We Are The Daleks is a tense, thrilling action-adventure with some nifty concepts and political parody, but comes across more like fanfiction than a legitimate adventure.
WRITTEN BY
Jonathan Morris, a Big Finish regular. Of his works, I've only had the chance to experience the Eleventh Doctor novel Touched By An Angel, which I have to say was a far superior and more original story.
PLOT
Landing in 1987 London, the Seventh Doctor and Mel stumble across a Dalek skyscraper and investigate to discover the Zenos Corporation producing popular video games without any workers. Whilst the Doctor uncovers the mystery behind the video games, Mel attends a meeting between Zenos and political figures, where Zenos unveils his scheme to ally Earth with Skaro for mutual economic benefit...
ANALYSIS
The concept of the Daleks developing their battle computer technology by using Earth children as their tacticians with a war game is a spectacular one, and it's by far the most memorable aspect of We Are The Daleks. The rest? Not so much.
The political take-over is basically copy-pasted from The Claws Of Axos(aliens provide limitless resources to Great Britain alone in exchange for basically nothing, but in actuality plan to subjugate Earth) and boils down to "conservatives be EEEEEVIL". I can't really blame Morris for this, because it's not like the Pertwee era was more layered, but there's just nothing new added here and it's not even done with that level of finesse because the character of Celia is even more ludicrous than Chinn.
The ending is also essentially a redux of The Daleks' Master Plan, with the random time storm aging the Dalek city into rust.
I do like the scope of the story, what with the space battles and the siege over Skaro. The characters are fairly likable and the stakes are clear, but similarly to Remembrance Of The Daleks, I'm not all the way drawn in, because it's a surface-level story. Besides, I feel like audio dramas are best suited for, well, dramas, where all that matters is the performance and acting. A punchy, off-the-wall action romp like this really loses a lot when the distracting visuals aren't there to distract you.
CHARACTERS
Not a great showing for Sylvester McCoy. I don't know if he's become aware of his R-rolling habit, but he does it constantly in this story and it really started to drive me up a wall. It was cute in the TV show, but here, it's almost like a nervous tick. Aside from that, this is a story that, the setting of 1987 aside, could've been written for any Doctor. There's none of the Seventh Doctor mythologising going on.
Bonnie Langford is pretty good as Melanie, though. The script takes advantage of his computer programmer skills and so she manages to be fairly useful to the story. I'm not sure how she became involved with Brinley or Zenos, though(perhaps her job was established in a previous story??).
Angus Wright played Alek Zenos, and not remarkably well. He just kept a monotone throughout the entire thing until he was killed off. I think he was aiming for a sort of quiet and dignified performance, but it became a bit silly.
Then there's Mary Conlon as Celia Dunthorpe, a caricature so insane that she just decides to go along with everything the Daleks do or say because "eh, life sucks anyway and people don't care about lives really". Obviously, she's meant to be the Chinn of the story, but it just didn't work for me, because at least he at least cared about his own wellbeing and figured out it was probably best to side with the army over the Axons whereas Celia just becomes completely subservient to the Daleks based on very little evidence of them giving Earth something good in return(and a lot of evidence against that).
Niles Bunbury(and Frank Lewis, who sounded so similar that I briefly thought they were the same character), as voiced by Robbie Stevens, is a likable plummy old Brit, serving as both comic relief and the moral compass of the story. He's somewhat similar to the Brigadier in that he's reasonable and loyal.
NOTES
*Both parts 1 and 2 had prologues. I know some Seventh Doctor stories do, but giving them to both parts seems a little odd.
*There's some strange out-of-order flashbacks where we first see Mel and Brinley playing Warfleet together, then the Doctor and Mel coming up with a plan and then Mel getting introduced to Brinley. So was Mel playing Warfleet before she met the Doctor? And how come Brinley didn't acknowledge that she'd gone missing for a year?
*The Doctor claims that the Daleks made the skyscraper resemble their design in order to attract his attention, but this is never referenced again. So what was the point?
*Mel starts her exposition dump with "as you know...". The worst kind of dump.
*As the story begins, we learn that Alek Zenos never leaves his office and only deals with executives, an obvious reference to Howard Hughes that could've gone a lot further than it did(since we spend the rest of the story seeing him interact with everyone he meets).
*It's kind of weird that we hear the Doctor writing down Brinley's name in his organizer. Doesn't the Doctor have eidetic memory?
*The deserted, automated factories are another reused plot point, from Spearhead In Space. Although in this case they're not really automated since the Warfleet games arrive directly on Skaro(by the way, imagining the Daleks putting together video games with stickers and all is hilarious).
*Celia's joke about little men pushing the Dalek casings around inside is a funny meta gag.
*Serena's car have a "car-phone". I don't know much about them aside from James Bond having a very goofy-looking one in 1963's From Russia With Love. Were they really a thing?
*How can one MP or even a few represent the entirety of Great Britain in this alliance with the Daleks? Doesn't this have to go through the government? The Queen??
*I have to wonder, is Lake Davian(or however it's pronounced) the very same one where we see a Thal get drowned in The Daleks?
*According to this story, Daleks have perfected terraforming abilities, which explains how they're able to restore Skaro on multiple occasions.
*I love how Brinsley's first reaction to seeing a journalist wanting to interview him is to offer her some tea. So British.
*How is nobody concerned about the massive advancement in technology that Warfleet represents? How are these games not taken into a dozen labs by a dozen companies to be taken apart and studied?
*What's the point in the Doctor dressing up as a stockbroker? It's like mentioned once and seems to purely exist for the sake of having him look different on the cover art.
*Mel has a mobile phone that can also send messages - I'm assuming that's not 1986 technology.
*How could Mel hack Warfleet? Isn't that Dalek code?
*The code for taking control over Warfleet from the Daleks is "F9A61C", which is a hex color... a yellowish sort. Morris's favourite, maybe?
*How much did the Daleks' and the Doctor's tampering with the Warfleet controls affect the other players? I mean, if the Doctor was able to sneak Brinsley back into the game, how did all the other drones regain control? And if they never lost it, why would Brinsley's absence affect the game?
*The Doctor employs Venusian jin-jitsu against Mel. So that's three styles of combat they've nicked from Earth.
*When did the Doctor provide Mel with detailed instructions on how to tamper with the hypnosis field?
*How did nobody notice the Zenos tower just disappear?
*Apparently, there was a vast hurricane in 1987, which this story alludes was the result of the Zenos tower teleporting away.
*Whilst I like Niles's loyalty, it is kind of strange that he just decides to walk away at the end of story and never ask any questions.
*Brinsley conceives of the internet as a result of the Warfleet technology, seemingly contradicting van Statten's claims of owning it(though maybe he made a bargain with van Statten, who knows?).
CONTINUITY ADVISOR
1) The Daleks do not recognise the Seventh Doctor, meaning this story seems to be their first encounter chronologically. Oddly enough, however, the cover features the white Imperial Daleks devised by Davros, but he is not the Emperor Dalek in this story.
2) The Doctor refers to the Daleks as "bubbling lumps of hate", just like the Third Doctor did.
3) Mel is somehow identified as a companion by Zenos(a Thal), suggesting that she had or will have some contact with them in another story, possibly with the Sixth Doctor.
4) The Thals mention the Doctor has helped their kind before, namely in the First Doctor story The Daleks and the Third Doctor story Planet Of The Daleks. Since those events, the Thals have built their own spacefaring community, which is neat.
5) The Doctor delivers the famous redecorating catchphrase as he notices Skaro's redesign.
6) The Daleks tell the Doctor that their battle computers are logical and lack intuition, and suggest that the minds of human children are preferable, which ties together Destiny Of The Daleks(where they were stuck in a logical stalemate) with Remembrance Of The Daleks(where they used a girl as a computer).
7) The Doctor is put on trial by the Daleks to humiliate him and prove to other races that he's dead, thus explaining why the Master was on trial at the start of The TV Movie.
8) The Daleks declare that they have "the power of life and death" over you the Doctor, reminiscent of Hindle's insane announcement in Kinda.
9) The Daleks use time corridor technology to travel between Earth and Skaro, as established in Resurrection Of The Daleks.
10) The Doctor gleefully says he's defeated the Daleks by enhancing their "Dalek factor", mirroring his use of the Human Factor to take them down in The Evil Of The Daleks(which seems to predate this story then).
11) The Doctor references the Daleks' nicknames for him - Bringer of Darkness, Destroyer Of Worlds(didn't Davros name him that in Journey's End? How would he know that one?) and the Oncoming Storm... this being the earliest chronological reference to that name that I'm aware of.
12) The Doctor uses a time storm(established in Dragonfire as something that can move people from one world to another) to age the Dalek fleet and much of Skaro into rust, much like the Time Destructor did to Kembel in The Daleks' Master Plan.
13) As Skaro is ravaged, the Doctor quips "ashes to ashes, rust to rust", a parody of his quote from Remembrance Of The Daleks.
14) The end of this story oddly seems to set up the events of Asylum Of The Daleks, what with Celia's announcement of taking over as Prime Minister as well as the Zenos tower remaining on Skaro(we see it at the beginning of that episode).
Jesus Christ, this one's big on nostalgia, isn't it?
BEST QUOTE
"THE POWER OF THE FREE MARKET!!!" - the Daleks' new paradigm.
CONCLUSION
It's fun and kept my interest, but it could've used more focus on the video game and less so on redoing Claws and plugging holes in Dalek continuity.
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