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Well, that was a soggy disappointment.
Look, I love a weird sci-fi concept. Libraries made of water? Sure. Sentient puddles with data storage capabilities? Why not. But The Genocide Machine is what happens when someone has one kinda-interesting idea, surrounds it with every dull base-under-siege trope from the 80s, chucks in the Daleks like salt in bland soup, and hopes you won’t notice there’s absolutely nothing of nutritional value here.
The premise—such as it is—is that the Doctor and Ace arrive on Kar-Charrat, home to the galaxy’s biggest library. Except this isn’t your local archive with dusty scrolls and whispered shame, oh no, this one stores data in a Wetworks tank, a glorified kiddie pool full of hyper-advanced memory water. Somewhere, a science consultant is sobbing.
Now, in comes the grand reveal: the Daleks are here. They want the data. They want to download All Of Knowledge™ to evolve beyond their squiddy little brains. Sure. Okay. Never mind that this completely torpedoes the usual “Daleks = racial purity über alles” angle. I guess they’ve decided to start doing self-help audiobooks now. Growth mindset for genocidal tanks.
Their plan involves building a robot Ace, which sounds juicy on paper, but in execution it’s just another “how do you do, fellow humans” moment. There’s no emotional punch, no eerie uncanny valley tension—just a half-hearted twist that flops into the story like wet toast.
Speaking of flops, we need to talk about Prink. He’s a character mentioned dozens of times but never actually speaks. It feels like a joke, but the story isn’t funny enough to sell it. It’s like the script is doing some meta-audio experimentation but forgot to include actual charm or payoff. In audio, a mute character is either a brilliant gimmick or a straight-up mistake. Guess which one we got.
The climax? Oh, now we’re getting somewhere… sort of. Turns out the water isn’t just metaphorical—nope, it’s people. Sentient aquatic life forms, enslaved by the library to store information. I want to say this could be a commentary on exploitation in academic systems, imperialism through knowledge, you know—meaty themes. But no. The execution is so undercooked it’s basically damp. You want commentary, you’ll have to BYO.
And as for keeping me awake during a 4am shift? Nah. This thing is ambient noise with a peppering of Nicholas Briggs shouting “EXTERMINATE” at inopportune moments.
Even McCoy and Aldred can’t save this one. They’re trying. There are flashes—brief glimmers—of that tricksy little chessmaster Doctor and his bat-wielding chaos sidekick. But the script gives them nothing to do. This whole thing feels like a first draft of a story that got greenlit because someone remembered the Daleks existed.
Final Verdict:
Wet, forgettable, and not even charming in its failure. I’ve heard better filler episodes from the radio static between stations.
0.5 out of 5 soggy data droplets.