The Monthly Adventures #040 - “Jubilee" by Robert Shearman

The King has returned, all hail the King! Robert Shearman is back and with another masterpiece, somehow (not sure how he keeps making these). Jubilee, better known as “did you know Dalek was based off an audio story?”, is a top contender for greatest Dalek story ever written and is most definitely the best Dalek story out of The Monthly Adventures so far; a funny, disturbing, original, shocking and wholly unique take on the Nazi pepper pots that doubles as a biting destruction of backward Fascist ideologies. The third in a line of perfect audios (because The Maltese Penguin didn’t happen), Jubilee is, no doubt, a seminal story.

A fault in the TARDIS strands the Doctor and Evelyn in an alternate version of London, where the British Empire are masters of the world and the President of England is torturing an unearthly prisoner for the sake of the next day’s 100 year anniversary of a failed Dalek invasion.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

As always, it’s hard to know where to start listing positives in a Robert Shearman story, considering you have a whole tidal wave of them crashing down at you. I guess I’ll start with how incredible of a script this is, once again playing around with time travel in a way I don’t believe I’ve seen before - having the TARDIS split in time, landing the Doctor and Evelyn in two different places at once. We don’t see one pair of the Doctor and Evelyn however, merely their effects a hundred years later. That is except for possibly one of the greatest twists in Doctor Who, when it’s revealed the version of the Doctor from 1903 has been imprisoned in the Tower of London for a hundred years. Not to mention the setting, I mean: an alternate fascist Britain that has taken the morals of the Dalek race where they’re torturing the last of their former attackers so that they can get it to talk by its execution the next day - at the jubilee celebrations. Immediately, you can see the similarities to Dalek, which Shearman based off this script, but it does go in a very different direction; Dalek was used to explore the Doctor’s PTSD after the Time War, very much an episode that could’ve only happened in the first series of the Revival, whereas Jubilee acts as a hilarious, disturbing and genius destruction of the futility of fascism. It takes the Daleks back to their roots, pointing out how they were always meant to be stand-ins for the Nazis and, how like we’ve actually trivialised the SS in real life, we’ve become accustomed to the Daleks just being those funny pepper pots. And it does not let down exploring its themes, you have so many different facets of fascist ideology being mocked it's hard to even count. How fascism breeds fascism, creating false enemies when you’ve conquered all the worlds, the insane back bending conformers to these beliefs have to do to justify them. And I don’t think it would work if Shearman wasn’t such a naturally comedic writer. Don’t get me wrong, Jubilee is a f**ked up story that does a lot of dark things, but it’s all mixed in a macabre brand of humour that means all these heavy themes, whilst not shied away from, are not too much to bear or become edgy or meaningless. And I really do need to point that I think this might be the blackest comedy to ever exist, maybe only beaten by something like Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. You have the president of the British Empire cutting the hands of little people so he can stuff them inside fake Dalek suits for his own entertainment, all the while laughing about how he’s only pretending to be evil.

And that’s another thing, our cast is amazing. Obviously we have Six and Evelyn, probably in what is their best outing; forget Arrangements for War, the subtle character building here is incredible, Evelyn’s conversations with the imprisoned Dalek alone should’ve won her some kind of award. And then there’s the leaders of the British Empire, Rochester and his wife, Miriam, both incredibly insane in very unique ways. Rochester, trying to justify his atrocities, has convinced himself everybody is under Dalek mind control and he has to pretend to be evil to survive, so really he’s a good man whilst Miriam has been so taken up by the British Empire’s generational fascist beliefs that she’s trying to overthrow the country because she thinks Rochester isn’t an abusive enough husband to her. And that’s only our villains, you have the slimy, power hungry second-in-command, the supposed good guy who’s only “following orders” and that god damn Dalek. Probably the best character here, the Dalek is centre to what is my absolute favourite interpretation of Doctor Who’s most iconic villain. They are not wholly evil and murderous, but tragic, not in a sympathetic way but for in a “wow, you’re f**ked” way. Without orders for a hundred years, the Dalek has gone mad, begging everybody around him to tell him what to do. And by the end of the story, it decides that, because the human race got destroyed by conforming to a Dalek ideology, the Daleks must kill themselves to prevent the same happening to them, the imprisoned Dalek blowing the fleet up and stopping the Dalek invasion in 1903 from ever happening. It is, in my opinion, an incredible ending that shows the absolute dredges of the kind of things Shearman’s criticising, and also gives us one of the most fascinating and oddly beautiful portrayals of the Daleks. It’s sad, it’s funny, it’s bombastic, it’s complex, it’s interesting, it’s- have I made it clear that I like Jubilee yet?

The cons section is, unsurprisingly, very short but I do have to highlight one problem that persists throughout most of Shearman’s work that was particularly bad here: the dialogue. Shearman’s dialogue can often be original, witty, funny and engaging but it can also be very often weirdly forced, in a way that no human would ever actually say those lines. Plus, he has a habit of often just explaining things we already know by having the characters repeat them ad nauseam. It’s not enough to ruin the experience,  but it’s enough to be a pet peeve.

All in all, what did I think of Jubilee? Amazing, it’s amazing, it’s so incredible I’ve done nothing but rant about it for 754 words that you probably skim read. It’s a masterpiece, and only Shearman’s third best, that is, in my opinion, miles above Dalek in quality. It’s a twisting and brilliant story that takes a hammer to fascist ideology all with a grin and a quip. It is a must listen for any fan of Doctor Who especially since it doesn’t require prior listening. It’s brilliant, it’s classic, it’s Jubilee.

10/10

Pros:

+ Enthralling, complex and original story

+ Incredible and macabrely brilliant takedown of fascism

+ Genuinely funny in a kinda f**ked up sort of way

+ One of the most interesting and unique takes I’ve seen on the Daleks

+ Amazing twist at the halfway point

+ Six and Evelyn are at their very best

+ Entertaining and fascinating side cast

+ Sombre and thematically rich ending

Cons:

- Dialogue can feel forced at points