Big Finish Productions releases the 201st Doctor Who audio drama in its main monthly range, starring Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford. 
The Doctor and Melanie arrive in London, 1987, where the Doctor warns Mel that revealing information about Earth’s future should be avoided. However, it would seem that someone else has already been tampering with time: an enormous building shaped like a Dalek has been built in central London, as the headquarters of a computer company called Zenos Corporation. Zenos is behind a hugely successful multi-player networked computer game of a kind that’s over a decade ahead of its time. The Doctor decides to pose as a stockbroker to find out more about Zenos, while Mel is able to infiltrate the company as a new employee. She attends a gathering for press and public figures, where Daleks offer guests cocktails and company founder Zenos himself reveals that the Daleks are “foreign investors” of an otherworldly kind, here to invest not in Earth, but in Great Britain. Mel finds herself and several other guests whisked away to Skaro as a demonstration of the Daleks’ advanced technology, while the Doctor begins trying to sabotage their operations on Earth. This brings the time travelers to the attention of an uprising among humanoids who have been enslaved by the Daleks, using remote drone ships controlled by players of Zenos’ computer game.
written by Jonathan Morris
directed by Ken Bentley
music by Wilfredo AcostaCast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Bonnie Langford (Melanie Bush), Kirsty Besterman (Serena Paget), Angus Wright (Alek Zenos), Mary Conlon (Celia Dunthorpe), Robbie Stevens (Niles Bunbury/Frank Lewis), Ashley Zhangazha (Brinsley Heaton), Lizzie Roper (Shari), Dominic Thornburn (Afrid), Nicholas Briggs (Daleks).
Notes: The Doctor references quislings while lecturing Zenos, who is only the latest Dalek mouthpiece on whom the Doctor has bestowed that description (see Day Of The Daleks, 1972). The word comes from the name of an infamous World War II Nazi collaborator, and was “genericized” into a noun referring to any traitor by numerous writers during wartime, including one J.R.R. Tolkien.
It’s a favorite pastime of science fiction to attribute the creation of the internet to some fictional character or event (anything other than the dull but historically accurate combination of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency, a.k.a. ARPA, and major universities). Here, the Dalek technology used to network computers for the purpose of playing the Daleks’ Warfleet game is left behind to form the basis for an international network (the entire contents of which will be handily downloaded by another Dalek decades into the future; see Dalek, 2005, and marvel at the Dalek’s ability to wade through all those cat videos to find strategically useful data).
Timeline: after Delta And The Bannermen and before Dragonfire
Review: In the 21st century, a brief burst of attention was refocused on the 1988 story The Happiness Patrol, after quotes from the production team and Sylvester McCoy himself indicated that the story in question was a barely-veiled parody/criticism of the Thatcher regime. If that’s the case, then We Are The Daleks is a gloves-off, come-out-swinging condemnation of Britain under Thatcher (though, as an American listener, I found plenty that was uncomfortably applicable to my own country in the here and now). When one of the Daleks’ humanoid collaborators mentions enemies of Dalek “progress”, a politician character who might as well be standing in for the Thatcherite mindset throughout the story replies, “Yes, we have those too. They’re called socialists.” The same character later advocates breaking up labor unions and forcing people to work. We Are The Daleks isn’t subtle, Swiftian political satire – it comes right out swinging. As the Doctor says to this character later, no doubt while slapping his own forehead, “You already are a Dalek.”
Hence the title of the story. Why does the world need to worry about Daleks when such thoughts are already in the heads of human beings?
LogBook entry and review by Earl Green