Doctor Who: The Dalek Generation

It was surely inevitable that, once Big Finish had managed to entice Tom Baker into working for them, that his first season would have to include a Dalek story in it somewhere. So here we are.

There isn't an awful lot to this story, which manages to feel shorter than its 60-minute length. The Doctor and Leela arrive in 2020s London just as the Daleks are about to launch a plan to destroy the Earth, largely for the sake of it. For the fans, the story does have Robomen in it, and they form quite a key part of the story. There's also some political commentary on energy shortages and pensioners freezing in their homes over winter, but it's pretty basic stuff.

The details of the Daleks' plan, once it becomes apparent, is completely bonkers - although, in all fairness, no more so than many of the things they've tried to do in the TV series. But the fact that they're Daleks is largely incidental; it's easy to see this working just as well as a Cyberman story, for instance. It really is just Doctor Who by numbers, and it's probably meant to be, but as I said in my review for the first story in this series, nostalgia will only take you so far.