At first glance, the Daleks are an extremely simple concept. Robots from outer space. Galactic invaders. Yet another watered-down variant of “the Nazis, only they're evil aliens”. A disgusting little gremlin hiding in a metal suit. All very familiar tropes.
Yet here I am in 2019, marvelling at a history that has lasted over 50 years, and setting out to draft the Daleks' complete history — from even before their very first appearance in 1963 to the new Dalek Civil War that may constitute the 2020 Doctor Who Christmas special, if rumours are to be believed. Why? What makes the Daleks such an endless source of fascination ? How did they transcend the status of “stock sci-fi baddies” to become the unique and enticing myth they are today?
The first answer, of course, is that rather than yet another Tin Man, the Dalek looks like this.
Undoubtedly, as soon as you go from "robot monster" to "robot monster shaped like a pepper pot", you've got something. That Ray Cusick is many times more the father of the Daleks than Terry Nation ever was is a bit of contrarian fan wisdom that is worth repeating. Yet that answer isn't entirely satisfying, is it? Daleks are undoubtedly cool, unique things to look at, but so's Ro-Man.
So what is the secret of the Daleks? …How should I know? This is only the introduction. I have, of course, seen Dalek stories before, and thought about these things before. Quite a bit, actually. But conceptually speaking, this is where the journey begins. It may be years before I arrive at some sort of an answer, but in the meantime, I'll have had some fun, and hopefully, so will you.
Yarvelling will update every week-end (or thereabouts) for the foreseeable future, featuring my thoughts on the variety of media featuring the Daleks, taken in chronological order.
Of course, no robot monster is an island, and for that reason we'll occasionally take short side-steps into contemporary stories which provide an interesting background or backdrop to what I have to say about the Dalek stories. Unlike the Dalek stories themselves, these features won't strictly be chronological, but rather come out just ahead of the Dalek story which they are most interesting when paired with; it is perfectly possible that something from the 1990's will be sandwiched in-between the entires on Rob Shearman's Dalek and R.T. Davies's Bad Wolf, and suchlike.
Although you may also choose to use Blogger's Archive features, I will maintain a masterlist of the critiques in their intended chronological order.
Oh, and… please comment. It is your destiny. Obey! Obey! OBEYYYYYYY!
I think the design of the Dalek casing is one of the best attempts to create a truly non-humanoid alien creature in all of science-fiction. It only has the barest hints of humanity, namely the vaguely triangular/traffic cone shape that ends in a somewhat-round head, and two arms coming off of the midsection. Otherwise, everything’s jumbled up.
ReplyDeleteYou can’t really look them in the face, because they don’t really have one. The indicator lights sit where one would expect ears, except that’s the ‘mouth,’ in a sense. The eyestalk almost looks like a funny extended nose, except that’s their eye. Which makes it hard to empathize with them, because you won't find the usual signifiers of 'humanity' there. (Like how cats get freaked out by dogs, since all of their "Hi, nice to meet you, let's play!" body language reads to a cat as, "Let's fight, I'm going to eat you!")
The monotone and grating speech is a cover for their insecurities and weakness, used in the same way the word ‘objectivity’ is used by a deeply-bias person. They’re as much pumping themselves up as proclaim to others that they’re the master race of the universe, and all that junk. Not to mention that unlike your usual robots, the Dalek has a lot of personality when it moves and speaks. (They even get so mad that they seem to rock the casing from the inside, despite being just a jumble of nerves and flesh sitting in a pasta strainer. Seriously, how did Ian even fit in there?)
And that helps to make them oddly relatable, in a way that the Cybermen or Ice Warriors never are. The Daleks are very, *very* flawed, anxious creatures, which clashes with their metallic and sterilized space-age exterior. They’re just as much Howard Hughes, gone to ruin and hiding away from the rest of the world, as they are scary space-conquering aliens.
And that mishmash of contradictions is why they’ve stood the test of time, unlike the constantly-morphing Cybermen. (Truth be told, the “Tenth Planet” variants are really the only ones that approach the Daleks in terms of complexity.)
Very good analysis. Blimey, you're even cutting the grass out from underneath my feet for next week's post, to an extent! The Cybermen and their failure to quite stick the landing as actual competition to the Daleks is something YARVELLING will, of course, be tracking with rapt attention; I won't be doing every Cyberman story, nor even, necessarily, every TV Cyberman story, but a fair number, definitely.
DeleteSpeaking of projects for the blog, the various conflicting ideas of what the Dalek inside the casing looks like is another thing we'll be keeping an eye on, starting next week with that pesky webbed claw.
Haha, thanks! I think, as many have pointed out, the problem with the Cybermen is that they weren't designed to be a recurring villain. Like the Daleks, they're an interesting one-off creation who ended up being really popular.
DeleteBut unlike the Daleks, the Cybermen were forced to become "The #1 Doctor Who Baddie" almost immediately, and didn't get to naturally evolve in the same way that the pepper pots did. (Imagine a Chase-style farce with Troughton and the Mondasian Cybermen!)
Also:
>starting next week with that pesky webbed claw.
*Cue that clip of Sylvester McCoy getting choked out in Remembrance*