The Time of the Daleks [AUDIO/2002.5.21]

★★☆☆☆

  It physically hurts to give The Time of the Daleks such a low score. I feel this way with any Doctor Who adventure that fails to reach their incredible potential, and in the case of this particular Dalek story the potential was massive. You have Daleks quoting Shakespeare, civil wars and the manipulation of time and reality. The famed playwright has been written out of history (in a scheme both devised and countered by one person!), and it's up to the Byronesque Eighth Doctor and his Edwardian adventuress friend Charley to save the day -- how could you go wrong with that, in a conceptual sense? It's exactly the kind of literature-laden science fiction extravaganza I'd usually fall in love with.

  I guess it could be a failure on my part (though the overall lukewarm response to this over the years has at least informed me that I'm not the only one to think so), but The Time of the Daleks fails to engage me, plain and simple. It has a fascinating premise, but none of the actors nor the sound design are of particular note. The plot simply moves on without the fanfare or attention to detail it deserves, and it's Paul McGann and India Fisher trying their darndest to make sense of a frankly baffling piece of work that brings this up a notch. I love it when stories get confusing and up their own arse, I really do -- because normally, that's an indication of a writer letting their ambition run wild. This doesn't have half as much creativity and gravitas as Justin Richards thinks it has, often relying on exposition to dish out ideas and concepts that were far more fascinating in The Evil of the Daleks, and therefore the entire material suffers. It becomes something you can make neither heads nor tails of... something you can't be bothered to try to. Thankfully, Neverland would be just around the corner and blow this out of the water.