The BF Time Warp 040: Jubilee

[SiHart]

Hurrah! The deadly Daleks are back! Yes, those loveable tinpot tyrants have another plan to invade our world. Maybe this time because they want to drill to the Earth's core. Or maybe because they just feel like it.

And when those pesky pepperpots are in town, there is one thing you can be sure of. There will be non-stop high octane mayhem in store. And plenty of exterminations!

But never fear. The Doctor is on hand to sort them out. Defender of the Earth, saviour of us all. With his beautiful assistant, Evelyn Smythe, by his side, he will fight once again to uphold the beliefs of the English Empire. All hail the glorious English Empire!

Now that sounds like a jubilee worth celebrating, does it not?

What do you think of this audio adventure from 2003 by Rob Shearman?

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

I've gone for 4/5. At the time it came out I think it would've been a 5/5 but looking back it suffers from the same problem as several things Shearman has written. It's trying too hard to be clever for its own good although it's nowhere near as pretentious as the Derek Jacobi Unbound play.

[Rob McCow]

I remember this being great. Things get a bit too mental towards the end, but the basic concept is so obvious-once-someone's-thought-of-it brilliant and showcases some of the best Dalek moments that BF have produced.

And given that they now do a Dalek tale every other month, that's saying something.

[Jon Masters]

"DALEKS DO NOT DANCE OR SING"

Best.Line.Ever

[Junkyard]

I enjoyed this one, especially the chilling performance by Martin Jarvis. Colin Baker and Maggie Stables were on good form as well. Is it my imagination or do the BF Dalek stories often involve temporal paradoxes/hiccups/snafus?

[Rob McCow]

You could be right about that, Junkyard. There always seems to be a time-travel element with the Daleks these days, as though they were the direct rivals to the Time Lords. Even BF's first Dalek trilogy had loads of time travel in it.

Martin Jarvis really elevates Jubilee as well, he's such a great audio performer. Who better to have as the future King of England?

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

Martin Jarvis and his real life wife Rosalind Ayres are both superb, I don't know if I was a bit harsh in my original comment. As has been observed the whole thing the Daleks messing around with time has been overdone in subsequent Big Finish plays which may have clouded my thinking (cf. Renaissance of the Daleks - yuck, yuck, yuck!)
I think if there was the option I'd probably have awarded this one 9/10 as it certainly deserves to be at least a 4/5.

[brandynigma]

My favourite moment is the brilliantly underplayed Episode 3 cliffhanger. It would have been easy for the actor to really ham up the last line- to have it so quiet and broken is perfect.

5/5

[Junkyard]

You could be right about that, Junkyard. There always seems to be a time-travel element with the Daleks these days, as though they were the direct rivals to the Time Lords. Even BF's first Dalek trilogy had loads of time travel in it.

Martin Jarvis really elevates Jubilee as well, he's such a great audio performer. Who better to have as the future King of England?

Now that I've thought on it further, it's clear that the Daleks have been messing about with time travel almost from their beginning in the Whoniverse. The Chase, Evil of, Day of and Resurection of the Daleks all involve time travel by the Daleks via one technology or another. So, it's a fairly common plot device anyway, not just Big Finish.

[Anthony Williams]

Wow. Every now and then, I come across a Doctor Who story that's so mind-buggeringly good that I don't know where to start when reviewing it. Jubilee is one of those stories.

This is a story so good that Russell T. Davies recruited its writer (the awesome Rob Shearman) to turn it into a script for the first series of the revived Doctor Who in 2005. Why is this worthy of note? Well, Shearman is (AFAIK) the only person who's written for NuWho that had precisely zero experience at writing for television when he wrote Dalek.

Yet, I believe Jubilee to be a better story than Dalek in virtually every way, despite its use of the classic Big Finish trope of the time paradox. The whole world that Shearman has weaved for this story is wonderfully complex and well fleshed-out. Here, we have an alternative world, entirely shaped by the Doctor turning up 100 years prior and defeating the Daleks. And from that point on, nothing is as we know it.

The thing about this script is that it just twists and turns. Everyone in it is absolutely bonkers - whether it's the Doctor that was left behind in 1903, Rochester, Miriam, or even the Dalek! They've all been driven mad by events. Make no mistake - the timeline here is bad and wrong and shouldn't exist. And it's all the Doctor's fault. No-one here is good. They took that world's version of The Doctor, and when he wouldn't stay, they chopped off his legs. They made him watch Evelyn age to death. It's horrible, really - but all these things take us out of our comfort zone, and turn this Dalek story into something truly gripping.

There are so many wonderful little ideas here that build our big picture of this crazy, nasty world. Rochester being so insane that he thinks that the Dalek is listening to him, no matter where he is. We're led to believe that Miriam wants to overthrow him because she wants to be liberated in some way - but eventually, we find out that she just isn't being hit hard enough by him, and she wants a "proper" man. What's so beautiful about all these characters is how they have their public and private personas, all of which are direct mirrors of the other - e.g. Rochester's attempts to be a tyrant, but all he wants to be is "a good man". Then there's the way that the Dalek is treated, and we see things like "Dalek juice", the viscous black liquid from the boiling Dalek. Vile.

Despite all this gloom, it doesn't mean that there isn't room for comedy. Rob Shearman is clearly a scholar, as Rochester's dwarf-inhabited Daleks so clearly echo one of Peter the Great's great amusements, where he forced dwarfs into having a mock royal-court, with a dwarf crowned as "tzar". Or how about Evelyn "hot lips" Smythe? That certainly raised a chuckle from me! And then there's "Doctor's column"! And the best bit of it all - Miriam asking the Dalek to marry her. That had me in absolute hysterics!

One of the really beautiful things here is just how the play looks into the psyche of the Dalek. What's its motivation for what it does? Why does it kill? What truly drives it? Here, we have a killing machine, created by genetic modification, and it's entire raison d'etre is to follow orders. What happens when it doesn't receive orders for 100 years? What then? We have a Dalek driven insane by 100 years of torture and lack of orders. The way that the Dalek soon takes control of everything is amazing, and totally believable - just as he gives up all his power when there's no-one who is able to give him what he wants. Then there's the Doctors speech to the Englanders, where he suggests that they way in which they behave has essentially turned them into Daleks. It's powerful stuff, and a stark warning to everyone.

What becomes increasingly apparent is just how much this story didn't just influence Dalek, but it clearly also influenced The Stolen Earth/Journey's End, with an insane Dalek (clearly used by RTD with Dalek Caan), and the film trailer at the beginning promising lots and lots of exploding Daleks (basically the resolution to Journey's End). While at the time this was a quirky and different Dalek story, it seems to have been used as the archetype for a lot of how the RTD-era portrayed our favourite pepper-pots.

And then the really striking thing happens at the end - while we know that Rochester and Miriam exist in the "real" timeline, Rochester suffers some of the effects of being stabbed in the alternate timeline, and Evelyn remembers starving to death in the tower in the early 20th century, when she tries to sleep - giving us the chilling impression that maybe that timeline isn't as dead as the Doctor thinks it might be.

This is as close to perfect as a Dalek story can get. It was so different and radical in 2003, but now we see so many elements used in televised Who. I can't give this anything less than 5/5. Absolutely stellar.