The Daleks

"German Expressionism? Never heard of her"

The Daleks, Episode One: The Dead Planet

This episode is loaded with heaps of nostalgia for me. I was one of those few fans who got into the series during the Wilderness Years; ‘Rose’ aired just before my tenth birthday. But thanks to a parent’s friend who was a fan, the VHS range, and UK Gold repeats, Doctor Who began for me somewhere around about 1999. It’s difficult to put a date on it, but this must have been one of the first ten stories I saw. I can vividly remember – long before Rob Shearman and Russell T Davies made the Daleks cultural icons again – trying to show this to some friends of mine, but somehow 25 minutes of lots of standing around discussing a plot which hasn’t quite started yet, and only being able to represent the alienness of the planet by having the vision mixer overexpose the cameras, and food machines, and obvious model shots, didn’t quite appeal to a generation for whom Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings were the genre fiction of the day. I couldn’t tell the difference (well, I almost certainly could tell the difference – I can’t really remember – it never mattered anyway). And it never has, because even if this doesn’t quite reach the heights of ‘An Unearthly Child 1’, which in 25 minutes deconstructs all our expectations of how 1960s television works, this is the first time Doctor Who goes for style over substance. And for all that it might be a bit ropey now, it unequivocally succeeds. Before we even get onto the Daleks themselves – and after all, we only see a plunger here (and how Doctor Who-ish is that? It can even make domestic tools menacing) – the design work in this is utterly stunning. Synthesizing mid-20^th Century futurism with German Expressionism is such an obvious idea once someone’s done it – and Ray Cusick did it first. And Brian Hodgson’s sound effects and Tristram Cary’s incidental music perfectly complement both the theme music and the design work for an all-encompassing sense of the uncanny. Over the next six episodes, we’ll talk about political allegory in science-fiction, and the problem of giving Terry Nation three more episodes after he’s finished his allegory, but for now, ‘The Daleks 1’ simply invites us to bask in its strangeness. This is Doctor Who’s first mood piece, and it’s an absolute triumph.

The Daleks, Episode Two: The Survivors

This is really where it all begins: a three-shot of the Doctor, Ian, and Susan pulling back to reveal four Daleks. And we’re still in the land of the strange: very little is revealed about the Daleks here – and this episode relies on us wanting to know more. In 2019, the Daleks are as much a 1960s pop culture icon as The Beatles or the miniskirt; but in 1963, they’re like nothing else – all gliding movements and ring modulated voices. And the Dalek city, with all its strange angles and negative spaces leans even further into German Expressionism than what we saw in Episode One – we’re almost in Dr. Caligari territory now – and the bleakness we saw in ‘An Unearthly Child’ is back in full force. The contours of the adventure haven’t been defined yet, but the Daleks tell the Doctor about a nuclear war that devastated their planet, and on a human level, this translates to a TARDIS team suffering from radiation sickness for almost the entire episode. And it’s worth bearing in mind that the rules of Doctor Who haven’t been established yet: an alien planet isn’t the place of wonder that it will become, and as Susan goes out in search of anti-radiation drugs, and the Doctor and Barbara slump back unable to move, we don’t know whether one of them might die. For all that Doctor Who has a reputation of scaring its child audience, and for all that us overeducated fans like to talk about the semiotic thickness of a performed text, Doctor Who will become rather a cosy show. It isn’t there yet. This whole first year, in a way, can be paratextually read as working out Doctor Who’s idiom – and certainly what works in ‘The Daleks’ is going to be carried over into Doctor Who’s future – but what is also striking is that the bleakness of this first year never quite reappears again. We’ve gone from an abduction of two schoolteachers, to a version of human prehistory more alien and violent than any alien planet, to radiation sickness and screaming man-sized metal tanks. And then the cliffhanger to the episode: Susan is back in the TARDIS having found the anti-radiation drugs, opens the doors, and looks out onto the dead planet’s surface as the rain pours down and lightning flashes. The bleakness isn’t over just yet.

The Daleks, Episode Three: The Escape

I don’t find the Thals quite as annoying as everyone else seems to, but aren’t Temmosus’s aphorisms tedious? One of the difficulties with ‘The Daleks’ as a whole – and this is thrown into greater relief the further we get through the story – is the awkward juxtaposition of some really strong themes for a science-fiction allegory (nuclear war, racism, and pacificism in particular) with some absolutely rotten dialogue. The Thals’ dialogue is overwhelmingly declamatory – any attempt at character is replaced with vague archetypes – and poor old Temmosus ends up stuck being ‘the philosophical one’. It’s by no means unwatchable, but it is the first time a Doctor Who script really feels old. Even Chris Chibnall can write better dialogue than, “the city looks as if they make science and invention their profession!”.

But thank God Temmosus doesn’t hog all the lines, because the rest of this is as great as its reputation suggests: it’s lovely to see the TARDIS crew working together and having some genuine camaraderie for the first time as they attempt to disable a Dalek – and that mixture of humour and menace that cemented the Daleks’ popularity is also seen here for the first time. The exchange, when Susan is writing a letter to the Thals that the Daleks dictate, and she signs it with her name…

Dalek: What is that word?

Susan: The last word?

Dalek: SU-SAAN! (Susan giggles) Stop that noise!

… elicited a proper belly laugh, and is definitely up there with Russell T. Davies’s, “Social interaction will cease!”, as one of my favourite lines of Dalek dialogue. Also of note: no Dalek has said, “exterminate!”, yet, but one of them does talk about “extermination” in this episode. Slowly, but surely, something more recognizably Doctor Who-ish is falling into place.

The Daleks, Episode Four: The Ambush

Is the overlong ‘escape via the lift shaft’ sequence Doctor Who’s first real instance of padding? Sure, 60s television is generally a bit slower than what we might be used to, but this is the first time I’ve sat here and thought, ‘this is all a bit unnecessary’. There are a few nice moments in it, however: well done to whichever operator is inside the Dalek who gets stuck on the other side, because he somehow gets the Dalek to do a double take, which is both a really nice touch and must have been almost impossible to get right stuck inside all that fibreglass. And when the Daleks shoot at the Dalek casing they believe to have Ian inside of it (spoiler alert: he’d already escaped), the effect of it breaking up is great.

What saves this episode, though, is that this is the first time we see the Daleks not just as suspicious or callous, but as without any shadow of a doubt the villains: although none of them actually use the term, this is the first time we see them exterminate a group of people, and it sets the story off in a new direction. The Daleks and the Thals aren’t going to be able to work together, but the Thals have become pacifists since the previous nuclear war nearly wiped out both of them, and the evil of the Daleks is shown to be – without any shadow of a doubt – grounded in their racism:

Ganatus: Why destroy without any apparent thought or reason? That’s what I don’t understanding.

Ian: Oh, there’s a reason. Explanation might be better. It’s stupid and ridiculous, but it’s the only one that fits.

Alydon: What?

Ian: A dislike for the unlike […] They’re afraid of you because you’re different from them.

Nuanced political discourse it ain’t – but heavy stuff for what’s supposed to be a children’s Saturday teatime serial – and ‘don’t be a racist’ is as good a message as any. When this aired, the Cuban Missile Crisis would only have been a year before, and the Second World War would still have been still fresh in the child viewers’ parents’ memory – when Terry Nation creates an alien planet with two entirely oppositional factions, on a planet that has been utterly devastated by nuclear war, with one of them being full of race hate for the other, it means something. Doctor Who’s political allegories will fortunately become a little more subtle as time moves on – well, at least until Tom starts paraphrasing Marx – but at least we can put to bed the idea that Doctor Who was ever meaningfully apolitical.

The Daleks, Episode 5: The Expedition

The second half of this is a bit generic B-movie, but it hasn’t outstayed its welcome quite yet. The first half of the episode, though, is the heart of the story, where Ian convinces the Thals that they have to fight against the Daleks. The cynicism that defines much of Terry Nation’s work is already here: Ian does this not because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but because the TARDIS crew need the Thals to fight for them, so they can get back into the Dalek city and recover the fluid link. And for all Susan says, “we must help the Thals to save themselves and not just them help us”, Barbara effectively wins the argument in replying, “All you’re doing is playing with words!”. It sets up the moral conundrum well for the child audience.

The Daleks, Episode 6: The Ordeal

Peak B-movie. The ‘jumping over the ledge’ sequence is impossibly dull. William Hartnell and Carole Ann Ford’s scenes are adorable – another sign of the Doctor feeling more Doctorish. On the whole, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this episode, but nothing really right about it either.

The Daleks, Episode 7: The Rescue

The final Dalek battle is awfully directed, and possibly the first inkling of what Richard Martin’s direction is going to be like in the future – it’s disappointing given it’s what the last seven weeks have been leading up to. All I can really say about this episode is that is wraps everything up nicely – what is slightly damning with faint praise given I was talking about political allegory in children’s television only a couple of episode ago. It’s telling, I think that the six and seven-parters decrease considerably after this season, because for all you save on budget, you end up losing out in dramatic terms. There are very few stories that require nearly three hours to be told. Maybe this could do with six: the first episode is such a good mood piece that it doesn’t really matter that no plot is happening, and you could happily merge together six and seven and not really lose anything – but this is a programme that’s still finding its feet. And whatever its individual merits, we have just watched the creation of a television legend. This is the story that secures Doctor Who’s future; that means while all the teenagers were obsessing over the Beatles, their younger siblings were getting scared by the Daleks. Just going by the numbers, this is a series that has shot up from 4.4 million viewers for ‘An Unearthly Child 1’ to 10.4 million for this – from a chart position of 114 to 25. We’ve still got another year before Doctor Who reaches its heights in the 60s, but this is where Doctor Who’s first renaissance really begins.

The Daleks Episode Ratings:

Episode 1: 9/10

Episode 2: 10/10

Episode 3: 8/10

Episode 4: 8/10

Episode 5: 8/10

Episode 6: 6/10

Episode 7: 7/10

Mean Average: 8/10