Nightmare of the Daleks

The Lost Resort #3

Released: 8 September 2021

Listened: 9/15/21

We close out the boxed set with a Dalek story, which happens to be Tegan’s first encounter with Daleks. (I guess “Resurrection” is vague enough on whether she knows what they are.) Marc collapses in the TARDIS, as a result of some signal he’s received with his cyber-parts, and he steers them to a drilling platform on a water world. The Doctor thinks that the sleep pods on the rig should help Marc stabilize, but there’s a problem: The crew of the rig have been having nightmares, and sometimes they don’t wake up. It’s Daleks invading the dreams, which is a trick they haven’t used before, and makes for a heck of a title. But things get a little confusing as there’s a lot of hopping in and out of the dreamscape, and once again the short length of the story means we don’t get to know much about secondary characters who we should care about. Mark departs the crew in this story, which unfortunately was fairly well telegraphed throughout this boxed set; it seems they’d run out of things to do with him. It’s a better departure than Adric’s, but in a story this short, it doesn’t feel entirely justified. I know part of it was due to the pandemic shaking up the schedule, but Marc doesn’t feel like he got a fair chance. So this one ends up somewhat flat.