Doctor Who A-Z #02: The Daleks (1963-4)

In a parallel universe – the one where John Lumic creates the Cybermen, perhaps, or the one where we all wear eye-patches – the second Doctor Who serial was Anthony Coburn’s The Masters of Luxor. Script editor David Whitaker held it back for reworking, then cancelled it when the problems with Coburn’s script became unfixable. The biggest issue with The Masters of Luxor was its central theme of religion. Pivoting on a discussion about the ethics of creating life, The Masters of Luxor portrayed the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan as Christians, which created a problem for Whitaker’s preferred policy of shrouding their origins in mystery. Did aliens believe in Jesus? It’s not the kind of question Doctor Who was set up to answer.

Ironically the script that replaced it also doesn’t quite fit the ethos of the show, albeit in a way that was less obvious at the time. It’s not just the focus on “bug-eyed monsters”, which famously angered show co-creator Sydney Newman; even he acknowledged that the success of the story showed producer Verity Lambert had a better grip on what the public wanted than he did. Nobody is going to argue that making The Daleks instead of The Masters of Luxor wasn’t a good move. But the plot revolves around the Doctor and his companions goading a peaceful race, the Thals, into war. It’s essentially the same plot as The Dominators, one of the show’s all-time nadirs. While I don’t think The Daleks is as significant artistically as it is historically, it’s nowhere near as bad as The Dominators. So what is it that works better here?

The most obvious point is the villains. War, in The Dominators, is justified because the Dominators are evil and only want to conquer and enslave. The same could be said of the Daleks, but they also have the benefit of all the immediately iconic elements – Raymond Cusick’s unique design, the irresistibly imitable voices, the grisly back-story about nuclear mutation – that the Dominators lack. This is the story where Ian famously sums up their ethos as “a dislike for the unlike”, but compared to later Dalek stories – like Resolution, where the Doctor can only manage a conversation with one by building a machine that jams its gun – they do an awful lot of shooting to wound and taking prisoners here. They do something genuinely evil towards the end, but for much of the story their design and manner is doing a lot of work to mark them out as monsters.

By contrast the Thals are good because they are, as Susan notes when she first sees one, “perfect”, and a very Aryan form of perfection at that – a friend described them as looking like “Nazi lifeguards”. This muddles the script’s intended critique of fascism, although I do like the idea that the ‘weak’, pacifistic Thals are both more beautiful and more suited to surviving in Skaro’s nuclear wastelands than the supposed master race. Given the brief to make the Daleks truly alien aliens, the production team do at least go all out. The episode one cliffhanger has a fabulously long build-up to our first sight of that sucker arm, with Barbara exploring a city whose doors correspond to no Earthly shape, and where the air is heavy with grating, metallic throbbing noises. It’s still legitimately scary even though everyone knows what’s coming.

The Daleks is seven episodes long, and in stretching itself out to this length it explains why so many of Nation’s later scripts had a picaresque structure. At the start of episode two and the end of episode four, the TARDIS crew are all ready to leave when some mechanical fault is contrived to keep them on Skaro. It’s a bit tiring. As the serial goes on, though, we begin to see why the Daleks remain the Doctor’s key enemy, and why each new Doctor seems to have to face off with them as soon as possible. Put simply, they bring something out of the Doctor.

The Doctor, at the start of The Daleks, is much as he was in the preceding story, which is to say he’s prickly, irresponsible and deceitful. Towards the end of the serial, the Daleks become concerned that the radiation levels on Skaro are too low for them to survive, and they unhesitatingly decide to launch a nuclear warhead against the Thals. They raise their sucker arms in a Nazi-like salute and chant about the glory of their mass extermination. Suddenly something comes out of the Doctor. He decries the killing as senseless, as evil. He becomes as morally absolute as his enemies, but in an admirable way. Finally – and I’m invoking the idea from The Day of the Doctor here, that this is a title you earn rather than a name – he turns into the Doctor.

Here, then, is why the Daleks are essential to the show in a way that the cavemen of the preceding story and the robots of Luxor never could be. Notable, too, that the Doctor’s abhorrence of the Daleks manifests itself in some recognisably Doctorish resistance. For all the militarisation of the Thals sits oddly with the show’s later ethics, at least it isn’t the Doctor who does this: it’s Ian, a character specifically designed to handle the action-hero business Hartnell was too old for. The Doctor, by contrast, takes an infectious, child-like glee in smashing up the Daleks’ machinery to see what happens. There is a lot in The Daleks that the show would abandon as it matured, and it’s a shame that Carole Ann Ford’s initially sparky, adventurous performance as Susan ends up being wasted as Nation writes her as a scared child. But something is mutating here, something that would leave the show more suited for survival in the unforgiving TV jungle.

Next: Inside the Spaceship (1964)

Graham’s Archive – The Daleks

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