MR 048: Davros

"When I press this switch, I will die. The poison in that projectile injector will kill me in a moment. It is a perfect, efficient killing machine."

Now we move to the second story examining classic who villains. This time our subject is the one and only Davros, the creator of the Daleks, and this is probably the single best Davros performance ever made, tv or audio. Speaking of fascism, there seems to be a running theme in these opening audios. If only the writer of Flip-Flop got the memo.

Davros is known as the creator of the Daleks, of course, but in this audio he is curiously on his own, without the Daleks. This gives him a lot of room to develop as a character in his own right, without his shouty monstrosities wheeling around. We get a lot of interesting backstory as well, revealed gradually over the course of the story and running sort of in parallel with the main story.

And in that opening we learn some backstory. Davros was offered a way to kill himself by the Kaled people. Fascists, of course, are not known for being favorable towards disability. After his accident from being hit by a nuclear blast, Davros is incredibly disabled, only able to move one arm and having no sense of sight or taste or smell. Now that he is disabled, his own fascist government thinks he is no longer part of the master race and must be destroyed. They don't have the heart to do it for him because of all his work for the Kaleds in the war, so they say he should do it. But Davros refuses to die. He can not and will not die.

We open on a massive intergalactic mega corporation where there's a rumor that they're going to shut down all their mines. This, of course, would devastate millions, perhaps billions, of people's lives and many different communities that rely on the mines. It's a parallel to how corporations work now. Whole communities and millions of people rely on the work from massive corporate projects like Amazon warehouses, but a few mega rich ghouls on the board of a corporation can just decide to devastate whole economies and cast millions of people into poverty by closing these warehouses just on a whim. It's a pretty horrifying way to organize society. It's just feudalism again with a few extra steps. It's also why cities will bid on and try to make laws favorable to corporations to lure them into building a warehouse there. Think about how many cities, communities, and people were devastated by factories closing in the US and going overseas where it's cheaper to run.

As the Doctor is investigating these rumors with a journalist, Willis, and an inside worker, Kimberly Todd, he discovers something pretty horrifying, to him. The CEO of the corporation, Arnold Baynes, and his wife Lorraine have recovered the corpse of Davros himself and are attempting to revive him. The Sixth Doctor, being the type of Doctor that he is, immediately breaks cover and runs out from hiding shouting about how Davros shouldn't be revived. Of course Colin is amazing in this, as he always is. As the audio goes on, he plays his Doctor so well as the shouty, in your face, irreverent Doctor. That is how the Sixth Doctor should have been played from the beginning on tv instead of menacing and murderous. I definitely remember this audio in particular being one of the formative stories in my love for his Doctor, understandably so.

I love how the Baynes couple try to play on the Doctor's compassion. Shouldn't a Doctor try to save lives instead of kill them? Only in the Doctor's mind, there is no conflict, Davros is already dead and needs to stay in suspended animation. But it's too late. They revive him and then offer him a job after showing him a commercial for the corporation. "We're just a good old fashioned family run mega corporation." It's like Momcorp from Futurama. The Doctor, desperate, offers his own services and so they work together.

This is mostly an excuse for the Doctor and Davros to bandy wits back and forth, and boy is it fun. The Doctor ruins two hours of Davros's work, hilariously before Davros pours his heart and soul out to the Doctor. He talks about being in suspended animation for a very long time after the humans defeated the Daleks. He talks about how he almost went mad, or did go mad, or already was mad. Every second stretched out to an eternity as he was forced to relive his entire life over and over again, unable to move or do anything but think. Davros says he's going to change his ways and become good to which the Doctor obviously does not believe him. All the while that Davros is talking about the torturous existence of being suspended, the Doctor is being flippant and irreverent, not buying it for a second.

There's also an interesting scene in which Willis interviews Baynes and then Baynes destroys his tape recorder and holds him prisoner. It absolutely sounds like something a mega powerful CEO would do to an unfavorable reporter. There's another interesting bit where they're required to break for lunch and Davros thinks it odd that there are laws that make workers less productive. Because, of course, he sees workers as slaves.

Lorraine then interviews Davros. She's a historian and wants to write his biography because she admires him so much. And this is where we get some more backstory. He created weapons for the war effort and he created food pills made out of the corpses of fallen soldiers. The only thing on Skarro in abundance is corpses, after all. He worked with a woman named Shan who first came up with idea of evolving beyond their bodies and creating the Daleks, but Davros continued the work.

The Doctor and Davros complete their work on a what was supposed to be used as a starship's navigation computer (but was actually used for robots without their knowledge) and Davros is tasked with ending famine. He finds the system grossly inefficient, because of course it is. Capitalism is ridiculously inefficient because it's a failure of distribution. People being unable to buy food and starving to death while corporations throw food out regularly is very much so inefficient and wasteful. As Davros says, planets that don't make enough food for their own population grow cash crops for planets that already have too much food. Because they have to make the cash crops just to survive, thus serving the imperial core.

And in response to this, Davros decides that it's time to bring down the inefficient corporate system. He's going to do this through the stock market. He understands it perfectly, able to develop a perfect algorithm to predict it. When he releases this algorithm to the world, stocks will be worthless and corporations will collapse allowing him to replace it with his new galactic order. Only instead of creating something better, he will create something far far worse. He plans on making the galaxy into his slaves to create weapons to enslave even more people. Even without the Daleks, Davros can't help but think like them. Or, more accurately, they can't help but think like him because he created them after all.

And now that we know that Davros is indeed still evil, we hear more backstory. It turns out that he might have been in love with Shan and was jealous that Shan was talking to someone else socially. So in that jealous rage, he fabricated evidence that the person Shan was talking with was a Thal agent and had him and all of his associates executed, even Shan. He let his hatred consume him to the point where he actually believed that Shan was a Thal agent just because she was hanging out with someone else.

When Baynes, Willis, and the Doctor go down to the robot factory where his work has been put to use, we see Davros break cover finally when he tries to kill them all. He gave a nuke to Willis earlier telling him it was evidence against Baynes (even though he just made it up) and sets it off. The Doctor gets to run with it very fast and drop it into a hole, hoping that it won't kill them. The blast doesn't, but the radiation starts to sweep upwards into the corporate dome, killing thousands of people who work there. But Davros has holed himself up in the bunker inside the bunker, the computer center, completely shielded from the radiation.

In keeping with Baynes still being evil (but less evil compared to Davros), he takes the opportunity to kill Willis. The hostile journalist will never get word out about what's happened if he's dead. When they get back up, Davros is trying to send out his stock market algorithm to the world, but he keeps getting stone walled. Baynes comes back to offer to take Davros away and use the algorithm for them both to get rich, but Davros kills him. We see the contrast here. Baynes' evil comes from his greed. Davros' evil comes from his hatred. Davros doesn't care about being wealthy even as Baynes offers him money over and over again. He wants to rule, to conquer.

The Doctor manages to foil Davros's plans over and over to send out his algorithm, so Davros escapes to a ship where he can use the com system to transmit it, but that fails as well when they're able to control the ship from orbit. The ship crashes and the Doctor assumes Davros has survived because he always does while he gets Lorraine arrested for causing all this mess in the first place because she admired Davros.

Davros is very much so a product of his environment. He grew up on a world in constant nuclear war, tearing itself apart from the radiation and nuclear blasts over thousands of years. War was all he knew and it's all he can contemplate even now. It's just hatred for the Thals turned into hatred for the rest of the universe. He then transferred that hatred into his Daleks. That hatred stays with him still. It's hatred for everyone but him. Even when he thinks of someone as his equal, like the Doctor, that hatred never leaves him. He thought of Shan as his equal, but killed her all the same. It's that hatred that motivates him to live. He refuses to die. He will live out of spite when everyone has turned on him and everyone is afraid of him. He will live and he will conquer and he will rule all.

Like I said, this is the best Davros performance I've ever seen/heard. Terry Molloy injects Davros with such pathos. You never truly feel sorry for him, but you understand why he's so evil. Colin plays against him perfectly. His irreverence is perfect for Davros's overly dramatic shouting and it works so well. This is a triumph of a story that shows how good both Colin and Terry Molloy can be and lets us really get to know Davros in all his disturbing glory.