The Final Phase is sold separately, but it is the second half of a two-disc story. For that reason, I am activating a manual override on the Selectortron and selecting the entire story:
Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Dalek Contract/The Final Phase
Starring: Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor, Mary Tamm as Romana, and John Leeson as K9.
Format: two full-cast CDs (or downloads) containing four half-CD episodes
Silly? K9 and the villain get some deliberate silliness. Other silliness seems unintentional.
Standalone? Not entirely, as the returning villain's plan directly follows from an earlier adventure. The most relevant details get explained early on, but hearing the actual story they happened in would be better. A mystery is left unresolved at the end to set up further plans of that villain.
Recommended? No, unless the fact that it is the last piece of Doctor Who media ever to star Mary Tamm is important to you.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it and for The Sands of Life and War Against the Laan.
Before listening
This is the first time on this blog that I've hit a story that is split up over multiple releases with separate release dates and titles. Fourth Doctor Adventures season finales, in particular, are mostly in this format. I do admit there are sometimes grey areas about what constitutes "a story" in Doctor Who, but I'm comfortable with ruling for the purposes of this blog that it wouldn't be fair to The Final Phase to listen to it as a story in itself. Other items I've covered that are part of arcs, such as Luna Romana, can be discussed independently as stories, but in this case The Dalek Contract ends with an episode cliffhanger and The Final Phase picks up on episode three.This two-disc story is, itself, part of an arc. Earlier in the same season of Fourth Doctor Adventures, the Doctor and Romana encountered Cuthbert, owner and CEO of the Conglomerate, in another two-disc story. At this unspecified time in the spacefaring future of humanity, the Conglomerate is more powerful than Earth's government. The Conglomerate has no apparent overall agenda more specific than simple profit, but this agenda is enough for it to have evil schemes the Doctor needs to stop. By The Dalek Contract, the Doctor has stopped one Conglomerate experiment from provoking an interplanetary war and Cuthbert has a grudge.
As a trivia note, Cuthbert was originally created for the 1980's unlicensed fan-produced cassette series Audio Visuals. Audio Visuals starred Nicholas Briggs as the Doctor and its production values were only slightly higher than you'd expect from the phrase "1980's unlicensed fan-produced cassette series". That take on Cuthbert isn't necessarily in continuity with the version found in Big Finish's officially licensed audios, and he wasn't played by David Warner, but the character does have a long history in some sense.
It's been a long time since I heard The Sands of Life/War Against the Laan, Cuthbert's earlier Big Finish appearance, and I'm not sure how much of it is needed for The Dalek Contract/The Final Phase. Since there is a substantial gap between the stories, I'm not going to manually override the Selectortron all the way back to The Sands of Life, and if there are things I have trouble following I'll just make note of the fact. I remember enjoying Cuthbert as a character, and I seem to recall this story having some excellent K9 scenes, so I think I'll enjoy this listen even I get a bit lost in the arc.
After listening to episode 1 of 4
"Isn't the Proxima system where the Laan were damaged by Cuthbert's mysterious experiment?" asks Romana early in this episode. It is clunky, but it gets the job done: this is a followup to an earlier story where Cuthbert was doing some kind of as yet not fully-revealed space-time experiment. The Doctor is now investigating it in case it threatens the fabric of the universe, and signs point to it doing so. Also worryingly, the Daleks have been hired as the Conglomerate's police force to pacify a nearby planet. The cliffhanger of this story is an odd reversal, in which the Daleks behave somewhat less intimidatingly than is normal for them. The Doctor is well aware that the Daleks must be plotting some subterfuge, but at this point it's unclear how that relates to the experiment, or what the experiment even is.K9 has a couple clunky lines early on, but then has quite a good role in the story. There is a bit of continuity regarding K9's actions here that I'm unsure about, as it seems he's been upgraded in ways that don't match TV stories taking place later. I don't know if I'm supposed to pick up on this and expect the upgrades to break by the end of the story, or if it's to set up later Big Finish audios set in the same gap, or if I'm possibly just mistaken about there being a discrepancy at all. It probably doesn't matter to the main action of the story, in any case.
This episode sets up a nice set of mysteries, and while there are some forced lines to set everything up at the beginning, everyone gets good dialogue once it starts. I'm looking forward to hearing the next part.
After listening to episode 2 of 4
The second episode builds on the state of the Dalek-subjugated planet. Demoralized planets under Dalek takeover are a major topic for Big Finish, especially in stories written and directed by Nicholas Briggs (e.g. the Dalek Empire series), and the desperation of this particular planet is represented well. The Daleks would rather just exterminate everyone, but are playing along with Cuthbert's plan of subjugation. The mystery of Cuthbert's experiment is only moved along very slightly, with the Doctor intercepting a Dalek transmission that brings a new technological plot device into the story and hints at the Daleks' reason for humoring Cuthbert.K9 and Romana continue to get some very good dialogue, and the Doctor and Cuthbert get decent dialogue. The rebels on the planet, while well-presented as a group, are relatively badly-written as individuals; there is bad blood between two groups of planetary inhabitants, but the script rushes the exposition of a past conflict that could have been an entire Doctor Who story in itself. The Doctor wants everyone to just immediately kiss and make up so they can fight the Daleks as a unified front, and Nicholas Briggs seems to be on the Doctor's side in this.
As I'd remembered, The Dalek Contract is very much not a story in itself; at the end, the party is split, no one is going to be getting back in the TARDIS and leaving, and the Doctor has just done something Romana very much did not expect him to do.
After the cliffhanger, there is a trailer for The Final Phase, followed by a few interview tracks (at least in the download version; I don't know if they fit them on the CD or not). An interesting revelation in the interviews is that the story started its life with the intention of it being set during Sarah Jane's time as a companion of the fourth Doctor and it underwent rewrites to work with Romana and K9 instead. Romana and K9 are fit in very well, with no traces I can discern of their being a later-draft replacement, but possibly accommodating two companions meant rushing other elements.
Despite dialogue issues and the rushed characterization of the planet inhabitants, I am enjoying this story. I think the story will come together more smoothly as the secret of the Daleks' interest in Cuthbert's experiment starts to be revealed, and I'm looking forward to The Final Phase.
After listening to episode 3 of 4
This episode, the first of The Final Phase, seems to have more breathing room for characterization than the two episodes of The Dalek Contract, to its benefit. Tension between the different human groups is handled more naturalistically, and the Doctor acknowledges that there are other issues besides the Daleks that they importantly need to deal with. Cuthbert and Romana get good dialogue. There is fun conflict between Cuthbert and a Dalek Supreme in which Cuthbert arrogantly refuses to believe that anyone who takes his money could be planning to betray him, despite the Dalek Supreme being about as bad at reassurances and office politics as you'd expect a Dalek to be.In the first episode of The Dalek Contract, the Doctor invented a science trick to remotely disable Daleks. He uses it again here in The Final Phase, and it continues to work. This struck me as poor Dalek writing, since if the Daleks can't adapt to strategies like that, they aren't the galactic threat that the plot needs them to be. However, the third time he tries it, the Daleks abruptly shut it down at a critical moment, regaining the upper hand by surprise and re-establishing them as competent adversaries.
The science-fiction dialogue in this story refers to "particles" a lot. This term does appear in other Doctor Who media and is by no means exclusive to Star Trek, but the way it's used feels like it is following a Star Trek paradigm rather than a Doctor Who one. There is a specific resemblance to the "omega particles" of Star Trek: Voyager, although no smoking gun that there was a direct influence from that Voyager episode.
There is an amusing gag in which K9 has a "stealth mode" silencing his usual sound effects, which he's never mentioned having before because "no one ever asked". In addition to other K9 abilities established earlier in the story, he's definitely at a power level that's not consistent with the TV episodes taking place later; as I mentioned before, I don't know if this is something the story addresses or not.
The cliffhanger of this episode is one in which other characters believe the Doctor couldn't survive events because they don't have the information the audience has, but a way for him to survive has already been pointed out to the audience fairly obviously. It doesn't really work as a proper cliffhanger in itself, but there are enough other unresolved problems happening simultaneously at the end of the episode that a formality of a cliffhanger doesn't ruin the tension. The story is building up nicely and I am looking forward to the conclusion.
After listening to episode 4 of 4
Maybe I'm in a bad mood today, but I'm going to say this episode was outright bad. The potential that was building up in the previous is entirely wasted, leaving the entire four-episode story a mess overall.There was some important political situation on the planet, before Cuthbert's experiments ruined it. The story doesn't make it clear exactly who the groups were, but there were oppressors and oppressed, with one culture actively suppressing the other's traditions and cultural expression. While we don't get many details, this was obviously something systemic in nature, not a personal conflict beween a few individuals in power. The "resolution" we get here: a leader from the oppressed group fights alongside a leader from the oppressing one against the Daleks, and when the latter is killed by the Daleks, the former cries and decides the planet should put the past conflict behind them and move on. That is to say, a legacy of oppression is thematically resolved by a representative of the oppressed group forgiving the oppressors.
There are other problems as well. Numerous vaguely described science fiction concepts appear one after another in rapid fire and start interacting with each other in a way the listener has no way to anticipate since rules for how they interact are not explained in advance, yet the story seems to treat this as something the listener is supposed to be excited to follow. The Doctor gets a speech that seems intended to evoke the famous "unlimited rice pudding" sketch of the TV series, but derails itself in an oddly theistic tangent. Cuthbert's obliviousness to the fact that the Daleks are planning to betray him continues even as he is actively aware that Daleks are burning through the bulkheads of his space platform, yet we are expected to see him as a competent villain rather than a purely comical simpleton.
This is sadly the last piece of Doctor Who Mary Tamm performed in, so may be worth listening to for reasons unrelated to its quality. In terms of quality, I do not recommend it.
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