H. G. Wells's The Time Machine is a story about a man only known by a title (the Time Traveller) whose first known trip, to the future, sees him exploring an alien world populated by two descendants of the humanoids of old. The members of one of them have forgotten their science and culture, but are handsome and fair and peaceful; the others have not forgotten how to work their devious machines, or about the practicalities of life; they lurk out of sight, twisted and alien, yet retaining a spark of genius which the Time Traveller cannot help but admire.
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| It's still stupid of Nation not to have noticed, but the Thals don't look like that because they're Aryans, they look like that because they're Eloi. (Note: the beings pictured above are in fact Eloi, not Thals.) |
The Thals are more mature, and much wiser (despite their forgetfulness of their history), than the Eloi. And the Daleks are stunted little toad-people, rather than the sickening-looking, yet muscular ape-men the Morlocks. But the Eloi/Morlock and Thal/Dalek pairings are still undeniably similar; the sheer name of "Dalek", if it does not come from the "Dal-Ek" volume of an encyclopedia as Nation liked to pretend, is very probably a redressing of the similar "Morlock". Like the Eloi, the Thals are off-putting to the time traveller(s) because of their naiveté, but the time-travellers still feel a kinship with them that is absent in the deathly Daleks/Morlocks, whose thought processes have become as alien as their mutated appearance. Here's the protagonist of The Time Machine about the Morlocks:
The sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and possible actions came home to me very vividly in the darkness.
If that doesn't describe the feelings that the Daleks in The Dead Planet are meant to evoke, then I don't know what does.
The concept in The Dead Planet that over time the roles have reversed — the Thals were once the warlike scientists oppressing the peaceful Dals, but now they are pacifists and the Dals' sons the Daleks have turned their fevered minds to genocide — even mirrors the satirical reversal of capitalist society in The Time Machine, where the Morlocks, descendants of an increasingly isolated working class, have become the ones preying (quite literally) on the decadent descendants of the class which was once made up of its oppressors. I'm not sure this is intentional, but it's interesting.
So those are the obvious points of similarities out of the way. Now here's the real question: how can The Dead Planet possibly be a thinly-veiled variation on The Time Machines if you take into account that The Dead Planet is The Survivors with its ending surgically removed? To recap for the more forgetful of my readers, The Survivors hinged on the revelation that there were three alien races in all, not two, and also that the Daleks and Thals weren't as different from each other as both peoples had come to believe. The Daleks in The Survivors weren't Morlocks, they were human players in a morality play about letting go of old prejudices. So?
Well, it's a hard question. I have become aware of it, but I don't really have a witty answer to it. Perhaps it is simply that Nation originally wanted to do a clever deconstruction of The Time Machine, which, like any "critical rewrite", started out with the familiar structure and then strayed from it more and more, cracking the seams — meaning that when the latter half of the plot, the one containing all the clever satire, had to be excised for contingent reasons, all that was left was the first half of the parody; a joke without a punchline.
Except that while a joke without its punchline ceases to be recognizable as a joke, that doesn't make it a functional story. The leadup of a joke sets up a tension which must be resolved in some way. The Dead Planet echoes The Time Machine in all kinds of ways, and borrows much of its concepts and imagery, yet somehow, it all comes across in The Dead Planet in a way that somehow leaves one thinking there is more to this story, some fundamental element that hasn't congealed quite yet. No one leaves The Time Machine wondering what the Morlocks will be up to next; the Eloi/Morlock conflict was simply a fact of the book's universe, a horrifying but inevitable status quo. It will end someday, but only because the Eloi and Morlocks themselves will end, and, with them, humanity itself.
The Dead Planet, on the other hand, inherits The Survivors' yearning for some sort of closure to the Daleks' story. A closure that can never come. Why? Because with its original ending lost, The Dead Planet's Thal storyline was reduced to what is frankly a mind-numblingly dull remake of the Eloi. The real reason that returning to Skaro to tie off the Daleks' storyline is quite impossible is that no one wants to hear from the Thals again, and yet The Survivors is not a story you can do simply do without the Thals. The Time Machine-esque Dalek/Thal storyline has to be in place if it is to be toyed with and rejected.
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| No but seriously, the Thals are so dull. |
And now we know why the Thals are so conceptually dull, why they are unconvicning Eloi-ripoffs with all the grating visual aryan-ness, and none of the satirical substance. They were conceived as simply the lead-up to pulling the rug underneath the audience's feet and revealing that no, "Eloi vs Morlocks" isn't actually how it works.
Now we know why the other shoe about the Neutron War will never drop — and why we leave The Dead Planet with this inexplicable, deep-seated urge to keep watching the Daleks to see what happens next.
Next week, enough faffing about: we jump into The Dead Planet itself. I formulated the bulk of the questions we'll be considering last post, but the short version is this: how do you make a (halfway)functional story out of a joke with its punchline cut off? If the Daleks cannot be redeemed, if they cannot be revealed as false Morlocks who can be turned back into human beings, then what must they be?
I wonder to what extent, however, David Whitaker might be responsible for the evolution of "The Survivors" into "The Dead Planet," especially in light of Terry Nation delivering his scrips and then yeeting off to Sweden. Whitaker, of course, is a very different writer to Nation with a different set of influences - and, if "Evil of the Daleks" is anything to go off, a writer who himself draws heavily from Victorian-era science fiction (which Wells' "Time Machine" is a late example of).
ReplyDeleteA salient point. I definitely think of David Whitaker as the father of the "mythological Daleks", as will become clear in later posts, but my assumption was more that the stunting of The Survivors was a grim necessity that Whitaker made the most of, as opposed to Whitaker actively wanting to cut the third alien race to begin with.
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