrated, if the Doctor were to commit violence against the enemy, it would instantly alienate and betray the trust of those around him and leave him without a leg to stand on, particularly since Davros holds most of the cards of trust, victimhood and sympathy here. But of course the divide between the Doctor and Mel isn’t so easily resolved, and infact this story ultimately becomes a counterweight to Full Fathom Five in which it’s the Doctor’s pascifism and mercy that horrifies and alienates his companion.
As I said above, the main characters manage to stay true to their basic founding principles. That’s quite an achievement when homageing a TV era that cared little for consistent characterisation and certainly wasn’t below forcing contrived actions and insincere motivations onto said characters. But this is a story that’s all about conscience, and about how beneath all the shades of grey of a person, there is a true dominating personality trait that firmly decides whether they’re fundamentally good or bad.
This is a strong entry for Mel- she’s still the TV companion we remember, who’s thankfully toned down and more seasoned, but still has the spontanaeity and enthusiasm of being the first 80’s companion who seemed to actually like travelling with the Doctor. Certain reminders of her appearances in Childrens’ TV manage to be wonderfully charming against such a dark backdrop, such as her leaving a music box on the Dalek ship or her christening of the Mechanoids as Sooty, Sweep and Sue. This story takes Mel into rather dark territory, but revealing a firey, vengeful side to the brash redhead is fairly in character. It takes the scene in Terror of the Vervoids where Mel is angry and horrified by both the Vervoid’s body mounds and by the Doctor’s rather warped empathising with the killer Vervoids, and expands on that rift between the intelligent man of peace who sees too much complexity and consequences to ever be able to act in good conscience, and the angry compassionate woman who can’t understand why the Doctor doesn’t just destroy Davros and the Daleks to prevent any more innocent deaths.
In other words Mel’s ultimate actions as executioner are made plausible by getting us completely behind her, emotionally. But of course once she does the vengeful deed, she realises she wasn’t prepared to live with the consequences of taking a life, and the guilt is immediately overwhelming and she finally realises why the Doctor holds the principles he does, and that she will have to live with what she’s done forever. Again this emphasises the theme of responsibility. It’s made all the more poignant by being the sour ending to three months of what looked to be an idyllic life for Mel amidst new friends and new possibilities, and her budding romance with Geoff, and there’s something genuinely tearful about her goodbye to Sonali, having to leave behind that now tainted life.
So inevitably we must address the question of how Davros is meant to survive this particularly nasty fate. Well maybe it was another clone decoy as in Revelation of the Daleks, or the Daleks managed to transmat Davros’s head to safety at the last moment, or maybe Davros had some other elaborate escape plan. We don’t get any explanation for how Davros survived and how he’s meant to be able to return for Remembrance of the Daleks, but then again it fits with the TV Colin Baker era’s unreliable grasp on continuity, where the Master could return unscratched from being burned to a crisp in Planet of Fire without any explanation (although the audio story Master finds a rather inspired and succinct way to explain away every time the bearded one returned from the grave), or where the Doctor could leave the Trial with Mel, even though he hasn’t met her yet. It also fits with the ruthlessly retributive ethos of its era, so maybe continuity had to be put aside to make sure Davros got what he deserved at the end. The fact is that Davros’ death here is so harrowing and disturbing and manages to finally tug sympathy for the evil scientist and press home why the Doctor could never do something like this, that it’s a shame it couldn’t be the real end for the character as a sharp and horrifying symbol of why the show’s values of non-violence and compassion matter.
For some listeners this may be wish fulfilment of contradicting Remembrance of the Daleks and thus disavowing the McCoy era from the canon, and setting up the Sixth Doctor audios as what we should have got instead after Trial of a Time Lord. For Doctor Who to have remained an adult, hard sci-fi show with a credible bold, cinematic and futuristic feel, rather than a magic based children’s pantomime show filmed on crude video. For the show to have built on Revelation of the Daleks (to many McCoy-bashers, Revelation was the last time the classic show was ‘cool’), in all its corporate satire, gruesome glory, right down to the tasteless innuendo of Geoff instantly recognising a woman’s headless body as one of his past conquests. For Davros to have suffered a different ultimate fate, allowing the Daleks to take centre stage, for Skaro to have not been blown up, for the Sixth Dctor to get his chance at redemption, and for Mel’s character to have been taken in a darker, edgier direction, that would be unsustainable in Season 24.
Personally we would always defend Remembrance of the Daleks as bringing a real renaissance to the show, and one 80’s story that John Nathan Turner should be proud to have his name on. But this can’t really be proved as an overt trashing of Remembrance, and even if it is, it’s hardly as obnoxious or snidey as War of the Daleks. But all this is immaterial, since as much as The Juggernauts is probably a fugue and a spanner in the canon, it’s really been too easily forgotten as a story to give anyone sleepless nights, unfortunately.
If The Juggernauts is less successful than the rest of the Davros audios, it’s mainly because it’s essentially a character piece- one that addresses the self-involved modern world but does so by becoming part of its media. Unlike the other Davros audios, it doesn’t really do anything monumental with the character of Davros, it’s never really building personal ambitions into something that really threatens to overthrow life as we know it or bring empires to rise or ruin. As such it never really feels like an ‘event’ story. Essentially this is just a futuristic soap opera with a new girl to the colony becoming a high flyer and developing sparks of romance, and the evil business tycoon plotting to ruin a rival company whilst an old enemy arrives to expose his dirty past. The Daleks and Mechanoids are really just there on sufferance to fill the action quota. This is of course exactly how American sci-fi would have done Doctor Who.
But on those terms it’s hard to fault. It is at least a soap opera we’d like to watch because it’s firmly in line with the right ideals about what’s wrong with our society, and because the characters are irrepressibly appealing strong personalities (even the initially annoying Geoff gets under the listener’s skin with his persistence eventually), and Bonnie Langford as Mel is perfectly in her element and given a real opportunity to show how good she could be. We all wish Mel had been given a story and performance like this in the TV years.
Another reason why this story perhaps makes little impact is that despite Big Finish’ initial best intentions when it comes to the Daleks, this actually is a Dalek story where Davros’ presence demeans the Daleks. Even though the effort has been made to keep the Daleks and Davros largely separated, it has to be said that this particular squad of Daleks sent to capture Davros must comprise of their most useless members, and it seems ridiculous that they should even need the Doctor to go in as their agent, let alone wait so long to act when they could have stormed the colony any time and destroyed the Mechanoid program long before it even reached prototype stage. And it has to be said that the Doctor and Mel’s final escape into an unguarded Tardis is rather too easy.
But overall the inept Daleks can perhaps be excused as being a faithful homage to the era at hand. Furthermore, Geoff’s heroic one man fight with the battered Daleks to save the rest of the colonists fares far better and is actually a great punch the air, poignant sequence that’s in tune with the story’s optimism and theme of better angels. Standing as a vital, affirming presentation of the human capacity for brave nobility in times of evil.
The final verdict on The Juggernauts is that it’s satisfying if not monumental, it’s somewhat indulgent but enjoyably so, and any routine academic tick boxing is made up for by the spontanaeity that the characters bring to the story, and indeed it shows the TV characters at their best and gives them some brief, treasurable moments that would make any fan proud.