Doctor Who A-Z #36: The Evil of the Daleks (1967)

Episode one of The Evil of the Daleks sets up an entertaining and unique adventure. For the first time since the Hartnell years – maybe since The Ark? – we pick up directly from a cliffhanger at the end of the previous story as the Doctor and Jamie chase the purloined TARDIS. In trying to get it back, their first obstacle is Gatwick bureaucracy, which is both funny and in keeping with the series’ increasing investment in contemporary Earth. It’s a wise decision, particularly given that the new Doctor-companion team amusingly inverts the series’ established dynamic. Rather than the Doctor being a wanderer who is grounded by a present-day companion, it’s Jamie, the 18th-century soldier, who is the fish out of water on contemporary Earth. By contrast, Patrick Troughton’s mop-topped Doctor is charmingly at home sitting in a 1960s coffee bar listening to ‘Paperback Writer’. 

But something else is going on. There’s a bevy of mysterious incidental characters, all of whom seem to know more about this situation than the Doctor for once. And in episode two, the promise of a light comic mystery is overturned. This isn’t as much of a shock as I’m making it sound; the story does have the word “Daleks” in the title. But the rug-pull is about more than just pushing a recurring monster into the plot. It’s revealed that some of these characters – including Professor Maxtible, whose resemblance to Karl Marx might be seen as a subtle hint to his time period – are from Victorian England.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. These days it’s an anomalous Doctor Who series that doesn’t find a way to go back to the 19th century once or twice, but back in 1967 the series had never made this trip before. You can argue that the series’s aesthetic has always had a Victorian-Edwardian quality, from William Hartnell’s costume to everything in The Celestial Toymaker, but this is the first time the connection has been made directly. And it happens at an unusual time. A huge part of the reason why the Daleks caused a sensation in their first appearance was that they were so searingly new; nothing like this had been seen on British television before, and their post-nuclear, neo-fascist ideology was perfectly keyed into early ’60s anxieties.

By the time Whitaker took over from Terry Nation as the series’ Dalek scribe, they had become more familiar. To Nation, who was trying to interest American broadcasters in a Dalek series, that familiarity was a selling point, but Whitaker knew it was a problem for Doctor Who, and both of his Dalek stories take pains to shake that up. The Daleks who guard Victoria Waterfield’s prison cell here aren’t as courteous as the ones at the start of The Power of the Daleks, but the essential unease remains the same: if a Dalek isn’t killing a human straight away, it must be because they have something really nasty in store for them later. And having a Dalek gliding through the corridors of a Victorian mansion, too, is disquieting – in this case, disquieting in a way that changed science fiction forever.

When Fortean Times did a feature on steampunk in January 2013, there was some correspondence on the letters page about what the first steampunk story was. Obviously the genre has its roots in the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but they weren’t writing retro science fiction, they were writing contemporary science fiction. The FT correspondents deduced that the first work that revived the tropes of Victorian science fiction without updating them in the way that – say – Byron Haskin or Steven Spielberg did in their adaptations of War of the Worlds is, unbelievably, this Doctor Who story. For these seven weeks, Doctor Who is not simply set in the Victorian era, it is a pastiche of Victorian science fiction, complete with insane, wilfully dated scientific concepts closer to Mary Shelley than the kind of cutting-edge research Kit Pedler was trying to inject into the series at the same time.

So this is perhaps the only Doctor Who story that didn’t just change the direction of the show, it changed the direction of culture. And there is a very good reason why it made that impact: it really is superb. Whitaker knows that the sheer strangeness of the story is gripping in itself: he knows that these puzzle pieces don’t seem to fit together, and he keeps you waiting for the explanations. Moreover, every time an explanation is offered it is balanced out by a new mystery, provocation or surreal set-piece. There is a terrific cliffhanger to episode five, which may be the only cliffhanger in the show’s history where no-one is in any danger at all. It reveals that the Doctor’s plan to infuse Daleks with ‘the human factor’ has produced Daleks who are happy, playful and child-like, picking the Doctor up and spinning him around the room. The promise to the viewer is not “tune in next week and see how the Doctor survives this”, it’s “tune in next week when we promise the show will be every bit as insane as this again”. Who could fail to be hooked?

There is a lot in The Evil of the Daleks that feels like distilled Doctor Who, the essence of the show boiled down as successfully as the Doctor isolates the essences of Daleks and humans. Problems that can be fatal to other 1960s serials are confidently shrugged off; the seven-episode run-time flies by, Patrick Troughton’s week off in episode four is ably covered by Fraser Hines as Jamie, who proves to be an absolutely natural leading man. Episode three introduces the wrestler-turned-actor Sonny Caldinez as Kemal, a mute Turkish henchman, which is enough to make a modern viewer prepare for the worst – but while he never quite escapes stereotyping, Kemal does enjoy a thoroughly unexpected babyface turn. His team-up with Jamie is unexpected and endearing enough to make me wish they got a spin-off – much as the cafe scenes at the start made me wish Troughton and Hines had reunited for a mod-era detective series.

For all I’ve talked about how influential this serial is, both on Doctor Who and on science fiction in general, it’s worth noting that, like a lot of great 1960s serials, it marks the last point at which the show could behave exactly like this. The Daleks would never be used with this much freedom; they would be brought back as hallowed series icons, rather than old villains on their way out. Two decades would pass before the show had writers mad enough to throw up their hands and say, “let’s just make magic real this week”. Doctor Who isn’t often scientifically rigorous, but The Evil of the Daleks is a serial where alchemy is actually real, and something like the soul can be passed between species.

Whitaker would stay around as a writer until Jon Pertwee’s first season, but he would never again have this much influence over the series – the man who arguably did more than anyone else to set up the show’s’ tone and ideas, returning to stabilise Doctor Who during its first regenerative crisis. Bringing him back could have been a retrograde move, but instead he created whole new series traditions – not least the tradition of old writers coming back to do the exact opposite of indulge in nostalgia. The transformations wrought upon the show by Robert Holmes in the 1980s and Russell T Davies right now are really following in the footsteps of Whitaker, the man who brought a kind of righteous chaos to Doctor Who‘s soul. The show has always been infused with the Whitaker factor.

Next: The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967)

Graham’s Archive – The Evil Of The Daleks

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