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.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Movellan Manoeuvre by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s getting his Seventies on again.

The New Counter Measures team are back, seemingly as a surprise to everyone, after the somewhat abrupt ending to which they came just one story into their third series. And if you’re going to bring this team back, you could do worse than giving them a double-disc blow-out up against first the Movellans and then the Daleks, as episodes 3.2 and 3.3 do.

The Movellan Manoeuvre in particular is a pacy little number which dispenses with much of the mystery of previous stories with long build-ups. The Counter Measures team face the resurgence of what might be considered their Lex Luthor, their arch-rival, Lady Suzanne Clare (Carolyn Seymour) who appears to be…erm…manufacturing home-cleaning robots.

On investigation, there seems to be nothing nefarious or deadly about these robots, which is quite enough to drive group Captain Gilmore (Simon Williams) up the wall, so he goes to the expedient of kidnapping Lazy Clare and demanding answers.

It’s fair to say he gets them, but they’re by no means the answers either he or Lady Clare expect.

The Movellans are in and of themselves a great creation – for those not familiar with 1979’s Destiny of the Daleks, first of all, go back and get acquainted with Destiny of the Daleks immediately, and secondly, the Movellans are a force of disco-haired, gorgeously humanoid androids, ruled by pure logic and able to tell you calmy and in words of as many syllables as you like why they’re the superior form of life and why you should submit to their conquest.

There was a driving force in Destiny of the Daleks, a form of robo-life equal to the Daleks in ruthlessness and conquest, and whom the Daleks couldn’t defeat or exterminate in great enough numbers. They were later revealed to have won their war against the Daleks by attacking the part of the Dalek with which they themselves were unencumbered – the organic part - with a Dalek-eating virus. So firstly, you should never underestimate the Movellans. Yes, they might have dodgy disco-hair, but they defeated the Daleks. When was the last time you did that? And secondly, when they have a plan to take over a planet, more often than not, that planet gets taken well and truly over, thank you very much – and by ruthless android overlords with much more conversation than your average Dalek or Cybermen too.

The plot here, written by John Dorney, is effective and holds onto its mysteries as long as it possibly can – for a story where the Movellans are right there in the title, it’s an admirable exercise in delayed gratification that they don’t appear en masse for the longest time. When they do make their move though, it’s pitched at such a pace of ‘Ta-Dah!’ triumph as to make all the waiting and hoping worthwhile. The fact that it also takes the notional human villain by surprise is just an additional joy. While it would be a mistake to over-use them, this is a story that proves the viability on audio of the Movellans, and we could happily listen to more from these ultra-calm robotic overlords in future stories (We’ve never yet had a Movellan origin story, for instance, and that could be fascinating to listen to). Their viability is partly due to the way Dorney writes them here, and partly down to a joyfully understated performance from Cyril Nri as Movellan Commander Vallan, his rich, melodic tones perfectly showing the difference in approach between the Movellans and the Daleks.

The story, in which perfectly innocent cleaning robots are a front for something significantly more insidious, makes perfect sense when you’re dealing with the Movellans, and utilizes a modern technology that didn’t exist when they first appeared on-screen, but which has subsequently been used in a different way with a different robotic life-form, the separation of body and animating mindset and then at an appropriate moment, the downloading of the latter into the former. If anything it makes rather more sense here in The Movellan Manoeuvre than it did on-screen with the Cybermen, adding to the indefatigable potential menace of the Movellans and answering another of the questions we’ve always had about them – how do the Movellans get the armies they need to withstand the onslaught of a might like the Daleks’? Since Power of the Daleks, we’ve had the haunting image of conveyor belts full of Dalek shells being filled with mutant occupants. Here we don’t get quite the same scene for the Movellans, but we get at least one arresting mind-image of how they multiply and activate, and it’s at least very nearly as alarming.

The Movellan Manoeuvre has a lot to do with its hour of run-time – bring back the New Counter Measures team, advance their emotional story slightly (here with a sense that Rachel Jenson – played as ever by the unsurpassable Pamela Salem – might be getting sick and tired of the front-line danger of her role with the team, and that the affection between her and Gilmore might be coming to a point of decision), bring the Movellans back in a viable way, show them as potentially epic threats in their own right and set the scene for what could be the end of the Counter Measures stories in a re-match with the Daleks.

John Dorney seems to do all this without batting an eye, and while giving every  member of the team something to do, and bringing back Carolyn Seymour’s arch villain Lady Clare with just the right amount of laughter and scorn for the do-gooders from the Post Office Tower. It’s a bit of a triumph, this story, and it’ll blast you through an hour of your life without you noticing it’s gone.

Check out The Movellan Manoeuvre and discover what the Discobots have been up to lately.

Big Finish Reviews+ Counter-Measures Series 4 by Tony J Fyler

Tony Fyler takes a lap of honour.

The end of Counter-Measures, Series 3 genuinely sounded like it might be the end of the team – gunshots behind enemy lines (not to mention Berlin walls), people impersonating other people, two of the team actively brainwashed to accept the fictions of a group conducting espionage – it felt like all it needed was one big push and the whole Counter-Measures experiment would fall into the abyss.

Series 4 doesn’t by any means dispense with that threat – in fact it carries it right on, with two of the team brainwashed by chips in their head and two trying to break out of a prison that’s custom-built to be inescapable. But somehow, the fact that it takes what feels like a victory lap before the end squanders what felt like a genuine sense of threat and replaces it with something which feels like business as usual until it’s very pointedly not any more. I’ll tell you what it’s like – it’s like that stomach-lurching moment in The End of Time, when the Doctor has won out against the mad schemes of the Master, and the return of the Time Lords, and he believes for a moment he’s going to survive the day. And then you hear Wilf knocking, gently, on the door of the Vinvocci machine, and both the Doctor and we the viewer know he’s not going to triumph after all, but everything’s going to go spectacularly wrong. That moment is echoed in the whole tone of Counter-Measures, Series 4.

Episode 1, New Horizons, by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, gets another 60s techno-trope into the series before it ends, with work on a gloriously energy-efficient new monorail system taking Alison and later Rachel into the realms of Indiana Jones and mythic fantasy, with things getting a bit Viking before the end and super-substances abounding as a power source and a brain enhancer. Nazi scientists, ancient arctic writing, multiple factions running about the place like a ‘who’s on whose side’ game of Find The Traitor - it’s all very good and interesting and not a little Curse of Fenric, and it’s certainly an absorbing enough listen with Alison in particular sounding more like herself than she has since she went home to see her father in Series 3, but it takes a while to come to the conclusion that yes, this really is how we’re carrying on after the taut and climactic events of the end of Series 3. In terms of the tension, it’s a fairly big step down, so you’re going to want to take it gently in case you break your expectations.

Episode 2, The Keep by Ken Bentley switches focus somewhat, taking us mostly to Sir Toby and Gilmore, who, being significantly less dead than we’d thought they might be, are busy getting their Great Escape on and revisiting a previous villain who this time has no cunning plan as such. Alison and Rachel are here, and they’re becoming more and more like themselves as the episode progresses, exposing the cover-up that’s kept them blinded and performing at least a little light brain surgery, and by the end of The Keep, Counter-Measures is looking more like itself as a cohesive group again. But whereas Counter-Measures has always been rooted firmly in government and the Establishment, after the events of The Keep, it’s quite clear that the group is out of favour, out of control and it seems, almost out of options.

John Dorney’s Rise and Shine, the third episode of the series, takes Counter-Measures right back to its very beginnings, or near as damnit, with the resurgence of a threat we haven’t heard from since The Assassination Games. While less in the market to destroy power-blocs than it was back then, the orchestrators of the Games still have it in their power to make things increasingly difficult for the Counter-Measures team, and here, if anywhere in this series, begins their trial by fire. With so many sides and sub-sides to choose from, leaving any old enemy alive at the end could be the last mistake you make. Arguably, it’s a mistake that’s made here.

And the threat comes back to haunt the team in Matt Fitton’s series finale, Clean Sweep. There’s coldness and ruthlessness aplenty here, but there’s also the opportunity for Counter-Measures to prove itself one more time – an opportunity the team more than takes. Gilmore, Jensen and Williams prove themselves more than a match for the skullduggery merchants who want them silenced, even after their base is blown to smithereens and the group go effectively on the run. Counter-Measures is triumphant, victorious, back to business as usual.

Remember those four knocks?

The ending that Fitton gives the series is a very ambivalent thing. You could argue it doesn’t work because it comes entirely out of the blue. You could argue that’s precisely why it works so well. I can see the point of both sides, but if you ask me for the emotional pitch, the taste it leaves in the mouth, I’d say it’s off-kilter and unfortunate. It feels like it makes a tragedy out of everything we’ve been through with the Counter-Measures team for four series. We understand of course there’s a ‘New Counter-Measures’ coming next year, and it could well be that the bleakness of the ending here is undercut in that series. Personally, I hope so, as the ending of Clean Sweep seems less fitting an exit than such a team has deserved over the 18 hours of their audio lives.

In essence then, Series 4 feels like a lap of honour, touching on villains from the past that Counter-Measures has made for itself, proving the worth of the people who get to serve in such a group, and then leaving us with what is probably the only way to conclusively bring the series to an end, without necessarily proving that such a move is necessary. If the series was going to end, it would perhaps have been better to end it on the notes of mystery which closed Series 3 than the tacked-on seeming certainty at the end of Clean Sweep. Again, we’ll need to see what comes in The New Counter-Measures to understand that ending entirely, but as it stands, it feels like an odd and unfortunate end to a great series.