It’s time to listen to and discuss The Apocalypse Element:
Buy it online using the link above, or listen for free - you’ll find links where to listen free on the story page!
Once you’ve listened, talk about it below! Even if you listened to it before and just want to discuss it - dive right in! Just please use spoiler tags where appropriate.
Everyone who participates will get a coveted Audio Club badge!
Also, is this the one where there’s a bit in it which is there to basically explain why a human eye (Chang Lee’s) opens the Eye of Harmony in the TV Movie - something to do with Evelyn’s eye and the door locks around the Capitol?
Listening to this story has made me realise that Big Finish struggled to make Dalek stories good in their early days. They want to make the stories big and bombastic, but the audio format mostly makes them a bit confusing. This one suffers from some of the same problems that The Genocide Machine had.
This marks the return of Lalla Ward as Romana, and I love her very powerful and straightforward presence here. She works surprisingly well with Colin. The rest of the cast is lost in the mix, though (Vansell is boring and the President is forgettable), and Maggie Stables takes the backseat for once (though she contributes with humour and a sympathetic presence).
There’s a season finale atmosphere here, as everything is explosive and intense (I like the idea of the gravity well, as well as the very effective cliffhanger to Part 1; it’s one of the best in early BF). The sound design can get a bit overwhelming during action scenes, though, which makes it hard to follow occasionally. The individual parts are over 30 minutes, so I zoned out a bit towards the end and couldn’t retain my full focus; it’s as if they tried to cram a bit too much into the story. This is a bit too long, but it sets up further developments nicely at the end.
I recently said that being boring is the worst crime for a Doctor Who story… This isn’t that, but it makes what surely must be the second most egregious crime: having two Time Lord making “Contact” without using the proper sound effect!!!
Joke aside, you have Sixie, Evelyn and Lalla Ward’s Romana - to ruin that you would really have to cock up your script. Granted it is a bit of a mess as most Daleks vs Time Lords stories tend to devolve into. Still it is fun and apparently it takes little more than a high Time Lord collar and the story taking place on Gallifreys to make me happy
Lalla Ward and Colin Baker are so tremendously great together, even if they were in different incarnations at the time you can easily believe that these two bumbled around the universe on a quest for the Key to Time.
The story is rather intense and as @MrColdStream says it has the feel of an explosive finale. Too much stuff has been crammed into this four-parter, nowadays it would probably be an entire box-set worth of backstory, world-building and action. Maybe not the strongest entry in the Main Range but highly enjoyable still
Oh hey its the earliest Big Finish I’ve listened to I think, that I only listened to because I went down a wiki rabbit hole checking the way to capitalise “Time Lord” for a fanfic.
I quite like it, bold to have the Daleks win, and its wild to me how neatly this fits as an event leading up to the time war given it was released 5 years before New Who started. I also enjoy how the Dalek victory partially comes about because of the CIA shooting themselves in the foot
The wiki has them. (The Apocalypse Element (audio story) - Tardis Wiki) If you click on the picture in the article, it pulls up a big image which you can then just save to your device and upload from there.
Went looking for alternative covers for this one and there are a lot. But I just have to highlight this one which I believe Clayton Hickman created - it is quite simply gorgeous
I think that this was a fun adventure. I like Romana and Evelyn and I am liking the sixth doctor more and more (I think he has passed the fifth doctor in my overall rating). The story is a bit thin sometimes but the good characters make up for that.
I think this and Patient Zero are my two favorite Big Finish Dalek stories. I’ve just finished Episode 1 and enjoy the political intrigue. This is the second of a loose three-story arc (The Sirens of Time, The Apocalypse Element and Neverland) that set the stage for the actual Gallifrey audio series. This story in particular and the Etra Prime Incident were if I’ve understood the wiki correctly, sited by RTD as early battles in the Time War.
About halfway through Part 3 now and this is every bit as fun as I remember. This is an excellent candidate for a professionally animated Big Finish story / big budget Doctor Who action movie. I’m definitely going to adding a bunch of quotes from this.
Yay Romana!! I’m not much of a Sixth Doctor listener but I really enjoyed him in this, and combining that with Romana being there makes it an enjoyable audio. Dalek stories aren’t my favourite perse but it’s nice to have a pre-Gallifrey range story involving them.
Finished this one this morning. And it’s every bit as good as I remember, still one of my favorites. One thing that occurred to me is that the effect of the element seems very similar to the Flux from Series 13. Six and Evelyn work so well together, and adding Romana into the mix just adds to the magic. Vansell is fine, but as far as CIA Coordinators go, I prefer Narvin.
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