📝5/10 = MIDDLING!

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

VICTORY XXI

Following the final battle in All Flesh is Grass (Victory XVIII), the Daleks are stuck in the Time Vortex between the Dark Times and their own time, with the Doctor on board their ship, leading to a tense confrontation between the two sides.

If you have a problem with Nicholas Briggs talking to himself in different voices for about 95% of the runtime, then this audio isn’t for you. The cast is literally made up of Paul McGann, two guest characters, and multiple Dalek characters, and this easily turns grating, especially when you add the fact that the dialogue mostly consists of Daleks spouting technobabble and panicking about their ship breaking down and the Doctor constantly working against them.

The limited setting and small cast don’t allow this story to evolve a lot, and the little tension it manages to build in the second half is never effective enough to help this one stand out.

On a damaged ship the Emperor Dalek and Dalek Strategist are at odds, their situation is not helped by the Doctor being on board.

In the last audio things had got moving: a race who could change the timelines of planets, and mentions of the Dark Times. I had, perhaps naively, thought that this episode would see the Doctor going back to the Dark Times, so I was a little put off balance when that wasn’t the case.

As far as the Timelord Victorious series goes, I played the VR game about 2 years ago, but didn’t really take a lot of notice of the plot. The Daleks! animated series on YouTube, seems to take place around here so I watched that. And it did give me some insight the the Emperor and Strategist, but in all honesty I’m not much the wiser with the overall plot. Having started this, stopped to see if I could make out where this was placed in the Timelord Victorious ‘timeline’. Watched the Daleks! animated series, and realised that unless I took in all the other media I probably wasn’t going to ‘get’ the story. I lost interest. (Retrospectivly, you have to read the novels, the Eighth Doctor turns up there in the Dark Times. The missing bit is there, that leads into this).

There are a couple of prisoners on board or ‘cargo’ as the Daleks call them - the last of their race. A nod to what’s to come for the Doctor. It did start fairly promisingly, The Dalek ship, battle worn,  and the Doctor needing to use his cunning to get back to the TARDIS and there are a couple of clever things the Doctor does to win the day.

This is probably quite a good adventure, but without the rest of the arc, its a little out of nowhere, and it was that feeling I’ve missed something, that kept me from enjoying it. I can’t help feeling a ‘the story so far…’ bit at the beginning, would’ve helped a lot, especially as some of the differing media is, or will, no longer be available. (I have since found most of it, barring the live events, and it would have been a much better pay off to have done all the TLV series in a proper order.).

This was... a very disappointing end to the 8th Doctor BF TLV run. The Doctor, two guest characters and Daleks for just over an hour, and it FELT like it. Other TLV audios went by so quickly, but this one dragged, and dragged, and then some more.