Genetics of the Daleks

📝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.

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