Return of the Daleks

Editor: Andrew Panero · Last update: 24 April 2007

The seventh Doctor meets the heroes of Dalek Empire, Susan Mendes and Kalendorf, on a distant planet, Zaleria, which holds a terrifying secret from his past.

 Return of the Daleks

Writer: Nicholas Briggs
Director: John Ainsworth
The Doctor: Sylvester McCoy
Kalendorf: Gareth Thomas
Susan Mendes:  Sarah Mowat
Release date: December 2006

Big Finish gave this CD away to subscribers with the Sixth Doctor adventure, ‘Year of the Pig’; a very shrewd move on their part. They must know there are thousands of fans out there who would never normally subscribe but who would doubtless be tempted by such an exclusive offer.

There are also many more who will try and spite Big Finish by splurging huge amounts on e-bay for the privilege, I wish I could say that it would be worth their while.

On the surface Return has a lot going for it, it has Daleks on ice, Ogrons and invisible aliens (great for audio) plus a link between the Seventh Doctor and the Dalek Empire series. All designed to make the fanboy’s heart flutter, which is perhaps the real problem with this rather lack lustre story. Ironically it shares a lot in common with an equally continuity obsessed story in the Doctor Who Magazine ‘Emperor of the Daleks’ which also featured the Seventh Doctor and that same army of Daleks on Spiridon.

Oops, did I give the big secret away? Well here we come to one of my biggest gripes with the plot; an awful lot seems to hang on this big reveal, which happens about halfway through the story. For younger fans it would probably mean nothing, Spiridon, Zaleria , some place beginning with ‘sss’. For older fans who remember ‘Planet of the Daleks’ the reveal will not be such a great surprise as it is pretty much prefigured with all the references to ‘light-wave sickness’ and ice volcanoes. With the Ogrons thrown into the mix as well, one couldn’t ask for more blatant sign posting. (And yes I know there were no Ogrons in ‘Planet of…’ but they played a big part in the preceding story ‘Frontier in Space’ which I’m sure I don’t need to tell you was part of the same story arc).

But I digress; for those not familiar with the original story, here is a brief synopsis: The Third Doctor arrives on Spiridon with his faithful assistant Jo and joins up with a group of Thals and sundry invisible natives to thwart a Dalek plan to conquer the Galaxy. This plan involves an army of 10,000 (toy) Daleks kept in an ice-volcano in readiness for invading the Milky Way, however the Doctor and his associates succeed in setting off the ice volcano and bury the Daleks in a pool of green slush. This slush freezes solid in time, trapping the army forever…well not quite.

Some considerable time later (we’re led to believe this would be in thousands of years) the Daleks return to Spiridon, looking for their lost army. Now this takes place at a time when the Daleks are already invading the Milky Way, so surely an army of ten-thousand archaic machines aren’t going to make an awful lot of difference? Well there you’d be wrong you see as apparently their army has multiplied by a factor of an hundred in the intervening years. The Dalek scans reveal that one million and one hundred thousand Dalek units are submerged under approximately thirty thousand cubic ‘gigathrons’ of molten ice beneath a ten ‘gigathron’ skin of frozen ice. This miraculous multiplication is cleverly explained by the Doctor as being down to the fact that on his last visit to Spiridon he had only seen one chamber full of Daleks when in fact there were hundreds of chambers with a mind-numbingly huge army of Daleks concealed within.

Again one is tempted to draw comparisons with ‘The Emperor of the Daleks’ where the same need to multiply Terry Nation’s original conception of a huge army must have occurred to the writers. In that story the multiplication is even more extreme with the huge army swelling to four million instead.

Not that it matters of course, it’s just amusing for me to note the twists and turns that Nicolas Briggs is forced to go through in order to make the plot accord with continuity. The same goes for the Zalerians/ Spiridons who must be the only invisible beings in science fiction history to try and hide themselves by becoming visible instead. The Daleks out them by bombarding the Zalerians with light-waves in order to make them invisible again; which is all part of their cunning plan to develop an ‘unstoppable’ army of invisible Daleks which was the same plan they’d come up with in ‘Planet’. Couldn’t they have thought up anything better in the meantime?

Did I mention the Doctor is in this story? Oh yes, he is, but not that you would really notice. Sylvester McCoy’s solitary time lord seems pretty bored most of the way through and his sole purpose seems to be to skulk around dropping vague hints in the first half, which he then goes onto explain in the second half. Obviously he has listened to the first Dalek Empire series on his travels in the TARDIS as he is well aware of Kalendorf’s (Gareth Thomas) and Suz’s (Sarah Mowat) role in a future Dalek rebellion. As if the plot was not continuity laden enough we now have Big Finish’s own to contend with as well, which is never a good sign in a story.

We have as a result a kind of parody of the source material in that ‘Planet’ was as Briggs once described it the ‘top-ten’ of all Dalek stories. In other words it was a pastiche of various stock devices and plot lines that date back to sixties Dalek stories and was done so intentionally as part of Doctor Who’s tenth season. Likewise Return is similarly constructed with the standard ingredients of a Doctor Who and the Daleks story for much the same kind of reasons.

Which makes for some pretty dull stuff unfortunately, which is a pity given that so much else could have been achieved with a crossover story such as this one. The only light in this dismal picture is in Thomas and Mowat’s performances, they take to their old roles with great gusto and bring a great deal of poignancy into their strained relationship as the Angel of Mercy and her assistant. Full marks to them for bringing such passion into an otherwise disappointing adventure.