Long after her travels with the Doctor and Jamie ended, and after the Time Lords wiped her memory and returned her to her own timeline, Zoe Herriot experiences disturbing memories of meeting the Doctor. She also remembers him showing her one of his terrifying adventures with the Daleks, and his subsequent reassurances that he had rendered the metal monsters extinct. But in her first trip in the TARDIS, Zoe and her friends find themselves embroiled in interplanetary politics, captured and used as pawns in a conspiracy to sabotage a peace conference. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, Zoe comes face to face with the very terrors that the Doctor said were no more.
written by Patrick Chapman
directed by Mark J. Thompson
music by Lawrence OakleyCast: Wendy Padbury (Zoe), Nicholas Briggs (Dalek voices)
Timeline: after The Wheel In Space and after The War Games
Logbook entry & review by Earl Green
Review: Cleverly getting around the plot complication that Zoe shouldn’t remember any of her adventures with the Doctor at all, Fear Of The Daleks is an intriguing little tale that feels like a four-part story crammed into a two-part bag. There’s a lot going on here, and as a result, it feels perhaps just a little bit rushed.
Wendy Padbury does an effective job of recreating Zoe, but of all of the Companion Chronicles I’ve listened to thus far, she gets even bigger kudos for recreating the character of the Doctor with whom she traveled. She does a great job of capturing Patrick Troughton’s occasionally bumbling verbal cadence as the Doctor, and in a couple of places I can almost hear his voice instead of hers.
The story itself sticks out like a sore thumb in the Troughton era, simply feeling more like something from the rather more convoluted Doctor Who of the ’80s. With telepathic mind control and avatars in a virtual world and whatnot, it’s a refreshing break from the “human colony/base under siege by Cybermen/Ice Warriors/seaweed” plotline that was common to so many of Troughton’s adventures. But it’s almost too far ahead of its time.
Still, for those who, like me, were skeptical of the Companion Chronicles as a concept, this release may very well be the proof that the concept can work – you should at least listen to it for Wendy Padbury’s splendid performance as the Doctor.
