There’s an awful lot ‘The Apocalypse Element’ has to do- on the one hand you have scheming Daleks beavering away on the next stage in their latest plan for universal domination, while on the other hand you have the whole Time Lord side of things to wrap up, with the Michael Wade President from ‘The Sirens of Time’ to be tidied away while the Big Finish range’s continuity is meshed with the situation as Virgin Books left it, with Romana returned from E-Space and installed as President. And the basic concept behind the story is equally compelling and awful- Time Lords v Daleks is the stuff of school exercise books and Letraset transfers, but somehow, somewhere, behind the ideas you have to have a story which is at least halfway equal to the billing. When the recent revival of Doctor Who decided to use a war between the Daleks and Time Lords as part of its backstory, it worked all the better because the details of the war leaked out bit by bit- and at the end of two years, the amount we’ve been told is still minimal, to the extent that we don’t know what started the war or the course it took, only that it ended with all bar a handful of the races involved being wiped out- but it’s more than enough for the dramatic and emotional needs of the ongoing story. So is this a case of it being more effective not to tell the story rather than to tell it?

The crucial thing by which ‘The Apocalypse Element’ stands or falls is its scale. It’s appropriately broad for its subject matter, beginning with the conference on Archetryx and a decent stab at creating a suitably diverse mix of characters, although on audio only it perhaps feels a little bit more Phantom Menace than it might otherwise have been with squeaky-voiced aliens and weird sound effects. Equally, the device of the Daleks using a galactic conference aimed at their destruction to bring all their rivals together in one place is suitably devious and worthy of a more cinematic approach to storytelling. After the attack on Archetryx, the action moves swiftly to Gallifrey as firstly the Daleks and then the Doctor’s party arrive, the Daleks again using a ruse to slip through the Time Lords’ defences at which point havoc ensues. While on the one hand it’s difficult not to feel that we’re missing something visually through the absence of pictures, on the other hand it’s surprising what a selection of Dalek gun and Gallifreyan staser effects can suggest, although it’s remarkably convenient for the Daleks that the particular Dalek with the eye-removing tool happened to be on duty that day. Once the device itself is set off, the multi-layered Dalek scheme is revealed in all its calculating shrewdness- effectively the Daleks have set up a win/win situation so they either emerge with control of multiple varieties of time technology and Gallifrey itself, or a virgin galaxy which they can use as a base of operations- and then there’s the Doctor’s speech in Part Four which brings home the sheer scale of the devastation which is about to happen.

The principals’ performances rise to the occasion- Lalla Ward steps back into Romana’s shoes with characteristic effortless grace, while Colin Baker and Maggie Stables have clearly gelled by this stage- not least in the above mentioned scene in Part Four, where both the Doctor and Evelyn learn to realise that each sees the situation from a different perspective. Evelyn’s line about giving squaddies the eye really brings home just how much of a welcome departure it is to have an intelligent middle-aged woman as a companion, and Maggie Stables is clearly at home in the role. The minor characters are less distinctive, although it’s probably one key to Vansell’s character that he should always be unobtrusive- Michael Wade’s President is pretty much a carbon copy of some of the crusty old Time Lords we’ve seen in the past, although he does get to step out of the shadows towards the end of the character’s time as he undertakes his fatally flawed diplomacy with the Daleks. Ultimately, however, the character was a throwaway one to tie ‘The Sirens of Time’ together, and became disposable with Romana’s return to Gallifrey, so his extermination tidies things up neatly and means that the Big Finish and Virgin ranges are somewhat less at odds with each other.

One final thought- looking at the timescales and publication dates, ‘The Apocalypse Element’ and ‘The Ancestor Cell’ must have been fermenting in Stephen Cole’s imagination at roughly the same time. It’s not difficult to trace a path from the Romana who presides over the rebuilding (and implied re-arming) of Gallifrey to the paranoid and war-beleaguered Gallifrey of the BBC novels leading up to ‘The Ancestor Cell’, and indeed beyond into an even more cataclysmic Dalek war. So while it stands perfectly well alone, neither is it difficult to see the events of ‘The Apocalypse Element’ as the beginning of the end of the Time Lords.