Has your life turned out the way you thought it would?
Do you still believe it will?
If it hadn’t, or didn’t, what would you be willing to do to change your stars?
We join I, Davros 2: Purity with Davros approaching his thirtieth birthday (in itself something of an achievement on the war-ravaged Skaro), but he is bored. Bored, and frustrated that his attempts to join the Scientific Corps are repeatedly blocked, despite his doing all the right things to justify his ascension to its ranks. We find Davros in a dull day-to-day job as a Tech Op, testing survival gear with his friend Reston. But while, yes, Davros has a friend, his sense of his own brilliance, nascent in Rory Jennings’ portrayal of the character in the first instalment, burns through his day-to-day frustrations here as we hear Davros played in his ‘humanoid’ years by Terry Molloy, who has given him augmented life since the 80s on TV and in Big Finish audio. The arrogance, however justified, feels like the frustration of the armchair manager as Purity begins, or the armchair show-runner for that matter – he knows how things should be run, how things could be improved, and how the war could be won, but he’s never been given the chance to shine. Davros, so potentially brilliant as a child, is heading for a life of unremarkable grumbling, his potential eclipsed by that of his mother, who is now a powerful councilor, while his sister Yarvell has exchanged her initial militarism for an increasing interest in the least tenable position on Skaro – that of the Peace Party.
The thing that comes shining through in Molloy’s portrayal of the ‘middle-aged’ Davros is what makes sense of the story’s subtitle – while as a child, Davros was interested in the history of all the races on Skaro, by the time he’s nearly 30, a fervent belief in the superiority of the Kaled people has gripped him, a need to keep the species ‘pure’ and to make it the only winner in a war not only for resources, but for what he feels passionately is its rightful place on the planet.
But Davros is stuck in equipment testing, going nowhere fast – until The Supremo, the leader of the Kaled Council, offers him and Reston the chance to make heroes of themselves. The story takes a significant risk, borrowing a little from Genesis of the Daleks at this point, taking us back and forth across the Skarosian wasteland, from the Kaled dome to the Thal citadel, but James Parsons and Andrew Stirling-Brown’s script does this better than the Genesis original, because it keeps the point of the journey firmly in front of our eyes at all times: this is Davros at personal war, sent into the field to get information on a new Thal mega-weapon and destroy it if possible. At least, that’s ostensibly the reason for the mission. On a planet like Skaro, of course, you can never be sure who’s playing what hand until the cards are seen. But more than just Davros at personal war on the orders of the Supremo, this is Davros at war with Destiny, with a fate that sees him relegated to a backwater job. It’s Davros’ true nature at war with the comfortable carapace he’s grown – friends, work, family, and the nature of his ‘greatness’ will take no more. When the opportunity arrives on this mission, Davros shows himself capable of strong strategic thinking, deceit, effective military command, scientific analysis and, in a thread picked up from the first instalment, an utterly driven, potentially psychopathic scientific absorption, detached from all the inconvenient emotional bonds of a ‘normal’ life. As the episode unfurls, he also finds himself in a position to play politics for the first time in his life, to outwit those who would seek to destroy or contain him as plots are revealed that give Davros, and his mother Calcula, more power than they’d imagined to make their dreams of his ascension into a reality. The price of that power would be terrible to ordinary people, would be unpayable. But these are not ordinary people. Not even close. They pay the price willingly, even gladly, revealing the truth of the title. It’s not just a notion of racial purity that infects Davros. It’s the purity of his own ego, his own ambition, and his own arrogance to overcome all obstacles, even when those obstacles are the people closest to him.
If you’ve ever had a dream of what you could be, what you could give to your society, but found yourself bogged down in the ‘Real World’ of getting from A-B, of college or work or thinking about things tomorrow, Purity has a kind of object lesson to teach. None of us on the right side of sanity will be asked to pay the kind of price that Davros and Calcula pay here, but the transformative power of a journey to ‘find yourself’ – which is what Davros’ trip across the wastelands really is – to strip away the flotsam and jetsam and make you focus on what’s really important to you, is a message applicable to everyone with a dream of any kind of greatness. Davros emerges from Purity as a focused flame, ready to do whatever is necessary to achieve his goal of Kaled supremacy, and also, for his mind has begun to turn this way, Kaled survival through the grimness of the war. It’s his experiences on this mission that turn him from an armchair manager into a force with which the Kaled government and the Scientific Corps will genuinely have to reckon for the rest of his life.
I, Davros is a series of four episodes, showing the early life of Davros up to Genesis of the Daleks. Purity shows us Davros clearing away the humdrum from his life, and setting himself and his people on the beginnings of a path that will lead to the evolution of the Daleks. Each episode is only £5 on the Big Finish website, and each episode gives a previously unimagined insight into the psychology of one of Doctor Who’s greatest villains. Get them all today – you’ll thank me.
Tony Fyler lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the 70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By day, he runs an editing house, largely as an excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book. With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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