Please Let's Not Return to Skaro

 By Danny Nicol

To describe Big Finish's Return to Skaro as conventional is understatement.  Briefly, using the ill-fated Fast Return Switch, the TARDIS materialises on Skaro a few generations after the last encounter.  The Thals are now dominant.  But in the old Dalek city lurk living Daleks...

This “canon-filler” audio-adventure provides us with a Dalek leader, a traditional ugly monster resembling an “intergalactic goldfish”.  We are told that this Dalek Supreme was actually pulling the strings in “The Daleks” itself and has managed to live to a ripe old age.  But such retcon robs us of some of the mystique of “The Daleks”.   The absence of a leader in the original serial is intriguing – particularly if, as Terry Nation intended, the Daleks represent what the Nazis might have developed into.  Recent studies show that, in Britain at least, the Far Right has changed radically since the 1930s with many now tending to be contemptuous of leaders unlike the pre-WW2 group-psychology mass-falling-in-love.  In later Dalek stories, there is often a Dalek Head Honcho who takes attention away from the Daleks generally and from the eerie uniformity of the species.  Return to Skaro thereby furnishes a homogeneity which detracts from the fascinating way in which the Daleks’ master-narrative developed.

Other instances of staidness are striking.  An important character turns out to have been foolishly in league with the Daleks and pays the price the moment they have outlived their usefulness.  Wow! The Daleks turn out to be deceptive, pretending to bring a message of peace.  Gosh!  At least they don’t claim to be the Thals’ servants or soldiers nor proffer cups of tea.

Presumably Big Finish did not press its author to write anything less stodgy.  Blazing rows between Thals or within the TARDIS team over appeasement-versus-war might have raised the game a little.  More audacious however would have been arguments between the Daleks, a peace faction pitted against a war faction.  Indeed what if the peace faction were victorious and the Doctor's and Thals' problems stemmed from an extremist grouplet?  The author could have outdone Malorie Blackman in inaugurating peaceful Daleks.  Of course any number of bold, unusual plots could be substituted for the ones suggested here.

But perhaps too much daring is not to be encouraged.  Perhaps Big Finish’s conservativism forms part of a commercial strategy in which comfy reiteration of canon trumps flights of fancy. Consider Lucie Miller in which the departure of an outstanding companion of the eighth Doctor is placed in the extraordinarily unoriginal context of a second Dalek invasion of Earth, strikingly similar to the one "as seen on TV".

To be sure Return to Skaro manages to evoke the feel of the Hartnell years and the acting is good with one exception.  The actress who plays Susan (a character much in need of greater agency) is horrendous, completely unable to get the voice right, and addressing listeners as if she were a member of the Royal Family circa 1950.  Frankly I can mimic Carole Ann Ford’s character a lot better myself.

One must return however to the story's conventionality.  The tale’s delineation of morality does not add anything daring either.  Quite the reverse.  It’s all “Daleks bad, Doctor good”.  By contrast “The Daleks” itself is fascinatingly ambiguous since the Daleks need radiation to survive and this would kill the Thals.  So the Daleks seem at times more driven by self-preservation than by a wish to destroy the Thals.  Here, at a stroke the author removes the radiation complication: the Daleks can be pure evil.  

Thus the Doctor accuses the Dalek Supreme of genocide and says that the Daleks are “murderous leopards which do not change their spots”.  Excuse me!  In “The Daleks” the Doctor poses as a war leader (driven by the need to regain the TARDIS’s fluid link).  His war plan in no way rules out the genocide of the Daleks.   The serial ends with that genocide, and with the Thal leader bemoaning “if only there could have been another way”.  In fact the Doctor explored no other way.   When in Return to Skaro the Doctor asks the Daleks “why not live in peace with the Thals?” one must consider how little the Doctor did to foster peace.

No doubt the author gave Big Finish what it wanted.  But if, God forbid, the Doctor ever ends up in a prison, then “The Daleks”, more so than Return to Skaro, gives us pause for thought as to whether her incarceration is richly deserved.