Dalek Universe 2 – Review

When this series of Tenth Doctor adventures were first announced, I remember there being a lot of buzz around it, the Tenth Doctor, finally meeting classic era Daleks, and then as more details were announced about the entire series, Davros was returning, River Song and the Movellans, and his companions were going to be Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven from the classic audio range! It was a lot of exciting stuff but I was left wondering how it was all going to piece together but I really shouldn’t have worried as Volume 1 of the series was brilliant. I’m pleased to say that Volume 2 continues that trend.

There was also a little discussion on how overused the Daleks are at this point in Big Finish’s output. It seems that there isn’t a month that goes by without there being a Dalek release of some shape or form. But what really impressed me about the opening volume was how little the Daleks were actually in it. That is also a trend that continues here, with their looming threat actually giving the series enough of a backbone to really help hammer home the upcoming terror of their proper appearance in Volume 3. And while Volume 1 was about bringing the Tenth Doctor, Anya and Mark together, then Volume 2 tries its best to pull them apart.

That begins with Roy Gill’s Cycle of Destruction. If you’ve seen the individual covers for the set, then it’s obvious it’s a story about Mark Seven. It’s brilliant to see Big Finish using even more obscure characters from old annuals and Mark featured heavily in the Dalek annuals of the Sixties/Seventies but we never really knew where he came from. Gill sets out to change that, by having him knock out the Doctor and Anya and taking control of their ship and piloting it back to his homeworld.

There we meet more androids like him, Mariah Six and Jason Four and get some decent exploration of his character. Of course, the whole robot uprising against their creator plot has been done plenty of times before and the majority of what we hear here isn’t exactly new, but Gill’s writing always makes us think and as we’ve grown to know Mark Seven, we have to wonder if he and the others on his planet are no longer androids, but people. It’s a heavy topic to get into too much in an hour-long audio play but the basic plot threads are there to help us ponder that question.

I was impressed by Nina Toussaint-White as Mariah Six. Fans of Doctor Who will know her more as Melody Pond from Let’s Kill Hitler but here she gives a much more impressive performance as Mariah Six. Not necessarily a villain but not necessarily a good character either, she has more than enough moral grey areas to make her a great foil to this group of characters.

Gill keeps the tension rising until the very end when you do worry what’ll happen to the characters with Mariah Six desperate to get out of the base they find themselves in and a group of alien Bears desperate to get in. Cycle of Destruction is a great way to get this new set off the ground and as we’ve come to expect from Gill’s writing, it’s as thought-provoking as it is thoroughly enjoyable.

Fans of the Sixth Doctor story, Revelation of the Daleks will no doubt love the second story, The Trojan Dalek, as there are some brilliant elements from that television story used to great effect on audio. John Dorney’s written has also been consistently excellent and he continues the story of the Tenth Doctor trying to find a way out of the past by looking for the scientist called Arborecc and that hunt takes them to the Space Security Service Space Station, where Mark Seven finds one of his old friends who has been wounded by a deadly Sontaran weapon.

While Mark and Anya try to find out what happened to Mark’s friend, the Doctor hunts the bowels of the Space Station he finds something really dark and disturbing. The Trojan Dalek is actually a surprisingly dark audio adventure, probably one of the darkest Tenth Doctor stories ever written, with the injured people of the Space Station having been made into Daleks. There are some brilliant references to Revelation with Mark and Anya finding Kaled Mutants in incubation chambers and I did wonder at some moments if, like Revelation, they were ever worried about just how dark and disturbing this story was.

If you are following the story closely, then the reveal of what the Daleks really are shouldn’t come as too much a surprise, but I felt Dorney didn’t rely on the shock value of the reveal to the listener, instead of much of the enjoyment of this story comes from the main characters gradual connection of the dots. When the Doctor finds out, it’s one of the rare moments, that the Time Lord Rage comes out to play.

What’s even more disturbing is that the plan for a Trojan Dalek isn’t necessarily a bad one. In Star Trek The Next Generation, Captain Picard was troubled with a similar situation concerning his arch-nemesis the Borg. Even the Doctor doesn’t seem too troubled, to begin with until he realises the full extent of the actions taken by the scientists on the station.

It all builds to an impressive ending and cliff-hanger with Mark trying to reason with his recently converted friend. But she has gone too insane in the Dalek and ends up exterminating him. It was a truly horrific moment, I really came to like Mark Seven over the last few stories from these two volumes and I think he might have gone a little too soon. But given how this is Doctor Who, I’ll never say he won’t be back. But the result is that the Doctor and Anya are at odds with one another, as they both feel guilty about Mark’s death and it leads brilliantly into the final story of this set.

Robert Valentine’s The Lost sees the Doctor and Anya using a stolen piece of Arborecc’s equipment to help them try and travel to the future. Instead, they end up crash landing in an unstable pocket universe that is on the brink of destruction. It quickly becomes clear they need to put their guilt aside, for the time being, to help them get out of this situation.

When they reach a large manor house, they find themselves up against a creature called The Lost, which is desperate to escape the death of its universe and escape to the one that the Doctor and Anya come from. Valentine rightly keeps the Doctor and Anya separated for much of this tale, allowing for some uncomfortable truths to be exposed about both of them. While The Doctor might hold Anya accountable for the death of her impersonated companion, Ann, Anya finds out about the Doctor’s involvement in the deaths of two of her family, Sara Kingdom and Brett Vyon, both of whom died in the First Doctor’s story, The Daleks’ Master Plan.

As the universe outside the manor quickly begins to be destroyed, things reach a head where Anya sacrifices herself to allow the Doctor to get back to the proper universe to save everyone from The Lost and the Daleks. Valentine does give us a no-win situation here which I really appreciated as I don’t like too many stories to have an easy answer at the end. And it was here that many will come to learn how much they loved Anya as a companion!

Of course, the Doctor can’t face the death of another companion, let alone another member of the Kingdom family and instead uses the Arborecc device to travel back to warn the Doctor and Anya about the collapsing pocket universe. This was the only bit of this story that fell a little flat, but given how much the story built up, and its no-win stakes, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any writer who could have written an ending that would please everyone after a brilliant story.

As always, David Tennant continues to impress as the Doctor. It’s taken a little while for him to find his Doctor on audio, but he’s really come into his own in this series, finally stripped away of the television tropes and allowed to have his own genuinely brand new adventures. It’s also clear how much Tennant loves playing the Doctor, he’s on fire here and he works brilliantly with his new companions. Jane Slavin can do no wrong with her audio performances and Anya Kingdom is just an excellent companion. We might not have forgiven her for the ‘death’ of Anne yet, but she’s quickly beginning to redeem herself and it’s an excellent plot thread that continues to be explored to great effect.

And Joe Simm’s Mark Seven was just amazing. He really impressed me as Mark through the last two series, it could have been easy to give us a bog-standard android/robot performance but he went for something different, giving us a human performance right up until the end. Poor Mark Seven was far too sweet for this world!

Dalek Universe 2 was another excellent inclusion to the Doctor Who mythology and like the first volume, does an excellent job of keeping the Daleks out of the main bulk of the action. Hopefully, this will lead to a really strong third and, I think, final, set of stories. With Davros and River Song returning, I really can’t tell how this set will conclude and that’s a brilliant thing. We’ve finally got a series where no one is safe, the stakes are as high as they’ve ever been.

We’ve got a Doctor who’s getting darker, a morally grey companion and the listener has no idea how things will wrap up, leaving us wanting more without even really trying. Well played Big Finish, well played!