Gary Hopkins

The spoiler-free version: This is great, a must-listen if you like Doctor Who and particularly like backstories.

The spoiler version:

This is the first in a four-part miniseries chronicling the early life of Davros, who is known to Doctor Who fans as the creator of the nefarious Daleks. Davros is a member of the Kaled race, which has been at war with the Thals for as long as anyone can remember. Davros comes from a military family but wants to apply his talents to the scientific corps. He show more carries a ruthless streak in him that is most certainly inherited from his mother: upon learning that her husband, Davros’s father, has been killed in an explosion, she says “I’m in pieces. Not nearly as many pieces as my late husband, of course, but I am upset.” Davros later displays his own ruthless streak by locking his tutor in a radiation chamber for an experiment, prompting many shouted expletives on my part. I had to start listening to Part 2 immediately. show less

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In Innocence, Rory Jennings becomes the fourth actor to portray Davros, but at the start rather than end of his career, as a callous little budding megalomaniac scientist - we completely understand how the youth becomes the Davros we know. An excellent depiction of a troubled family background in an intricate and violent political situation; of all the stories, this shows the most obvious homage to Robert Graves, and that's not a bad thing.

Other Lives is one of those rare stories where the only sfnal elements are the Doctor and companions, and the Tardis. On a visit to the Great Exhibition (as promised originally by the Fifth Doctor at the start of Time Flight), everyone gets entangled in their own plotline - the Doctor embroiled in a case of mistaken identity, the Tardis arbitrarily wandering off with a couple of French tourists, C'rizz kidnapped by the proprietor of a freak show, and Charley rather gloriously hooking up with show more the Duke of Wellington, memorably portrayed by Ron Moody as a paragon of aged courtesy occasionally flipping into anti-revolutionary frothing. The plot doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it is enjoyable stuff. show less

I've started listening to these on my drive into work in the morning. My first impression is that they've rather boldly stepped outwith what might be expected of a Davros biography. While you might expect very little in the way of Daleks as Davros tells the story of his pre-Dalek youth, there's actually very little science fiction at all, and mercifully little continuity for a Doctor Who spin-off. It's more of a story of war and politicking and its main failing is the fairly predictable show more characters - politicians who scheme and plot and soldiers who prefer to die than retire. Through all of this we catch little glimpses of Davros as a boy discovering his fascination for science and growing into the cold, psychopathic man he will become. Unfortunately the lad playing the young Davros sometimes sounds like he's reading his lines off the page without thinking about them, but in all, it's an interesting enough story revealing a little more about the history of one of Doctor Who's best-loved villains. show less