“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.