Tony Fyler punches a
Dalek.
Daleks are Nazis in
casings.
Everybody knows this.
Everybody understands this. Even on some level the children who are their core
audience understand that screeching about exterminating everybody not like them
makes them bullies, and it’s a tiny step in today’s world to go from ‘Daleks
are bullies’ to ‘Daleks are Nazis.’ It’s what inspired them, it’s what runs
through their stories, it’s what they are – Daleks are Nazis.
Now imagine they’re not.
Imagine the Daleks had
been imbued not with the kill-the-not-we philosophy of Nazism, but the
idealistic fraternalism of Communism.
Because that never went wrong…
Brotherhood of the Daleks,
by Alan Barnes, is generously described by Sixth Doctor Colin Baker in the
extras of this story as ‘among the most complicated Doctor Who stories ever
recorded.’
He’s absolutely not wrong,
bless him, because Commie Daleks is only one strand of experimental thinking
within this wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels affair. Under no circumstances
try and follow Brotherhood of the Daleks while operating heavy machinery or
trying to have a life.
Daleks on drugs? How about
Daleks on drugs, does that fry your mind a little bit? Those are in this story
too.
And the weird thing is,
neither of those is the real mind-melter
in Brotherhood of the Daleks. There’s something altogether weirder still going
on, but to tell you much about that would make the whole experience fairly
pointless. Let’s just say that Brotherhood of the Daleks takes the notion that
‘Things are not quite as they appear’ to at least five new levels of reality,
and throws them at you more or less simultaneously, with characters being in
one level, but believing they’re in another, and bluffing other characters that
they’re in a third level again. Often, several characters are doing this at the
same time, so what you end up with is a kind of crushed crisp sandwich of
reality, to which it’s necessary to cling by the very last of your fingernails
if you want to confidently assert at the end that you’ve more or less
understood what you’ve just heard.
Brotherhood of the Daleks,
then, is not an audio story for beginners. You have to have well and truly got
your timey-wimey on to make sense of this one.
It’s not helped in that
regard by the fact that it’s one of an already paradigm-breaking run of stories
that more or less paved the way for River Song, where a companion of a later
Doctor imperils their own timeline by then travelling with an earlier incarnation of him, while trying
to keep her prior experience a secret, so as not to unravel his own timeline. India Fisher stars as
Charley Pollard, the Eighth Doctor’s first friend in the audio world,
eventually accidentally abandoned by him and picked up by Old Sixie, who of
course at that point in his life has no idea who she is. Are we having fun yet?
Add in a return trip to
Spiridon, the legendary Planet of the Daleks, and a bunch of strung out,
terminally confused Thals fighting for survival against their Dalek enemies,
the ever-present threat of blue-eyed Dalek replicants and the aggressive local
flora and you have…erm…Level 1 of the fun that is Brotherhood of the Daleks.
This is before we get to Commie Daleks, thought experiments, and the whole
‘watching us, watching them, watching us’ confusion of potential that seeks to
disguise what really is going on in this story. Let’s say this much – there’s a
scientific experiment being run by…someone…in Brotherhood, to try and change
the minds of…someone…about….erm, something, and the confused Thals, Commie
Daleks, the Doctor, Charley, replicants from the future, a sequence of
extraordinary events in Folkestone (which, to understand, you need to have
listened to another story), are all a part of it. Probably. Maybe. There are
fascinating questions here in among the levels of reality, all tied in with
what makes Daleks Daleks – if they were all peace-loving hippy mutants in their
bumpy casings, would they still be Daleks? How inherent is it to their nature
that they exterminate non-Dalek life-forms? As was later explored on screen in Into
The Dalek, Brotherhood of the Daleks explores the idea of Daleks striving for a
different interpretation of ‘goodness’ than their usual murderous take on the
nature of a better universe.
It’s probably at least a
couple of reality-layers too complicated to be entirely enjoyable, because as
much as most Who-fans enjoy getting lost in the drama, there’s getting lost…
and then there’s getting blinded and stumbling around a labyrinth of
what-the-hell-is-going-on-here, and Brotherhood errs on the side of the latter
a little too often. But in terms of finding interesting things to do with the
Daleks more than fifty years on from their original appearance, it’s certainly
rich in ideas and potential.
By all means, take a
listen to Brotherhood of the Daleks. Do it once, while doing absolutely nothing
else. Then perhaps do it just once more, to make sure you understood who was
whom and what was what and, if you want to go for bonus points, why anything
was the way it was. It’s unlikely to be an audio you slaver to return to time
and time again, but as a once or twice in a lifetime listen, it’s big and bold
and in its own way, a pretty amazing thing.
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