The Time of the Daleks

Main Range #32

Released: 21 May 2002

Listened: 8/4/21

It’s getting to be past time that Charley encounters the Daleks, so this story takes care of that. The twist is that at the start of the story, Charley reveals that she doesn’t know who Shakespeare is (and neither did Orson Welles), so the Doctor follows a time fissure to mid-21st Century Earth, where England is under a benevolent dictatorship, and the population is slowly losing its memory of Shakespeare. It may have something to do with time-travel experiments the government had been conducting, but according to the Doctor, those experiments shouldn’t work. Even stranger, the government found a bunch of Daleks in the vortex, and they’ve been playing the “I am your servant” trick by offering to help with the Shakespeare problem in exchange for the technology to go home. The Daleks are trying to become a temporal power here, and in fact this story ties in with the other “Dalek Empire” stories from the Main Range. It could even be considered to be part of the Time War, except that the new series didn’t exist at the time this story was made. The Daleks’ grasp of time technology certainly seems to be shaky here, and that lack of experience ends up costing them. As frequently happens in stories about Shakespeare, several characters quote from the plays every time they get a chance. Only the Doctor seems to pull it off properly, because he’s aware of it and being somewhat ironic. Daleks quoting Shakespeare probably sounds like a good idea on paper, but even with Nick Briggs’ excellent line readings, it sounds wrong. Charley’s somewhat unusual status in time is brought up again, and that thread will get resolved before long. It’s an OK story, but the somewhat odd pacing and lack of ruthlessness on the Daleks’ part make it not as good as it could be.