The Monthly Adventures #032  - "The Time of the Daleks" by Justin Richards

It’s no secret that the Dalek Empire stories that periodically reared their ugly heads in the Main Range is not a favourite of mine. Four extremely loosely related audios that aimed to explore the Daleks at the height of their power, but never actually tried to do anything particularly new with them and all ended up being putrid bores that felt like torture to sit through. And The Time of the Daleks is no exception; the unfortunate end to a streak of alright to all-time great stories that began way back with The One Doctor, Justin Richards provides one last kick in the head as once again we’re thrown into a decidedly dull adventure with the nazi pepperpots. And rather than try anything new, we have a bizarre remake of The Evil of the Daleks.

The universe has forgotten Shakespeare. With the world’s most famous author wiped from history, the Doctor visits the palace of English dictator Mariah Learman, and discovers the Daleks assisting her with a dangerous time travel experiment, experiments to commune with William Shakespeare.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I will give The Time of the Daleks some fair dues as it is probably the most creatively wealthy of the four Dalek Empire stories and does boast the most initially interesting premise. The Daleks helping wipe Shakespeare from history sounds like something out of a Paul Magrs script and the absolute insane ideas that this audio toys with certainly feels like the hallmarks of some of Who’s crazier authors. Unfortunately, our author this time around is none of them, our author this time around is Justin Richards. Richards isn’t a bad writer per say, just a persistently bland one who, despite any good ideas the story may be built on, always seems to fail at creating anything very memorable. He has numerous strengths that are on clear display here, from how well the action sequences go down to how well structured I think the whole thing is, taking place in near real time, it’s just that so little actually does occur in the story that my interest is just never peaked, I never feel excited outside of fleeting moments of adrenaline, the story is just bland and constantly takes meaningless asides to pad out its own length. When it decides to dip into the more bizarre aspects of its plot, it’s easily at its best; though worryingly similar to Waterfield’s machine in The Evil of the Daleks, Learman’s time machine, a menagerie of clocks and mirrors working off some poorly explained philosophical concept, is a really interesting and unique take on time travel that I can admire. Then there’s the bonkers twist that the kid the Doctor and co have been hanging around with for the duration of the story is actually a kidnapped 8-year-old William Shakespeare, and if more ludicrous shenanigans like that happened over the same old tired Dalek runarounds, I’d be a lot happier.

But the thing is that I’m not happy, I’m very, very, very bored. The Time of the Daleks is once again a Dalek story that just fails to captivate, though more through wasted potential rather than lack of trying this time. It is, surprise surprise, a painfully dull affair, and that might seem like it contradicts with my praise for the story’s structure earlier, but let me clarify: I like how the story is presented, I’m a big fan of plots that happen in real time and never stop moving (whilst leaving space for character development, tone-setting and all that jazz) and whilst this is the approach that The Time of the Daleks takes, there is little to no narrative wealth filling up that structure, just scene after scene of nothing happening, or Charley getting sent back to a Dalek occupied Elizabethan London only to go “oh, there’s a Dalek” before leaving, never getting to explore this much more interesting looking world. This sort of thing happens a lot, where we get tastes, little whiffs of a great idea that Justin Richards has come up with, and then it’s ripped away before we can play with it, or it’s simply sidelined. Learman getting turned into a Shakespeare obsessed Dalek mutant, the Doctor running around with a young Will Shakespeare, the Daleks slowly occupying different parts of history. Hell, I’d even take a story about the rebellion that happens in the very vague background of this story, which seems like a more interesting plot than running around a palace, constantly getting captured and recaptured by very idiotic daleks. In fact, I think “idiotic” is a good way to describe most characters in this story, so many actions they make just don’t make a lick of sense. Like actively denying that the erasure of Shakespeare from history had anything to do with you, whilst experimenting with time travel with your primary goal being to meet William Shakespeare. Yep guys, definitely no link there, none at all, glad somebody with your intellect is running the country. It’s this reason and a distinct lack of characterisation that makes our cast so dull this time around, and Charley and Eight don’t do much to rectify that. But, The Time of the Dalek’s biggest sin, is just not being very interesting. A veritable Pandora's box of cool ideas squashed by messy explanations that utterly lose the listener and devolve into circling around a dull setting whilst Daleks with no interesting qualities chase a cast with the personalities of various differently-shaded bits of granite. But then again, what did I expect from the Dalek Empire stories?

All in all, I’m just glad to be done with this “mini-series” that really had no right to be grouped together at all, their only uniting trait seemingly that they’re joyless and conceptually barren stories with all the originality of a Marvel movie. It’s not a good Dalek story, it’s not a very good Doctor Who story, and it’s certainly not a good story, so in my personal opinion, I’d just try my best to skip it.

4/10

Pros:

+ Boasts some really fun and inventive ideas

+ Creates action well

+ Is certainly better when dipping into crazier ideas

Cons:

- Void of narrative significance

- None of it’s grandiose ideas are explained properly

- Dull and shallow sidecast

- Yet another barebones story with nothing to discuss