Tangled Web

Dark Eyes #1.3

Released: 10 November 2012

Listened: 11/14/21

Things start to come together a bit more here, as you’d expect from the title. But if we’ve had the setup and the runaround, this episode is the misdirection, a plot thread that distracts the heroes and the audience while the bad guys get on with their plot. It’s the typical problem with converting a three-act arc into a four-part Doctor Who story, and it’s a bit ironic that Big Finish changed the format, but still wound up with the same problem. The misdirect in this case is a timeline where the Daleks reformed, and became a force for good in the universe. While it’s amusing to hear the Daleks playing with children, the thematic purpose is to explore the psychological damage that the Doctor’s long-running war with the Daleks has done to him. Molly is uniquely qualified to help with this, as she’s seen war weariness, and she’s also a brand-new companion, so hasn’t yet internalized the idea that the Daleks are pure evil. There’s some Time War foreshadowing here, but at this point Big Finish was still being coy with new-series references, as they didn’t have the license yet. We also find out that Molly got lost as a child, and was found by Kotris, which started her on her special destiny. Kotris and the Daleks have a “relativity map,” which is a rather benign name for a device that allows them to see all of time and apparently avoid paradox somehow. The image of the peaceful Daleks is one of the strongest from this set, but that doesn’t change the fact that this story is mostly filler.