While Nyssa hears voices in Earth’s past, the Doctor investigates the Dalek invasion that wasn’t in the future.
2 Comments
Styre
on May 8, 2016 at 12:51 AM
RENAISSANCE OF THE DALEKS
(Note: “Renaissance of the Daleks” is credited as being “from a story by” Christopher H. Bidmead; for the sake of brevity, I will refer to Bidmead as the author.)
This was another big moment for Big Finish: with the new Paul McGann audios getting decent reviews, the main range of Doctor Who audios was undergoing its own relaunch, with new cover art and story formatting. You certainly can’t blame BF for thinking big: a Dalek story written by former Doctor Who script editor Christopher H. Bidmead was bound to generate serious interest. Unfortunately, the end product is troubled by a small problem: it’s absolutely appalling!
We’ll start with the good points: the central concepts. The idea of the Daleks seeding their thoughts and attitudes throughout Earth’s history, thus fostering a more conflict-ridden planetary society, is thoroughly intriguing. And the way they plan to do this is brilliantly insane: using “nano-Daleks,” particle-sized Daleks that float through the very air to gain a foothold in the minds of humanity. This leads to the idea of crates full of “Dalek dust,” the sort of concept that could only come from the mind behind season 18 of the classic series. I also love the image of whole cities constructed from empty Dalek shells joined together into walls and ceilings. There’s a great audio that’s still waiting to be produced from these ideas.
Unfortunately, we got “Renaissance of the Daleks.” The greatest strength of Bidmead’s television era is its atmosphere: the sense of impending doom and decay that pervaded season 18, growing increasingly oppressive before reaching its peak in “Logopolis.” This strength is borne out in his scripts, which invariably bog down when Bidmead abandons his worldbuilding and focuses on characters standing around arguing. What are the worst parts of “Logopolis?” Characters standing around arguing on Logopolis. What are the worst parts of “Castrovalva?” Nyssa and Tegan standing around arguing in the TARDIS. Compare those scenes to the wonderful scenes in Castrovalva itself, with its fairy-tale serenity being eaten away from within. This sort of atmosphere is completely absent from “Renaissance,” a play which consists of nothing more than characters running around from place to place and pausing to argue with one another. Visits to Earth’s history are so rapid that a sense of place never develops, while the sheer number of characters overwhelm the TARDIS scenes. I think Bidmead has a sense of the TARDIS as a “still point” — the concept of the Zero Room backs this up, as well as the unsettling cloister bell — but he rarely allows his characters the space to appreciate it as such. By the time we reach the fantastic timescape at the play’s conclusion there isn’t enough time to let it develop, either, so we’re merely given an incomprehensible situation to take or leave. In short: the plot is horribly convoluted, there’s no atmosphere, and there isn’t even an attempt at thematic consistency.
A brief aside about American performances in Big Finish. Many people complain that the American accents on display are horrendous, but while they often are, many people also overlook that the majority of American Big Finish characters are played by real Americans. The writing is actually the problem, and it happens again in “Renaissance:” the American characters are almost universally presented as forthright boors. I don’t know if American tourists behave this way in the UK — and it’s possible that my Midwestern upbringing has protected me from these behaviors — but I have met very few of my countrymen who are this demanding, arrogant, and obnoxious. Why is Tillington (William Hope) written as something out of “Dr. Strangelove?” What the hell is wrong with Alice (Regina Reagan)? Is it too much to ask to write lines normally and then cast American actors instead of writing smirking “American” characters? (This isn’t a problem unique to Big Finish, either — Jimmy McGovern did this just as obnoxiously in the final “Cracker.”)
Peter Davison stands apart, of course, and Bidmead captures the character as brilliantly as in “Frontios.” Sarah Sutton is lumbered with some atrociously clunky dialogue (“32 feet per second per second”), and while she manages to make some of it convicing, she completely fails in other cases, especially the “Doctoooooooor!” and “Noooooooo!” As for the supporting cast, I’m not sure if I should blame the script, the director (John Ainsworth), the actors, or all three. I know William Hope is a capable actor (check out “Aliens” for proof) but he’s horrible as Tillington. Jon Weinberg’s character Wilton is annoyingly written, but Weinberg does nothing to rescue him, giving a bad performance as a character who exists mainly to yell plot information. There’s absolutely no reason to have all three of Mulberry (Nicholas Deal), Floyd (Richie Campbell), and Alice hanging around the TARDIS, as at least two of them could have been cut from the script without incident. Deal, at least, gives a dignified performance, while Campbell’s performance is decent, though his character seems to exist solely to be defined by his race. An explanation of the rebel yell would have been helpful, as without it Floyd sounds like a lunatic. Lastly, of course, is Reagan, whose performance is among the worst in Big Finish history. The word “cringeworthy” is thrown around Doctor Who fandom far too freely, but I honestly found myself wincing during more than one of Alice’s lines.
It’s hard to fault the production, as Gareth Jenkins is asked to create an even wider range of settings than usual, and turns in admirable, if unmemorable work — and the same can be said for Andy Hardwick’s music. I don’t know how much of this is Ainsworth’s direction, but considering the interminably dull pacing and laughable acting on display, the director cannot go without fault. The discs also contain interviews, the first disc featuring Hope and Stewart Alexander, and the second featuring Weinberg, Deal, Campbell, and Reagan. I wish we could hear more from the regulars, the writers, or the production staff, as these interviews are starting to get repetitive.
There are some good ideas at the heart of “Renaissance of the Daleks” — brilliant ideas, even — and the production values are sound. So at least it’s not the worst Doctor Who audio produced by Big Finish… but it’s firmly in the bottom 10. After 93 releases and countless spinoffs there is absolutely no excuse for releasing something this poorly constructed, especially not as the centerpiece of the relaunch of the main range.
“War is horrible enough but incompetent war is an abomination.”
Although it probably comes in for more flack than it really deserves, there’s no denying that this is where Big Finish majorly jumps the shark. Big Finish was once a boundless free-reign venture for fans who owned Doctor Who and could do what they liked with it, making it the way we always wanted it to be and were happy to prove that actually yes they could do Doctor Who better than the most recent producer. Now Doctor Who no longer belongs to us, and anyone knows that since the return of New Who, the mood of fandom has become particularly rancorous again. In particular, on the late Outpost Gallifrey, one poster expressed the opinion that they thought Rennaisance of the Daleks was a better, more substantial Dalek story than Journey’s End, and they were swiftly pounced on and stripped for this by half a dozen opinion-nazi sychophantic creeps. Then again OG was one of those elitist, view by membership only type fan forums that nearly always have a sinister underworld, cultish, pretentious secret society vibe to them complete with vindictive back alley creeps who love to make up a whole history with you when they’ve never met you, and are usually ran by shadowy middle management scum. Fandom now seems to be a place where personal expression and expectations for anything greater than what we’ve got are ruthlessly stifled, mocked and smacked down. In short whatever side of the fence you’re on, the New Series is seen as being as good as it gets. There’s either no room for improvement, or no redeeming Doctor Who from how low it’s sunk, and so on each side of the fence, the fandom that once possessed such drive and creativity, has never become so entropic.
Now, Big Finish lives in the shadow of Doctor Who’s new found success and wants a piece of the pie. Now Big Finish is geared towards apeing the qualities and formulas that make New Who a success and no longer aspiring for anything more than that. Now Big Finish is making product, not art. Big Finish’s audience was assured by the absence of the TV series. Now that the series is back on our screens, some fans are likely to lose interest in the audios and would be reluctant to bother with any substitute. Besides some fans might have simply gotten bored with the well Big Finish was reusing. But New Who’s success has led Big Finish to try to market itself at the new fans.
As I said above, a writer no longer has free reign to write what they want without interference from the range producer. This was once a Christopher Bidmead story but it was so heavily rewritten that Bidmead eventually wanted his name taken off it. This would not have happened under Gary Russell who respected a writer’s integrity and allowed their work to have the purity that made Big Finish so special. Of course Bidmead has very little regard for the New Who approach, as he made clear in a recent DWM interview which surprisingly the magazine had the courage to actually print, though predictably it desperately tried to paint Bidmead as a phenomenally unhinged grump who doesn’t know how to be hip enough to join the party, in a manner that just confirms how low the magazine’s maturity level has sunk since the revival. I don’t agree with Bidmead’s views on the Williams/Adams era, but all his points about New Who are spot on. Suffice it to say, Bidmead’s writing was always about the journey being as important as the destination, and indeed it was the moments of realist banality and the vaguely real-time presentation of Logopolis that made it such an effective, subversive story, so he’s certainly antithetical to New Who’s ‘cut to the chase’ fast food television approach, so no wonder Bidmead and the new regime Big Finish aren’t going to work symbiotically, which is a shame because Doctor Who stories pretty much live or die by their creative symbiosis. This is perhaps the biggest problem with Big Finish now, in that the quieter atmosphere building moments are now being treated as a vacuum that needs to be filled with attention seeking winceful humour and routine character motions that somehow manage to make the audio feel even more tedious. Say what you will about Castrovalva’s dull patches, at least they hinted at the plot going somewhere greater.
You can hear echoes of Bidmead’s themes and concepts in this- the Zero Room gets put to healing use again; the world of Logopolis and block transfer computations are name dropped and we see walls of Daleks standing on each other’s heads, which should be a nightmarish vision. We see Daleks cut down to size in much the same way as the Tardis was in Logopolis (and in that regard the mini-Daleks briefly conjure the same charm as the Gremlins), but this is sadly too short lived. Also like Logopolis, the first half of the story is spent arbitrarily introducing a crowd of temporary companions from various locations seemingly on a whim and the Tardis doesn’t reach its destination until the second half. But crucially there’s nothing underlying to give these concepts or images meaning or memorability like there was in Bidmead’s past efforts. Logopolis and Frontios had their themes of decay, Castrovalva had its theme of identity. Whatever got lost in the rewrites, it’s left this story without a point.
This is definitely a post-New Who story, in the sense that to paraphrase Ace, the plot moves so fast it ceases to exist. The Doctor’s developing war of words with General Tillington happens completely out of the blue as though we’ve missed several weeks of backstory and developing antagonism and as such this just comes across as hollow sound and fury from the outset. This thread is then discarded quickly as the Doctor runs away, as if Big Finish is deliberately undoing all its good work by regressing the Fifth Doctor back into the spineless coward he was on TV. There’s an interesting moral question raised by this encounter in that the Dalek invasion of Earth in the 22nd century has been prevented and Earth has been saved, but the Doctor, in trying to put history back on its proper course is going to ensure the invasion does happen after all. This is also in line with Bidmead’s themes in Logopolis and Frontios of the Doctor sometimes having to let terrible atrocities happen if causality demands it. If Bidmead had been allowed to make the story his own, maybe that theme would have come to the fore and made for a much more challenging story, rather than this angle being effectively discarded. Then there’s the new companions. Tillington’s nephew Wilton throws himself at the Doctor’s feet to get on board, in a manner that’s completely random and forced. It’s also all too close to the frequent meanness of New Who of showing the Doctor being chased and fawned over by tagalong fans that he has nothing but contempt for. It’s particularly saddening to see the nice guy Fifth Doctor retconned this way here, just like it was in Time Crash.
Contrived random stops are then made to pick up Nyssa who is joined by ye old English knight Mullbery, and then to pick up Floyd and Alice from historical American warzones, the American Civil War and Vietnam respectively. It’s clear what the story is trying to do, in linking humanity’s history of warfare to the evil of the Daleks, in the same way that Genesis of the Daleks did. Whilst it gets across the horrors of both wars, the death pits where soldiers are helplessly shot like fish in a barrel, or the poisonous fumes of Agent Orange, it only does this in a transitionary way which is immediately forgotten when they change location. There’s no sense of a mood or tone being carried or applied consistently. Instead what we’re left with is a Tardis crowded with particularly annoying, obnoxious Yankee stereotypes. For many listeners this was the point in the audio when the wall of sound became completely repellent and inaccessible. We recall Bidmead’s approach to Logopolis and Castrovalva of crowding the Tardis as a means of thrusting ordinary people into extraordinary situations and showing how they manage to cope, and it’s not really till the end that they get to do anything pro-active. When they do it requires them to take the hint of the Doctor’s inspiring clue of singing ‘three blind mice’ (a moment which Peter Davison actually manages to make quite charming), but even that is an anticlimax which achieves nothing constructive.
The actual final confrontation takes place in the Dalek lair, which should be an awe inspiring, nightmarish vision of the show’s lore being subverted. Of Logopolis being ran by Daleks who now have the power to change, pervert and crush the very form of the universe. But it just doesn’t conjure anything of the kind. It just feels like any other Dalek headquarters. No worse, it feels like a headquarters made out of sandcastles. There we meet the Graylish, which probably amounts to the biggest wasted opportunity of the whole thing. The Graylish is basically a humanoid Dalek with future sight and which believes itself to be an impartial God that’s indifferent to the evils of the Daleks. There’s so much more that could have been done with this concept but the Graylish arrives too late into the story, which by this point is swamped by the crowded cast and info dumps of the Daleks’ latest dastardly plans and thus the Graylish is never able to come into its own presence.
Worse still, it only takes the Doctor a few words in its ear to turn the Graylish against the Daleks and destroy their world in an almighty cop-out that rivals Terror of the Autons and The Daemons in the rankings of anticlimaxes. The difference is that Terror of the Autons and The Daemons just might leave the viewer with the impression that the Earth has been saved by a lucky fluke. Renaissance of the Daleks however never managed to convey that anything was ever really at stake in the first place and so the threat might as well have been rubbed out with an eraser. So lacking is the sense of danger that Mulberry’s sacrifice simply seems pointless and feels rather wrong and hollow.
Christopher Bidmead wasn’t the best Doctor Who writer, especially when it came to phonetics and dialogue, but there was a method to his writing, his themes, concepts, imagery and longeurs that produced some of the more musing, haunting and memorable stories of the 80’s. Frankly the show needed a tedious perfectionist like him and if he’d stayed on as script editor during the JNT years, the decline of the show might have been averted. Judging from Logopolis and Frontios, he had a greater sense of the show’s utilitarianism than Eric Saward did, and he could craft suspenseful, downbeat stories without having to completely castrate or character assassinate the Doctor. But if Bidmead’s TV stories were sharply memorable with a visual sting, then this rushed, disposable, forgettable audio story is the complete opposite. Even though Peter Davison does his best to inject urgency into the story, the whole thing is just a washout, and if it’s not a washout then it’s probably simply very annoying. There’s a nagging sense that this is all down to Bidmead’s original ideas being compromised, sanitised and overwritten, and it’s the same compromised, diluted feeling we’ll get when we come to Assassin in the Limelight, The Condemned and (although we quite like it) Brotherhood of the Daleks. Frankly if things had always been done this way, we never would have gotten masterpieces like Davros or Jubilee, or Natural History of Fear, and now there’s a worry that we may never see their like again.
RENAISSANCE OF THE DALEKS
(Note: “Renaissance of the Daleks” is credited as being “from a story by” Christopher H. Bidmead; for the sake of brevity, I will refer to Bidmead as the author.)
This was another big moment for Big Finish: with the new Paul McGann audios getting decent reviews, the main range of Doctor Who audios was undergoing its own relaunch, with new cover art and story formatting. You certainly can’t blame BF for thinking big: a Dalek story written by former Doctor Who script editor Christopher H. Bidmead was bound to generate serious interest. Unfortunately, the end product is troubled by a small problem: it’s absolutely appalling!
We’ll start with the good points: the central concepts. The idea of the Daleks seeding their thoughts and attitudes throughout Earth’s history, thus fostering a more conflict-ridden planetary society, is thoroughly intriguing. And the way they plan to do this is brilliantly insane: using “nano-Daleks,” particle-sized Daleks that float through the very air to gain a foothold in the minds of humanity. This leads to the idea of crates full of “Dalek dust,” the sort of concept that could only come from the mind behind season 18 of the classic series. I also love the image of whole cities constructed from empty Dalek shells joined together into walls and ceilings. There’s a great audio that’s still waiting to be produced from these ideas.
Unfortunately, we got “Renaissance of the Daleks.” The greatest strength of Bidmead’s television era is its atmosphere: the sense of impending doom and decay that pervaded season 18, growing increasingly oppressive before reaching its peak in “Logopolis.” This strength is borne out in his scripts, which invariably bog down when Bidmead abandons his worldbuilding and focuses on characters standing around arguing. What are the worst parts of “Logopolis?” Characters standing around arguing on Logopolis. What are the worst parts of “Castrovalva?” Nyssa and Tegan standing around arguing in the TARDIS. Compare those scenes to the wonderful scenes in Castrovalva itself, with its fairy-tale serenity being eaten away from within. This sort of atmosphere is completely absent from “Renaissance,” a play which consists of nothing more than characters running around from place to place and pausing to argue with one another. Visits to Earth’s history are so rapid that a sense of place never develops, while the sheer number of characters overwhelm the TARDIS scenes. I think Bidmead has a sense of the TARDIS as a “still point” — the concept of the Zero Room backs this up, as well as the unsettling cloister bell — but he rarely allows his characters the space to appreciate it as such. By the time we reach the fantastic timescape at the play’s conclusion there isn’t enough time to let it develop, either, so we’re merely given an incomprehensible situation to take or leave. In short: the plot is horribly convoluted, there’s no atmosphere, and there isn’t even an attempt at thematic consistency.
A brief aside about American performances in Big Finish. Many people complain that the American accents on display are horrendous, but while they often are, many people also overlook that the majority of American Big Finish characters are played by real Americans. The writing is actually the problem, and it happens again in “Renaissance:” the American characters are almost universally presented as forthright boors. I don’t know if American tourists behave this way in the UK — and it’s possible that my Midwestern upbringing has protected me from these behaviors — but I have met very few of my countrymen who are this demanding, arrogant, and obnoxious. Why is Tillington (William Hope) written as something out of “Dr. Strangelove?” What the hell is wrong with Alice (Regina Reagan)? Is it too much to ask to write lines normally and then cast American actors instead of writing smirking “American” characters? (This isn’t a problem unique to Big Finish, either — Jimmy McGovern did this just as obnoxiously in the final “Cracker.”)
Peter Davison stands apart, of course, and Bidmead captures the character as brilliantly as in “Frontios.” Sarah Sutton is lumbered with some atrociously clunky dialogue (“32 feet per second per second”), and while she manages to make some of it convicing, she completely fails in other cases, especially the “Doctoooooooor!” and “Noooooooo!” As for the supporting cast, I’m not sure if I should blame the script, the director (John Ainsworth), the actors, or all three. I know William Hope is a capable actor (check out “Aliens” for proof) but he’s horrible as Tillington. Jon Weinberg’s character Wilton is annoyingly written, but Weinberg does nothing to rescue him, giving a bad performance as a character who exists mainly to yell plot information. There’s absolutely no reason to have all three of Mulberry (Nicholas Deal), Floyd (Richie Campbell), and Alice hanging around the TARDIS, as at least two of them could have been cut from the script without incident. Deal, at least, gives a dignified performance, while Campbell’s performance is decent, though his character seems to exist solely to be defined by his race. An explanation of the rebel yell would have been helpful, as without it Floyd sounds like a lunatic. Lastly, of course, is Reagan, whose performance is among the worst in Big Finish history. The word “cringeworthy” is thrown around Doctor Who fandom far too freely, but I honestly found myself wincing during more than one of Alice’s lines.
It’s hard to fault the production, as Gareth Jenkins is asked to create an even wider range of settings than usual, and turns in admirable, if unmemorable work — and the same can be said for Andy Hardwick’s music. I don’t know how much of this is Ainsworth’s direction, but considering the interminably dull pacing and laughable acting on display, the director cannot go without fault. The discs also contain interviews, the first disc featuring Hope and Stewart Alexander, and the second featuring Weinberg, Deal, Campbell, and Reagan. I wish we could hear more from the regulars, the writers, or the production staff, as these interviews are starting to get repetitive.
There are some good ideas at the heart of “Renaissance of the Daleks” — brilliant ideas, even — and the production values are sound. So at least it’s not the worst Doctor Who audio produced by Big Finish… but it’s firmly in the bottom 10. After 93 releases and countless spinoffs there is absolutely no excuse for releasing something this poorly constructed, especially not as the centerpiece of the relaunch of the main range.
Embarrassing.
3/10
“War is horrible enough but incompetent war is an abomination.”
Although it probably comes in for more flack than it really deserves, there’s no denying that this is where Big Finish majorly jumps the shark. Big Finish was once a boundless free-reign venture for fans who owned Doctor Who and could do what they liked with it, making it the way we always wanted it to be and were happy to prove that actually yes they could do Doctor Who better than the most recent producer. Now Doctor Who no longer belongs to us, and anyone knows that since the return of New Who, the mood of fandom has become particularly rancorous again. In particular, on the late Outpost Gallifrey, one poster expressed the opinion that they thought Rennaisance of the Daleks was a better, more substantial Dalek story than Journey’s End, and they were swiftly pounced on and stripped for this by half a dozen opinion-nazi sychophantic creeps. Then again OG was one of those elitist, view by membership only type fan forums that nearly always have a sinister underworld, cultish, pretentious secret society vibe to them complete with vindictive back alley creeps who love to make up a whole history with you when they’ve never met you, and are usually ran by shadowy middle management scum. Fandom now seems to be a place where personal expression and expectations for anything greater than what we’ve got are ruthlessly stifled, mocked and smacked down. In short whatever side of the fence you’re on, the New Series is seen as being as good as it gets. There’s either no room for improvement, or no redeeming Doctor Who from how low it’s sunk, and so on each side of the fence, the fandom that once possessed such drive and creativity, has never become so entropic.
Now, Big Finish lives in the shadow of Doctor Who’s new found success and wants a piece of the pie. Now Big Finish is geared towards apeing the qualities and formulas that make New Who a success and no longer aspiring for anything more than that. Now Big Finish is making product, not art. Big Finish’s audience was assured by the absence of the TV series. Now that the series is back on our screens, some fans are likely to lose interest in the audios and would be reluctant to bother with any substitute. Besides some fans might have simply gotten bored with the well Big Finish was reusing. But New Who’s success has led Big Finish to try to market itself at the new fans.
As I said above, a writer no longer has free reign to write what they want without interference from the range producer. This was once a Christopher Bidmead story but it was so heavily rewritten that Bidmead eventually wanted his name taken off it. This would not have happened under Gary Russell who respected a writer’s integrity and allowed their work to have the purity that made Big Finish so special. Of course Bidmead has very little regard for the New Who approach, as he made clear in a recent DWM interview which surprisingly the magazine had the courage to actually print, though predictably it desperately tried to paint Bidmead as a phenomenally unhinged grump who doesn’t know how to be hip enough to join the party, in a manner that just confirms how low the magazine’s maturity level has sunk since the revival. I don’t agree with Bidmead’s views on the Williams/Adams era, but all his points about New Who are spot on. Suffice it to say, Bidmead’s writing was always about the journey being as important as the destination, and indeed it was the moments of realist banality and the vaguely real-time presentation of Logopolis that made it such an effective, subversive story, so he’s certainly antithetical to New Who’s ‘cut to the chase’ fast food television approach, so no wonder Bidmead and the new regime Big Finish aren’t going to work symbiotically, which is a shame because Doctor Who stories pretty much live or die by their creative symbiosis. This is perhaps the biggest problem with Big Finish now, in that the quieter atmosphere building moments are now being treated as a vacuum that needs to be filled with attention seeking winceful humour and routine character motions that somehow manage to make the audio feel even more tedious. Say what you will about Castrovalva’s dull patches, at least they hinted at the plot going somewhere greater.
You can hear echoes of Bidmead’s themes and concepts in this- the Zero Room gets put to healing use again; the world of Logopolis and block transfer computations are name dropped and we see walls of Daleks standing on each other’s heads, which should be a nightmarish vision. We see Daleks cut down to size in much the same way as the Tardis was in Logopolis (and in that regard the mini-Daleks briefly conjure the same charm as the Gremlins), but this is sadly too short lived. Also like Logopolis, the first half of the story is spent arbitrarily introducing a crowd of temporary companions from various locations seemingly on a whim and the Tardis doesn’t reach its destination until the second half. But crucially there’s nothing underlying to give these concepts or images meaning or memorability like there was in Bidmead’s past efforts. Logopolis and Frontios had their themes of decay, Castrovalva had its theme of identity. Whatever got lost in the rewrites, it’s left this story without a point.
This is definitely a post-New Who story, in the sense that to paraphrase Ace, the plot moves so fast it ceases to exist. The Doctor’s developing war of words with General Tillington happens completely out of the blue as though we’ve missed several weeks of backstory and developing antagonism and as such this just comes across as hollow sound and fury from the outset. This thread is then discarded quickly as the Doctor runs away, as if Big Finish is deliberately undoing all its good work by regressing the Fifth Doctor back into the spineless coward he was on TV. There’s an interesting moral question raised by this encounter in that the Dalek invasion of Earth in the 22nd century has been prevented and Earth has been saved, but the Doctor, in trying to put history back on its proper course is going to ensure the invasion does happen after all. This is also in line with Bidmead’s themes in Logopolis and Frontios of the Doctor sometimes having to let terrible atrocities happen if causality demands it. If Bidmead had been allowed to make the story his own, maybe that theme would have come to the fore and made for a much more challenging story, rather than this angle being effectively discarded. Then there’s the new companions. Tillington’s nephew Wilton throws himself at the Doctor’s feet to get on board, in a manner that’s completely random and forced. It’s also all too close to the frequent meanness of New Who of showing the Doctor being chased and fawned over by tagalong fans that he has nothing but contempt for. It’s particularly saddening to see the nice guy Fifth Doctor retconned this way here, just like it was in Time Crash.
Contrived random stops are then made to pick up Nyssa who is joined by ye old English knight Mullbery, and then to pick up Floyd and Alice from historical American warzones, the American Civil War and Vietnam respectively. It’s clear what the story is trying to do, in linking humanity’s history of warfare to the evil of the Daleks, in the same way that Genesis of the Daleks did. Whilst it gets across the horrors of both wars, the death pits where soldiers are helplessly shot like fish in a barrel, or the poisonous fumes of Agent Orange, it only does this in a transitionary way which is immediately forgotten when they change location. There’s no sense of a mood or tone being carried or applied consistently. Instead what we’re left with is a Tardis crowded with particularly annoying, obnoxious Yankee stereotypes. For many listeners this was the point in the audio when the wall of sound became completely repellent and inaccessible. We recall Bidmead’s approach to Logopolis and Castrovalva of crowding the Tardis as a means of thrusting ordinary people into extraordinary situations and showing how they manage to cope, and it’s not really till the end that they get to do anything pro-active. When they do it requires them to take the hint of the Doctor’s inspiring clue of singing ‘three blind mice’ (a moment which Peter Davison actually manages to make quite charming), but even that is an anticlimax which achieves nothing constructive.
The actual final confrontation takes place in the Dalek lair, which should be an awe inspiring, nightmarish vision of the show’s lore being subverted. Of Logopolis being ran by Daleks who now have the power to change, pervert and crush the very form of the universe. But it just doesn’t conjure anything of the kind. It just feels like any other Dalek headquarters. No worse, it feels like a headquarters made out of sandcastles. There we meet the Graylish, which probably amounts to the biggest wasted opportunity of the whole thing. The Graylish is basically a humanoid Dalek with future sight and which believes itself to be an impartial God that’s indifferent to the evils of the Daleks. There’s so much more that could have been done with this concept but the Graylish arrives too late into the story, which by this point is swamped by the crowded cast and info dumps of the Daleks’ latest dastardly plans and thus the Graylish is never able to come into its own presence.
Worse still, it only takes the Doctor a few words in its ear to turn the Graylish against the Daleks and destroy their world in an almighty cop-out that rivals Terror of the Autons and The Daemons in the rankings of anticlimaxes. The difference is that Terror of the Autons and The Daemons just might leave the viewer with the impression that the Earth has been saved by a lucky fluke. Renaissance of the Daleks however never managed to convey that anything was ever really at stake in the first place and so the threat might as well have been rubbed out with an eraser. So lacking is the sense of danger that Mulberry’s sacrifice simply seems pointless and feels rather wrong and hollow.
Christopher Bidmead wasn’t the best Doctor Who writer, especially when it came to phonetics and dialogue, but there was a method to his writing, his themes, concepts, imagery and longeurs that produced some of the more musing, haunting and memorable stories of the 80’s. Frankly the show needed a tedious perfectionist like him and if he’d stayed on as script editor during the JNT years, the decline of the show might have been averted. Judging from Logopolis and Frontios, he had a greater sense of the show’s utilitarianism than Eric Saward did, and he could craft suspenseful, downbeat stories without having to completely castrate or character assassinate the Doctor. But if Bidmead’s TV stories were sharply memorable with a visual sting, then this rushed, disposable, forgettable audio story is the complete opposite. Even though Peter Davison does his best to inject urgency into the story, the whole thing is just a washout, and if it’s not a washout then it’s probably simply very annoying. There’s a nagging sense that this is all down to Bidmead’s original ideas being compromised, sanitised and overwritten, and it’s the same compromised, diluted feeling we’ll get when we come to Assassin in the Limelight, The Condemned and (although we quite like it) Brotherhood of the Daleks. Frankly if things had always been done this way, we never would have gotten masterpieces like Davros or Jubilee, or Natural History of Fear, and now there’s a worry that we may never see their like again.