“The Daleks” (also known as “The Mutants” and “The Dead Planet” was the second serial in the British science fiction television series, Doctor Who and was broadcast in seven weekly parts from 21st December 1963 to 1st February 1964. It was written by Terry Nation. “The Mutants”, as it was originally known is no normal story. Its importance in Doctor Who history cannot be overstated. For it introduced the, perhaps, greatest and most iconic of the Doctor’s adversaries in time, the Daleks. In addition to the Daleks, the story also introduced the other key race on Skaro, the Thals, who were the reluctant enemies of the Daleks.
In the story, the Doctor (William Hartnell), his granddaughter Susan Foreman (Carol Ann Ford), and her teachers Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) land in the TARDIS in a petrified alien jungle. The Doctor’s curiosity (and cunning) takes the group into what they believe is an abandoned city. However, they discover that the Daleks inhabit it, using static electricity to power and move the tank-like machines that their grossly mutated bodies now exist inside. They are captured by these Daleks, and discover that this race of mutated creatures now survive off the radiation that remains in the atmosphere after a nuclear war they waged with their enemies.
As the group attempt to escape the Daleks, they discover more about the planet and the ensuing war and attempt to broker peace between the Daleks and the pacifist Thals. Some of these Thals are killed by the Daleks in an ambush, having used Susan to persuade the Thals that the Daleks want peace. The Thals realise that they cannot trust the Daleks and are persuaded by Ian that they will have to fight and compromise their pacifism or otherwise the Daleks will annihilate the entire Thal race. The Daleks are intending to release more radiation into the atmosphere, making it possible for them to control the whole planet. The Thals are facing genocide.
The Coalition (Fellowship?) of the Doctor, his companions and the Thals reach the city after a perilous journey with some casualties and after an intense hand-to-hand (plunger?) fight, they are able to stop the Daleks for the moment. The Thals now have the chance to make their planet habitable for future generations. The Doctor predicts he will return to see their grandchildren thriving. The TARDIS crew leave Skaro, but an explosion on board knocks them out.
Terry Nation once stated in a press interview at the time, that he had named the Daleks after seeing the letters DAL-LEK on a set of encyclopedias. This was a great story but unfortunately a myth. The ‘Daleks’ were undoubtedly the highlight of this episode and have rightly taken their place in the Pantheon of science fiction villains. Nothing like them had ever been seen before. Their sedate gliding movements combined with their harsh electronic voice creates an unnerving presence and their weaponry is devastating. But they are more than just a killing machine. For the organic creature within is intelligent, cunning and ruthless. An almost unstoppable combination.
Furthermore, as Ian realises during his encounter with them, the Dalek race are extreme xenophobes. They hate other races because they are different from themselves. As Ian expresses it so well and so profoundly: ‘‘They (the Daleks) dislike the unlike’’ It is a comment that takes us far from the imaginary worlds of Doctor Who and straight into the real world. Terry Nation had been influenced in his writing for this episode by the atrocities committed under the Nazis less than 20 years prior during World War Two.
The attempted genocide of the Thals by this avowed Master Race and the Churchillian admonitions by Ian to fight to preserve the peace, would have resonated very deeply with the viewers at the time. They were well aware that the Jewish people had been the victims of the ‘Final Solution’ as Hitler and his henchmen had termed it. Over 6 million had been slaughtered by the Nazis. An atrocity which is still difficult even today to fully comprehend. Yet even after this brutal inhumanity, there have been further atrocities: Biafra 1967-1970; Year Zero in Cambodia under Khmer Rouge in 1975; Rwanda in 1994; Bosnia 1992-1995; Al-Qaeda and ISIS 2000-ongoing; Burma/Myanmar 2017- and we will no doubt be witness to more human tragedy in the future.
So prescient is Terry Nation’s line of dialogue he gives to Ian, that it has universal applicability to just about every act of intolerance, bigotry and hate both large scale and small scale that humanity has ever committed. An episode about Rosa Parks in the most recent season of Doctor Who (probably the highlight of the series) dealt with these same themes of intolerance, and Ian’s line from “The Daleks” reverberated for me through the entire episode.
The Thals are the very polar opposite of the Daleks and they have to be to make the story work and highlight how evil the Daleks truly are. Terry Nation had originally given Germanic names to the Thals, but their physical similarity to the Aryan race as espoused by the racial theories of the Nazis would have invalidated the subtext that Nation had created. What is so striking about this story is the influence that The Time Machine by H.G. Wells had on Terry Nation and in particular the 1960 film adaptation by George Pal. I have covered The Time Machine and it’s film adaptations in some depth in two previous pieces.
So briefly. In the 1960 film adaptation, a time traveller finds himself in a strange land with ruined remnants of a once great civilisation. In the film there has been an Atomic War. On exploring further he discovers two types of creature which have de-evolved from their human ancestors over countless millennia into the Eloi and the Moorlocks. The Eloi are fun loving and peaceful, an image of human perfection, whilst the Moorlocks are ape-like, violent and predatory, breeding the Eloi as cattle to be eaten. The Eloi look exactly like the Thals and behave almost the same. The Moorlocks live underground and still work the machinery that is necessary to sustain them and the Eloi. Terry Nation has taken the basic ingredients of the story by Wells and the adaptation by George Pal and fashioned an allegory for the 1960’s and our own time.
His triumph is for me, first, the creation of the Daleks in 1963. An Atomic War has created a mutated species that although still partly organic has created a technically advanced ‘body’ to enhance its capabilities with only one purpose. To extend its once limited environment and to conquer and destroy anything that inhibits this. The Daleks version of Lebensraum (German: living-space) for a race of killing machines. Not for ‘Others’, only for the pure Daleks. The racist ideology of Nazism taken to the nth degree with the single, chilling, nihilistic, order from each and every Dalek of : ‘‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’’.
They are perhaps the greatest single threat to life in the Universe. The response to the Daleks by viewers was overwhelming. The arrival of the Daleks has often been cited, with some justification (c.f. viewing figures), as the development that secured Doctor Who’s popular success. We are now over 50 years later still excited and terrified by the return of the Daleks whether en masse or even by just one, single, lone-wolf, destroyer of worlds. That is because they are firmly based upon evil, human, antecedents which must still be faced today and stopped.
This is the second triumph of “The Daleks” as an allegory that transcends both time and space. Terry Nation’s purpose was to warn us, just like H.G. Wells did very successfully in The Time Machine (1895) and as George Pal did in his scenes of destruction caused by an Atomic War. But Nation’s warning isn’t about the devolution of the human race or the threat of nuclear annihilation but is perhaps more relevant and more important. It is about the devastating, human cost, of prejudice, bigotry and racism in the world. If we do not fight like the Thals when and where necessary, to prevent its hegemony, then the result is and will be: subservience, slavery and genocide for that disliked group whether they be: Jewish, Irish Catholics, Tutsis, Rohingyas, Native American, Biafran, Afro-Caribbean, Aborigines or Thal.
Marc Barham
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