Extermination

Gallifrey #6.1

Released: 16 October 2013

Listened: 4/25/21

Series 6 came out just a few months after Series 5, and they were obviously planned together. But 6 has some of the bells and whistles that 5 lacked, including individual covers and an extras disc. It’s also pretty clear that the first story of this series was intended to be a part of Series 5, as it puts a capstone on Cruel Gallifrey. Both these sets were released in 2013, and both Doctor Who and Big Finish had changed a lot since Gallifrey started. In particular, we knew a lot more about the Time War, and what it did to Gallifrey. That’s still in these characters’ futures, but it colors this episode because if you want to present a multiversal threat that can annihilate Gallifrey, you go to the Daleks, which wouldn’t have been the case in the classic series. Most of the minor characters are forgotten, and our three protagonists spend way too much time trying to convince everybody else just how serious the threat is. Writer Scott Handcock seems to want this to be a war story, with the characters suffering stark terror at their imminent deaths, and pushed well beyond the bounds of their personal ethics by the stresses of battle. All of them are willing to grab heavy weaponry to fight (which Cruel Gallifrey has plenty of), and Romana in particular has enough PTSD from being a Dalek prisoner for 20 years (in “The Apocalypse Element”) that she’s more than willing to torture one for information. Unfortunately, she also seems to be trying to talk it to death, and Lalla Ward’s portrayal simply can’t maintain that level of intensity through all the speeches she has to make. Leela, for some reason, won’t kill an unarmed Dalek, which is insane, because she knows what they can do. And Narvin lectures Romana over abandoning Cruel Gallifrey, even after they’ve eliminated the Daleks, when last episode he was all for leaving without a backward glance. I can see what they were going for, but it doesn’t quite come off, resulting in an episode with lots of shouting and heightened emotion, but no real sense of what comes next.