“The Enemy of the Daleks”

…or Enemy of the Daleks, as it is more commonly, but also incorrectly, referred to.

This audio story from 2009 is the first Big Finish effort we'll be looking at; it features mainstays Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, once again reprising their roles of the Seventh Doctor and of Ace, respectively. Big Finish may quite possibly never have gotten off the ground if not for those two's stunning willingness to return to their old characters at the drop of a hat, whether or not the production has a license — Aldred put in an appearance in the low-budget Internet parody series Bitesize Who just a few years ago, for example. 

At any rate, they're very good, and in general The Enemy of the Daleks' cast is quite good (if nothing else, Nicholas Briggs as the Daleks, need I say more?). So is its sound design, though the Kiseibya's voices are not as intelligible as I think they're meant to be.

Now the writing… ah. Hm. Well, there's this divide in Who fandom — though it is somewhat arbitrary, as has been well-argued elsewhere — between the ‘frock’ and ‘gun’ approaches. The former embraces the beautiful silliness of a story about a daft old man moving through time and space in a police box and whose greatest enemies are pepperpots who sound like parrots with laryngitis, and are named after the “frock coat” worn by the Doctor (not that it's actually a frock coat in any incarnation past the first, any fashion enthusiast will be happy to tell you, but that's neither here nor there). The latter, whose totem is, ahem, obvious, prefer darker, more mature stories about war and moral dilemmas and totalitarian dystopias. 

The Enemy of the Daleks is an extremely gun story (…just look at the cover!), is the thing, and I just don't like gun stories very much. 

The central conceit is that this Japanese scientist in the future, while humanity is at war with the Daleks, creates a new and equally monstrous species to act as predators for the Daleks, finally kicking them off the top of the food chain that they otherwise occupy. These monsters, uneuphoniously called the Kiseibya, eat flesh in larval state and metal in adult form, making the Daleks the ideal food-source for them. The first sign that the Professor cannot control them is, however, when they begin eating all his scientific equipment, and it's clearly played for drama, even though, guys, this here is a mad scientist who created metal-eating monsters and is now upset that they're eating all his stuff. This is a joke. A good one too. Own up to that. 

The other problem is that, in presenting a “History tragically repeats itself” scenario, the story is trying very hard to be a thematic sequel to Genesis of the Daleks — a thematic sequel where the Doctor actually crosses the wires and exterminates the Daleks/Kiseibya before they can escape into the universe. Fair enough, but Bishop isn't actually up to the task of exploring the moral ramifications of this decision; in fact, the Doctor's main reason for going through with it appears to be that he has known all along that a great atrocity must be committed on this day in this place, and so It Is His Destiny to do this, and he knows it, and so he does, and GAWD NO. The fact that the characterization of McCoy's Doctor, as time went on, was increasingly swallowed up by the “machiavellian chessmaster who knows in advance everything that must be done, and does them out of a grim sense of duty” idea, is usually trumpeted as a good thing, but rather than making him epic and complex, I always felt it just robbed him of any real characterization.

Oh well. It's not boring at all, but it's all a bit too grim and gritty for me. 

Post-Scriptum:

• Not entirely sure what the point of the local human army detachment being a “Valkyrie Unit” entirely composed of women is, whether in- and out-of-universe. It's just there, a vaguely nonsensical detail in a story so very desperate to be taken seriously. …And come on, if you're going to stick Ace with a whole batallion of other trigger-happy female soldiers, you had bloody well better do something with it.

• This was my first exposure to companion Hex (I am not listening to the Big Finish audios in anything like chronological order) and, I mean, he's okay, I guess? I don't see much to tell him apart from Rory for now — yes, Hex actually came first, but that's neither here nor there. I also wish that just for the hell of it, it was Hex from Discworld as a companion. I don't even know what that would look like, but it sure would be funny. 

“Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth”

…so the ironic thing is that it'll probably be a while before I watch the actual, televised version of this story, seeing how I've already watched two other takes on the same plot and am getting pretty sick of it. The first version, of course, was the excellent bit of fun that is the Peter Cushing movie, which, in its sole greatest flaw, bears the syntaxically-nightmarish title of Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.. (All the rights words are there, but it just doesn't………!) 

The second, and subject matter of the present review, is the Terrance Dicks novelization of the same book, from 1977 — well, no, not even that; what I actually got was the 2009 audiobook read by William Russell (Ian Chesterton in the TV series, way, way back) and Nicholas Briggs (the latest and greatest of Dalek voice artists). 

I could recite the plot by heart at this point, but for the benefit of those not currently suffering from Dalek Invasion of Earth overdose: after numerous travels through time and space with 1960's English schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the two runaway Time Lords known as the Doctor and Susan English, respectively, finally manage to land the TARDIS in what appears to be London, where they have been trying to return Ian and Barbara since the second episode. Unfortunately, it soon turns out that this is 22nd century London, and in ruins at that, following many long years of Dalek occupation. 

For indeed, the Daleks, last seen being karmically exterminated by their ancestral enemies the Thals at the end of The Dead Planet, are back with a vengeance. After meeting up with the local resistance, the TARDIS travellers are soon separated and all sorts of things happen as they trudge about the devastated England trying to figure out what the Daleks want on this planet and how to stop them. 

Notable secondary figures in this plot are the laughably-named Robomen, a first draught of the Cybermen (being robotized, emotionless humans) who serve as the Daleks' henchmen; Tyler, a resistance leader who has lost the use of his legs, but not the will to think up a giant bomb with which to rid the planet of the Daleks' filth; and David, a handsome young fighter in the resistance, who develops into Susan's love interest. (In both the televised episode and the audiobook, his last name is Campbell, but I'm told that in the printed version of the novelization, his name was, rather hilariously, David Cameron.) 

So how does it fare? 

Well, for a start, four hours and ten minutes is way too long for this story, which was perfectly condensed as the hour-and-a-half Cushing feature. But that can't really be helped, and I know there is much, much worse (some Doctor Who audiobooks push on 10 hours! Ten blinking hours!). 

As an audio product it's otherwise quite good. William Russell was always a bit too deadpan for my taste as Ian, but he's perfect as a narrator; he doesn't sound much like himself anymore, it must be said, making the times he's reading out Ian's dialogue somewhat eerie; but on the plus side, he's very good at voicing the First Doctor. He's not limiting himself to an impression of his late co-star, not by far; he couldn't do that if he wanted to, because Terrance Dicks took many liberties with the original teleplay when turning it into a novel. 

If nothing else, the Doctor's farewell speech to Susan is very different, and Russell's delivery of it, accordingly, couldn't be further from Hartnell's serene “one day, yes… one day I shall come back”; the corresponding line in the Dicks script (simply “One day, I'll come back!”) is angrier here, as if he's scolding Susan for doubting that he would. 

Aside from the weirdness inherent in an old man voicing Barbara or Susan, there is one weird bit that doesn't quite work, though; the Robomen's voices are described by Dicks as “slurred”, and Russell took that, I think, a bit too much to heart. They don't sound like zombies, they sound drunk. 

Meanwhile, Nicholas Briggs is predictably awesome as the various Daleks, bringing his full range into it, bless him; it's not that the original voices were bad (1960's Dalek voices, whether on the small or big screen, are the best non-Briggs Dalek voices, in my opinion), but Briggs is an outright wizard. At the drop of a hat, he is the Daleks, and that is because he gets them; as he has explained, when he voices the Daleks, he's not voicing emotionless robots, he's voicing three-dimensional people — it's just that those people happen to be inordinately awful, perpatually-angry little people. Hence he is convincingly confused or vainglorious or angry, without ever forgetting the all encompassing irrational hatefulness lurking beneath their every dark throught. 

The sound design is great; the music, where there is some, is fitting, though a bit forgettable; it's certainly no patch on Bill McGuffie's fantastic score to the Peter Cushing film, which contains, among other things, a marvelously energetic theme song, and one of my favorite pieces of movie music ever, Fugue For Thought. 

What of the script? Well, it does what it can with the meandering plot; certainly it conveys the apocalyptic scope quite well, and while no character is particularly deep, they're all believable people. Dicks is inordinately good at setting up moods, better than he is at thinking up people; thus things are creepy when they need to be, or majestic, or tense, or thrilling. The opening line “Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man” is justifiedly famous. 

The story itself, for which, of course, we cannot blame Dicks, is as I said needlessly meandering and needlessly reliant on Susan twisting her ankle at convenient times of the plot, but the sheer fun of a premise like “the Daleks have taken over the Earth” usually makes up for it, and the worldbuilding of what life is like under the Daleks for the resistance forces and for the mining slaves is actually quite well-thought-out. 

Dicks is quite good at foreshadowing the Susan/David romance, but not so much the Doctor's decision to leave her to live with him. The way the televised story made a story arc out of the Doctor's slow realization that she wasn't his little girl any more may have been a bit ungraceful at times (“jolly good smack-bottom” indeed), but it was something; here there is no trace of it; we spend most of the story with no insight into the Doctor's view of Susan, nor any signs that he's getting on in years in a way that would justify her determination that she needs to stay with him to take care of him. Then suddenly, we're told (in quite a hamfisted fashion) by David that “he knew all along”. Well, okay, jolly good, why shouldn't he have? What have we discovered exactly? 

Oh, and another failing, simultaneously very small and quite major: Dicks made the very questionable decision to refer to the mining-cart in which Ian gets trapped for most of the climax as a “giant bucket”. It is much, much harder than anyone in the production expected to take seriously the travails of a man trapped in what an old British actor keeps calling a “giant bucket” with the utmost seriousness. 

All in all, I enjoyed Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, but if you're not a dedicated Who fan, there are probably much quicker, much funnier ways to experience the story, starting with the Cushing film. (Unless, of course, you are visually impaired, in which case, yes, I'm not an expert, but this seems like a pretty fun audiobook.)

Post-Scriptum:

• An oft-repeated bit of trivia that non-Whovians in the audience may not be aware of: the cover of the novelization, here reused for the CD jacket, was drawn with the Peter Cushing flick as a reference, rather than the TV episode; as a result, the Dalek spaceship is modeled on that in the film rather than the one in the episode itself. Though it's endlessly cut that the Daleks are the only A-list aliens in popular culture who genuinely, unironically use flying saucers as their primary mode of transportation, there's no denying that the hovership in question is a much more interesting bit of design-work. 

• Also about the CD jacket: that Roboman, from this angle, looks fainty like he's about to ask me if I'm his mummy. 

“Cranford”

Where have I been? I wonder too. But among other things, I've been watching more of those awesome BBC period dramas. Including 2007's Cranford, a mashup adaptation of three of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels, penned by one Heidi Thomas. It was excellent watching, and beyond that, I am fast running out of things to say about BBC period dramas based on A-list 19th century British literature (and Gaskell, from what I've read of her, belongs on the same list as Charles Dickens, in a heartbeat). So let me run through the things I say every time that isn't Vanity Fair:

• The actors are uniformly excellent and a perfect mix of old and new fances — here we have Imelda Staunton and Michael Gambon in recurring roles, which incidentally fills our “every BBC period drama will have at least one (1) actor with a role in the Harry Potter films” quota, as well as Judi Dench, Jonathan Pryce, Jodie Whittaker, and, of all people, Tom Hiddleston (who's actually quite good); and we have some younger faces who nevertheless succeed at being excellent; and we have old reliables like Jim Carter, Francesca Annis and Julia McKenzie who aren't household names but frankly deserve to be. 

• The script is full of wit and true human sentiment and neither too slow nor too quick; it bears deep criticial analysis if you care for it (there's very interesting dilemmas there about the coming of modernity) but doesn't beat you over the head with a hammer of moral superiority. It succeeds beautifully in carrying over Gaskell's stunning handle on humanity.
• [Related: the adaptation is a very clever mix of three different Gaskell novels, and while this does at times jar just a little bit (the medical-drama bits are operating on an entirely different system of priorities from the properly Cranfordian bits; there's more than a bit of whiplash when the stakes of one subplot are life-and-death for a recurring child character who's caught the croup, and the other is whether Judi Dench will swallow her pride and deign set up a tea shop, you know?), you certainly wouldn't guess that those were originally unrelated stories without reading the Wikipedia page]

• It's beautifully shot. I lack the technical knowledge to go more into detail than that, but it is. The angles, the lighting especially, the choice of locations make it into a marvelous experience on a purely aesthetic level. 

• The music's quite good, with a theme song that's pleasantly quirky and unhummable. 

Look, there is nothing else to say. Go watch it. Also read the original Cranford if you like, it's a brilliant little book. 

Ye Inevitable Olde Post-Scriptum:

• The last episode of Return to Cranford (the two-part Christmas-special epilogue in 2009, which I watched alongside the main series and consider more or less of apiece with it) ends with a cameo-ish appearance by… well, I won't spoil it. But the identity of the man, and the circumstances of it, are absolutely the last thing you'd expect as the conclusion of an Elizabeth Gaskell-based BBC Christmas drama, let me tell you. I have no clue how they even got him. He's predictably excellent, mind you, if you can get over the shock of his sheer presence. 

• Bessie is one of my favorite recurring gags in a BBC period drama, ever. 

• Oh yeah, Jodie Whittaker's in this, I should probably say something. Well, she's very good at being cute, flustered and slightly out-of-her-depth. I see no evidence that she has in her that which critics keep finding missing in her Doctor, though, namely the slightest drop of toughness. Not that you'd expect it to come out in such a part, you understnad; Peggy Bell shouldn't be in any way, shape, or form, tough. It would go against the whole point of her. But while it confirms that Whittaker is a good actress, it does little convince me that she has very much in the way of range.