Doctor Who: The Juggernauts
Starring: Colin Baker as the Doctor and Bonnie Langford as Mel
Format: Two full-cast CDs (or download) of four half-CD episodes
Silly? Some callbacks to the First Doctor era are a bit silly, but generally no.
Standalone? Yes; timeline placement is rather specific but is not important to the events of the story.
Recommended? Only for Davros completists.
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it and slight spoilers for the Doctor Who audio story Davros.
Before listening
I've heard this one before, but I think only once. I remember that it involves Davros in a weird situation that one wouldn't expect to find Davros in, but not as weird as the situation in the earlier Colin Baker audio titled Davros (which was, for a few brief scenes, an office comedy with the Doctor and Davros as co-workers). I vaguely recall Mel being Davros's assistant in some way, possibly without realizing who he was.I don't remember especially liking this. Possibly I thought it was rehashing that earlier Davros audio but being more timid about it, or possibly there was something else off about it. I don't really remember at all. I think I knew less Dalek lore then than I do now, so maybe I'll appreciate it more this time around.
After listening to part 1 of 4
The story opens in media res. I seemed to notice a bit of resemblance to events described but not shown in the Mel audio Flip Flop and wondered if this was supposed to be taking place right after that, but then I realized Flip Flop had the seventh Doctor and The Juggernauts had the sixth Doctor, so there's no such connection.After things go horribly wrong in the opening, the Doctor and Mel are separated. Mel is stuck on a planet for weeks making servant robots with a kindly old crippled scientist in a motorized chair. The Doctor is held captive by the Daleks. The servant robots seem rather crap to me compared to most Doctor Who robots and not the revolutionary marvels of technology that the characters discussing them seem to think they are.
The scientist turns out to be Davros, whose voice for some reason lacks the vocal synthesizer effect when Mel hears it but has it when the Doctor hears it. The Daleks want the Doctor to intervene to prevent the creation of a new robotic race that has the potential to wipe out the Daleks in the future; the Doctor has nothing against the prospect of wiping out the Daleks, but is willing to play along to protect Mel.
I happened to look things up online to check the possible Flip Flop connection before I realized it wasn't the same Doctor, and apparently the crap servant robots are a resurrection of the Mechanoids, crap robots who fought the Daleks back in the first Doctor's era. Mechanoids are even bulkier, less articulated, and less threatening than Daleks, so with that in mind I'm not really buying the idea that they're a potential threat to anything whatsoever. I definitely hadn't seen Mechanoids on TV when I heard The Juggernauts the first time around, so context is coloring this listen differently.
The cliffhanger at the end of this episode is the confirmation of Davros's identity. It's a good cliffhanger and I want to keep listening.
After listening to part 2 of 4
This episode features a bit too much expository dialogue about when this is happening in Davros's timeline and implications thereof. I don't care enough about Davros's timeline to have listened closely to those parts.Mel isn't Davros's only assistant. Another assistant, Jeff, has a budding romance with her. Realizing she'd inevitably leave with the Doctor if and when he came for her, he gave her a music box and told her to keep it to remember him by. This feels to me like a large arrow pointing at Jeff with a caption saying he is going to die by the end of The Juggernauts.
I don't think Mechanoids have been mentioned by name yet, but the Juggernauts have been mentioned as the result of reconstructing unearthed artifacts. They are described as having "excessive vibration" and being "a bit bigger than I thought", and an executive responsible for funding the colony's work says "we're hoping to use the retro design as a selling point". The main actual value proposition for them seems to be their ability to do complicated, extended work independently of human operators, particularly terraforming; presuming there aren't other robots around who can do that, it does seem like a reasonably big deal that could compensate for their physical awkwardness.
Davros has been manipulating the colonists on planet Lethe with a viral agent so they won't realize who he is. One of the visiting executives is immune for a cleverly logical reason, and the Doctor also seems to be immune, probably just for general Time Lord physiology reasons.
The cliffhanger confused me enough that I continued listening into part 3 to make sure I was interpreting it correctly. Davros has a few Daleks secretly with him obeying his commands; these Daleks are entirely distinct from the Juggernauts that Mel has been assisting with. Nicholas Briggs is voicing both the Daleks and the Mechanoids so I wasn't really sure until dialogue in part 3 established more clearly what the Doctor was reacting to.
Despite slight clunkiness, I am definitely interested in The Juggernauts and I look forward to continuing.
After listening to part 3 of 4
Davros decided to turn dug-up relic Mechanoids into "the ultimate Dalek killers". According to the Doctor, Mechanoids already were the ultimate Dalek killers. This does not match my memory of their TV appearance very well; they did kill some Daleks but they weren't very good at that or anything else.Davros has been using human brains and hearts in the reimagined Mechanoids. It's unclear what advantage Davros thinks this gives them versus being just robots, and it seems to me that it lowers their practical utility since, for instance, a planet with just Mechanoids on it wouldn't be able to build more Mechanoids. The Doctor would possibly have considered allowing the existence of purely robotic beings that killed Daleks while otherwise serving peaceful functions, but trapping human brains in them puts it firmly over the line for him. The Doctor considers Davros trying to do a thing like this "the status quo", after having briefly considered that he might have been making some effort to redeem himself.
Mel apparently puts a backdoor into every program she writes. In real-world computer programming, this would be absolutely terrible, but it seems to work fine by Doctor Who logic.
It is unclear what the Daleks actually wanted to use the Doctor for. They've had cameras all over the colony and have been tracking Davros's work on their own, and towards the end of this episode they invade the colony in person, so I don't see why they sent the Doctor ahead. The Doctor says it's because they wanted him to "reason with" Davros, but that doesn't seem like a motivation Daleks would even have. I am worried that there might not be a better explanation forthcoming.
At the close of this episode, Davros's Daleks have killed a bunch of people in the colony, the other Daleks are invading, and the Mechanoids/Juggernauts are fighting off the invaders in a big multi-way bloodbath all the named characters need to hide from. I don't know what's going to happen next and I am interested to find out.
After listening to part 4 of 4
The climax does not live up to the build. The Daleks had a larger plan than previously indicated, and yet the actual point of this larger plan, and why they chose to involve the Doctor in it, is not explained. There are many scenes of groups of Nicholas Briggses fighting other Nicholas Briggses. A great deal of time is spent on Jeff single-handedly luring Daleks around so that other colonists can escape. I was thinking for a while maybe the music box scene had been setting up Jeff to obviously die just so that later events could subvert the expectation, but that was not the case. Davros has a self-destruct mechanism which gets activated in an overly convenient way. There are good moments, like Mel using her backdoor in the Juggernaut code against Davros, but overall the end of The Juggernauts is a bit of a mess, like writer Scott Alan Woodard thought it would be fun to put all these playing pieces together but then had no idea what to do from the resulting board position.I'm looking up what else Woodard has written for Big Finish, and the only others I've heard are two Dark Shadows episodes. One of these also is more interesting in setting up the board than in its endgame, and the other ends in a cliffhanger a different writer picks up, so perhaps failure to write solid endings is par for his course.
Overall, I don't recommend The Juggernauts unless you are particularly into Davros. It is not as good as the earlier Davros on any axis I can think of. Bonnie Langford is pretty good in it.
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