Gareth plays Kalendorf in the 4 part Big Finish CD story 'Empire of the Daleks' written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.
It's got a lot going for it, and has some particular resonances for B7 fans. It's raising serious questions:
Is collaboration with an enemy justified if it saves lives?
What price are you willing to pay to for a revolution to succeed?
This story does't duck the issues, it's facing them head on. The joy of the 4 CD format is that it's allowing the story to go at its own pace, rather than trying to pack everything into four half-hour episodes. It allows for slower pacing and for more time to examine the issues.
Having said that, there's also plenty of action, planetary invasions, and occasional humour (and one minor character who totally fails to work for me), but for me, the real appeal of this series (apart from Gareth) is the questions it is starting to raise. Sometimes fiction allows us to ask the questions that are almost too sensitive to raise in real life. Does anyone remember 'The Bridge over the River Kwai'? It's many many years since I saw it, but some related issues are surfacing here. Where does the line lie between survival and collaboration, between hope and despair? What's right, what's wrong?
If you've argued long and hard with regard to whether Blake was right to want to destroy Star One, then you may well find this CD interesting (but don't buy it on it's own, you need 'Invasion of the Daleks' as well as that starts the story and leads to the situation in the second CD), but I'd recommend it as a good story in any case.
It's ironically entertaining to hear Gareth's character being the one to express doubts about the price being paid for possible feeedom in The Human Factor.
Kalendorf (Gareth) is a bit of a dark horse and I have one or two personal speculations about what he may do in the final CD. Right now, he wants to defeat the daleks by any means possible, but his entire back history is one of hatred for the Earth Alliance (think of him as a man bred to warfare). What will he do if Earth Alliance finally defeats the daleks?
I enjoyed the first CD, but feel this is the better of the two.
Last changed on 17th of August 2001