Big Finish Reviews+ Brotherhood of the Daleks

Tony Fyler punches a Dalek.

Daleks are Nazis in casings.

Everybody knows this. Everybody understands this. Even on some level the children who are their core audience understand that screeching about exterminating everybody not like them makes them bullies, and it’s a tiny step in today’s world to go from ‘Daleks are bullies’ to ‘Daleks are Nazis.’ It’s what inspired them, it’s what runs through their stories, it’s what they are – Daleks are Nazis.

Now imagine they’re not.

Imagine the Daleks had been imbued not with the kill-the-not-we philosophy of Nazism, but the idealistic fraternalism of Communism.

Because that never went wrong…

Brotherhood of the Daleks, by Alan Barnes, is generously described by Sixth Doctor Colin Baker in the extras of this story as ‘among the most complicated Doctor Who stories ever recorded.’

He’s absolutely not wrong, bless him, because Commie Daleks is only one strand of experimental thinking within this wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels affair. Under no circumstances try and follow Brotherhood of the Daleks while operating heavy machinery or trying to have a life.

Daleks on drugs? How about Daleks on drugs, does that fry your mind a little bit? Those are in this story too.

And the weird thing is, neither of those is the real mind-melter in Brotherhood of the Daleks. There’s something altogether weirder still going on, but to tell you much about that would make the whole experience fairly pointless. Let’s just say that Brotherhood of the Daleks takes the notion that ‘Things are not quite as they appear’ to at least five new levels of reality, and throws them at you more or less simultaneously, with characters being in one level, but believing they’re in another, and bluffing other characters that they’re in a third level again. Often, several characters are doing this at the same time, so what you end up with is a kind of crushed crisp sandwich of reality, to which it’s necessary to cling by the very last of your fingernails if you want to confidently assert at the end that you’ve more or less understood what you’ve just heard.

Brotherhood of the Daleks, then, is not an audio story for beginners. You have to have well and truly got your timey-wimey on to make sense of this one.

It’s not helped in that regard by the fact that it’s one of an already paradigm-breaking run of stories that more or less paved the way for River Song, where a companion of a later Doctor imperils their own timeline by then travelling with an earlier incarnation of him, while trying to keep her prior experience a secret, so as not to unravel his own timeline. India Fisher stars as Charley Pollard, the Eighth Doctor’s first friend in the audio world, eventually accidentally abandoned by him and picked up by Old Sixie, who of course at that point in his life has no idea who she is. Are we having fun yet?

Add in a return trip to Spiridon, the legendary Planet of the Daleks, and a bunch of strung out, terminally confused Thals fighting for survival against their Dalek enemies, the ever-present threat of blue-eyed Dalek replicants and the aggressive local flora and you have…erm…Level 1 of the fun that is Brotherhood of the Daleks. This is before we get to Commie Daleks, thought experiments, and the whole ‘watching us, watching them, watching us’ confusion of potential that seeks to disguise what really is going on in this story. Let’s say this much – there’s a scientific experiment being run by…someone…in Brotherhood, to try and change the minds of…someone…about….erm, something, and the confused Thals, Commie Daleks, the Doctor, Charley, replicants from the future, a sequence of extraordinary events in Folkestone (which, to understand, you need to have listened to another story), are all a part of it. Probably. Maybe. There are fascinating questions here in among the levels of reality, all tied in with what makes Daleks Daleks – if they were all peace-loving hippy mutants in their bumpy casings, would they still be Daleks? How inherent is it to their nature that they exterminate non-Dalek life-forms? As was later explored on screen in Into The Dalek, Brotherhood of the Daleks explores the idea of Daleks striving for a different interpretation of ‘goodness’ than their usual murderous take on the nature of a better universe.

It’s probably at least a couple of reality-layers too complicated to be entirely enjoyable, because as much as most Who-fans enjoy getting lost in the drama, there’s getting lost… and then there’s getting blinded and stumbling around a labyrinth of what-the-hell-is-going-on-here, and Brotherhood errs on the side of the latter a little too often. But in terms of finding interesting things to do with the Daleks more than fifty years on from their original appearance, it’s certainly rich in ideas and potential.

By all means, take a listen to Brotherhood of the Daleks. Do it once, while doing absolutely nothing else. Then perhaps do it just once more, to make sure you understood who was whom and what was what and, if you want to go for bonus points, why anything was the way it was. It’s unlikely to be an audio you slaver to return to time and time again, but as a once or twice in a lifetime listen, it’s big and bold and in its own way, a pretty amazing thing.