Tony Fyler goes to
Skaro.
When it
comes to mammoth undertakings, Big Finish has always had the staggering
optimism of the wonderfully clueless. They haven’t been clueless, which means
they’re either maddeningly overconfident, or just really, really brave and
good. What determines which they actually are is the rate of their success.
Bringing back classic TV monsters and villains for new adventures and making
them as good or better than the originals – plenty of Dalek stories,
Robophobia, Spare Parts, Domain of the Voord and a handful of Vardan stories
versus plenty more Dalek stories, a few weird Cybermen stories, an odd Morbius
double, The Feast of Axos, an OK Krynoid story and The Juggernauts probably
puts them ahead in the ‘brave and good’ category on points. Creating companions
as good as any – yes, any – on TV: Charlie Pollard, Lucie Bleedin’ Miller,
Bernice Surprise Summerfield, Hex, Eli real person on a journey of destiny,
rather sabeth Klein, Oliver Harper and Evelyn Smythe probably more than make up
for the incidental Hannah Bartholomew, Flip Jackson, Sally Morgan and so on,
and most of them could stand toe to toe with Sarah-Jane Smith and Jo Grant. But
what really gives the company its claim to being as good as it thinks it is is
its talent for expanded worlds – Gallifrey, Jago & Litefoot, Counter
Measures, Bernie Summerfield, Unbound,
and there, right there, is Big Finish’s version of a Roman epic. I, Davros
dares to tell the story the TV show never did – the story of the man behind the
monster, from his youth to just before we first meet him in Genesis of the
Daleks. The sheer scope of such a thing is ridiculous and scary. Delivering the
definitive Davros in just four hours seems like an insanity.
So does it
work?
Pleasingly,
it does more than work. By bringing the sense of Roman epic I, Claudius to the
story, and merging it to the world of racial supremacy and dirty war envisaged
by Terry Nation, Big Finish does the seemingly impossible – taking us into the
world where Davros’ creation of the Daleks make a hideous kind of sense, and
where he is a real person on a journey of destiny, rather than just the
scheming, screaming megalomaniac we know as the force behind the Daleks.
Episode 1 –
Innocence – is the most ‘Roman’ of the four episodes, with Davros as a teenage
boy, born to a wealthy, political and military family, but with an overriding
interest in science and history. Rory Jennings (Tommy from the TV episode The
Idiot’s Lantern) plays Davros with a clipped precision and either a quiet or a
psychopathic disinterest in the people around him as people, rather than as
players in his story – the uncertainty over whether he is merely quiet and
reserved or actually a psychopath is cleverly, creepily rendered as we see him
in the context of a ‘Roman’ family saga – a Caligula or Nero in his own time,
his mother Calcula unhealthily doting, his father Nasgard (played with
surprising brio by Richard Franklin) determined that an army career will be the
best thing for him, Aunt Tashek a kind of prophetess of doom over the
household, and Yarvell, Davros’ sister, the only one who can prick his bubble
of self-importance. Innocence is the story of exactly that – the journey from a
kind of normality to the first steps on a journey towards monstrosity, and when
Davros goes – still with a magnificent quietness, far beyond the pale of even
the moral bounds of Kaled society (a society predicated on war and the
philosophy of racial purity, don’t forget), it’s more shocking than anything
the Romans did, straying into territory familiar to horror fans from the Omen
movies. Oh yes, there’s more than a pinch of Damien Thorn in the young Davros,
his relinquishing of ‘innocence,’ and the allies he finds on that path setting
his destiny a long way from that of any normal Kaled soldier or politician.
Episode 2 –
Purity – shows us Davros at 30, now played by on-screen Davros actor Terry
Molloy, but played as ‘human’, desperately frustrated by his lack of progress
into the Kaled scientific corps, taking a desperate gamble to earn promotion
and once again shake off a ‘normal’ destiny in favour of the one he believes he
is due to have. Davros signs up for what could be a suicide mission across the
wastelands of Skaro to the Thal dome and back, determined to win his chance to
help direct the Kaled cause. Along the way, he encounters weakness, disposes of
friends, runs into old enemies and learns a lot about the kind of weapons that
could win the war, the threats of politics and the threats closer to home, to
bring the coldly rational psychopath back out of hiding, and make him
determined that nothing will stand in the way of his career.
In Episode
3 – Corruption – Davros learns to play politics with the leaders of his race,
while rising to the summit of the Kaled Scientific Elite. He’s growing old in
this play, but still has not become the thing he will become. If you’re looking
for a ‘Genesis of Davros’ moment, this is where you’ll find it, but not before
one final temptation threatens to sway him from his terrible destiny. You
remember that hint of Damien Thorne? Episode 3 throws a threat more terrible
than any other his way, just as the third Omen movie did to Damien – the threat
of love, here embodied in a young researcher with a fine mind, Shan. But while
Davros acknowledges her brilliance – and admits a thing about the future
creation of the Daleks that will surprise you – we know from the beginning that
any hope she has of turning him from his path of extremism and extermination
will be doomed. That’s the scope of drama we’re in with the I, Davros
collection – it’s Shakespearian tragedy, because we know going in what becomes
of the protagonist, so we know his pathway leads not to love, happiness,
children, but to darkness, to impotence, to horror.
Episode 3
sees that moment we’ve always wondered about – the horrible wounding of Davros,
his rebirth in his life-support unit, but it also shows us how the
transformation went beyond the physical, how the creature we know was
essentially born out of a will to survive, a will to prove wrong people who
thought his physical disabilities meant he was lessened, and how his terrible
clarity of purpose, already at psychopathic levels as a child, became stripped
of all but the most political of pretence.
And Episode
4 shows us the path coming full circle, as Davros begins to simply outlive the
people he grew up with, to span generations on a planet where, famously, no-one
dies of old age. It shows us Davros captured by Thals, rescued by a young
lieutenant by the name of Nyder, and taking more and more control over the
offspring of Skaro, leading to not one but two conclusions, both as shocking
and horrifying as each other. But the mission of I, Davros is completed with
terrifying effect – we hear Davros assume control of everything he needs, and
we hear the creation of the Mark I Dalek. From the end of I, Davros to the
beginning of Genesis of the Daleks is nothing but a little time away, and we’ve
traveled the whole length of Davros’ life up to the invention of at least the
prototype Dalek. The scope of the drama and the tragedy of brilliance perverted
by single-minded dedication to hatred and self-supremacy, only ever suggested
on-screen, is shown to us through these windows on Davros’ life at its pivotal
moments – first blood, taking control of his destiny, the rejection of love,
uncovering of corruption, his transformation into a power that could
theoretically live forever, and his development of the ultimate evolution of
Kaled life. While in Michael Wisher’s and Terry Molloy’s performances
particularly on TV, so much of this is hinted, it took the dedication of four
hours of superlative audio to render this journey in a way which, nine years
later, still feels fresh, and shocking, and absolutely canon, true to Nation’s
world, but with a grander storytelling sweep than any he ever mustered.
Big Finish
is a company with many triumphs under its belt. It’s hard to beat the ambition
of Spare Parts, the Cyberman genesis story, hard to dwarf the achievement of
the second Bernice Summerfield box set – four hours of Gabriel Woolf’s return
as Sutekh. But in I, Davros, it’s possible the company achieved a thing that
can stand as its greatest contribution to the expanded world of Doctor Who, and
yet also stand on its own terms as the history of a world and a character we
think we know, given a new vitality, a new horror, and a new warning on the
single-mindedness of science stripped of conscience, of ethics, and of
everything bar the ends it sets itself.
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