Doctor Who A-Z #10: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964)

For all that Doctor Who is famously a show that changes continually, its core tone, themes and concepts are remarkably durable. The show’s bank of ideas are often added to but rarely subtracted from: whereas there are many things in Ncuti Gatwa’s first season that wouldn’t happen in a Patrick Troughton story, Patrick Troughton’s last season is full of stories whose core ideas would fit into modern Who perfectly neatly. It’s the William Hartnell years that are the experimental ones, the era when the widest variety of approaches were tried and sometimes abandoned. As a result, certain stories – most obviously the pure historicals – are hard to reconcile with what the show later became, and persuading people to appreciate them on their own merits can require a bit of special pleading. Here, though, is a story that has been consistently highly regarded ever since it originally aired, which nevertheless rests on a concept the series spent the next ten years gradually phasing out.

Claiming that The Dalek Invasion of Earth is out of step with later Doctor Who sounds, on the face of it, insupportable. This is the first Doctor Who story to visualise an alien invasion of our planet, a concept the show would famously return to once or twice. It’s also the first story to include a returning villain, and one of the most striking things about rewatching it is recognising how it immediately grasps the potential of that idea. Since we’ve seen the Doctor beat the Daleks before, writer Terry Nation knows these Daleks have to be more threatening, more mobile and more aggressive than the desperate band of survivors we saw on Skaro last year. This is also the first story where a member of the TARDIS crew leaves, and the fact that this happens in a Dalek story forges a link between recurring monsters and changes to the Doctor Who status quo that continues to this day. If you want a monster with enough gravitas to force a departure, a regeneration or a death, a monster who the Doctor has priors with is a good choice.

Indeed, one of the main ways in which The Dalek Invasion of Earth feels ahead of its time, rather than of its time, is that it takes care to give Susan the right send-off. Credit here probably goes to script editor David Whitaker, who heavily rewrote Susan’s scenes, but whoever did it it’s light years ahead of the leaving scenes we’ll be getting over the next few years for companions like Dodo, Ben and Polly. If those had been cut back any more they’d qualify as subliminal images, but Whitaker hits the brakes to allow for some scenes showing Susan’s growing connection with the human freedom fighter David Campbell, setting up the genuinely moving ending. It would be nice to think that The Invasion of Time could have been rewritten along these lines, if only to explain what in god’s name Leela saw in Andred.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and this story isn’t one to get ahead of itself. Indeed, one of The Dalek Invasion of Earth‘s key strengths is that it moves at its own pace, devoting the whole of episode one to the Doctor and his friends exploring the ruins of London before we see our first Dalek. This is a narrative tic that would become self-parodic in future stories – what beasts, I wonder, could possibly lurk on the Planet of the Daleks? – but  here it gives its villains extra weight, allowing us to see exactly how much carnage the Daleks are capable of before they enter the narrative. There is time for entertaining detours, like the Pynchon-style alligators in the sewers who threaten Susan, or the Slyther, one of those rare Doctor Who monsters that looks better in motion than it does in stills, as director Richard Martin effectively cuts around the rather ungainly prop. (I have a sneaking fondness for Martin’s direction, and it’s probably the exact reason why most fans don’t rate him: he is the most likely to go for a big, weird visual swing, which sometimes backfires completely but is still refreshing in these days when television directors are seemingly discouraged from making any choices, good or bad)

Most of all, the steady-as-she-goes pace allows us to appreciate the extraordinary tragic villainy of the Women in the Woods, two near-feral human survivors who sell out Barbara and her friend Jenny to the Daleks in exchange for food. As the show started telling these stories of resistance and rebellion more regularly, the guest characters would occasionally feel like they were being written to a template, and this kind of genuine grappling with the moral ambiguities of invasion and resistance would become less common. It is the first of many moments to come where you realise that 1960s and 70s Who is written by people who can remember World War II first-hand. This is less of a Dalek invasion of Earth than it is a Dalek occupation of Earth; it reminds you that It Happened Here, Andrew Mollo and Kevin Brownlow’s controversial film about a parallel Nazi-occupied Britain, was made in the same year that The Dalek Invasion of Earth was broadcast.

Nation is establishing some good, durable foundations for Doctor Who‘s future here, with its ongoing penchant for alien invasions of the viewer’s own world. Except – and this is the bit that is really out of step with the show’s future – this isn’t our world. The serial doesn’t trumpet its far-future setting: its subsequent feature film adaptation, Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., would foreground that futurism from the title down. Yet this still isn’t our world. 22nd century Earth certainly looks like 1960s Earth, enough to give the viewer a shudder when Daleks roll over familiar bridges, or spray their alien language on national monuments. But it’s not – this is the future Earth has to look forward to.

And this is the element of the story which is incompatible with the show to come. Over the course of the 1960s and early ’70s, Doctor Who‘s future-Earth settings would creep closer and closer to the present day before being phased out entirely, largely because of an uncomfortable bleakness at their heart. The show hasn’t started routinely making stories set on a recognisable present-day Earth yet; the preceding story is set on present-day Earth, but not a recognisable one, and it won’t be until the end of the next season that we get something located visibly here and now. Once present-day Earth stories became a regular part of the show’s make-up, someone seems to have realised that hopping forward to a dystopian future Earth makes any effort to save the world as it is now into a pyrrhic victory. The middle of the Troughton era, with its coming ice ages and globe-straddling tycoons, stands as the series’ last sustained effort to map out a future history of Earth. We see the Human Empire among the stars, and we see alternative, avertable futures in episodes like The Mysterious Planet, Orphan 55 and 73 Yards, but not much more. Even the UNIT stories, which are nominally set in the future, don’t do much with this other than the odd joke about female Prime Ministers and third BBC channels. (Thanks to BBC Three’s relaunch as a terrestrial channel in early 2022, we can therefore assume that all of the contemporary stories from the end of Season Eight to the start of Season Thirteen are set during the forty-nine days of Liz Truss’s premiership)

Recasting the human future as a wide-open affair helped turn Doctor Who into an optimistic show. When Lewis Marks, the writer of the previous story, returned to the show after a long hiatus he grasped this instinctively, and turned in a script whose ending can be read as erasing this one from the show’s continuity. (The precise dates and circumstances of the two Dalek invasions of Earth don’t quite match, but that can be explained by the human resistance fighters in both this and Day of the Daleks working from oral histories) After this, the show would still make some very dark stories, but they came with an inbuilt redemptive quality. The Dalek Invasion of Earth, by contrast, has a future that isn’t guaranteed and a Doctor who is still excitingly prickly and dangerous even as the Daleks, once again, force him into a hero’s role. The fact that the darkness is so unforced is, perversely, part of the innocence of the Hartnell era – a time when the show could do anything, and would sometimes do it as brilliantly as this.

Next: The Rescue (1965)

Graham’s Archive – The Dalek Invasion of Earth

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