#45 I, Davros: Innocence

On a day when I've decided to listen to more stories than usual, my Randomoid Selectortron has coincidentally taken me to two stories about stories. Let's see where it goes next...

I, Davros: Corruption

My understanding of I, Davros is that it's a chronologically ordered "biography" of pre-Genesis of the Daleks Davros and isn't meant to be listened to out of order. I am therefore activating a manual override and selecting:

I, Davros: Innocence

Starring: Rory Jenning as Davros and Terry Molloy as older Davros
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? No
Standalone? The episode does not have a cliffhanger but is openly just the first of several
Recommended? Yes

My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it, and possibly for related stories such as Dalek Empire and Davros.

 

Before listening

I know almost nothing about this and definitely got it during a sale when it was cheap enough to impulse-buy. The Daleks are when Big Finish gets darkest, and my understanding is that this is the story of how Davros was already hideously evil long before his disfigurement and his invention of the Daleks. Considering the known circumstances of Davros's life in Genesis of the Daleks, this is presumably a bleak story about a life lived during wartime. I am probably not going to enjoy it emotionally, but the gear-shift might be good for me, and I am going to go ahead and listen today.

After listening

There is a scene in which Davros presents his sister with what she thinks is a rock, but is actually a shelled creature, then Davros, fascinated by a shelled thing, talks about evolution. There are not many such "secret origin" incidents, but there are a couple, and this is certainly the type of story that such things belong to.
The story is framed with a TV-era Davros on trial by the Daleks. They are not trying him for a crime, but rather to determine whether he can lead them to overcome a string of recent defeats. He finds it pathetic that they lack self-motivation and need a leader, and this story from his childhood is for the sake of a pep talk he is giving them. The body of the story is not narrated and is not interrupted by returns to the frame tale.
A great deal of I, Davros is a political soap opera focused on Davros's parents, a military officer father and politician mother. They are both evil in different ways encouraged by Kaled society, and they are inattentive to their son's needs in the way of wealthy parents who want to buy affection instead of earning it. The parents are thus unaware that Davros is a different kind of evil from either of them, although the episode ending suggests Davros's mother might have developed a genuine appreciation for his ambition and ruthlessness. Davros's own arc in this episode takes him from an undirectedly cruel child to a child with a passion for flagrantly unethical science.
I was surprised that this was more soap opera than war story. Davros's family are wealthy enough to be sheltered from some of the consequences of the ongoing war, and to his mother in particular the war is essentially a political abstraction.
This story, while clearly not the complete story of Davros's childhood, is self-contained enough to have its own beginning and end, not a cliffhanger that leaves one guessing at what will come next. I found it more engaging than anticipated and I look forward to when the Randomoid Selector will point at I, Davros: Purity.