Tony’s beginning all over again.
What if Davros never
completed work on the Daleks? What if the raid that badly crippled him and
trapped him in his life support system in fact killed him stone dead, and
someone entirely else oversaw the development of the Daleks? Someone
without Davros’ signature weaknesses – or at least someone able to channel them
more effectively, the megalomania and god complex funnelled into making the
Daleks winners, adapting to new developments along much more fluid lines than
the rigid doctrines of their own supremacy?
In other words, what if
someone did Genesis Of The Daleks…right?
Strap in, people, we’re
going back to Skaro in the old times.
Except of course, first we
have to get there. Nicholas Briggs devotes large chunks of his first story in
this set, From The Flames, to circumnavigating the obvious and logical
difficulties with just popping back to Skaro in the old times. It’s a kind of
War Master version of Ocean’s Eleven – only with a smaller cast of
villains. There are deaths to fake, slaves to manipulate, Gallifreyan archives
to steal from, and only firm fan-favourite Co-Ordinator Narvin (Sean Carlsen),
to stand between the War Master and the knowledge of exactly how to go
about infiltrating one of only a handful of forbidden battlegrounds in the Time
War – the birth of the Daleks themselves.
That’s gonna go well…
The story, like much of
the box set, is an amalgam of elements which play on nostalgic notes – the War
Master here is reputed dead, his body brought home to Gallifrey (*Cough* TV
movie *Cough*) by, in this case, a corrupted servant, and he’s brought back from
the dead in a fairly ritualistic fashion (a la The End Of Time) – with a
sense of freshness and creativity that elevate its elements above the status of
pure nostalgia. It’s probably not any particular spoiler, given that you
already know the rest of the set exists, to tell you that Jacobi’s War Master
is more successful than the Time Lords even imagine is possible. Because Time
Lords underestimating the Master is not so much a cliché as a fundamental rule
of the universe. And while there’s absolutely plenty of ‘returning from the
dead and pilfering a Time Lord archive’ fun to keep you hooked throughout the
course of the story, it’s the end of this story, and how everything unfolds from
there, that really deliver on the promise of the set. The way in which this
story ends and the next begins is so audaciously scampish, while being also
some fairly full-on cold-blooded evil on the War Master’s part, it’ll warm the
War Cockles of your heart. It’ll make you chuckle, and huff, and then chuckle
again at quite how gloriously camp and timeline-devastating it is.
And so to episode two, with
a title that should absolutely win awards, The Master’s Dalek Plan, by
Alan Barnes.
This is probably the slice
of the set that most people will really be buying it for, inasmuch as it deals
with the bread and butter of what would happen if the War Master, rather than
Davros, had developed the Daleks. There are gracenotes by the bucketload,
mentions of characters we remember from Genesis and from I, Davros
(the already definitive and groundbreaking Big Finish version of Davros’ road
to the Daleks). It gorgeously guts the history we know and overlays it with a
version with the War Master (hiding under perhaps just possibly the Master’s
least imaginative alias ever) rewriting the destiny of the Daleks. Imagine
Davros got to keep the knowledge the Fourth Doctor gave him of all Dalek
defeats in Genesis. And also that he happened to not only understand the
idea of life on other planets, but already be into his umpteenth life of time
travel and evil plans.
Yeah. That.
If you had to keep just
one of the four episodes on this box set, this would probably come out on top
as your favourite child of Skaro, simply by virtue of all the mayhem it
delivers to the timeline we know. Though that said, mayhem in our established
timelines and histories appears to be something of a sore point with Doctor Who
fans lately, so maybe it’d be the episode you’d be most keen to exterminate).
The degree of sheer tap-dancing revision we get in this episode creates a sense
of freedom, a shaking off of the shackles of established ‘reality’ – and of
course also delivers the opportunity for the Time Lords to potentially meddle,
because now they’re meddling in an altered, corrupted timeline, rather than the
timeline which created the Daleks we know and perversely love. What that means is that we’ve now got two
competing timelines, each with an at least technically equal right to survive.
The Daleks we know or the Daleks amended and updated by the War Master – which
would you prefer? Another question referenced by the recent on-screen
finale (The Cybermen we know, or the Cybermen augmented by the Master…), the
Big Finish version has the scope to be both more complex and more ultimately
satisfying to older, less casual, more heavily invested audiences.
In Shockwave, the
second Alan Barnes episode in the set, we hear the Daleks we know growing
fearful for their own survival, and recruiting a most unlikely ally, providing
a welcome return for the artist formerly known as Sam Kisgart. Yes – screw
spoiler-warnings, the Unbound Master is back, dragged through the several
hedges of improbability backwards to try and protect the reality we know from
the reality being knitted together by victory after victory of his alternative
self’s Daleks.
With Narvin and President
Livia experiencing the flux of dimensions and timelines – you’ll love rural
yokel Narvin, that’s all we’re going to say about that – it becomes clear that
the Unbound Master and our known-quantity Daleks are facing more than just a
standard fight, trying to thread the eye of harmony on the needle of reality
with the sledgehammer subtlety of a staser.
To catch a Master, reset
the flapping coat-tails of causality and avert a dimensional crisis of
unprecedented proportions, it might well be that you need to set a Master on
his tail.
Shockwave gives us a thoroughly entertaining,
funny, dark example of what might happen if you try.
Which leads us ultimately
to He Who Wins, the clincher from Nick Briggs. One way to go about the
conclusion of a box set in which the War Master takes over the destiny of the
Daleks and uses them to destroy everything else in the universe might be
to throw every blaze of audio glory you
can imagine at the listener, but what we get here is grander, colder, darker
and (probably not inconsequentially) more low-key and probably much more
straightforward to record. It deals with the ennui of success, and echoes of
the truth the Doctor has always maintained about the Master’s hatred and fear –
every time he wins, it blazes bright for a moment, but then it leaves him
slightly colder, slightly sadder, slightly lonelier in a universe of slaves,
servants and the ever-present inevitability of his eventual overthrow. The more
you clamp down on dissent, the more certain you make your destruction. The War
Master has won almost everything. The window on our reality is sliding shut.
And that’s when the Unbound Master (Mark Gatiss) steps into the War Master’s
life, to give him an extra shove of perspective. And when push finally comes to
that disconcerting shove, what will the War Master choose? The life of strife
and struggle in our universe, with a Doctor to play with, societies to crush
for a while, doomsday weapons to steal, and planet-burning fun to have, or the
bleak, quiet, empty certainty of his own victory, and no-one but himself to
talk to?
Where the first War Master
set gave us a War Master acting like a would-be Doctor with a dark, innovative
twist, the second gave us his nature as a contaminant personality, a stalking,
shadowy patient evil with a plan, and the third showed us to him as the breathtaking
scientific strategist of grand designs, this fourth set lets him loose among
the established chronology of the Doctor, the Daleks, and the Master himself.
The result is joyous, funny, dark and brilliant, bringing together elements of
Gallifrey and the Unbound universe and giving us a race against if not time,
then at least the results of causality gone tonto. It’s a punchy set of
stories, each of which reward the listener in new and different ways, and all
of which seethe with the wonderful, horrifying character of the War Master, played within an
inch of his life and then some by Derek Jacobi at the seemingly ongoing peak of
his powers.
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