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

Previous Story: The Sandman

It's an incredible challenge to make a Dalek story truly great, particularly on audio, so much so that whenever I see one coming up I typically write it off. Needless to say, Robert Shearman has made a genuinely fantastic Dalek story, maybe the best Dalek story of all time. Finally, we have an adventure where the Daleks are actually explored as characters, rather than mindless robots that only exist to make loud explosions.

From listening to this and The Holy Terror, it seems Rob Shearman likes his bizarre and absurd societies. The idea of an English Empire in which contracting words is illegal is utterly ridiculous but it makes an incredibly entertaining backdrop for this story. The President was a very fun character, Martin Jarvis really sold his absolute lunacy. The President's wife was similarly insane, but very much a different brand of it. She was also excellently played by Rosalind Ayres.

The way the characters kept flip-flopping between good and evil was fantastically written and performed. I was kept on the edge of my seat trying to guess who was secretly evil and who secretly good. Maggie Stables as Evelyn had some great moments with the lone Dalek and I love how this story actually went through with the "good Dalek" idea and didn't cheap out by having it betray Evelyn at the end. Overall, a fantastic story that definitely lives up to the hype.

Next Story: Doctor Who and the Pirates

Jubilee is a story that, in my eyes, represents some of the best of Big Finish. It subverts what you'd typically expect from a Dalek story and from Daleks in general, and this works well to explore how the Dalek mindset works. There are some nice elements of mystery and unknown which run through most of the story, which I like, but everything is explained by the end. As you may already know, this story was later adapted into Dalek from series 1 of New Who. I think Jubilee is better by a lot. The longer run time gives it more space to explore the concepts.

📝9.6/10 → FAVOURITE!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: “JUBILEE”

Robert Shearman is back writing for the Main Range, this time with the oft-lauded Jubilee, a Dalek story with Six and Evelyn. He kicks off the story with a fun fake trailer for a Dalek movie before dropping Six and Evelyn in London in the early 1900s, where they exist on two time tracks at once (a bit like The Space Museum). From here, Shearman begins slowly unravelling this strange alternate timeline, with a British Empire ruled by a president and America ruled by a prime minister, and with contractions in speech strictly forbidden.

Shearman adapted Jubilee for TV in 2005, when he wrote Dalek for Series 1 of Doctor Who. Having seen the episode before listening to Jubilee, I immediately recognised some of the common elements between the two versions, such as the initial mystery of a prisoner the President keeps torturing in hopes of making it speak in time for the jubilee celebrations or the special bond between the companion and the prisoner.

Even though I guessed it was coming, the Dalek reveal in the cliffhanger to Part 1 is fairly effective. What I didn’t see coming was the brilliant shock cliffhanger in Part 2. Shearman keeps hinting about someone in a wheelchair locked up in jail who is responsible for creating the Daleks, making us believe it's Davros, only to then reveal that it is, in fact, the Doctor himself.

Much like Holy Terror or Spare Parts, Jubilee builds an effectively eerie and tense atmosphere strengthened by dark humour and complex but meaningful narrative beats. The Doctor remembers how he’s already been to 1905 to save the world, yet knows nothing of it—still, both he and Evelyn are celebrated figures because of that. All of this feels very unnerving and adds to the tension.

It’s interesting to follow a story playing around with a timeline where the Daleks have been defeated and are then belittled and made fun of, similarly to the Nazis after WWII in our timeline. This is all played about against the backdrop of the Doctor and Evelyn somehow existing on two time tracks at once, constantly living their present and their past. In the second half, we realise that the Doctor has become a fascist totem, his actions directly leading to the creation of the current, dark times.

Colin Baker and Maggie Stables are magical, as you'd expect. Evelyn, in particular, is used well as a counterbalance to the Doctor, as she refuses to stay put and wants to do whatever she can to solve the problem at hand.

The Daleks play a different role here; they are seemingly friendly, but with a presence that still makes them feel creepy and dangerous. This is easily the most effective use of the Daleks in early Big Finish—not too big and bombastic, but with genuine depth and character. The conversation between Evelyn and the Dalek in Part 2 is a great example of this new way to write and characterise the pepperpots—a Dalek with an existential crisis. I also love how the human characters try to control and use the Dalek for their own ends, only to notice that the Dalek slowly but steadily takes control of the situation.

The supporting cast is superb.

The latter half of this story takes a brilliantly dark turn, with some brutal violence introduced as the Dalek begins to realise its potential. We also fully realise the psychopathic tendencies shown by Miriam, who becomes the biggest villain of the piece.

Part 4 unleashes the Dalek threat after great buildup but also gets weighed down somewhat by it. The nature of the Doctor and the Daleks are explored, and this is the most enjoyable aspect of the final episode.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

• The Daleks movie advertised at the beginning stars Plenty O’Toole, who we know better as the name of one of the Bond girls in Diamonds Are Forever (1971).

The Monthly Adventures #040 - “Jubilee" by Robert Shearman

The King has returned, all hail the King! Robert Shearman is back and with another masterpiece, somehow (not sure how he keeps making these). Jubilee, better known as “did you know Dalek was based off an audio story?”, is a top contender for greatest Dalek story ever written and is most definitely the best Dalek story out of The Monthly Adventures so far; a funny, disturbing, original, shocking and wholly unique take on the Nazi pepper pots that doubles as a biting destruction of backward Fascist ideologies. The third in a line of perfect audios (because The Maltese Penguin didn’t happen), Jubilee is, no doubt, a seminal story.

A fault in the TARDIS strands the Doctor and Evelyn in an alternate version of London, where the British Empire are masters of the world and the President of England is torturing an unearthly prisoner for the sake of the next day’s 100 year anniversary of a failed Dalek invasion.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

As always, it’s hard to know where to start listing positives in a Robert Shearman story, considering you have a whole tidal wave of them crashing down at you. I guess I’ll start with how incredible of a script this is, once again playing around with time travel in a way I don’t believe I’ve seen before - having the TARDIS split in time, landing the Doctor and Evelyn in two different places at once. We don’t see one pair of the Doctor and Evelyn however, merely their effects a hundred years later. That is except for possibly one of the greatest twists in Doctor Who, when it’s revealed the version of the Doctor from 1903 has been imprisoned in the Tower of London for a hundred years. Not to mention the setting, I mean: an alternate fascist Britain that has taken the morals of the Dalek race where they’re torturing the last of their former attackers so that they can get it to talk by its execution the next day - at the jubilee celebrations. Immediately, you can see the similarities to Dalek, which Shearman based off this script, but it does go in a very different direction; Dalek was used to explore the Doctor’s PTSD after the Time War, very much an episode that could’ve only happened in the first series of the Revival, whereas Jubilee acts as a hilarious, disturbing and genius destruction of the futility of fascism. It takes the Daleks back to their roots, pointing out how they were always meant to be stand-ins for the Nazis and, how like we’ve actually trivialised the SS in real life, we’ve become accustomed to the Daleks just being those funny pepper pots. And it does not let down exploring its themes, you have so many different facets of fascist ideology being mocked it's hard to even count. How fascism breeds fascism, creating false enemies when you’ve conquered all the worlds, the insane back bending conformers to these beliefs have to do to justify them. And I don’t think it would work if Shearman wasn’t such a naturally comedic writer. Don’t get me wrong, Jubilee is a f**ked up story that does a lot of dark things, but it’s all mixed in a macabre brand of humour that means all these heavy themes, whilst not shied away from, are not too much to bear or become edgy or meaningless. And I really do need to point that I think this might be the blackest comedy to ever exist, maybe only beaten by something like Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. You have the president of the British Empire cutting the hands of little people so he can stuff them inside fake Dalek suits for his own entertainment, all the while laughing about how he’s only pretending to be evil.

And that’s another thing, our cast is amazing. Obviously we have Six and Evelyn, probably in what is their best outing; forget Arrangements for War, the subtle character building here is incredible, Evelyn’s conversations with the imprisoned Dalek alone should’ve won her some kind of award. And then there’s the leaders of the British Empire, Rochester and his wife, Miriam, both incredibly insane in very unique ways. Rochester, trying to justify his atrocities, has convinced himself everybody is under Dalek mind control and he has to pretend to be evil to survive, so really he’s a good man whilst Miriam has been so taken up by the British Empire’s generational fascist beliefs that she’s trying to overthrow the country because she thinks Rochester isn’t an abusive enough husband to her. And that’s only our villains, you have the slimy, power hungry second-in-command, the supposed good guy who’s only “following orders” and that god damn Dalek. Probably the best character here, the Dalek is centre to what is my absolute favourite interpretation of Doctor Who’s most iconic villain. They are not wholly evil and murderous, but tragic, not in a sympathetic way but for in a “wow, you’re f**ked” way. Without orders for a hundred years, the Dalek has gone mad, begging everybody around him to tell him what to do. And by the end of the story, it decides that, because the human race got destroyed by conforming to a Dalek ideology, the Daleks must kill themselves to prevent the same happening to them, the imprisoned Dalek blowing the fleet up and stopping the Dalek invasion in 1903 from ever happening. It is, in my opinion, an incredible ending that shows the absolute dredges of the kind of things Shearman’s criticising, and also gives us one of the most fascinating and oddly beautiful portrayals of the Daleks. It’s sad, it’s funny, it’s bombastic, it’s complex, it’s interesting, it’s- have I made it clear that I like Jubilee yet?

The cons section is, unsurprisingly, very short but I do have to highlight one problem that persists throughout most of Shearman’s work that was particularly bad here: the dialogue. Shearman’s dialogue can often be original, witty, funny and engaging but it can also be very often weirdly forced, in a way that no human would ever actually say those lines. Plus, he has a habit of often just explaining things we already know by having the characters repeat them ad nauseam. It’s not enough to ruin the experience,  but it’s enough to be a pet peeve.

All in all, what did I think of Jubilee? Amazing, it’s amazing, it’s so incredible I’ve done nothing but rant about it for 754 words that you probably skim read. It’s a masterpiece, and only Shearman’s third best, that is, in my opinion, miles above Dalek in quality. It’s a twisting and brilliant story that takes a hammer to fascist ideology all with a grin and a quip. It is a must listen for any fan of Doctor Who especially since it doesn’t require prior listening. It’s brilliant, it’s classic, it’s Jubilee.

10/10

Pros:

+ Enthralling, complex and original story

+ Incredible and macabrely brilliant takedown of fascism

+ Genuinely funny in a kinda f**ked up sort of way

+ One of the most interesting and unique takes I’ve seen on the Daleks

+ Amazing twist at the halfway point

+ Six and Evelyn are at their very best

+ Entertaining and fascinating side cast

+ Sombre and thematically rich ending

Cons:

- Dialogue can feel forced at points

19.08.2022

Yes, it really is that good.

First of all, compared to Dalek, this is three times longer, which allows it to go much more in depth with the themes and the setting. Several Dalek confrontations would be a stand out in TV seasons, and they all come from one play.

This might be my favorite portrayal of the Daleks ever. It makes them make sense. This is the logical progression of the monster. This should've become the golden standard. Instead we have whatever Moffat and Chibs were doing with them.

The conversations about power and where it comes from, the nature of fascism and its long term implications, the torture and the broken spirits, and of course, compassion. It amazes me how much can one put in a single 2h story. Needless to say, 5/5.