📝7/10 = ENJOYABLE!

Time Lording through time and space, one victory at a time! 

VICTORY XXV

This story is a little coda to the Time Lord Victorious event (and a prequel to the A Dalek Awakens escape room story) and involves the Fourth Doctor going up against a lone Dalek.

We are onboard a starship transporting humans to a new world when a bunch of the crew is awoken from their cryogenic sleep ahead of time after the ship is boarded by a Dalek. They decide to experiment on it to potentially use its assets, but that is naturally a bad idea. The Doctor is needed to sort everything out.

Jonathan Morris builds the atmosphere slowly, and the guest cast performs the script believably (particularly when first facing the Doctor and dismissing everything he says). We learn early on that one of the humans is working with the Dalek and can sense everything going very wrong eventually. It takes a while for the Doctor to show up in the story, and this time is used to effectively build the threat.

Tom Baker is in good spirits, but his Doctor here is more of the older, funnier geezer type than the occasionally very alien and rude version we saw on TV.

The story turns more entertaining once Brooke becomes a Dalek puppet. It's also interesting when the Dalek taunts the Doctor with his future crimes.

Really enjoyed this coda to the TLV series, one of the better BF releases for this event. Four was great in this story, and I really bought into the base under siege stuff. One day if I ever get round to the escape room it'll be so cool knowing it follows on from this!

On the Starship Future, 10 thousand people lie in status travelling to their new home, a skeleton crew is keeping things running, and a dead alien has been discovered…

It is a nice start, people being woken up to to relieve or replace staff. An unfortunate event that killed a security officer. There’s a bit of mystery when one of the revived people doesn’t remember the person lying next to him. Not to mention the Dalek that’s been found.

It takes over fifteen minutes for the Doctor to enter the story. I do feel its worth mentioning as sometimes you’re left wondering what’s going on - Love and Monsters springs to mind.

The Dalek that’s been discovered isn’t as dead as is first believed. The fact is that this story is a pretty typical example of lone Dalek needing to rebuild the race using whatever resources available. Its just rehashing bits of other Dalek stories, Revelation of the Daleks, Resolution of the Daleks etc. Its not doing anything new and its a little disappointing.

The other plot strand, is that people have been replaced before the ship left earth, but this is kind of in the background as the Dalek theme takes precedence. It feels that there wasn’t enough space for both plots to be played out. Meaning that neither is as developed as much as they could have been.

I was going to say that this could be just any fourth Doctor adventure, however about three quarters of the way through a Dalek gets chatty and references ‘Timelord Victorious” and the previous audio, Mutually Assured Destruction. It does feel shoehorned in, as if they suddenly realised it needs to tie in in with the arc and better mention it. The Daleks are not known for their small talk, and it comes out of the blue.

Not sure what this does to the TLV arc, I gather it led into the escape room event. But you can enjoy it on its own without needing the rest.

Its an Ok story.

I think I just was t in the right head space for this one ngl

It's literally just The Power of the Daleks (Remix), with an interpolation of The Ark in Space. Tom's fantastic though.