The Destroyers
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Big Finish Productions The Destroyers |
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| Written by | Terry Nation and Nicholas Briggs and John Dorney |  |
| Format | Compact Disc | |
| Released | 2010 |
| Starring Jean Marsh |
| Synopsis: When the crew of Explorer Base One is attacked by the Daleks, Space Security Agents Sara Kingdom, Mark Seven and Jason Corey investigate. They discover a plan that threatens the future of the entire galaxy... |
Seek! Locate! Destroy! by Jacob Licklider 16/2/23
Terry Nation is a man who knows just how to make a quick buck with an idea. Working for the BBC had him keeping the rights to use the Daleks and in late 1967 he took his creations which couldn't be used in Doctor Who again and took them to America. He pitched The Destroyers a pilot for a science fiction show about the Daleks conquests of the galaxy in a time where Star Trek was just getting started. Details on the entire series remains scant and Big Finish did make a Dalek spin-off a reality with Dalek Empire, but the script for The Destroyers does survive and was adapted in the same set as Prison in Space because it would have aired around the same time as Prison in Space. Terry Nation may be a good ideas man, but sadly he suffers when it comes to the actual plot of his pilot. He takes Sara Kingdom and gives her a story about her first encounters with the Daleks before The Daleks' Master Plan. It's a bit odd however as she doesn't really understand how evil the Daleks are in that story, while here she gets the full force of their evil right to her face.
Jean Marsh is great here. I mean, it is Jean Marsh, she can't not be great, and Sara Kingdom is an extremely interesting character. She doesn't have the baggage of killing her brother Bret as she would in The Daleks' Master Plan, and I feel that if it wasn't for the fact that when this was recorded Nicholas Courtney had contracted the cancer that took his life, Bret Vyon would have made an appearance here. Instead David Kingdom is used, and let's be honest he really doesn't make an impression at all. Alex Mallinson plays David Kingdom and is all right as the character, but he really feels like there isn't much to him. The same can be said for Chris Porter as Jason Corey, the brother of Mark Corey from Mission to the Unknown. The question is why are all the characters changed as this takes place before any of the events on Kembel? Well, it is probably because of the fact that an American television network will not be interested in already established characters. If that is the case, however, then why is Marsh as Sara Kingdom included? She only appeared for two months on Doctor Who and really only had her death be her defining feature as the show went on. I really don't know why any of this story turned out the way it did.
Mark Seven, however, is a really good idea of the future, giving us an android that is the perfect human, but still acts like your stereotypical android, not understanding human colloquialisms or cliches. It's Doctor Who does Kryten from Red Dwarf, just not very well. Nicholas Briggs, however, is great as the Daleks. The Daleks here are the ones seen in Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks' Master Plan as totally ruthless killing machines with no regard for any life other than themselves. They are murderous and are planning to create the Time Destructor, which is where I think the series would have gone if it was actually sent to series. It does, however, lead nicely into Dalek Empire.
To summarize, The Daleks: The Destroyers is a story that really shows the flaws in Terry Nation's writing. It's a pilot that never would have been picked up for a series as the science fiction being presented on television in America was of an optimistic future while Nation is trying to make a dystopia. The adaptation is an interesting little time capsule, and it's got some good moments, but really there isn't much here that wasn't done better in Nicholas Briggs's own Dalek Empire. 50/100