What Is a Dalek?: Nicholas Briggs's Dalek Empire, Series One and Two (2001–03)

Back before Big Finish became a Doctor Who content machine, spin-offs were a rare thing indeed. The very first of them came in 2001, a four-part miniseries called Dalek Empire about a Dalek invasion of the galaxy... with no Doctor around to stop it. Written, directed, sound-designed, and composed by Nicholas Briggs (plus with Daleks and one other character played by him), the series strikes a very different tone to other Big Finish releases; it doesn't just feel like Doctor Who without the Doctor in it as many of Big Finish's later spin-offs have. 

It was successful enough to spawn three further series: Dalek Empire II: Dalek War (2003), an immediate sequel; Dalek Empire III (2004), set thousands of years later; and Dalek Empire: The Fearless (2007-08), an interquel set during the original Dalek Empire. There was also a Doctor Who story where the Doctor met a couple of the main characters, Return of the Daleks (2006), and a Short Trips volume (2006).

I picked the set up in a Humble Bundle sale in 2014... but with my Big Finish backlog, didn't get around to listening to them until late 2024! I'm sorry I waited so long, and here I kind of want to review them, but mostly want to think a little bit about what the Daleks "represent" in each story.

Dalek Empire Series One

As much as I have gone off a lot of Nick Briggs's writing tics at this point, it's interesting how much I enjoy his approach to something like this. I wouldn't say he's a great master of characterization, but I think he does a good job with some archetypes that a set of skilled performers successfully bring to life. The ground-level view here also plays to his strengths a lot. The stuff with Suz and the Daleks is genuinely clever.

As he often did early in his career, I think Briggs make some interesting structural choices; I really like the bait-and-switch about who the narrator is, which totally wrongfooted me. Some comedy aliens with sound effects, so points off for that, but overall this plays to his strengths in that the end is totally about the futility of resistance, which isn't something I want from all or even most of my Doctor Who stories, but does seem to me the exact kind of story the Daleks deserve on their first solo outing. And at the end, we even learn that the Daleks themselves are kind of pointless. A lot of stuff here, Briggs would do again later but worse (e.g., the Cutbert stories), so it's good to hear it done well.

The cast is largely great. I particularly like Gareth Thomas as Kalendorf, though I hope he gets more to do in series two. Sarah Mowat is excellent, she teeters between likeable and unsympathetic perfectly. And the guy who plays Alby Brook manages to make a somewhat stock character come to life.

What I really miss is the early 2000s Big Finish sound design. It's funny that when Briggs became the head honcho, the company largely moved away from this style. I don't know if I have the vocab to support my claims, but it's not doing the "episode of the new show without pictures" style that dominates now, but it has a real tactile feel to it. I miss those clunky Nick Briggs space doors opening and closing! When you listen to a piece of sound design and music by early 2000s Nick, you live it. I much prefer the "moody noise" style of music to the "orchestral warblings" that dominate Big Finish now. All those clunking doors and electronic dings... beautiful!

Even the covers are unique and beautiful; again, a lot of 2020s Big Finish product looks samey, all photoshopped floating heads, but from the moment you pick up the CD (or open up your download, I guess), you know you're in for something different here.

I also miss that early 2000s "Big Finish universe" feel; it's not distracting, but in addition to the ties to the main range Dalek Empire stories, we also get ties to The Sirens of Time (the Knights of Velyshaa) and Sword of Orion (the Garazone sector... complete with the notorious cell phone ring!).

Dalek Empire II: Dalek War

Dalek War is less focused than the original Dalek Empire but I still enjoyed it a lot. Like in a good movie, we actually don't know these characters—Kalendorf, Suz, Alby—very well in the sense that we've only spent a few hours with them, but in actuality you become quite attached to them, which really makes the ending quite effective. Maybe it's because I was an emotional wreck for other reasons at the time, but I teared up a bit at Kal and Suz's final scene in Dalek Empire II. Would not have expected that of a Nick Briggs script, to be honest.

What Is a Dalek?

Surely the best Doctor Who monsters "mean" something beyond the literal. A Sontaran, for example, is over-the-top patriotism and militarism; hardly subtle, but a good Sontaran story does something thematically with this. (Part of the reason they work so well in the Crimean War in Flux, for example.) A Cyberman can represent ideas about transhumanism or conformity—the monster doesn't have to be the same thing in every story.

Daleks are often stand-ins for fascism and/or xenophobia; in the original series, this is probably most clear in their first and last stories, The Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks. The latter, in particular, makes it very obvious by having the Daleks team up with humans who think England should have allied with the Nazis during World War II!

I spent a lot of the first two series thinking about what the Daleks "mean" for Nick Briggs. Though there are flashes of Daleks-as-fascists here, that's not really his mode. So what is it? The ending drove home that they are humanity's need for conflict, for war (what, if we want to get pretentious, literary theorist Elana Gomel calls "the violent sublime"). The frame story of DE II makes it clear that the Daleks will always be with us, they will always comes back-- just as war always comes back. The flip-flopping of who is on whose side in DE II shows that someone will always be fighting someone else, and Kalendorf's story in particular shows that if he wasn't fighting the Daleks, he would be fighting someone. The Daleks always return, because humanity always returns to violence. It's bleak, but hey, it's Nick Briggs writing a universe (essentially) without the Doctor, of course it's bleak.