The Time of the Daleks (Doctor Who) [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

This comes right after the audio embrace the darkness, which had a superb first episode but became a very disappointing runaround of a story afterwards.

And alas, the same thing happens here.

What a set up!

Future britain under a military dictator. The daleks. Who recite shakespeare. Time travel via mirrors. And a mysterious young boy. Who is he?

Once having set this up in the first part, the next three have the doctor run around for the course of the episode before everything is resolved at the end with lots of explosions. Justin Richards has done so much doctor who fiction now many of his characters do tend to come over very cliched, and that's true of the supporting cast here. You will either guess the identity of the boy early on and find the story totally obvious as a result, or be compltely fooled and knocked for six as a result. Maybe whether you like this story or not hinges on that, but I'm afraid I fell in the former camp.

Justin Richards' contribution to the second "season" of Big Finish Eighth Doctor audio adventures clearly wants to be an 'event story'. Not only does it feature the Eighth Doctor's first run in with the pepperpot menace (at least in the audio format) but there are time travel mirrors and the Daleks have picked up a fascination with the works of Shakespeare.

'Event stories' work when they manage to twist and catch you off guard, taking directions you did not expect at the start of the story. One of the best examples is from the TV episode 'Earthshock' which managed to keep its returning villain secret, thrilling its audience. 'The Time of the Daleks' tries hard to surprise us but somehow it feels predictable.

More crucially, the concept of Daleks as Shakespeare buffs is simply too crazy to be taken seriously. The result is a story whose deficiencies simply overpower its strengths (for instance Paul McGann's excellent performance, allusions to 'Evil of the Daleks' or the superb sound design).

'The Time of the Daleks' is not terrible - it simply disappoints by over-reaching itself and being very, very silly.

This is the thirty second release from Big Finish in their range of full cast audio adventures starring classic Doctor Whos. It stars Paul McGann as Eight and India Fisher as Charlotte Pollard. There are four episodes, roughly 25-30 minutes each, complete with original theme music between each, and cliff hanger endings. Two episodes per disc on 2 discs, and a short booklet with some pictures of the cast and production notes.

This release is the fifth in the second miniseries of Eighth Doc stories, through which there is a loose story arc revolving around Charlotte Pollard's rescue from the R101 by the Doc back in their first adventure. The arc has a greater presence on some stories than others, and here it starts to come to the fore in the effect that Charlie's existence is having on the fabric of time. There is also a reference to story 30, Seasons of Fear, which explains a brief cameo in that story.

The Doctor and Charlie are following a rather worrying rift in time, which has resulted in Shakespeare being removed from history. The follow it back to a dystopic near future earth, where England is ruled over by a seemingly benevolent dictator, there are improbable time experiments going on and Daleks are wandering around, spouting Shakespeare quotes and even more improbably being incredibly helpful...

It's a tale of two halves. On the one hand there is a lot of fun to be had with the tinpots quoting the bard rather than their usual motivational speeches of `Obey!' or `Exterminate!' There's some genuine intrigue as the Doc gets stuck into trying to figure out just what the pepperpots are up to and tries to convince people that they are not benign. But on the other hand, things get confusing as the tale starts to get wrapped up in time paradox and hard core SF. On this level the story does not work well, and is a bit of a confused mess.

McGann and Fisher are their usual excellent selves. Especially McGann, who portrays the happy go lucky Doctor slowly coming to realise just what a mistake he has made and becoming very worried in a very convincing manner.

A partly entertaining romp with some great ideas, but partly confused mess, so only three stars for this story.