Tony cries ‘Fake News!’
Daleks Among Us is…well,
it’s challenging if you just pluck it off the shelf or out of your download
list and decide to give it a go. It’s challenging because it’s very much the
culmination of a trilogy that, as with much that is Sylvester McCoy, comes with
some fairly heavy baggage. For one thing, his ‘lead’ companion, Dr Elizabeth Klein,
is a complicated space-time event he first met when she was a Nazi, and who
subsequently has been de-Nazi’d not by any psychological deprogramming, but by
more or less being re-born in a different environment and raised to be UNIT’s
scientific advisor.
So…there’s that.
His secondary companion in
this trilogy, Will Arrowsmith, is a kind of male precursor to TV’s Osgood – an
assistant to Klein who’s more or less socially inept but is at least
technically brilliant.
And then there’s the
Persuasion Device.
The Persuasion Device
is…well…it’s a device…that allows you to…erm…persuade people…of anything you
like. Possibly alien, more likely the work of a Nazi named Shulke, now probably
hiding behind a barrier in the mind of an innocent man named Hinterburger, and
wanted really rather hard by at least a handful of alien races – in the
previous story, Starlight Robbery, the Sontarans had a stab at getting hold of
it. Failed. Now the Daleks fancy their chances.
The nature of the actual story in Daleks Among Us is a
practically savant satire of the world in which we live. The Daleks invaded a
world named Azimuth twenty years ago, and were given what-for by the Doctor and
Ace (there’s a naked statue with a baseball bat and everything). But the
‘police’ on Azimuth are in charge of supressing not so much crime as memory. In
particular, memory of a certain creature. Covered in balls. Screams
‘Exterminate’ a lot. Begins with D.
It's become something of a
rule that when you get Alan Barnes in to write a Dalek script, things
get…headachey, in terms of the complexity and the levels of reality with which
you’re asked to deal – he also, for instance, wrote Brotherhood of the Daleks.
Daleks Among Us is no exception to that rough rule of Barnesian complexity, and
by the end of it, we’ve uncovered some entirely confusing truths behind the
confusing conflicts of Elizabeth Klein’s Nazi/NotsoNazi life and history. But
at its core, it’s a story of how, if you keep repeating a lie long enough, and
vehemently enough, and you’re prepared to back up your lie with remedial
action, your lie becomes the only truth that people dare know, dare speak, and
then you control the history of the societal narrative. It’s Trumpism in
fiction, or Orwellian prophecy with added Dalek-bumps. The parallel strands of
the search for Shulke and the attempt to get him to build his Persuasion
Device, and the impact of information-oppression on Azimuth makes for demanding
listening, and you really need to be up to speed with the previous history of the
device to get the most out of this story.
That said, it’s one of the
odder Dalek stories even in Big Finish history – which is saying something, as
the company has done things with Daleks you’d never dream of in your most
cheese-fuelled nightmares, and there are other Easter eggs along the way that
still manage to surprise when you reach them (No, we’re not spoiling those for
you!), and at a pinch, Daleks Among Us is more accessible than the likes of
Brotherhood of the Daleks, even with the Doctor more or less consulting Douglas
Adams-style spiritual oracles in order to get himself into the story. That’s a
weird note when you come across it, but ultimately, the Doctor’s blatant
cheating comes back to haunt him, and to provide an interesting angle by which to
engineer a solution to the mounting pressures of the story.
Daleks Among Us is worth a
listen, absolutely – but it’s most worth
a listen at its prescribed place in the Big Finish universe, after Persuasion
and Starlight Robbery. Strap yourself in for the whole Persuasion trilogy, and
Daleks Among Us will repay your brow-furrowed attention far more than it will
if you simply pick it up and just try to catch up as you go along.
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