Thursday, 4 June 2020

Big Finish Reviews+ Counter Measures: Dalek Gambit by Tony J Fyler



Tony’s caught in the crossfire.
  
The Movellan Manoeuvre was Act 1 of what probably shouldn’t feel like a two-part finale, but absolutely does. Creepy factories, double crosses, business geniuses taken by surprise, and the nerves of the Counter Measures team strung tight as the Movellans didn’t appear for the longest time despite being in the title of the episode, and then brilliantly did, revealed an audacious, emotionless plan and took on the forces of the Earth for a kind of supremacy they saw as utterly logical.

One line from that first act sets the tone and pace for The Dalek Gambit – ‘We are better than the alternative.’

It’s time to meet the alternative.

Doctor Who fans of course know of the war between the Daleks and the Movellans, but it’s rather gorgeous that in what might yet be the final episode of The New Counter Measures (spoilers!), our team of heroes are back on turf that’s familiar to them. Certainly, far more familiar than was the mystery of the Movellan Manoeuvre.

Daleks are what got them into the lives they’ve now led for over a decade. Might it be Daleks who bring those lives to an end?

Certainly, it sounds like it might be a very close thing, and it’s a flash of brilliance that makes Roland Moore, writing this story, validate and prove the line about the Movellans being the better option. This is not a story of deep Dalek cunning and round-the-houses prevarication. This takes its pace and tone from those second parts of Russell T Davies Dalek stories – everything’s built up and up and up like the charge in a laser gun. This episode fires the gun, and things never really stop from that moment on.

In terms of the pacing, there’s a flip here, from the creeping, building mystery of The Movellan Manoeuvre to all-out high-pitched dramafest of this episode, with the war, and the battles, and the yelling, and the running, and the planet-killing bomb as the Daleks refuse to mess about, and the giant ticking clock that’s counting down.

That’s all really rather the point of The Dalek Gambit – non-stop action and pace and breathlessness when the Daleks, rather than being engaged in an internecine war with their own kind, as when the Counter Measures team first encountered them, are engaged in a full-on war with the Movellans, and are prepared to blast the planet to dust just so it will take the remaining Movellans with it.

Along the way, Moore manages to delineate the difference between the Movellans and the Daleks, and its no small irony that the Daleks, with their organic component, are less rational and more overwhelmed by fury and devastating destructive power. In a way, the no-questions-asked, no-compromise Daleks here make The Dalek Gambit one of the best Dalek stories you’ll ever have encountered, because they’re not hampered by the need to explain their plans, or engage in some extermination-stopping buzzkill game with the Doctor. These are Daleks as primal and straightforwardly lethal as you’ve ever seen or heard them, and they fairly blow your hair back in this story. That brings us round in a rather joyful, if nail-chewing, full circle to Remembrance of the Daleks – while Gilmore, Jensen and Williams had their hands full with a few scattered Daleks more intent on killing each other than noticing the human flotsam, here we get a sense of that ship that lurked in orbit with its colossal firepower, able in a heartbeat to wipe humanity off the face of the earth.

Here, it might very well happen for real, and the New Counter Measures team are mostly caught up in mini-quests, dealing with landing parties, chasing a surviving Movellan, trying to work out a way to broker a survival for humanity that neither the Daleks nor the Movellans ever really see as an option, and all the while, the clock ticks down, malevolently, your chest getting tighter as the stakes get higher, the team fighting Daleks, the team trying to imagine a way round the inevitable destruction of the earth…

It seems as yet uncertain whether any more New Counter Measures stories will be made.
We’d rather like them, if they were. But if not, then let it be said that the New Counter Measures team went out on a screaming high, fighting the alien monster than first got them into the business. It’s punchy and powerful and you’ll pretty much forget to breathe as the run-time runs on, and the ending will affect you. Maybe not in the way you think it will, but it will.

If this is the end, it’s the best of endings. If it’s not the end, there are ways to write around the end of this story, and let the adventures continue. But if it is the end, it’s an end that’s true to the evolution of the characters, in a full-circle full-on fight for survival, and for the earth itself. It’s a tale of noise and fury, with aggressive Daleks, desperate flailing hopes against hope, and at least a little Something Very Clever from one of the team. It’s an ending that says thank you to everything that’s come before, everyone who’s had the privilege of writing for the team, everyone who’s made their world come alive, going all the way back to Coal Hill School and the mind of Ben Aaronovitch. It’s a thank you to the actors who play the roles that they get to save the world again in such spectacular style, while also being a truly exceptional, if uncomplicated, Dalek story.

Thank you, New Counter Measures team. We’d love to hear you again some day, but if this is the end, you went out playing an absolute blinder.

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