Doctor Who A-Z #60: Day of the Daleks (1972)

Steven Moffat once cited The Rescue as one of the most influential stories in Doctor Who‘s history, arguing that while we commemorate the debut of a new Doctor, companion or monster we rarely remember the stories which introduce new ideas, or a different type of story that can be told within this wide-open format. I can’t remember what innovations Moffat ascribed to The Rescue, but if you were looking for the origin point of the ideas he enjoyed working with, you could do worse than Day of the Daleks. Here, for the first time, time travel is used to explain an apparently paranormal event (The Girl in the Fireplace, The Day of the Doctor) with haunted-house overtones (Blink, Listen) resolving in a bootstrap paradox (The Big Bang, Time Heist). Recurring monsters are present, but only as one of a number of factions (The Pandorica Opens, The Time of the Doctor) against the backdrop of a political thriller (The Zygon Inversion, Extremis). It’s not just Moffat, either – the comics writer John Byrne acknowledged the story as an unconscious influence on his legendary X-Men arc Days of Future Past.

It’s a remarkable legacy for a story that doesn’t seem to be as celebrated as it should be. I enjoyed it as a child, but I haven’t bothered to revisit it since; its reputation as “the best of the Jon Pertwee Dalek stories” is not a towering bar to clear. Yet everything feels perfectly calibrated right from the opening scene, in which the British diplomat Sir Reginald Styles is threatened by an assassin who vanishes before his eyes. The danger of using this kind of locked-room mystery set-up in Doctor Who is that the show can’t play fair: the solution will likely involve some gadget whose properties can be invented by the writer at will. Yet Louis Marks’s script and Paul Bernard’s direction take care to set as much up as they can. The assassin’s disappearance is overlaid with an effect that resembles the show’s opening titles, immediately seeding the notion that time travel is at work. The whole concept of time paradoxes, which have been startlingly absent from the show up until now, is introduced with an early scene where the Doctor and Jo mess up trying to break the Time Lords’ control over the TARDIS. Indeed, you could argue the entire storyline is a reaction to the Pertwee years’ exiled-to-Earth arc; rogue time travellers are a more formidable threat if our hero can’t travel in time himself.

The Doctor is at a disadvantage, then, although needless to say Pertwee never plays it like that. His haughtiness, anathema to some fans in other contexts, is at its most purely entertaining here. In the course of staking out Sir Reginald’s mansion, he takes the opportunity to raid the politician’s cellar, critiquing the quality of his wine and cheese. This time, though, he’s using his snobbish edge as a weapon for justice. Transported into a 22nd-century Earth ruled by Dalek collaborators, he casually schmoozes his way into the offices of Aubrey Woods’s Earth Controller and feigns interest in his food and furnishings before giving him a brutal verbal beat-down. Pertwee’s incredulity over the Controller claiming a concentration camp is really a rehabilitation centre is a Doctor-rant for the ages.

The Daleks, too, are switching things up. Marks had to incorporate them into the story at a fairly late stage, and this has maybe unduly influenced how fans regard their role here. Certainly, their voices sound weirdly reedy and their assault on Sir Reginald’s manor is fairly unthreatening. For most of the story, though, they’re in the same position that worked so well in The Power of the Daleks: hiding in plain sight, manipulating humans. Previously, a Dalek Invasion of Earth required constant Dalek squadrons patrolling London streets. Here, they’re so contemptuous of humanity that they can afford to palm governance of the whole planet off on some hand-picked quislings. It is possible that Day of the Daleks‘s ending overwrites that Hartnell classic entirely, leaving Earth’s future as wide-open as the show needs it to be.

Like a lot of early Pertwee stories, Day of the Daleks captures its moment superbly. Viewers watched this tale of the build-up to a catastrophic global conflict as the Northern Irish Troubles got underway and Nixon flew out to China – indeed, the diplomatic conference Sir Reginald is booked for takes place in Beijing. For modern-day viewers, there is one more uncanny resonance. Jo and the Doctor seem to get their dates mixed up a few times, but there is every possibility that these talks – which we are told will start a century-long war and pave the way for a Dalek invasion – will be held on September 11th…

For all their inflexible morality, the Daleks are remarkably versatile as a story ingredient, and here’s the proof: nearly ten years after their original appearance sparked a national craze, they can be revived after a long break in a story that not only adds new ideas to their own mythology, but to the entire tapestry of Doctor Who as a series. It won’t be the last time this happens, but it deserves more acclaim for being the first.

Next: The Curse of Peladon (1972)

Graham’s Archive – Day of the Daleks

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