MR 007: The Genocide Machine

This one was pretty meh. I'll be honest, I kind of checked out about halfway through it. This is BF's first Doctor Who use of the Daleks though! So that's exciting I guess.

There's a library with all the knowledge of the universe in it and the Daleks are after it. They want to assimilate all of that knowledge into one single test subject Dalek. That said, most of this story is just standard Dalek faire.

I did enjoy the inclusion of an Ace duplicate so we get to hear Sophie Aldred playing her evil clone. I wasn't too sure what the point of the theives trying to steal the zigguarat that the Daleks came out of was. Just to have other people in the story to get killed off I suppose.

There were a couple actually interesting things here. Firstly, when the test subject Dalek actually comes out, having assimilated all knowledge in the universe it comes to the opposite conclusion of the Daleks' fascist philosophy. It believes that all life must be preserved. I like this a lot. It has a real "reality has a liberal bias" feel to it.

The other thing I liked was that the librarian has been systematically genociding an entire species of natives to this planet the entire time the library has existed. It created aqueous storage facilities for knowledge, but every drop of water is a sentient being. The library has been erasing their minds and using them to store data without knowing or caring that they were sentient. That's wild.That means that these beings are inherently nomadic. They have to be with the water cycle. Goodness knows what happens if you drink water on this planet.

Definitely not the greatest Dalek story of all time, but it's pretty ok. I liked McCoy's reaction to finding out about the water people genocide and how he chastises the librarian.