Doctor Who – The Monthly Adventures

#201. We are the Daleks ~ 10/10

◆ An Introduction

Thatcherite politicians are in bed with the millionaires of Great Britain, whilst the every-man is made redundant; taking up arms in strikes across the country. It’s fair to say that the 1980s were one of the most turbulent eras for this country from a political stance (I’m only in my twenties, but I do hail from a town in the north of England, and you can still see the effect Maggie Thatcher had on this area; with unemployment levels being through the roof constantly).

The Seventh Doctor has already had one Earth-bound Dalek story, and I think we can all agree that ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ was one of the best things to come from his televised tenure. But we’re a long way from Shoreditch in this adventure, as the Doctor and Mel take on stockbrokers and Thatcherite bankers. Not to fear however… the Daleks are offering to invest in Great Britain alone!

◆ Publisher’s Summary

The year is 1987, and Britain is divided. In Bradford, strikers are picketing and clashing with the police. In the City of London, stockbrokers are drinking champagne and politicians are courting the super-rich. The mysterious media mogul Alek Zenos, head of the Zenos Corporation, is offering Britain an economic miracle. His partners wish to invest – and their terms are too good to refuse.

While the Doctor investigates Warfleet, a new computer game craze that is sweeping the nation, Mel goes undercover to find out the truth about Zenos’s partners.

The Daleks have a new paradigm. They intend to conquer the universe using economic power. The power of the free market!

◆ The Seventh Doctor

I briefly touched on this in my review of ‘Red’, but BigFinish have really made a conscious effort to redeem the Season 24 era in the eyes of an incredibly picky fandom. Sylvester McCoy delivers a pitch-perfect performance in ‘We are the Daleks’.

The Doctor claims that he’s blending in as a young-ish, upwardly mobile professional (wearing red braces and armed with a PDA, he’s definitely blending in with the Thatcherite elite). It’s important to look the part of a stock-market broker; he deals in futures. He doesn’t like to be the sort of person who cares about what people are wearing.

◆ Mel Bush

‘We are the Daleks’ really shows how far Bonnie Langford has come since becoming a part of the BigFinish family. She is genuinely one of my favourite companion actresses, and this performance is just immaculate!

Mel thinks that Warfleet is only realistic if you have nothing to compare it to. She doesn’t like to be the sort of person who plays computer games. In her experience, offers that sound too good to be true tend to be exactly that. Mel knows that her and the Thals are dead unless they prove to the Warfleet players that they are real people, so she ingeniously does something an AI would never do… and surrenders!

◆ Story Recap

After discovering a skyscraper in the shape of a Dalek, slap bang in the middle of London, our dynamic duo are compelled to investigate its owners. The Zenos Corporation has come from nowhere, and that’s causing great concern amongst the stockbrokers of London. For all anyone knows, they’re just another stock-market bubble getting ready to burst. As for the corporation’s enigmatic founder, he never seems to leave his office on the top floor of the tower, and only deals with the great and the good (he’s not even named in the company accounts).

Alek Zenos seems to have risen without trace over the last few years, becoming head of his own media empire – buying up newspapers, publishers and radio stations, all through an intricate network of dummy companies to avoid the attention of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Strangely though… the Daleks are nowhere to be seen.

The Zenos Corporation’s biggest project of late is Warfleet. Marketed as an ultra-realistic spaceship shooter, it’s taking the UK by storm… but a game isn’t always a game, and the people you kill inside of it may be more alive than you could possibly imagine, as the Doctor and Mel will soon discover!

◆ Money Talks

‘We are the Daleks’ is the second time Jonny Morris has written for this TARDIS team, and it’s thankfully nowhere near as problematic as his first attempt (see my review of ‘Flip-Flop’).

The Daleks are basically using a video game to turn the people of Great Britain into the perfect spaceship pilots in their many galactic wars, with Warfleet having a direct connection to their highly advanced drone ships. If you didn’t immediately punch the air when you read that, I’m going to assume you’re a killjoy who doesn’t like fun.

Morris does add a few layers to this story too, because the Zenos Corporation are basically a carrot on a stick for the greedy, Thatcherite business folk of planet Earth; all of whom want a larger slice of the economic pie. Zenos and the Daleks promise a new golden age for the United Kingdom alone, even going as far as showing them a stage-managed area of Skaro that is filled with palm trees and skyscrapers – a showcase of the benefits of joining the Intergalactic Free Market. Our base instincts will always be that of savagery and greed, and the Daleks are using that to their full advantage, all so they can turn the UK into their foothold on Earth. I really love the writing for this story, it’s just marvellous!

◆ Sound Design

Welcome one and all to Thatcher’s Britain, where the rich get richer and the poorer are left to rot by a Tory government that couldn’t give a damn (sounds strangely familiar). Acosta’s sound design here really captures the era perfectly, and does a great job at making the story feel fast and action packed.

Cars driving through the streets of the capital. Hawk ships whoosh through asteroid clusters in Warfleet; instruments bleeping as they are picked off, one by one. The clicking of an old-fashioned keyboard. Big Ben chimes in the background, as people go about their day in the city centre. Listen to all those gloriously pixelated laser blasts coming from the Warfleet consoles. The bass-filled jingle of a news broadcast reporting on the protests in Bradford. Chants of “We shall not, we shall not be moved!” outside of the Ultra-Mega Tech factory. A high pitched shriek makes the protestors move away from the factory gates, allowing the delivery trucks to continue doing their jobs. A swirling time corridor in the penthouse of the Zenos Tower. On Skaro, the Thals fire high powered energy weapons at the Daleks, before kidnapping Mel and Niles! The front of the Zenos Tower explodes with some force, setting car alarms off for miles around, before the Daleks emerge and try to gun down the Doctor. Thal Hawk Ships team up with the Warfleet players to bombard the Dalek capital city on Skaro in tremendous fashion! Daleks are filled with so much hate that they start shooting at their own ships, before spontaneously combusting (in a scene reminiscent of the end of ‘Red’).

◆ Music

The score for ‘We are the Daleks’ is also being handled by Wilfredo Acosta, and what a marvellous job he’s done with it! Gorgeously electronic and dramatic, it really fits both the tone and setting of this adventure.

◆ Conclusion

“DALEKS INVEST AND RETURN!”

The Daleks have created the most advanced spaceship shooter of 1987, and they’re using it to turn unsuspecting members of the British public into the perfect spaceship pilots. It’s far from being all fun and games when you’re being shot down by one of the genocidal salt-shaker’s high-tech drone ships!

Jonathan Morris hits a real home-run with ‘We are the Daleks’, delivering an action packed adventure that is genuinely so much fun – and isn’t that what we all want from our Doctor Who stories? A sense of fun?

Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford are clearly having a whale of a time in this adventure, and the same goes for the entire cast (Mary Conlon makes for an eerily accurate Thatcher parody, and I really like Robbie Stevens portrayal of Niles Bunbury).

The core idea of ‘We are the Daleks’ is genuinely amazing, and oddly reminiscent of ‘Warriors of Kudlak’ from ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’. It’s just such an amazingly well-written and fun story.

In conclusion, be careful when you’re playing video games… a bunch of hate filled shuttlecocks might just be about to plug you into a galactic war!