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I’ll be honest, all four of the Dalek Empire stories are hard to sit through, and this one’s just painful to think about.
It’s a heap of wasted potential, Richards isn’t a writer short of good ideas, just one with the inability to realise a single one of them.
Messy, poorly conveyed and constantly going in circles, it’s a dull barrage of technobabble with unusually fun moments peppered throughout that show glimpses of a better story but are quickly sidelined for more boring Dalek material.
And don’t even think it’s going to actually do something interesting with the Daleks.
4/10
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It’s snooze o’clock here in the MR… many MR Dalek stories are not that great and this is not an exception. It’s just completely unmemorable and dull, I think
I was incredibly tired and ill whilst listening to this and I can’t tell whether THAT’s why this story sucks or whether it somehow improved it. Regardless, this story kinda sucks imo.
This story is objectively not good. But I really had fun listening to this for some reason. Maybe it’s the sheer stupidity of the plot but it made a really fun “turn your brain off” listen and I can probably make up some trite about the irony of Shakespeare and a bad story and all that.
It reminds me of The Chase in that, rather than come up with an interesting story to do with the Daleks, we just get the ‘gimmick’ of them doing something out of character. In The Chase, we had them appear in a variety of unlikely situations with the umbrella premise of them chasing the Doctor. Here, we have them spouting Shakespeare and getting caught in some kind of time loop. It’s especially disappointing, as this was part of a series of audios featuring the Eighth Doctor that - up to this point - had been very good. You can’t win 'em all.
Going to have to go with the crowd on this one. It’s a bit dull, and a bit “been there, done that”. Last time I listened to this one I just found myself bored. Hopefully today’s rematch between the Eighth Doctor, Charley and the Daleks fares better!
I think I’m starting to go crazy. Last week was great and this week is bad? Have my opinions fallen into some vortex time displacement or something?
With this Steven Moffat title I was expecting a load of shooting and screaming and larger than life cosmic fights that I won’t be able to comprehend. Instead, it’s a very small scale story, taking place in mostly one location. It shows how from such small things as experimenting with some mirrors can then result in like the end of the universe and stuff. That’s really fun imo.
The story is very intricate and i had to rewind several times. Couldn’t miss a moment or I’d had completely lost the plot. But it knows very well what it wants to do and where it’s going. No solutions coming out of nowhere. Just a very solid, small scale time travel story. 8/10 (reading these other comments i feel like i sound insane)
I enjoyed this one. It didn’t have that much tension, yes, but I was pretty tired while listening, so it was just right for me. Daleks and Shakespeare works better together than I would have expected.
Finally done with that one.
The sequence with the Daleks going on and on and on in the resolution of the problem was so drawn out that I am not quite sure what actually was going on in the end.
And was there actually a good reason for all the stuff with Shakespeare? Seemed a bit redundant…
I’ll upgrade from “a bit dull” to “decidedly boring”.
1/5 is almost more than it deserves…
I’m surprised this one is so controversial. It’s a solid 7/10 for me. The Shakespeare stuff was silly but I didn’t feel like the gimmick burdened the story. It did help make this Dalek story feel distinct even if it feels like a huge step down from the rest of the Eighth Doctor audios that immediately predate The Time of the Daleks. It doesn’t help that the whole idea of Daleks being false allies to a third party is kind of overdone at this point, but at least this is an early example of that story trend in action so I don’t hold that against it much.
This one is pretty disappointing for me, having McGann facing against the Daleks in Audios for the first time leaves a lot to be desired. There are many great Ideas thrown in here, sadly some of them were done so much better in other Stories, such as “Evil”. There are some fun bits here with the Daleks, but it’s just quite unmemorable and quite dull.
is almost more than it deserves…