The 8th Doctor Adventures #1.2 - “Blood of the Daleks: Part Two” by Steve Lyons

This is the first distinctly two part audio I’ve ever reviewed so this should be interesting. Blood of the Daleks opened with a (somewhat muffled) bang, giving us a charismatic duo, a fun location and a slightly boring story. But that’s forgivable, Part One was focused mainly on setting up our characters and story so I can easily forgive the relatively bare plot. However, only half the job is done and I’m counting on Part Two to do what One didn’t: deliver a genuinely hooking story that gets me to keep on listening. Did it succeed? Let’s see.

Faced with an obscene experiment and a hostile Dalek fleet, the Doctor finds himself in the middle of a bloody war and ruthless genocide as Lucie finds herself face to face with pure evil.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

The nature of this being a Part Two does immediately eradicate one of the previous audio’s worst parts: the pacing. This time, the in media res works and is necessary, leading to a far better and more cohesive structure that is fast paced and rarely slows down but services the script in a fun way, making this feel more like an action movie than Doctor Who.

On top of that, we have a cast in full swing; even if some of the characters feel more like cast fillers than actual personalities, Eight and Lucie still excel, with each getting a nice amount of agency and their own heroic moments. Eight especially is a really understated force here, playing once again with the concept of a “good dalek” and having the Doctor as a bitterly hopeful on looker to a fruitless war.

Now, I have a number of problems with the actual plot of this story but I do have to highlight the ending, which ties into what I just said about Eight. For as much as I think this story is relatively generic, the conclusion still felt satisfying and the final confrontation between Eight and the Dalek Supreme was genuinely engaging and dare I say even somewhat tragic, the Doctor looking down at this broken species, now indistinguishable from the supposed lesser versions of themselves created by Martez, with a kind of spiteful pity was an astonishing piece of acting from McGann and if nothing else sold me on Eight going forwards (even if I already knew he’d be great).

However, I did hint at my issues with Blood of the Daleks before and I have to say, I dislike this more than Part One. Part One had some nice atmosphere and actively felt like it was going somewhere, but Part Two basically equates to a series of underwhelming action scenes with a nice ending, but the same way a good hat doesn’t save a bad outfit, the rest of Part Two is just kind of bland. For one, it abruptly throws out the direction it was going for with the Daleks in place of a story about clone Daleks and genetic purity, which, whilst certainly more interesting, doesn’t really get enough space to play around and just amounts to the laser fire sound effect being layered over itself again and again. Also, our secondary antagonist, the body hopping Professor Martez is just not particularly intimidating. He has some interesting character beats but for the most part is just getting repeatedly defeated by the Daleks.

On top of that, Red Rocket Rising becomes significantly less interesting. Because of the heightened focus on action, we lose a lot of the atmosphere of Part One and whilst the pace is improved, the lack of downtime means we’re jumping from pivotal scene to pivotal scene, making the world feel tiny and significantly more uninteresting, the desperate population turned into background noise.

Blood of the Daleks: Part Two wasn’t that big a deviation from its first part, but was a let down nonetheless. I am looking forward to seeing where these characters go but this opening can only be described as “just another Dalek story”. It scrapes at something innovative but always manages to just miss the mark. A worthy pilot but you can find both better Dalek stories and better Steve Lyons stories elsewhere.

6/10

Pros:

+ Decently energetic and entertaining

+ McGann and Smith have brilliant chemistry together

+ Satisfying and interesting resolution

Cons:

- Professor Martez is somewhat underwhelming

- The world feels a lot smaller in scope

- Relatively derivative

As so often with Dalek stories, things devolve into a run around and you’re left wandering where all the promise of the initial set up disappeared to. The main issue is that fans have seen and heard this story many times before, with various Dalek factions facing each other off.

Despite this Sheridan Smith and Paul McGann continue to delight as an audio power couple. As with all the best Doctor / companion duos they lift proceedings.

Blood of the Daleks Part 2: 8.9/10 - This was a very enjoyable and well done finale to the first story of the Eighth Doctor adventures. I really liked the Daleks in this story and thought the Daleks vs Daleks concept was particularly good here. Martez worked really well as a villain truly believing in their actions. Klint and Tom were good side characters here as well and it was nice getting to know them more after the first part. The Doctor and Lucie's relationship is also fleshed out more here which was really nice and the dynamic between the two is very good! The two cliffhangers, the Telos mention and the call between the headhunter and Mr. Hulbert are good at setting up intrigue and I am excited for where this goes from here!

Unfortunately, I don't feel part two of Blood of the Daleks quite lives up to part one. Part one, I feel, nicely set up a mystery, a new setting, and some ideas for a part two. I had kind of assumed were were dealing with Daleks posing as saviours only to turn out to be villains like in Victory of the Daleks, or maybe we were going to deal with Daleks wiping out lesser versions of themselves, like we've also seen in Victory or a few other episodes in the New Series.

Instead, Blood of the Daleks Part 2 is doing both of these things and much more. So not only are the Daleks false saviours, but they are also mutants created from humans like in the Parting of the Ways, and ALSO are powerful enough to stand up to the real Daleks and provoke a full blown civil conflict on the Red Rocket planet.

It's a pretty cool idea, but somehow, even with two very long parts to it, I don't think any of these ideas are given enough justice, or explored thoroughly enough to pay off. None of these plot elements are fully fleshed out, and instead we get a bit of each idea, all of which is pretty compelling, by the way, but not explored enough to really work. It becomes clear quite quickly to the humans the Daleks can't be trusted, the mutant Daleks have a pretty cool relationship with Hayley Atwell's character but I don't think we get enough of that (she's great though), and the civil strife ends in a bit of a muddled mess of a battle that was a little hard to follow in an audio-only format the way they went about it.

Finally, Lucie and the Eighth Doctor are both a bit of a problem here. On their own, they are fine and quite powerful performers. But writer Steve Lyons puts way too much animosity between these two characters for them to be enjoyable. I know this improves over time and reflects, to a degree, character development in progress, but it takes away from the mystery of Lucie's character writing her like this and it does no favours to Blood of the Daleks.

It sucks, too, because were it not for these faults, Blood of the Daleks could have been intensely amazing. There's a lot of great moments with the Doctor and the Daleks here, and the Red Rocket setting and situation, along with the idea of a Dalek civil war, all had so much potential. It feels wasted, all things considered.