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Throughout time and space, the Doctor and Davros have battled
- a fight that ended with the Time Lord's destruction of Skaro
and the Daleks. But Davros survived... alone, in the dark,
with only thoughts of revenge keeping him alive. Now the Doctor
has returned to his home universe, and Davros is waiting for
him...
WARNING: THE PENULTIMATE PARAGRAPH CONTAINS
SPOILERS!
Big
Finish's Davros
inhabited the space between Resurrection
of the Daleks and Revelation
of the Daleks. The
Juggernauts filled in the gap between Revelation
and Remembrance of the Daleks. Now Terror Firma,
the Eighth Doctor's (Paul McGann) first adventure following
his return from the Divergent universe, is a sequel to Remembrance,
thus completing Big Finish's loose Davros trilogy.
Following
the intense character study that was Davros and the
lightweight fun of The Juggernauts, you might have
cause to wonder which angle writer Joseph Lidster was going
to take with this story. In fact, the tone is pitched somewhere
in between those two poles.
On
the one hand, we have the split personality of the demented
Davros (Terry Molloy) veering erratically between vengeful
Kaled scientist and dedicated Dalek Emperor, pleading for
the Doctor's help one moment, while also springing a cruel
trap for the Time Lord. Molloy swings skilfully between the
two personalities, illustrating the differences between them,
which you might not have noticed before from his few minutes
on screen in Remembrance.
On
the other hand, there are eccentric characters and odd situations
that seem to have taken their inspiration from the Dalek epic
Jubilee. Intercut
between the Doctor and Davros' intense scenes is a shindig
whose dysfunctional attendees would not have seemed out of
place in Mike Leigh's Abigail's
Party. Julia Deakin plays a drunken matriarch
once again, though her upper-class accent couldn't be more
different from her role as Marsha in Spaced.
Meanwhile, even when facing the prospect of imprisonment or
extermination, the Doctor also has his lighter moments. So
pleased is he to be back in his home universe that the presence
of Daleks only serves to remind him that the old times are
here again!
As
well as being a sequel to Remembrance (and a proper
one this time - none of the ridiculous retconning that fans
endured in the novel War of the Daleks), Terror
Firma is also a prequel of sorts to The
Parting of the Ways. Whether deliberate or
coincidental, Davros' delusions of godhood and his ultimate
fate add weight to the possibility that the Emperor we saw
in the final Christopher Eccleston episode might be the last
vestige of the Daleks' ancient creator. Unfortunately, two
key plot elements from Parting are also repeated here:
an army of Daleks engineered from human beings and the fact
that humanity's sad fate is largely the Doctor's fault.
Though far from flawless, Terror Firma is a firmer
addition to the Eighth Doctor audio series than we've had
for a long time.
Richard
McGinlay
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