Dang.  I was pretty excited for this audio.  Sure, I found Omega a little underwhelming, but it is generally considered the weaker of Big Finish's "Villain Trilogy" from these early Main Range releases.  Surely Davros and Master would impress me!  The jury is still out for the Master, as of writing this review, but Davros, well, Davros let me down in a lot of ways.

First, the good.  Davros' character is really well done here.  We do a good job getting into his past and delving into his history.  I like some of it.  It pairs nicely with the content we've seen in The Witch's Familiar and Magician's Apprentice.  And it fits well with Davros as he was established in the original series.  This was Big Finish's big debut of this character, and it was largely impressive overall.  It's cool having a Davros story completely independent of the Daleks.

I don't love the idea of Davros making the Daleks over some lost love and hurt feelings, rather than other stories that tend to focus on them being a more natural consequence of war, discrimination, and hatred.  It feels like Davros the audio adventure opts for character work more than the political side of the Daleks, and it does so at great cost.  Because the politics feel more relevant here than your average Davros story.  The whole point of the plot is that this corporation finds Davros and tries to use him.  The Doctor is forced to work with Davros while navigating the CEO, his wife, and an ongoing labour dispute kind of existing in the background for this.  It feels like the perfect set-up to examine the relationship between capitalism and fascism.  That's history.  That's how the Nazis were able to consolidate power and build their war machine, and there's a reason they went after the socialists and trade unions first.

So for the Davros story to kind of touch on these plot points, but never really examine it, is a missed opportunity.  I'd argue, if anything, writer Lance Parkin seems to not only miss the point, but kind of presents CEO Arnold Baynes in a sympathetic light.  I don't know if it was intentional, but it is laughable.  So even if the story has the right idea at heart - Davros does eventually take over the company while Baynes and his wife are completely irresponsible about it - it really feels like it fails to deliver on any concrete message about fascism.  Which kind of defeats the whole point, or what I most like, about Davros and the Daleks.

It's hard for me to get past this stuff.  If it were just a character focused story, then Davros would be a pretty solid audio.  I would have been okay with that - not every Dalek story needs to be serious, after all.  I'm not the one that brought up all this stuff about capitalism and corporations, though.  I wouldn't have even thought about it, if that wasn't the focus of the story.  If one is going to feature these ideas in any story, and bring it up as much as it is focused on as it is in Davros, than I expect that story, or any story, really, to have some purpose in doing so.  That Parkin fails to deliver a coherent point about this stuff means that it felt like a lot of the content around both Baynes characters was a pointless distraction.  I don't like how in both Davros and Omega now, we've had two different women obsess over the villain and basically serve as their mommy-therapist.  So when we are left with a fairly underwhelming ending, well, I'm left feeling dissatisfied, to a degree.

If it weren't for that good character work around Davros, I would rate this much lower.  He really gets to shine here.  Terry Molloy performs the character so well, and he delivers a full suite of emotions here.  We start off with familiar character beats - experiencing his rage, his bitterness, and his ability to scheme.  But near the end, we even get to see some new stuff - Davros gets very scared near the end of the audio and it is a performance to behold.  So I'm not blind to the strength of the Davros story.  I just had trouble getting past these weaknesses, because they are pretty serious faults in what could have been something special to me.

The Monthly Adventures #048 - “Davros" by Lance Parkin

Getting into the second instalment of the villain’s trilogy and getting away from what is definitely the third most iconic Doctor Who villain (totally), we are now diving into what would most certainly constitute as the Doctor’s two biggest rivals and, in a way, his two equals. We’ll get to the obvious next story, but now, it’s time for an old foe: a distillation of evil, a being of guile and hate and rage. It’s time to learn all about Davros.

Called to investigate megacorporation TIA and their affairs, the Doctor finds himself hired as their new head of R&D, along with an old enemy - Davros. But it seems Davros has turned over a new leaf. Can evil really change?

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Davros has always been a bit of a strange concept for me; on one hand, is it more interesting to have Daleks be a product of themselves, the natural route when hate and fascism takes over, slowly poisoning their minds and bodies (in the most literal sense) with their ridiculous ideals until it consumes them or have them be the product of a mad scientist’s experiment, like something out of a 1950s pulp sci-fi novella? When put like that, the answer may seem obvious, but then you actually watch the stories with Davros and it turns out he’s always the best part of whatever episode he’s in. I actually consider Genesis of the Daleks the most overrated episode of Doctor Who ever (I mean, come on guys, it’s a 7/10 if we’re being generous) but I can’t deny the absolute masterwork Nation did writing the scenes between the Doctor and Davros. But what about here? In the story named after the scarred tyrant. Well, I think this is the absolute best he’s ever been. And in no small part because of Terry Molloy, whose maniacal, crazed performance is captivating from start to finish, delivering some of the best dialogue I’ve heard in The Monthly Adventures so far. Parkin gives Davros several monologues here but easily the best is when he describes his dwindling sanity during his cryostasis, every regret, night terror, hate and guilt running through his head, bringing him to the point of madness, only for his heart to beat, along with the realisation it had been a single second. It’s a moment that makes the blood run cold and from the sharp stringed music to Molloy’s viscous delivery, it’s easily my favourite part of this whole 150 minutes audio. And that’s saying something, the story here is great. The Doctor and Davros have both been hired by a megacorporation to develop new tools for human benefit, and Davros sees it as a chance at redemption, whilst the Doctor fears Davros will inevitably slip back into his old ways, just now with the largest company in the galaxy backing him up. Not only is it a great concept, it's endlessly fun watching these two bicker in a lab and honestly, I wished there were more of them stuck working together, constantly sabotaging each other’s projects. It would’ve been a very different tone but it would’ve been fun. But that’s the thing, this audio isn’t fun, it’s as grim as can be. It’s about change and inherent evil, it’s about redemption and the point at which your past wrongs become too great. We get to see bits and pieces of Davros’ backstory here, showing how he stole the idea for the Daleks from a female colleague he was in love with before, being driven mad by jealousy over her idea, eventually killing her when she confronted him about it. For a moment, it looked like it was trying to make Davros a sympathetic villain but then, much akin to the characters in the story, the rug is pulled out from under you as you realise just how sick and twisted Davros truly is. It’s a twist you know is coming; like the Doctor, you know Davros, and you know he’ll inevitably change. And that’s the other thing, through its examination of evil, Davros also manages to fit in a nice little criticism of neo-nazism. I mean, the main plot is basically what if Tesla revived Hitler and got him to work alongside Churchill, so you just know that there’s some nice mockery of modern fascism, mainly through the CEO of TIA’s Dalek-sympathising wife. It’s not the focus, but it’s always a nice addition to a story.

However, Davros is a character-piece first and a story second it would seem because I have a couple complaints. My main one is that the first and second halves don’t really flow into one another. Davros feels like he’s becoming better one second and then is back to murdering thousands of people the next. He seems to flip mindsets within the space of a scene and it can be somewhat jarring, especially when everything leading up to it had been so subtly done. And then there’s TIA itself, the megacorporation who hires the Doctor and Davros. They’re odd because it feels like Parkin tried to make some anticapitalist comment but then just stopped short of going all the way. The CEO - Arnold Baynes - and his wife, Lorraine, are both oddly sympathetic characters. You’d think they’d be money-making sociopaths, akin to Rochester and Miriam from Jubilee, but on the whole they’re just normal characters, and perfectly reasonable people. But then you have Lorraine being a published neo-nazi and Arnold murdering a character in the third act only for it to never be brought up again. It’s weird because the fact that this story did nothing with the giant capitalist money making farm and even showed them as somewhat likeable was just a strange choice to me.

Davros is as distilled as a character piece can get, insightful, twisted and intelligent, it’s filled with great performances and even better characters. A few hiccups in the story don’t impact what is an incredible entry into the villains trilogy and a brilliant portrayal of one of Who’s oldest enemies.

9/10

Pros:

+ Davros has never been more terrifying, cruel and fascinating

+ Terry Molloy’s performance is sickeningly mesmerising

+ Amazing dialogue that fuels some all time great monologues

+ Chilling portrayal of evil and insanity

+ Brilliant take down of neo-nazism

Cons:

- The switch from recovering megalomaniac to tyrannic ruler of all in Davros’ behaviour feels unnatural

- Confusingly sympathetic portrayal of a megacorporation

MR 048: Davros

"When I press this switch, I will die. The poison in that projectile injector will kill me in a moment. It is a perfect, efficient killing machine."

Now we move to the second story examining classic who villains. This time our subject is the one and only Davros, the creator of the Daleks, and this is probably the single best Davros performance ever made, tv or audio. Speaking of fascism, there seems to be a running theme in these opening audios. If only the writer of Flip-Flop got the memo.

Davros is known as the creator of the Daleks, of course, but in this audio he is curiously on his own, without the Daleks. This gives him a lot of room to develop as a character in his own right, without his shouty monstrosities wheeling around. We get a lot of interesting backstory as well, revealed gradually over the course of the story and running sort of in parallel with the main story.

And in that opening we learn some backstory. Davros was offered a way to kill himself by the Kaled people. Fascists, of course, are not known for being favorable towards disability. After his accident from being hit by a nuclear blast, Davros is incredibly disabled, only able to move one arm and having no sense of sight or taste or smell. Now that he is disabled, his own fascist government thinks he is no longer part of the master race and must be destroyed. They don't have the heart to do it for him because of all his work for the Kaleds in the war, so they say he should do it. But Davros refuses to die. He can not and will not die.

We open on a massive intergalactic mega corporation where there's a rumor that they're going to shut down all their mines. This, of course, would devastate millions, perhaps billions, of people's lives and many different communities that rely on the mines. It's a parallel to how corporations work now. Whole communities and millions of people rely on the work from massive corporate projects like Amazon warehouses, but a few mega rich ghouls on the board of a corporation can just decide to devastate whole economies and cast millions of people into poverty by closing these warehouses just on a whim. It's a pretty horrifying way to organize society. It's just feudalism again with a few extra steps. It's also why cities will bid on and try to make laws favorable to corporations to lure them into building a warehouse there. Think about how many cities, communities, and people were devastated by factories closing in the US and going overseas where it's cheaper to run.

As the Doctor is investigating these rumors with a journalist, Willis, and an inside worker, Kimberly Todd, he discovers something pretty horrifying, to him. The CEO of the corporation, Arnold Baynes, and his wife Lorraine have recovered the corpse of Davros himself and are attempting to revive him. The Sixth Doctor, being the type of Doctor that he is, immediately breaks cover and runs out from hiding shouting about how Davros shouldn't be revived. Of course Colin is amazing in this, as he always is. As the audio goes on, he plays his Doctor so well as the shouty, in your face, irreverent Doctor. That is how the Sixth Doctor should have been played from the beginning on tv instead of menacing and murderous. I definitely remember this audio in particular being one of the formative stories in my love for his Doctor, understandably so.

I love how the Baynes couple try to play on the Doctor's compassion. Shouldn't a Doctor try to save lives instead of kill them? Only in the Doctor's mind, there is no conflict, Davros is already dead and needs to stay in suspended animation. But it's too late. They revive him and then offer him a job after showing him a commercial for the corporation. "We're just a good old fashioned family run mega corporation." It's like Momcorp from Futurama. The Doctor, desperate, offers his own services and so they work together.

This is mostly an excuse for the Doctor and Davros to bandy wits back and forth, and boy is it fun. The Doctor ruins two hours of Davros's work, hilariously before Davros pours his heart and soul out to the Doctor. He talks about being in suspended animation for a very long time after the humans defeated the Daleks. He talks about how he almost went mad, or did go mad, or already was mad. Every second stretched out to an eternity as he was forced to relive his entire life over and over again, unable to move or do anything but think. Davros says he's going to change his ways and become good to which the Doctor obviously does not believe him. All the while that Davros is talking about the torturous existence of being suspended, the Doctor is being flippant and irreverent, not buying it for a second.

There's also an interesting scene in which Willis interviews Baynes and then Baynes destroys his tape recorder and holds him prisoner. It absolutely sounds like something a mega powerful CEO would do to an unfavorable reporter. There's another interesting bit where they're required to break for lunch and Davros thinks it odd that there are laws that make workers less productive. Because, of course, he sees workers as slaves.

Lorraine then interviews Davros. She's a historian and wants to write his biography because she admires him so much. And this is where we get some more backstory. He created weapons for the war effort and he created food pills made out of the corpses of fallen soldiers. The only thing on Skarro in abundance is corpses, after all. He worked with a woman named Shan who first came up with idea of evolving beyond their bodies and creating the Daleks, but Davros continued the work.

The Doctor and Davros complete their work on a what was supposed to be used as a starship's navigation computer (but was actually used for robots without their knowledge) and Davros is tasked with ending famine. He finds the system grossly inefficient, because of course it is. Capitalism is ridiculously inefficient because it's a failure of distribution. People being unable to buy food and starving to death while corporations throw food out regularly is very much so inefficient and wasteful. As Davros says, planets that don't make enough food for their own population grow cash crops for planets that already have too much food. Because they have to make the cash crops just to survive, thus serving the imperial core.

And in response to this, Davros decides that it's time to bring down the inefficient corporate system. He's going to do this through the stock market. He understands it perfectly, able to develop a perfect algorithm to predict it. When he releases this algorithm to the world, stocks will be worthless and corporations will collapse allowing him to replace it with his new galactic order. Only instead of creating something better, he will create something far far worse. He plans on making the galaxy into his slaves to create weapons to enslave even more people. Even without the Daleks, Davros can't help but think like them. Or, more accurately, they can't help but think like him because he created them after all.

And now that we know that Davros is indeed still evil, we hear more backstory. It turns out that he might have been in love with Shan and was jealous that Shan was talking to someone else socially. So in that jealous rage, he fabricated evidence that the person Shan was talking with was a Thal agent and had him and all of his associates executed, even Shan. He let his hatred consume him to the point where he actually believed that Shan was a Thal agent just because she was hanging out with someone else.

When Baynes, Willis, and the Doctor go down to the robot factory where his work has been put to use, we see Davros break cover finally when he tries to kill them all. He gave a nuke to Willis earlier telling him it was evidence against Baynes (even though he just made it up) and sets it off. The Doctor gets to run with it very fast and drop it into a hole, hoping that it won't kill them. The blast doesn't, but the radiation starts to sweep upwards into the corporate dome, killing thousands of people who work there. But Davros has holed himself up in the bunker inside the bunker, the computer center, completely shielded from the radiation.

In keeping with Baynes still being evil (but less evil compared to Davros), he takes the opportunity to kill Willis. The hostile journalist will never get word out about what's happened if he's dead. When they get back up, Davros is trying to send out his stock market algorithm to the world, but he keeps getting stone walled. Baynes comes back to offer to take Davros away and use the algorithm for them both to get rich, but Davros kills him. We see the contrast here. Baynes' evil comes from his greed. Davros' evil comes from his hatred. Davros doesn't care about being wealthy even as Baynes offers him money over and over again. He wants to rule, to conquer.

The Doctor manages to foil Davros's plans over and over to send out his algorithm, so Davros escapes to a ship where he can use the com system to transmit it, but that fails as well when they're able to control the ship from orbit. The ship crashes and the Doctor assumes Davros has survived because he always does while he gets Lorraine arrested for causing all this mess in the first place because she admired Davros.

Davros is very much so a product of his environment. He grew up on a world in constant nuclear war, tearing itself apart from the radiation and nuclear blasts over thousands of years. War was all he knew and it's all he can contemplate even now. It's just hatred for the Thals turned into hatred for the rest of the universe. He then transferred that hatred into his Daleks. That hatred stays with him still. It's hatred for everyone but him. Even when he thinks of someone as his equal, like the Doctor, that hatred never leaves him. He thought of Shan as his equal, but killed her all the same. It's that hatred that motivates him to live. He refuses to die. He will live out of spite when everyone has turned on him and everyone is afraid of him. He will live and he will conquer and he will rule all.

Like I said, this is the best Davros performance I've ever seen/heard. Terry Molloy injects Davros with such pathos. You never truly feel sorry for him, but you understand why he's so evil. Colin plays against him perfectly. His irreverence is perfect for Davros's overly dramatic shouting and it works so well. This is a triumph of a story that shows how good both Colin and Terry Molloy can be and lets us really get to know Davros in all his disturbing glory.

24.09.2022

Interesting how they choose to go into origin stories for these villains. The implication of Davros not feeling love as a result of a broken heart is interesting in practice (even though it sounds tedious in theory), but there's not much else in this story, I'm afraid. Also, Davros' plan here is applicable in every subsequent appearance. There's literally nothing the Doctor can do to stop it, and Davros doesn't have to do anything the second time for it. The plan itself is great though, both in concept and in its realisation.
2.5/5

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: The Two Doctors

A really great insight into Davros' motivations and his character overall. I might consider listening to I, Davros if it's anything like this because I think he's an absolutely fascinating villain. I find it a bit odd how nobody really questioned hiring Davros to work for their big mega-corporation. It feels like the Doctor Who equivalent to if Amazon revived Hitler to hire him, and then hired his greatest rival to work alongside him.

Still, it makes for some really fun moments, of both the Doctor adjusting to this newfound job and also sabotaging Davros at every opportunity. Not only are there fun moments, but there are some really intense ones, especially when Davros is recounting his time in suspended animation. The way he described coming up with every possible thought and idea and practically going mad only for the first second to pass was a chilling reveal and really drove home his insanity. Terry Molloy acted this excellently and I really think he's one of the best versions of Davros out there.

Colin Baker took a much more secondary role here and I think that really suits this story in particular; giving the spotlight to Davros is a great move. It got a teeny bit muddled towards the end but that doesn't really bring down what is otherwise a fantastic character piece that brings so much depth to a character who's usually reduced to mindless screaming like his mutated creations. Very good, I'm keen to see how Master is after two excellent villain-focused stories.

Next Story: Timelash

If you're going to do a set of character pieces on Doctor Who villains, Davros is an obvious choice. A man willing to destroy his own race is an obvious candidate for a story that dives into his psyche. And Lance does a phenomenal job here.

A theme across this trilogy is that each story is telling two stories: one in the present, with the Doctor thwarting the latest evil scheme, and one in the past, describing the villain's origin. This is partially guesswork on my part, but I assume Master follows the same formula. And, if the trend holds true, then the present section of each story also prominently features the villain going through some sort of mental break which ends with them reaffirming who they know themselves to be.
Unlike the other entries in this trilogy, Davros also has an extra job to do, as there are stories with him set after this (again, assuming Master doesn't try to set up the TV movie), so a good chunk of the story is also devoted to laying tracks to set up Revelation of the Daleks, which I now have to rewatch.
Everything in this story comes together. The ties between capitalism and fascism, the hero worship in modern societies toward monsters of the past, the use of propaganda... just an incredible story which gets to the heart of everything.