The next Once and Future story, “A Genius for War”, is sadly the most generic of them all so far, though at least it’s a good example of a pretty standard Time War story only with the Seventh Doctor in it, but that’s about the only thing that’s different here. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Davros story as much as the next guy, but it’s safe to say that this one doesn’t feel like any kind of anniversary special at all and I’m beginning to long for the days of overly-crammed multi-Doctor releases… Still, let’s take a look, shall we?
After flittering between a couple of incarnations again The Doctor settles on his Seventh (Sylvester McCoy) but before he can look into his condition any further he’s time scooped onto the same space station from Trial of a Time Lord by The General (Ken Bones) who along with Veklin (Beth Chalmers) informs him that they received a plea of help from Davros (Terry Molloy), who is imprisoned by his own creations on Falkus, one of the moons of Skaro. His offer is that if specifically The Doctor rescues him he’ll help the Time Lords defeat the Daleks and end the war. Thankfully The General is pretty sure it’s a trap and The Doctor is 100% certain its one, so they’re not seriously considering it like you’d think, though it does get the point where The Doctor is interested in what he’s planning so “intentionally falls for the trap” and rescues Davros from the moon with the help of Kaled guards called Aldan and Bosco (Yasmin Mwanza and Esmonde Cole) as apparently retro-created Kaled slaves who think the great war is still going on are more dependable guards that actual Daleks, or something…?
It’s odd to hear Beth Chalmers with the Seventh Doctor and have no mention of how eerily similar she is to his old companion Raine Creevy…
It turns out Davros’ idea is to blend Time Lord and Dalek DNA to create the ultimate hybrid that will rid the universe of both races and end the war, leaving in place one singular race mightier than all the others, and thanks to the mentioned-for-one-TV-season-only legend of the Hybrid The General comes on board with the plan. This kind of annoyed me because in the show The General fought against Rassilon’s plan to “ascend” the Time Lord race to a higher plain of existence at the expense of the universe, I don’t see turning the Time Lord race into Dalek hybrids that will no doubt conquer the universe as much different to that so it seemed really out of character, which is impressive given how shallow the character is already. As all this is going down a Dalek fleet arrive as they planted a homing beacon on Davros’ chair…
As I said, it’s a perfectly fun Time War story with a lot of familiar elements, though I didn’t really like The General’s weird personality shift, but the whole degenerating into older incarnations plotline is barely mentioned until the ending, which really makes me wonder why this story strand even exists…
The Continuity:
The Special Edition cover, once again not feeling all that special…
Beyond continuing the “Once and Future” narrative (barely) the Time Lords have repurposed “Space Station Zenobia”, which was the same location that the whole courtroom trial part of the Sixth Doctor linked TV story “The Trial of a Time Lord” took place, and he’s brought there via a Time Scoop, which was used during the 20th Anniversary story “The Five Doctors”.
Lots of Davros continuity as well, but pleasantly it connects to other Big Finish audios as much as it does TV stories, including the Eighth Doctor Time War story “Restoration of the Daleks” and the Sixth Doctor Audio “The Curse of Davros”, plus TV stories like Fourth Doctor classic “Genesis of the Daleks”, Seventh Doctor TV outing “Remembrance of the Daleks” and Twelfth Doctor two-parter “The Doctor’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar”, which is also where the whole “Hybrid” storyline started.
Overall Thoughts:
“A Genius For War” was a fine one-hour Time War story though the treating of The General is very odd, but as a continuation of “Once and Future” it wasn’t… well, it wasn’t, though at least its core concept was used in the ending even if it left The Doctor is in the same position as he was at the start. I guess how much you like this will depend on what you expect out of it, but at least Terry Molloy and Sylvester McCoy can always be counted on to put in a good performance. It’s a perfectly fine hour really, but I doubt I’ll be putting it on again because somehow it didn’t feel like anything really happened…
Not much to say here, Davros uses the Doctor’s DNA to create some hybrid Time Lord/Daleks but due to his current degeneration crisis they fail, and soon the Dalek army destroy the space station and recapture Davros while The General, Veklin and The Doctor escape, the latter being Time Scooped back to where he been taken from.
Hogan Reviews 