It may seem oddly unorthodox to begin the story of the Daleks not at the beginning, but before the beginning; with a story that no one (least of all me) has ever seen, or even read, because it only existed for a brief period of time in the mind of a writer by the name of Terry Nation, sitting in his office in 1963 by a typewriter.
But the Daleks at their beginnings are defined almost entirely by their backstory, by their past — the great Neutron War between their forefathers and the Thals', the one which turned Skaro into the irradiated hell visited by the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara, the one which reduced them to paranoid little mutants hiding in gliding metal suits. The Daleks of The Dead Planet are defined as much by the Neutron War as their descendants in Dalek onwards will be by the Last Great Time War — complete with the shadowy Thals and Time Lords respectively, whose importance is first communicated to the viewer in terms of “this is the species which fought a war with the Daleks and reduced them to this”.
So it makes metaesthetic sense to start this review of Dalek history before their first screen appearance, as well.
Because that's what The Survivors is, to those of you who didn't know: the story that never was. The first draft of what would later become The Dead Planet, altered drastically before it made it to screen.
So what would have been like? Visually, much like the Dead Planet we got, I should imagine. Despite my fanciful idea, as illustrated above, of The Survivors starring Cusick's first Dalek sketches rather than the familiar pepperpots, it's even likely the final Dalek models would have looked basically the same as they do in The Dead Planet.
And story-wise too, in some respect. Most of the serial would have been the same, though there is a variety of plot details cut at various stages of development of The Dead Planet (the eagerly-awaited “Great Rain” which would help radiation levels drop, for example) which one might want to reincorporate into a fantasized version of The Survivors.
No, the meat of The Survivors — of the sense in which The Survivors is a completely different story from The Dead Planet — is instead to be found in the summary given of this road not taken in the legendary First Doctor Handbook:
Terry Nation's original storyline, entitled The Survivors, (…) involved the Daleks joining forces with the Thals in order to repel an anticipated attack by a force of alien invaders whose rockets had been detected approaching Skaro; when the aliens landed, however, the Doctor realised that they were in truth peaceful beings: these people come from the planet that two thousand years before fired neutron bombs on Skaro.
Since that time, their own civilisation has progressed and they have realised the enormity of the crime committed by their forefathers. They have waited until the radiation level has fallen, and now they come to make reparations and assist in rebuilding the planet. With Skaro's safe future assured, Dr. Who and the others leave for new times and distance.
And here we see why the Daleks and Thals — why The Dead Planet as a whole — makes so much of their two species' past, of this mysterious, shadowy Neutron War. The answer is the same as in any mystery where certain well-trodden details are hammered on, again and again, the better to surprise the reader when it turns out that not all is as it seems. Just like, forty years later, we will discover that the worst side of the Time War wasn't the one we thought, we see here that the Daleks were never the true enemy.
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Except the reveal is that there isn't a true enemy — there was once, perhaps, but that's all over now, so many centuries later; all that remains is the practicalities of dealing with the consequences of conflicts past, and for all to be friends once more. Dals vs Thals, hideous trolls vs handsome aryans, oppressors and oppressed, it was all a false dichotomy, all along. The Daleks and Thals need fight no longer. The Neutron War is history, and Skaro moves on at last.
It's an optimistic ending, one to warm the heart of any pacifist. The Dead Planet as we know it goes to great lengths to point out how little the modern Thals and Daleks are like the Thals and Dals of old (the original Thals were warriors and the Dals their slaves; oh, how the tables have turned). We'll see next week what this says in the bleaker context of the transmitted version, but within The Survivors, the use of this plot-point is clear: it foreshadows that the whole Dalek-Thal conflict is a thing of the past, born of circumstances utterly unlike those of the present day, which has no reason in the world to start up again generations down the line.
Of course, that ending is also an egregious deus ex machina; the aliens come out of nowhere, dump the mystery's answer at you without the TARDIS travellers doing anything at all to earn it, and then these aliens moralise at everyone and promise to solve everyone's problems. But the thing is, I wouldn't pursue that line of argument too long, because, well… “a group of aliens drops in at a random time, moralises a bit, and solves everyone's problem as well as figuring out mysteries that had lingered for generations” is in fact the plot structure that Doctor Who eventually settled on as its most basic story. It's just that in the future, the aliens are the Doctor and his companions.
Why, then, did they not go with this ending? Budget constraints, apparently. It was bad enough that they were reduced to using ordinary off-the-shelf plungers for the Daleks' manipulator arms — the BBC simply couldn't sprain for a third alien race. That's a bit like if execs ordered that The Doctor's Daughter end with the Source actually being a bomb which kills all the villainous Hath, because, well, they just couldn't afford the “glowing life-giving gas” effect the original concept called for.
And so for lack of a couple of costumes, the Daleks lost their true ending.
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| The Daleks die looking up. I wonder why… Where they expecting someone to descend from the heavens? |
They still end in The Dead Planet, mind you. They die. But reluctantly. As the last Dalek begins to curl up and die, it still cries: “the • Daleks • must • survive!”. Even as the TV story famously throws a gigantic spanner in the works of bringing back the Daleks later by killing all of them off, it makes their return inevitable by denying the Daleks the closure they were originally designed to acquire. In the rounded narrative of The Survivors, the past, the very past that has defined the Daleks from the start, comes back to put a definitive end to their story, ending the Daleks not physically but conceptually. In The Dead Planet, the Daleks simply die, against their wills.
Elizabeth Sandifer of the TARDIS Eruditorum wrote fascinating things in her essay on Genesis of the Daleks (and elsewhere) about the Daleks as demons of staticness — “being without becoming” made mutated flesh. Let us expand that and amend it slightly: the Daleks are characters without an ending. With their story irreparably cut off, they can only linger beyond their natural 'death', to haunt later stories with their unfinished business.
The fundamental paradox of the “Daleks as space conquerors” approach is, of course, that robot suits designed as perfectly adapted to staying in a custom-made metal city are now being touted as the ultimate in interstellar warfare; well, in true metaesthetic fashion, I posit that their strange mystique relies equally on being taken out of their proper story. Plucked out of time just before what should have been their natural end-point, with the chances of that future ever coming to pass becoming more unthinkable with every return appearance.
Let's recap. The Daleks. They're cut off from their own time, their own people… “one day”, they shall come back… yes, one day… (except, well, not really).
Sound familiar?
No wonder they are soon to become the Doctor's archenemies.
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Next week, we will see what notorious literary inspiration rears its head when the third alien race and the Daleks' disculpations are cut off from the equation, leaving a daft yet handsome people and the degenerate, subterranean, yet highly intelligent monsters who prey on them.
And the week after that, we take a look at what we're left with in The Dead Planet. If The Survivors's pacifist, humanist outlook on war and prejudice relied so heavily on that ending that makes all the difference, then what is The Dead Planet saying, in its current form? And the difference between the two plots is not only that the third alien race fails to descend, leading to the Daleks' death. No, no, no. Another, cheaper, yet much stranger plot-point was added in The Dead Planet compared to The Survivors. But what does it mean?
And the week after that, we take a look at what we're left with in The Dead Planet. If The Survivors's pacifist, humanist outlook on war and prejudice relied so heavily on that ending that makes all the difference, then what is The Dead Planet saying, in its current form? And the difference between the two plots is not only that the third alien race fails to descend, leading to the Daleks' death. No, no, no. Another, cheaper, yet much stranger plot-point was added in The Dead Planet compared to The Survivors. But what does it mean?
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