When the Doctor and his companions stumble into a petrified jungle on a distant planet, they find themselves at the mercy of a new and chilling breed of science-fiction villain: the Daleks. The 2023 colourised recut injects fresh life into the original 1963 serial, draping Skaro in vivid hues and nostalgic menace. It’s a time capsule that’s been carefully polished rather than tampered with — and it shines brighter than ever.
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Trying to review Doctor Who as a single, cohesive entity is a bit like trying to explain time travel to a goldfish. It’s vast, contradictory, charmingly eccentric, and completely untameable. Born in the monochrome corridors of 1963 BBC ingenuity, Doctor Who began as an educational sci-fi serial meant to teach kids about history through adventure. What it became, quite accidentally, was the single most elastic storytelling concept television has ever seen: a shape-shifting alien in a blue box that can take you anywhere in time and space. That’s not a premise — that’s an infinite playground.
From its very first story, “An Unearthly Child,” the series captured a strange alchemy — the marriage of the familiar and the fantastic. The early years were filmed on sets so flimsy you half-expected them to blow over if someone sneezed too hard, but what it lacked in polish it made up for in imagination. The black-and-white Daleks rolling across the small screen were as terrifying as they were absurd, and by the mid-sixties, Dalekmania had seized Britain. Kids screamed, parents rolled their eyes, and suddenly these sink-plunger terrors were as big as The Beatles. There’s something delightfully British about that — a national obsession born from ply-wood and echo chambers.
As the show regenerated through the ’60s and ’70s, its lead actors became almost mythic figures in their own right. Patrick Troughton brought warmth and mischief; Jon Pertwee injected suave Venusian action-hero energy (and a surprising number of velvet capes); but it was Tom Baker, with his wild curls, alien grin, and absurdly long scarf, who cemented Doctor Who in cultural immortality. Baker’s era was the show’s crescendo — gothic, experimental, and steeped in weird philosophical dread. Stories like “Genesis of the Daleks” and “Pyramids of Mars” felt like televised mythology, each one stretching the limits of what BBC studios could pull off on a tiny budget and a prayer.
The beauty of Doctor Who’s classic era lies in its contradictions. It was both camp and profound, silly and smart. One week you’d have cardboard robots invading a quarry; the next, a meditation on morality, death, or free will hidden inside a monster-of-the-week story. It had the audacity to change its lead actor every few years — and somehow, that became its greatest trick. Regeneration wasn’t just clever plotting; it was reinvention baked into the DNA.
Of course, even time travel can’t escape the grip of reality. By the early 1980s, the BBC’s purse strings had tightened, unions were striking, and the grand old show was beginning to look its age. Doctor Who soldiered on valiantly, juggling shrinking budgets with boundless ambition. The effects may have faltered, but the spirit endured. Colin Baker’s controversial tenure gave way to Sylvester McCoy’s impish, mysterious Seventh Doctor — my personal favourite — who played the part with equal parts whimsy and danger. His era flirted with darkness and depth the show had never dared before, hinting at vast secrets in the Doctor’s past and giving the Time Lord an edge of moral ambiguity that felt way ahead of its time.
Then came 1989. The BBC pulled the plug. No big finale, no grand farewell — just an episode, “Survival,” where the Doctor and Ace walked off into the sunset with the line, “There are worlds out there…” And for sixteen years, that’s where they stayed, while the fans, the books, the audios, and the imagination of Doctor Who’s community kept the TARDIS spinning in its own way.
Looking back, the classic Doctor Who run is a triumph of creative endurance. It’s scrappy, it’s weird, it’s occasionally nonsensical — but it’s also one of the most influential works of science fiction ever broadcast. Without it, there’d be no Star Trek revival, no Red Dwarf, no oncoming storm… Every episode, no matter how small, contributed to a mythology that’s still expanding today.
The genius of the show isn’t in its effects or even its monsters (though the Daleks still rule supreme in that department). It’s in its idea — that curiosity, intelligence, and courage can triumph over brute force and fear. And that’s why, sixty years on, that old police box still means something. It’s hope. It’s adventure. It’s television magic. There’s still an awful lot of running left to do!
Big Finish’s early Doctor Who output is sometimes looked back on as experimental, a company finding its footing, but The Genocide Machine is where they take a confident step into the Dalek-infested waters and come up with something cracklingly good. It’s one of those releases that feels not just like a continuation of televised Who, but an expansion of it – broadening the canvas, tightening the atmosphere, and giving the Doctor’s most infamous enemies more room to breathe (and exterminate).
Mike Tucker knows his Daleks. This isn’t a lazy “wheel them out, shout EXTERMINATE, job done” affair. Instead, he leans into their social order, the hierarchy of drones, commanders, and that looming Special Weapons Dalek, reminding us that the pepperpots are as much a society as they are a war machine. There’s always been something chilling about how the Daleks organise themselves – obedient soldiers funnelling into rank and file beneath shrieking leaders – and here that sense of disciplined fanaticism is sharpened into a scalpel. The Daleks don’t just want to win; they want to build, conquer, and rewrite reality in their image.
The Seventh Doctor is at his most scheming here, the chess master with shadows behind his smile. McCoy relishes stories like this because they allow him to sound both curious and calculating, playing off the Daleks’ single-minded brutality with his own layered subtlety. Sophie Aldred’s Ace, ever the heart of this TARDIS pairing, grounds the chaos with her brash humanity. She’s the antidote to the Daleks’ monotone logic, quick to call things out and quicker to act. Together, the dynamic is still electric decades on.
And then there’s the setting. Ah, Doctor Who and jungle planets – always a winning formula. There’s something about alien greenery that just begs for mysteries to lurk behind every vine. Tucker uses this to its fullest, giving us that sense of a hostile, living environment where both Daleks and humans are out of their element. It calls to mind the lush, paranoid atmosphere of The Dalek Factor from Telos’ novella line, with its similarly treacherous landscapes and lurking Dalek menace. Both settings harness the primal unease of a world where the foliage itself feels complicit, hiding threats in every shadow. Here, Big Finish takes that idea and runs with it, delivering audio that makes you hear the undergrowth crackling under Dalek treads and the insects buzzing over secrets best left undiscovered.
Where the story truly punches above its weight, though, is in its concept of the Library of Kar-Charrat – an archive containing millions upon millions of entries, knowledge from across the galaxy, stored in pristine seclusion (The Genocide Machine had it first folks!!!). It’s a marvel of imagination and, importantly, a device that feels both natural to the Who universe and a precursor to ideas later seen on television. Silence in the Library would become one of the Tenth Doctor’s most celebrated outings years later, but you can trace a conceptual ancestry back here. Big Finish was seeding big ideas early, showing they weren’t just recycling old monsters but building out the mythos in bold strokes.
SPOILER: The Daleks’ attempt to absorb this vast knowledge bank is quintessentially them – not content with conquering through firepower, they want to control the very fabric of information. It’s an echo of the way fascist regimes manipulate knowledge, rewrite history, and weaponise culture. In the hands of Daleks, knowledge becomes not just power but annihilation.
The appearance of the Special Weapons Dalek is the cherry on the cake. Unlike the beast wheeled out in Remembrance of the Daleks with its grotesque cannon, this iteration carries a more traditional silhouette – a claw arm and standard gunstick, as though someone tried to retrofit the horror into something deceptively ordinary. On audio, that makes it doubly unsettling. You hear it described and realise this is not the lumbering heavy weapon of old but a hybridised abomination, one foot in the ranks of the drones and one firmly in nightmare territory. Its presence rumbles across the soundscape, a constant reminder that the Daleks are never content with a single form of terror; they evolve their monstrosities with clinical precision.
Speaking of which, the soundscape is exquisite. This is one of those stories where closing your eyes doesn’t mean losing anything; it means gaining it. The jungle rustles, the library hums, the Daleks’ metallic shrieks reverberate with an oppressive clarity. You can tell that Big Finish, even in its earlier days, was aiming for cinematic immersion. If this were a TV serial, it might have been constrained by budget and rubber foliage. In audio, it becomes limitless.
What makes The Genocide Machine stick in the mind isn’t just its thrills, though – it’s the way it continues the tradition of using the Daleks as mirrors for humanity’s worst impulses. Their rigid hierarchy, their obsession with purity, their unrelenting drive to consume and destroy… it’s monstrous, yes, but it’s also uncomfortably familiar. The best Dalek stories don’t just scare you with the idea of extermination beams; they scare you with the idea that this mindset is not entirely alien.
SPOILER: By the time the Doctor pulls his final trick and the Daleks are sent packing, there’s no sense of an easy win. The cost of the story lingers, the weight of all that knowledge nearly perverted by Dalek logic reminding us how fragile civilisation can be. The Seventh Doctor thrives in that ambiguity – victories that taste bitter, triumphs with shadows at their edges.
Looking back now, The Genocide Machine feels like a template for what Big Finish could do at their very best: respect the legacy, expand the canvas, and tell stories that couldn’t quite exist in another medium. It’s a cracking Dalek yarn, yes, but it’s also a showcase of imagination – the sort of release that proves why Big Finish became such a cornerstone of Doctor Who’s survival and revival.
An 8/10 rating feels spot on for The Genocide Machine– it’s a story that delivers atmosphere, spectacle, and depth in equal measure, with only a couple of pacing hiccups stopping it from perfection. But even with those, it remains a high point of early Big Finish, a Dalek tale that lingers long after the exterminations have faded into jungle echoes.