Masters of War

After Doctor Who was cancelled, we Whovians had many strategies for dealing with our sudden loss. Some of us tried bargaining ('Maybe... maybe Pip and Jane Baker weren't so bad... if we like them, can we have the Doctor back?'). Some of us threw ourselves from very high places... onto almost but not quite as high places ... no one really knows why. Some became trappist monks in the hope that they would achieve enlightenment and discover what the Cartmel Master plan was all about (* assertion not verified). Some attempted to self-medicate with Blake's 7 reruns (not a recommended course of action. Blake's 7 has been linked to self-harm and violence related to its final episode).

And some of us... got involved in the dark and dangerous world of spinoff material.

There were many lines that tried to fill the gap left by the cancellation of the good Doctor. The first notable success were Virgin's New Adventures series: an extremely controversial but generally well-written continuation of the Seventh Doctor's adventures. If you're a fan of New Who, you've seen at least one New Adventures story adapted for the screen ('The Family of Blood'). Alongside the New Adventures were the Missing Adventures series, which related stories about past Doctors. With the sudden introduction (and just as sudden departure) of the 8th Doctor, the Virgin lines ended and the BBC started up its own series of 8th Doctor Adventures (and a companion line, called the Past Doctor Adventures which, spoiler alert, told stories of the past Doctors' adventures).

And then there was Big Finish's Doctor Who audio dramas. The good folks at Big Finish had a brilliant idea: hey, why don't we get actors who used to play the Doctor to play the Doctor *again*... but in a purely audio medium so we don't have to worry about how they might have aged, or sets or props or anything like that? And from those humble beginnings emerged an absolutely stunning series of Doctor Who dramas that were so good that the eighth Doctor's dramas were recently canonized by the New Who series in the minisode 'Night of the Doctor'.

Which brings me to the actual subject of today's ramblings: The Doctor Who Unbound line of audio dramas. Doctor Who Unbound was meant to be a creative playground for the writers: what-if stories which asked various questions like 'What if the Doctor never left Gallifrey?', 'What if the Doctor never became UNIT's advisor' or even my favourite, 'What if the Valyard Won?'. I listened to most of the DWU line six or seven years ago and then ran out of time in which to listen to Who, much to my regret. But realising that I was really missing my old Big Finish adventures, I decided to pick up where I left off and since it required the least amount of work to figure out where I'd stopped, I listened to the last in the DWU line: Masters of War. Spoilers follow.

Masters of War is an interesting tale that follows up on a previous drama, Sympathy for the Devil (and hints that it might possibly also exist in the same space as Auld Morality and A Storm of Angels). The story takes an idea from Terry Naton's original draft of The Daleks about there being a third party who started the war between the Thalls and the Kaleds and then returned some time later, named the Quatch in this story (I suppose because 'Quarks' and 'Zarbees' were already taken). The Daleks have returned to Skaro in order to protect the Thalls from the returning Quatch threat...

Yes. The Daleks are back to protect the Thalls. The weirdness of this cannot be overstated and the drama plays on subverting your expectations of everything Dalek throughout the story. They're still arrogant, war-mongering racists... but they're *good* arrogant, war-mongering racists.

You see, it turns out that when Davros was building his Dalek army, he found he could only make them loyal to him by allowing them to feel pity. Over time, that sense of pity has grown so that the Daleks believe that their destiny is to become the dominant race of the galaxy in order to protect all of the other, weaker, inferior races of the galaxy.

It's amazing how much life this premise injects into 'yet another war between the Daleks and someone else'. We're so used to the Daleks being completely bad that it leaves the listener a little bit disoriented to start feeling sympathy for them. I found that I loved this story so much more for having this little twist in it.

The acting is top notch. David Warner voices the 'first' Doctor (though a first Doctor who spent too much time on Gallifrey and thus is trying to make up for lost time) and Nicholas Courtney reprises his role as the Brigadier (retired) and both deliver a great performance that has the right amount of chemistry to it to sell the fast friendship between a hyperactive Doctor and an unflappable military chappie who serves as companion and makeshift battle commander. Everyone else turns in a great performance too... with the unfortunate exception of the Quatch.

One of the problems with audio dramas is that you have to be able to differentiate every different species by voice. With the Dalek's, that's easy: just use a voice distorter and bang, you have a Dalek. But new alien species need new techniques for making them sound alien... and unfortunately, the director of this drama chose to give the Quatch a long, drawn, sibilant voice that grated on me after a while. I really wish that they'd found a better way to sell the Quatch's alienness... but ah well. We can't have everything we want.

There are quite a few great and unexpected moments in this drama. I'll list off a few!

* A Dalek rationalizing why surrender might be acceptable
* A touching goodbye scene between the Black Dalek and Davros
* A Dalek who thinks he's Davros
* Philosophical arguments between the Doctor and the Daleks... in which the Daleks aren't completely wrong

I really enjoyed this. I'm looking forward to what's next in my queue. It's so nice to return to something like this after so long away.