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'Daleks Among Us'

CD adventure released September 2013, 4 episodes

Writer: Alan Barnes
Director: Ken Bentley

Roots: Star Wars ("Aren't both of you a little short for storm troopers?") Roman religion (Lemuria). The Boys from Brazil. The encounter with Schalk echoes The Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lecter. Schulk paraphrases Nietzsche on the Supermen and the Untermensch Father Knows Best. The German legend of Alraune, child of the mandrake root. A Wrinkle in Time.

Intertextuality: Falkus, second moon of Skaro is identified in the Dr Who and the Daleks Omnibus. Zogron, leader of the Cybermen comes from Steve Parkhouse and Mike McMahon's DWW comic strip Junkyard Demon. Klein refers to 'The Counter Measures mob'

Technobabble: Iron filings (such as those the Doctor has) glowing green indicate recent artron propulsion, detecting the presence of "crude" artron energy..

Fluffs: "This is a tangled enough affairs as it is"

Goofs: Klein's Sambuca stunt seems... improbable.

Dialogue Disasters: "Don't worry, Father. I'll be - er, Mother..."

"I cannot... stop. I can never... stop"

"Flaming Sambuca!" "Language, Mister Arrowsmith."

Davros' exit speech: "You fool, Doctor. You should know that I never enter into any negotiation without an exit strategy prepared. In this case, a Dalek time capsule. Now, I depart this wretched world to again rule over my creations in some other far distant place!"

And, tellingly: "What father would miss school sports day, with his son running the egg and spoon?"

Double Entendres: "I have already had a team of Daleks fitted with the appropriate... tools."

"Without your bully boys to back you up you're as impotent as I am."

"I do my best work in the dark"

Also: "Let the agony begin!", "Stop! Stop! Stop!!" and "I'm wasting my time!"

Continuity: The planet Azimuth is located at the nexus point between two solar systems, and was the target of a Dalek invasion before the Doctor and Ace intervened (see: Unrecorded Adventures) It has an underground rail, hovercrafts and mines. Davros ostensibly came to Azimuth looking for Daleks he knew to have been there. The Doctor says Kaleds were blonde-haired and blue-eyed. (wasn't that the Thals?). He says there are more Daleks in the universe than there were on Skaro. Falkus is a Dalek word meaning 'new dawn.' Davros is familiar with Nasty history. Project 9001 (Falkus) was to create a cloned body for Davros' consciousness to be downloaded into.

Lemuria is a wraith-world, hosting an undead population of outright judiciary. The Book of All Ills is the Lemuria database it took the Wraiths so long to compile it that all of its identities contained therein have long since died, and so living descendants are prosecuted instead. The Wraiths are of psychic rage - the echo of the howl of the lynch mob.

The TARDIS Library contains volumes of New Scientist.

Klein is familiar with TARDIS operations and can almost operate it herself accurately, after having watched the Doctor. Klein's father was a spy for the English, but her biological parents are Elizabeth Volkenraff and Schalk. She was a designer baby reared to precise specification in order to operate the Persuasion machine with an uncorrupted mind. She was to be cloned. Klein's basic UNIT training protects her against hypnosis. The Doctor imagines that if Klein held herself as a baby then the Blinovitch Effect could have temporal consequences - altering history, therefore just by being in close proximity with them knocks the TARDIS out of calibration by a couple of hours off-course - a "wrinkle in space-time".

Unrecorded Adventures: The Doctor and Ace liberated the planet Azimuth from a Dalek invasion twenty years previously, resulting in a statue of a [narked] Ace being erected to commemorate the planet's 'Liberty'. Some time before this adventure the Doctor set up his and Klein's credentials as "re-educators" on Azimuth.

Links: Persuasion, Starlight Robbery, Twin Dilemma (Jaconda in 2310), the Sense Sphere (The Sensorites), Terra Alpha in the twenty-fourth century (Happiness Patrol), Remembrance of the Daleks (the Black Dalek, Davros mentions the destruction of Skaro). Will has seen film footage of Daleks from "Shoreditch [Remembrance]... Auderley House' [Day of the Daleks]. The Doctor recalls the 'agony seat' he once sat in on Skaro (Genesis of the Daleks) - its records were destroyed, but Davros committed them to memory. Dalek duplicates. Silver Nemesis (Schalk's Nietzsche fixation mirrors that of De Flores]. Unit: Dominion (The Umbrella Man; Klein even quotes the Master over the Doctor checking in on her from time to time).

The Bottom Line: "What's with the swastikas everywhere?"

A spectacular own-goal in terms of tying up loose ends (see box-out below), character continuity, and mercifully an end to the Will Arrowsmith diversion (not that Will is a bad character, but there was something about his character and supposed disjoint with the actor's appearance that... bothered some listeners) and all the development he had in Starlight is lost here. McCoy gives a very hurried performance, certainly not his best. The Klein-clone gambit sounds like The Holy Terror with Nasty trappings, while Falkis' Persuasion machine plan is a watered-down Word Lord plan. Add to that cod Nasties, Daleks for some reason and the most unnecessary retcon of a companion yet, and stir well. Even Davros is squandered. There's very little good here.

THE TIMELINE OF ELIZABETH KLEIN

Daleks Among Us seems to be borne out of Alan Barnes' overcomplicating Klein's back story, a story which is really not complicated at all. No, really!

The Colditz Klein is born around 1935, and is aged around thirty by the time she meets the Doctor at Colditz (1944), having come from an alternative 1965 created by Ace's misplacing future technology which enables the Third Rich to win the War (Colditz) The 1965 Klein, with the assistance a certain 'Schmidt' (an alternative Eighth Doctor - Klein's Story), finds the TARDIS of a dead Seventh Doctor and programs it to retrace one of its most recent journeys, to 1944. 'Schmidt' meanwhile programs it to dematerialize after she arrives, trapping her there. After Colditz Klein is trapped in a restored timeline and escapes Germany, fleeing to South America with the likes of De Flores, and then to Kenya nearly a decade later, where she meets the Doctor once more (A Thousand Tiny Wings) and travels with him before betraying him (Survival of the Fittest) and being tracked down by him in an alternative future 2044, where she ultimately succumbing to his re-engineering of the alternative history she has created (Architects of History). Her time line and existence are utterly erased here - as are the events of Colditz, for that matter.

As a result of this historical reboot Klein is also 'reset', having now been 'born' in 1945 (Daleks Among Us), an artificially-conceived clone of Elizabeth Volkenraff. The 'Dominion' Klein is spirited out of Germany by her adoptive parents to England where she is raised, studies at Cambridge and receives her doctorate, eventually joining UNIT's scientific team (Architects of History). Persuasion fixes some dates so that by UNIT Dominion it is established that Klein is active with UNIT around 1990 as their scientific adviser, and this is the same Klein who appears in Persuasion and its subsequent stories.

This version of Elizabeth Klein is therefore ten years younger than her Colditz counterpart. If we suppose the new Klein was born around 1945, this makes her about 55 by the time of Dominion - around the same age as actor Tracey Childs.

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