Wow, I’ve been away from the monthly range for a while. The last new-to-me stories I listened to were in December and July. A lot of box sets and early-monthly-range stories have filled the gap since then. Well, starting now I’m back on a focus on the monthly adventures; expect three new-to-me monthly adventures per month, reviewed here on Mondays. If I keep up this pace, I’ll get to the end of the monthly adventures in 2022 – about a year after they finish.
Monthly story #218, from November 2016, is Order of the Daleks. It features the 6th Doctor and Mrs. Constance Clarke, introduced the year before in a trilogy of stories beginning with Criss-Cross. It’s a dalek story, the first one for Constance, and it deals with two themes not normally present in a dalek story: a low-tech setting, and mind control.
Yes, the seasoned Doctor Who fan is familiar with Dalek replicants, duplicates, robomen, and partial-robotization that’s basically about mind control, but this plot is on a larger scale. They’ve discovered the “dream flower” growing on this planet where they’ve crashed, has hallucinogenic properties which create a sort of telepathic communion within the natural realm. The local monks use it to commune with their planet, and the Daleks have begun to use it to tap into that psychic network and influence their behavior, completely taking control of the abbot for a good long time.
The low-tech setting is the other critical factor for this story’s uniqueness: the planet is a “grade 3 civilization” akin to medieval Europe. The Doctor and Constance come to explore its natural beauty, while Pendle and Asta, a team of galactic surveyors, are there to investigate a high-tech signal the daleks are emitting so they can steal their ship and get off-world again. The Daleks, meanwhile, have been up to some pretty strange survival tactics: unable to rebuild their casings they’ve had to make do with what the monks do best: lead and stained glass, armed with spears. It’s a strange image:
Needless to say, Constance is not terribly frightened of them at first, despite the terrified reaction of Pendle and Asta. But she learns just how evil the daleks can be as the story goes on, and as they become more deadly as they sieze technology from the surveyors’ shuttle.
Another unusual thing that happens in this story which almost never happens (until it’s suddenly normalized in the 13th Doctor’s tenure) is that there are some active daleks outside of their casings. Some are being nursed back to health feeding on human blood (!) while another infiltrates the surveyor’s shuttle. Even the Black Dalek is hiding behind a tapestry without a protective casing. Constance gets to stab a dalek’s tentacle with a screwdriver at one point! It’s an unusually visceral story for the daleks, seeing them in a disadvantaged state we’ve almost never seen before, and so that’s a neat angle to keep them fresh and interesting in a story.
The character interplay in Order of the Daleks is also pretty good, another strength to commend this story. The Doctor and Pendle are often thrown together while Constance and Asta make an excellent team off and on throughout the story also. The monks, with their various levels of experience and awareness of what’s going on with the daleks, create a believable monastic setting that gives the story’s “scenery” both coherence and beauty, mystique and depth. It’s probably not going to land on my list of favorites, but it’s another solid story showing us that the monthly range is still going strong and the 6th Doctor’s newest companion is a reasonable and likeable character.
Ripples in my Tea 