Berserker

The War Doctor Begins #5.2

Released: 16 May 2023

Listened: 5/29/23

After the last story, you might be forgiven for assuming that this set was going to be lighter, and let the Doctor be Doctor-y. If, like me, you thought that, we’d all be very, very wrong. Because this story takes a very dark turn, and brings us very close to the War Doctor doing horrible things with good intentions. Turns out that Case’s Dalek programming is slowly killing her, and the only way to fix that is to get their hands on another Berserker Dalek, take it apart, and try to figure out the problem. Of course, getting anywhere near a Berserker Dalek is suicide, and they’re usually not alone. But history records that the planet Sunspire was razed by Daleks, and one was trapped inside a bunker for 400 years, slowly going (more) insane. Unfortunately, the gene-bank that could revive the Sunspire race was also in that bunker, so eventually the remaining Sunspires decided to try a raid to retrieve it. Case and the Doctor join that raid in the guise of a Dalek-Killer and her squire. They know the raid is doomed, but they’re using it as cover to get to the Berserker. However, the Sunspires don’t know that part. Timothy X Atack sets up a decent moral dilemma here: given that the objective is to save Case, this seems like the best way of going about it. But to the Sunspires, the Doctor and Case are committing horrible acts of deception. The only way to come close to justifying it is to believe that the Sunspires are “dead already,” and compartmentalize the mission. The Doctor can do that; Case, not so much. And maybe the Doctor has an additional goal in mind, which isn’t good for Case to discover while she’s having mixed feelings about deceptions. It’s dark, there’s a lot of death, and a lot of emotion. About the only thing that doesn’t quite work here is the Berserker itself. It’s supposed to be this terrifying thing that even other Daleks avoid. They mostly keep it off-screen during the story, which is smart. But the few times it does appear, it’s not clear what makes it so scary, except for the fact that it’s insane. There’s a detector that’s supposed to ramp up tension by making clicking noises as the Berserker gets closer, but that leads to the unfortunate mental image that the Berserker is tip-toeing across a metal floor, getting faster as it approaches, which is fairly silly. Aside from that, though, this is an awfully tragic one.