The Dalek Defence / The Triumph of Davros [AUDIO/2021.10.13]

★★☆☆☆

  Such a fan-brain script. When an adventure's setup (Destiny of the Daleks) and resolution/epilogue (Resurrection of the Daleks) are both heavily reliant and/or entirely dependent on these TV serials, one starts to wonder what the merit the story has on its own. As it turns out, all this two-parter finale of Dalek Universe really offers is a bunch of noise. Noisy Daleks, noisy Movellans, noisy Davros with his dreams of conquest, et cetera ad infinitum. The Dalek Defence, part one of this two-parter, fares better with an actual drive as the big stakes are held close to the story's heart, with the big chess pieces seeming to come together to form something electrifying and, at the very least, entertaining. Then Mark Seven comes back from the dead, and while I won't go as far as to say it's a terrible decision, the revelation that Mark is the first Movellan is executed in the most boring way; all we get is Mark surrounded by a couple of Movellan lackeys, with Joe Sims sounding a bit bored by this little bit of Dr. Who necromancy as the actors playing his servants mumble occasionally. It's just not interesting, almost none of the big things happening in this finale are! For an installment that calls itself The Triumph of Davros, I sure wish they'd have given us a bit more manipulative Davros, cunning Davros, scheming... well, any more of Davros, really, instead of giving us one handshake electrocution/mind control trick and calling it a day. C'mon, Terry Molloy is having the time of his life playing Davros here and he's obviously up for some more juicy material. Give the main characters more to do than do the oh-so-familiar Dalek story runaround where they escape, get captured, crawl around, rinse and repeat -- but no, Matt Fitton, you had to resort mainly to two sick lore references to convince the audience that this finale is actually exciting and subtly written, when my heart and brain tell me it's neither. 

  Dalek Universe 3, then, is one of the weakest boxsets I've got from Big Finish in a long time. It doesn't help that it only has three CDs telling a total of two stories, and those two stories do not work for me. The Dalek Defence / The Triumph of Davros is, sadly, just as boring as The First Son was, and even more disappointing due to the toys it had at its disposal to be creative with. It doesn't try to do anything genuinely fun, it focuses on bringing all these recognisable elements together in a room and making them talk the most uninspired drivel to each other, while the Doctor gets barely anything to do. A disappointing resolution to a middling series -- definitely the case. Dalek Universe, for all its acclaims and popularity in the general fandom, feels to me like little more than celebratory fanfare that takes the idea, 'what if the Tenth Doctor ended up in the Dalek stories of the 1960s and '70s?' and does absolutely nothing special with it.