The Juggernauts
An attack on a space cruiser they’re visiting forces the Doctor and Melanie to evacuate by any means necessary. Mel manages to make her way to an escape pod, which takes her to a research colony on the planet Lethe. The Doctor and the TARDIS, however, are captured by the Daleks, who offer to send the Doctor to Lethe too…so long as he reports back on what their creator, Davros, is doing there. When the Doctor arrives, he finds that Davros has managed to conceal his appearance and is calling himself Professor Vaso – and worse yet, he has unearthed specimens of one of the Daleks’ worst enemies, the Mechonoids. Davros has quietly set up self-replication facilities for the Mechonoids, aware of their potential for battling the Daleks, claiming that he hopes to atone for his past by ridding the universe of his creations. But even with this claim of a noble mission, the Doctor sees Davros up to his old tricks, leaving a trail of death in his wake. But when the Doctor fulfills his end of the bargain and alerts the Daleks, who still want to capture Davros and try him for crimes against them, things only get worse, with an entire colony of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of a new Dalek-Mechonoid war.
written by Scott Alan Woodard
directed by Gary Russell
music by Steve FoxonCast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Bonnie Langford (Melanie), Terry Molloy (Davros), Bindya Solanki (Sonali), Klaus White (Geoff), Peter Forbe (Kryson), Paul Grunert (Brauer), Julia Houghton (Loewen), Nicholas Briggs (Dalek and Mechonoid voices)
Timeline: after The Trial Of A Time Lord and before Catch-1782
Notes: The Doctor mentions Evelyn in the past tense here. If one follows the generally accepted view from the novels that the Doctor dropped Melanie – a future companion he hadn’t met yet – off in her own post-seventh-Doctor timeline after The Trial Of A Time Lord, only to encounter her and begin their travels together at a later date, it’s reasonable to assume that the stories with Evelyn Smythe take place in the interim.
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
Greeted by Davros and the Daleks after their escape from the Divergent universe, the Doctor, Charley and C’rizz are separated from each other. Davros is suffering from a split personality as he begins to lose himself in the identity of the Emperor Dalek. Charley and C’rizz flee the Daleks with members of a local resistance cell, but they too are separated from each other; Charley joins up with a woman who talks frequently about how her daughter was killed by the Daleks, while C’rizz ends up on the run from the Daleks with a young woman who could very well be that daughter. But the Doctor discovers that she could also be a former TARDIS traveler – even though he has no memory of her. And worse yet, Charley finds out that this planet, the new Dalek homeworld, is also known as Earth – and that its resistance movement is run by the Daleks themselves.
The Doctor finds himself unexpectedly saddled with a new companion, the aacerbic Lucie Miller, who’s not too happy to be with the Doctor, either. Unable to return her to her own time, the two mismatched companions find themselves on the planet Red Rocket Rising, where a natural catastrophe has pretty much destroyed the society. But hope seems to arrive in the form of friendly aliens called the Daleks, who ally themselves with Acting President Klint. The Doctor tries to stop the Daleks, but when they realize he is on Red Rocket Rising, they set a price for their cooperation: the Doctor.
The Daleks begin to show their true colors while the mad scientist Martez (in the body of his assistant Asha) has revealed his own version of the Daleks, built from salvaged technology. The Doctor realizes that it is these “new” Daleks that are the reason the “true” Daleks have come to Red Rocket Rising. As an all-out war breaks out between the two factions, the Doctor finds himself with little choice but to choose sides in the battle, in the hopes that the lesser of the two evils wins out in the end.
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.
The TARDIS is drawn to a meeting with General Tillington, an American general heading up an anti-alien agency called Global Warning in the U.K., in 2158 – a year after the Daleks should have overrun the entire planet to begin a ten-year occupation of Earth. But the Daleks are on Earth as tiny toys that are all the rage among kids and collectors. Global Warning employs a number of “time sensitives” who foresee the Dalek invasion that the Doctor thinks should be in progress, and yet they can’t pin down when or how it will happen, and for that matter, with the timeline apparently already disrupted, neither can the Doctor. With the help of Tillington’s seemingly rebellious son Wilton, the Doctor escapes and returns to the TARDIS and begins trying to track down Nyssa, who he left in an earlier point in Earth’s history to test a piece of temporal communications equipment she’d invented. But Nyssa isn’t where or when he left her – she and one of the Knights Templar who was pursuing her have somehow been transported to the American Civil War, where they aid a wounded former slave. The Doctor rescues them, but the TARDIS then leaps into the heart of the Vietnam War, where they rescue yet another passenger, a tough-talking female helicopter pilot. But unknown to the Doctor, Wilton has brought his toy collection with him – the miniature Daleks – and the tiny but deadly Daleks sieze control of the TARDIS. They need the Doctor’s time machine – and, of course, him to pilot it – to launch a new and more devastating invasion of Earth.
Notes: This marks the first time that footage for episodes of Doctor Who has been custom-shot in the United States. In 1985, the Colin Baker story The Two Doctors was originally written to take place in New Orleans, but budget constraints forced the story to be rewritten to take place in Seville. The 1996 TV movie’s shots of San Francisco were taken from stock footage (the movie itself was shot in Vancouver). For Daleks In Manhattan and Evolution Of The Daleks, director James Strong and a small camera crew from BBC Wales traveled to New York City and shot video and photos – much of which would be digitally touched up in post-production to “de-age” the city to the 1930s; most of the footage – even the scenes that appear to be at the base of the Statue of Liberty – were still filmed in Cardiff. Guest star Hugh Quarshie has dabbled with Duane Dibbley in Red Dwarf and protected Padme as Captain Panaka in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
On the backwater planet of Talis Minor, Salus Kade has a decent life; he helps to bring home the food that feeds his people, he has a wife and daughter – and he wants absolutely nothing to do with the war raging between the Earth Alliance and the Dalek Empire. When he finds Earth soldiers holding a recruitment drive in the middle of his home town, he’s not pleased, and he’s not afraid of them until he discovers that the “recruiting” is just for show and it’s actually a forced conscription drive. Even as he rallies his own people around him by denouncing the Earth Alliance’s tyranny, the Daleks themselves arrive – and a catastrophic attack helps to change Kade’s mind. He enlists, along with many other men from his community, and ends up leading a battallion of Earth and allied soldiers in the Alliance’s newest gear: a sealed, self-contained armored spacesuit which is practically its own interstellar vehicle and weapons platform built around one man. Designed specifically to combat the Daleks, these suits are worn only by the Earth Alliance’s elite troopers, code named the Fearless. But Kade’s latest mission into the teeth of the Dalek war machine is enough to strike at least a little fear into his heart…