We journey over to The Early Adventures with The Dalek Occupation of Winter and the writing debut of David K. Barnes, as first impressions go Mr Barnes gets a massive thumbs up from me and between this and another story written by him I'll get to soon, he may well be on his way to becoming one of my favourite Big Finish writers.

The Early Adventures was a series that focused solely on the first two Doctors and presented themselves as a mixture of full cast and narrated, in a lot of ways mimicking the 60s vibe of listening to one of their lost episodes back when the BBC’s policy for archiving was code for “toss it in a fire”.

The TARDIS lands on the planet Winter which as you can guess from the name is a world locked in an endless Summer of course! But in all seriousness, the planet’s inhospitably cold climate makes it impossible for a civilisation to develop and yet develop one has, as the Doctor, Vicki and Steven find themselves in the midst of a city in celebration as the people of Winter celebrate the graduation of their finest students as they prepare to spend the rest of their lives locked away in the research centre where the citizens receive freshly grown fruits. All thanks to their generous benefactors, their friends even from another world. The people live freely and happily under the watchful eye of their Dalek occupants in return for the construction of thousands of Daleks to be sent out into the stars where the Daleks hope to no doubt “deliver aid to other worlds”.

There are of course plenty of the Dalek stories that toy with the idea of the Daleks putting on a friendly façade and keeping their true intentions hidden, but The Dalek Occupation of Winter takes it to a new level where the Daleks seem to have conquered this planet and yet they don’t impose their cruelty on anyone, nobody is afraid of the Daleks and are quite happy to work for them. David K Barnes presents a Dalek story that seems on the surface to be your typical Doctor liberates planet from Dalek rule, but he throws in so many twists and turns to the plot and characters to the point where you can’t really be sure of where the story is going. While the story reaches it’s expected result, it’s done so in a very bleak and bittersweet way as the Doctor’s main conflict isn’t even with the Daleks themselves, but rather those who are well aware of what the Daleks are capable of but still continue to be complicit in their evil in order to maintain peace and happiness among the population. It’s a story that tackles the complacency of living under a dictatorship and how easy it becomes to make it part of your everyday life, or even those who understand how wrong it is but have lost all hope for change.

The Dalek Occupation of Winter is a fantastically depressing and uncompromising story that stands as not only one of the best First Doctor stories but one of my favourite Dalek stories of all time.