Doctor Who: Why Nicholas Briggs writes the best Dalek stories
By James Aggas
As well as voicing the monsters for both the TV series and Big Finish, Nicholas Briggs has also written some of their best stories, too.
(Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.
Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)
While he’s yet to write for the TV series, Nicholas Briggs has not only written several of the best Dalek stories for Doctor Who on audio. He’s even given them a brilliant spin-off series, too.
If there’s one major disappointment I’ve had with Doctor Who, it’s we’ve never had a Dalek episode on television written by Nicholas Briggs. And that’s a huge shame. Because honestly, I think there are very few writers out there who know how to write a Dalek story as brilliantly as Briggs does.
While many fans might know Nicholas Briggs best as the voice of the Daleks, that’s not his only involvement with them. He’s also written stories for them, too. These include several audios, plus even a novel with the Eleventh Doctor. And many of them have been absolutely fantastic.
But what makes him such a great writer for them? It isn’t just the fact that he voices for them on a regular basis. That might be a part of it, especially as he’s been voicing them on television for nearly one and a half decades, and even longer with Big Finish. So it probably helps that, since he voices for them so often, he’d want to give the monsters he’s playing strong material. But even if that is a factor, that would only be a tiny part of it.
Nicholas Briggs showed exactly how well the Daleks can really work when he gave them their own spin-off series, Dalek Empire.
(Image credit: Dalek Empire/Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.
Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)
Simple threat, complex humanity
No, I think what sticks out the most is that Nicholas Briggs really loves the Daleks. He’s a big fan of the pepper pots, and he knows what makes them work best. He knows what made the original stories work, especially in the Sixties.
And he knows how to make the Daleks work. For some writers, the Daleks can easily come across as too basic. They’re traditionally seen as the most evil creatures in the universe, and it can be seen as a challenge to add depth to such a race.
The trick with Briggs’s stories is that he generally doesn’t even try to add some depth to them. Oh, he makes them clever and sly, when they need to be. But generally, he sticks to making them ruthless beings who want to conquer and destroy everything. How do you make a good story out of that? Simple: you focus on the human characters trying to stop them.
Dalek Empire, Briggs’s own Dalek spin-off, is an absolutely perfect example of this. So many of the human characters are explored across the entire series. Through them, we experience fear, anger, suffering, desperation, heroism, cowardice and even love. The Daleks aren’t given as much depth, but then again, they’re not meant to be too complicated. Their function in the story is to be ruthless and unstoppable. The perfect threat to face against.
There isn’t a single Dalek episode as dark or grim as the Eighth Doctor story To The Death. Is this the kind of Dalek story that we need in the TV series?
(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.
Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)
The darkest Dalek stories?
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It’s not just in their own series that Briggs has explored this with, either. Two of the best Eighth Doctor stories, Lucie Miller/To The Death and Dark Eyes, have the Daleks at their most ruthless and most relentless. They’re a constant threat that push our heroes to the very brink, and possibly beyond. Along the way, people get killed in the process, and we see the effects those deaths have on our characters. Especially on the Doctor.
And that’s what makes Briggs so good at writing the Daleks. By making them such a terrible threat to humanity – one that can’t be reasoned with or bargained with – and by focusing on humanity’s reaction to that, we get some really excellent drama.
This is why I really want to see Nicholas Briggs write a Dalek episode. He could throw the characters right into the middle of a Dalek war-zone and give an episode packed with not just action, but also drama that developed naturally from the story, rather than separately such as in Resolution. If he did write for the New Series, and if Chris Chibnall let Briggs write the episode his way, I think Nicholas Briggs could give us the best Dalek story we’ve had in years.
Next. Review: Was Resolution a strong return for the Daleks?. dark
What do you think? Should Briggs make the jump from audio to television and write a solid Dalek story? Do you think he’s the best writer of the Daleks we’ve got right now? Let us know in the comments below.
