Dang.  I was pretty excited for this audio.  Sure, I found Omega a little underwhelming, but it is generally considered the weaker of Big Finish's "Villain Trilogy" from these early Main Range releases.  Surely Davros and Master would impress me!  The jury is still out for the Master, as of writing this review, but Davros, well, Davros let me down in a lot of ways.

First, the good.  Davros' character is really well done here.  We do a good job getting into his past and delving into his history.  I like some of it.  It pairs nicely with the content we've seen in The Witch's Familiar and Magician's Apprentice.  And it fits well with Davros as he was established in the original series.  This was Big Finish's big debut of this character, and it was largely impressive overall.  It's cool having a Davros story completely independent of the Daleks.

I don't love the idea of Davros making the Daleks over some lost love and hurt feelings, rather than other stories that tend to focus on them being a more natural consequence of war, discrimination, and hatred.  It feels like Davros the audio adventure opts for character work more than the political side of the Daleks, and it does so at great cost.  Because the politics feel more relevant here than your average Davros story.  The whole point of the plot is that this corporation finds Davros and tries to use him.  The Doctor is forced to work with Davros while navigating the CEO, his wife, and an ongoing labour dispute kind of existing in the background for this.  It feels like the perfect set-up to examine the relationship between capitalism and fascism.  That's history.  That's how the Nazis were able to consolidate power and build their war machine, and there's a reason they went after the socialists and trade unions first.

So for the Davros story to kind of touch on these plot points, but never really examine it, is a missed opportunity.  I'd argue, if anything, writer Lance Parkin seems to not only miss the point, but kind of presents CEO Arnold Baynes in a sympathetic light.  I don't know if it was intentional, but it is laughable.  So even if the story has the right idea at heart - Davros does eventually take over the company while Baynes and his wife are completely irresponsible about it - it really feels like it fails to deliver on any concrete message about fascism.  Which kind of defeats the whole point, or what I most like, about Davros and the Daleks.

It's hard for me to get past this stuff.  If it were just a character focused story, then Davros would be a pretty solid audio.  I would have been okay with that - not every Dalek story needs to be serious, after all.  I'm not the one that brought up all this stuff about capitalism and corporations, though.  I wouldn't have even thought about it, if that wasn't the focus of the story.  If one is going to feature these ideas in any story, and bring it up as much as it is focused on as it is in Davros, than I expect that story, or any story, really, to have some purpose in doing so.  That Parkin fails to deliver a coherent point about this stuff means that it felt like a lot of the content around both Baynes characters was a pointless distraction.  I don't like how in both Davros and Omega now, we've had two different women obsess over the villain and basically serve as their mommy-therapist.  So when we are left with a fairly underwhelming ending, well, I'm left feeling dissatisfied, to a degree.

If it weren't for that good character work around Davros, I would rate this much lower.  He really gets to shine here.  Terry Molloy performs the character so well, and he delivers a full suite of emotions here.  We start off with familiar character beats - experiencing his rage, his bitterness, and his ability to scheme.  But near the end, we even get to see some new stuff - Davros gets very scared near the end of the audio and it is a performance to behold.  So I'm not blind to the strength of the Davros story.  I just had trouble getting past these weaknesses, because they are pretty serious faults in what could have been something special to me.