Hogan Reviews

After a long wait and a pretty bang-average previous boxset we finally have the next box in the odd Second Doctor post-regeneration story arc and guess what? Once again it’s not great as some of the early parts may as well have not existed and there is a heavy focus on your typical Dalek stuff we get so often in other ranges rather than anything interesting the concept could have given us. Oh well, let’s have a closer look…

At the end of the last set Jamie had vanished and the “Kippers” were causing countless copies of Skaro to appear across time and universe thanks to everyone being at the fabled “Vanishing Point”, a place outside the universe and home to the powerful overseers known as the Morai. It was an interesting set up… well, sort of, can’t say more Daleks taking on a powerful time-based race particularly appealed in a series I thought would be about the Second Doctor unbound by continuity, but hey. Sadly though the follow up is brief, by the end of the first half of the first episode the infinite Skaros have been stopped, Jamie is suddenly back with little-to-no explanation and soon The Doctor (Michael Troughton), Jamie (Fraser Hines), Zoe (Wendy Padbury) and the Time Lord known as Raven (Emma Noakes) are back in the TARDIS and searching out the Kippers’ origin. They soon find it as an old lady we get to hear make unpleasant sounds for a good 30 or 40 seconds (thanks for that, Big Finish sound designers…) and her childhood self both enjoy the classic Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme and thanks to her mum in the childhood era having been given schematics to make a bit of technobabble it starts to bring a “Kipper” into reality. The Doctor and Jamie are in one time period and Zoe and Raven are in the other, but they soon reunite and The Doctor figures out that the Kippers are actually “Potential Daleks” trying to break through into reality and a Doctor Celestine in the older woman period is somehow the Dalek Emperor as a human, or something? Either way the fact Nicholas Briggs was voicing the character didn’t exactly help any surprise there. The whole first part was a big lot of nothing really, at least not until that revelation right at the end and how The Doctor was going to sacrifice his temporary self to close the time corridor, but didn’t have to in the end.

Part 2 has The Doctor and team follow the time corridor only to find a peaceful forest planet full of a simple tribal people and they happily stay there for weeks (or minutes in terms of what we hear) until Raven begins to have a rather unpleasant headache and hears the Dalek Emperor in her head and sure enough the whole forest was a staging ground for the Daleks, who then take over Raven’s mind and kidnap The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe. They want to have the coordinates to the Vanishing Point so instead of looking into Raven’s mind while they have her under their complete control they try to get the information out the Doctor instead and end up seemingly killing him only for him to actually be mentally connected to the Dalek pathweb, allowing him to take control of a Dalek and then eventually pop into Raven’s head and “disconnect her” from the Emperor just in time for her to help Zoe and Jamie. The Doctor is then ejected back into his own body just in time to reunite with everyone and escape as the Dalek base is destroyed by a roboman who The Doctor befriended regaining his senses just in time. As they get caught up plotwise in the TARDIS, including the revelation that Raven was never working for the Time Lords and instead had been in the hands of the Daleks this whole time, the Emperor reaches into Raven’s head one last time and gets the coordinates to the Vanishing Point from her instead, again, like they should’ve done from the beginning. It’s now a race to get back to the Vanishing Point in time to stop a Dalek invasion…

The story may have been mostly pants but at least the artwork is good!

These first two parts were really not up to much, again I can’t stress how disappointing it is to have this unique “free from continuity” splinter version of the Doctor and instead of running with it and the Time Lord’s shady CIA like it was always supposed to be it’s all been scrapped in favour of telling yet another Dalek story, especially since the “final end” from The Evil of the Daleks that’s constantly mentioned didn’t result in the Daleks and Skaro being erased from existence like this plotline has suggested, making it even weirder.

I will say though while the “companion rejoins The Doctor as an older person” plotline has been done to death the older Zoe here remarking that now after all her experiences she sees The Doctor is a new light compared to her bright-eyed younger self led to some interesting lines, especially with Jamie, who is just the same as he ever was and doesn’t get her meaning. Zoe was a real highlight this set.

The Continuity:

Beyond mentioning the ending of “The Evil of the Daleks” a bunch of times as well as the events of the previous three boxsets in this run, there isn’t really any continuity to mention. That’s quite enough though, especially as you really need to have followed the story up to this point, it’s not at all stand-alone.

Overall Thoughts:

“The Potential Daleks” was a bit of a disappointment. The final part had some highlights and Zoe was unusually but happily well served, but overall the first two stories are a load of nothing that only serve to get us back to where we were at the start of the box in order to bring the story thread to a close, as if they wrote that cliffhanger last time but didn’t know how to solve it in three hours so filled in time for the first two. Fingers crossed the line picks up a bit now that, hopefully, this story thread has come to an end…

The Doctor, Jamie, Zoe and Raven arrive at the Vanishing Point only to find it already teeming with Daleks, who are pulling the dead Morai from the wall and trying to revive them (the Morai, when dead, become “part of the Vanishing Point itself” apparently) They make a break for it but The Doctor, Jamie and Raven get pulled into a weird barrier while Zoe is left behind and taken prisoner. In the strange barrier dimension all three witness their own bodies being crushed into nothing and remark how they are still conscious and aware of each other as disembodied voices (that’s twice The Doctor’s become a floating consciousness in as many episodes!), then they meet Anake (Jacqueline King) the Morai from the first part/last boxset who claims that the Daleks have won because all the Morai are now “dead” within this realm and due to their non-interference policy they can’t fight back. Back with Zoe and the Dalek Emperor where the latter manages to connect itself to Zoe’s mind using its new Time Lord DNA from the experiments in the previous episode and find out that the nice young-sounding Morai from the previous box that Zoe liked, Aether (Callum Pardoe), had access to the part of the Vanishing Point that will allow them to restart their Kippers/infinite Skaros plan from the start of the story and use their technology to revive him.

Zoe manages to outwit the Dalek Emperor and convince him that Zoe and Aether need to go into the special Vanishing Point room by themselves to buy time and sure enough the combination of The Doctor’s pleading and her son suddenly being alive puts Anake and the rest of the Morai into action, leading them to push the barrier dimension forward and kill any Dalek absorbed into it, putting an end to the Daleks’ plans, um again and this time permanently… even though the Dalek Emperor escaped before being absorbed. Aether wishes to travel with The Doctor and co. but he says its too dangerous as his whole existence shouldn’t be a thing and once the Time Lords find out they’ll come after him, and Raven for that matter given she worked with the Daleks and broke the rules, even if unknowingly. Then as if on cue the TARDIS receives a distress call from Gallifrey…