The Genocide Machine
The Doctor and Ace arrive on the rainforest world of Kar-Charrat, where expatriate Time Lord Elgin has become the librarian of the largest storehouse of knowledge in the universe. Elgin eagerly shows the Doctor his latest innovation: a wetworks facility which has assimilated all of this knowledge into a single consciousness. The Doctor is alarmed by this development, as it means that any invading force could take over the facility - and with it, all of the knowledge of the universe. Elgin admits that some races have tried to do exactly that, including the Daleks, but none have been successful. But the Doctor and Ace quickly learn on a first-hand basis that the Daleks haven’t given up - they intend to take over the library of Kar-Charrat and use the wetworks facility to create a new, all-knowing, all-powerful breed of Daleks. But the Daleks don’t achieve the desired results, even when the Doctor is forced to help - and everyone soon discovers that an even greater power than the Daleks exists on Kar-Charrat…a power which, if unleashed to rid the world of the mechanical invaders, could also exact revenge on a Time Lord guilty of enslaving Kar-Charrat’s indigenous creatures.
written by Mike Tucker
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Nicholas BriggsCast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Sophie Aldred (Ace), Bruce Montague (Chief Librarian Elgin), Louise Falkner (Bev Tarrant), Alistair Lock (Dalek voice), Nicholas Briggs (Dalek voice), Daniel Gabriele (Rappell), Nicholas Briggs (Cataloguer Prink)
Timeline: between The Fearmonger and Dust Breeding
Review: I was somewhat unexcited by the first two of this story’s four episodes. I mean, Daleks waiting in the shadows, preparing for the Doctor’s arrival, kidnapping and duplicating his companion, and doing all sorts of nasty, convoluted things…hey, if I wanted to hear that, I would just listen to Resurrection Of The Daleks without watching the TV screen. But in part three things begin to get far more interesting, with the revelation of a consciousness whose body is, for lack of a better explanation, the most common and vital substance found on any world whose surface is covered by a rain forest. (more…)
Seven years after the massacre of his crewmates and the death of Blake on Gauda Prime, Kerr Avon comes out of seclusion to hear a proposition from an anti-Federation rebel named Lydon on a distant, unnamed world. Lydon has contacted Elise, Avon’s sometime-lover, to try to get Avon involved in an attempt to raid a shipment of Federation gold. Avon is skeptical of how Lydon hopes to help the resistance movement with what is essentially an interplanetary train robbery, and upon hearing Lydon’s plan he’s even more incredulous. But Avon still has an ace up his sleeve - he consults Orac to help him devise a more cohesive plan of action. Before any of those plans can be put into practice, Federation troops converge on Avon, Elise and the others, mounting a strike so precise that they must be getting information from Elise, her strong-arm cohort Kelso, or Lydon. Again, Avon comes to believe that the person he wanted to trust most has betrayed him, and he kills Elise. But this time, his actions and even his contingency plans have been anticipated by Federation psychostrategists, and Avon is captured and brought to Servalan, who has reclaimed her seat of power. But as part of her strategy to remain in power, Servalan has decided she needs enemies to keep the Federation distracted, and she intends for Avon to keep the resistance movement alive…even if it means that the man Avon is now will cease to exist.