“The original Dalek” (The Dead Planet)

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(Sorry for this post being late. In my defence, there was Christmas followed by New Year's followed by Chris Chibnall up and casting a new Master at me, and then a Doctor. And worry not, the next post will be going live next Sunday, on schedule.)

(EDITOR'S NOTE, AUGUST 2021: "next Sunday", huh. Ha. Ha. Haaa. Well, my defence this time around is that 2020 happened. But perhaps I'll be back sooner than not.)

Is this story called The Dead Planet, The Survivors or The Mutants? What it definitely shouldn't be called is The Daleks, which is just dull and technically a spoiler — there are in fairness few watchers who would set out into this story not knowing it was the Daleks' debut, but I feel as though outside concerns about the twists being well-known shouldn't lead to works being revised to no longer care to maintain said twist; compare how annoying it is that the Star Wars prequel still try to act as though "Palpatine is a villain" is a surprise. The Mutants and The Survivors aren't too bad; both preserve the twists of the story by allowing that the offscreen Thals be assumed by the viewers to be the mysterious being in the title, before it becomes clear that the true threat is the Daleks. But they're both taken, respectively by an unrelated Jon Pertwee story and by, well, The Survivors, the subject of two weeks ago's post. So really, it has to be The Dead Planet. And what a fantastic title it is too. 

Since I am, for the first time, talking about something that is neither a half-missing bit of trivia or a well-known literary classic, the "review" aspect of this blog comes in for the first time. Hence, allow me to say a few words in review of The Dead Planet as a Doctor Who story in general:

• The "First Doctor + Susan + Barbara & Ian" TARDIS crew is at its all-time best, in no small parts (I'm told) thanks to Carole Ann Ford campaigning to get a more active part in the plot than she'd originally been given. All four time-travellers are well-acted, sharply-defined, and get distinct plotlines and character arcs. 

• Structure-wise, starts out solid enough, but then we waste an episode or two faffing about in caves. I'm sure Terry Nation fancied speleology to be very exciting, and maybe it is when you're living it or even reading about it, but it speaks to how little of a visual ideas-man Terry Nation was, that it did not occur to him that the excitement would fail to carry over on film.

• The Thals are bleedin' dull. 

Right, now back to the regularly-schedule business of an analysis of what The Dead Planet shows about the Daleks. We saw over the last two posts the significance of the importance given  the Daleks' ancient history in this story. What's left now that the "third alien race" reveal is gone and the Daleks remain bad guys? Something… awkward as "race politics" go: the aryan Thals were originally the oppressors of the Daleks, yet now we are asked to side with them against the Daleks because the Daleks still (one would imagine rightfully) fear the Thals and are consequently intent on blowing them up. 

Hence, what I assume must have been David Whitaker in his extensive post-The-Survivors rewrite comes in and gives the Doctor a line to thematically recontextualize the whole affair, making it not about old grudges that need to be let go, but about the fear of the unknown and the Other. The Daleks lash out, wish to exterminate the Thals simply because the Thals are different from them. This, this clumsy patch for a truncated story, is where it all begins — the notion of the Daleks as the ultimate racists, the greatest xenohobes in the universe, the cosmic supremacists. 

Yet it is, for now, only a sketch of what it will become. Where the future will tell of Daleks who push racism to its logical breaking point, who are genetically hardwired (oh, the irony) to think of anything even slightly different as by definition inferior, the whole point of the somewhat moralizing takes on the "racist Dalek" idea here is that they are exhibiting a destructive paranoia all too familiar to plain old humanity. 

But either way, that explanation fails to convince, never mind what possibilities it open for the future. For one thing, the famous line “If [the Daleks] think [the Thals] are mutations, what must they be like?” fails to account for the fact that the Daleks, within this story at least, make no difference between themselves and their human-like ancestors (the Thals may speak of the humanoids as "the Dals", implicitly likening them more to the Thals of today than to the dreaded enemies in the city, but when the Daleks recount their history to the Doctor, they say, “there were two races on Skaro then — the Thals, and us, the Daleks”). They start out bemoaning that they are withered little frog-people forced to use travel machines, and those travel machines, as Ian soon finds, are still calibrated for a normal-sized human form as the default. So why would they see the humanoid Thals as different enough to rouse that panic, once the mistaken belief that they are themselves mutants is cleared up?

But are the Thals mutant? Here we must engage with the tremendously strange idea of these "cycles" of mutation that Nation tells us about, wherein which both Thals and Daleks began to mutate and decay from the neutronic radiation, but over hundreds of generation, the Thals "refined" themselves back into human form while the "cycle" was not completed in the Daleks. The following is perhaps not quite what Nation and Whitaker were thinking, but if one tries to translate that into words that wouldn't give a real scientist a stroke, this appears to mean that after the initial period of degenerative mutations, ordinary natural selection took its course among the mutated Thals until they evolved back into humanoids. 

(We must grant, here, lest the whole edifice fall apart, the dubious notion that the humanoid form is the natural peak of evolution, not in some abstract moral sense but in the literal sense that it's best-adapted for survival and will always be the endpoint of natural selection. But bear with me. Anyway, considering the shocking number of humanoids running around the Whoniverse, it's perhaps best to just accept the idea that it is, for whatever reason, very well-adapted to just about any environment, as far as this fictional universe is concerned. The Book of the War has a very amusing idea of why that might be the case, even if it is anachronistic heresy to bring it up now.)

The Doctor remarks, then, on how curious it is that the "cycle" has not completed itself in the Daleks, and there is no explicit answer, but I posit — and I am surely not the first — that the reason is this: the Daleks, by building the travel machines and hiding out in their City, have betrayed the laws of natural selection; they have removed themselves from the game. They don't evolve back into humanoids because instead of paying the harsh price of natural selection (namely the death of the weak) that would in trade have Mother Nature guide them back into a form well-suited to their environment, they have opted to remove themselves from this environment and create a new, self-contained world where their sludgy forms are perfectly suitable. 

They hope, of course, that they will reconcile themselves with Skaro over time, that when the radiation level drops they'll be able to get out of their metal suits, but that is a fool's errand, and not just because of the twist which reveals that they are actually dependent on Skaro's radiation to survive. Because consider the ending, in which switching off the power of the Dalek City, and, with it, the power of the Dalek travel machines, immediately causes the mutants inside to die. (Later stories force us to consider the possibility that the mutants survived, trapped in their immobile shells, and later managed to switch the power back on; but within The Dead Planet on its own merits there is no doubt that all those buglike, deathly-still, bent Daleks are dead.) Since we now know that the suits' keeping the Dalek creatures alive wasn't a matter of protecting the Daleks from the radiation, we are forced to conclude that the Dalek creatures had simply become incapable of surviving without those suits, and just refused to admit it to themselves. 

No, let's close off this entry of YARVELLING by going one step further: already the Daleks are the suits. 

There exists a fundamental tension between the narrative fact that the Daleks are little blobs who drive minitanks, and the common-sense perception of them as "space robots", where the pepperpot with a plunger is the shape of the Dalek, not just of its metal "clothing". It surprised even me to find it already in place here, but I don't think it has actually ever been stronger than it is in The Dead Planet, as a result of the conflict between the scriptwriters and the production team. Playing the "whatever you imagine will always be worse than what we can show on the BBC at teatime" card, the script treats the nature of the frog monster inside the Dalek as the primary attractor of the creature; almost as soon as they encounter the pepperpot-Daleks, the time-travellers begin to speculate about whether there are "people like us" controlling the machines from the inside. 

And that would be an entirely valid direction for the story to go if the Daleks still looked like the fairly dull tin cans originally envisioned; but once Raymond Cusick was in, the visual mythos of the Daleks immediately begins to exert a gravity of its own. It will take a long time for the Dalek props to again look as lively as they do in their first moments here, with their plungers extending back and forth, their eyepieces not just whirring but twitching, like so many feelers and antennae. 

And if the Thals are a disappointment, then aesthetic laws demand that there exist another nemesis, another counterpart to the Daleks. Narratively the Thals continue to fill that role, for now. But visually, already we see shades of the great Doctor-Dalek opposition yet to come: the Daleks, after all, are little men who travel about in visually-striking boxes. And wait a minute. Perhaps something even stranger is at work. Didn't we just see that the feeling that the pepperpot is the Dalek is already planting its seeds in the viewer's mind? If so, then the little frog-man who would be the Doctor isn't the Dalek. 

No, the true "good counterpart" to the Dalek is in fact the TARDIS.

 Look at the last picture again, that of the Thal cloak from under which we see the claw of the Dalek peeking… doesn't it seem a little familiar, this pattern? Those hexagons? And the Daleks are primarily motivated by getting their hands on a vial of drugs that will allow them to once more be in sync with the environment of Skaro — whereas if the TARDIS "wants" anything, needs anything in this story, then it is the vial-like fluid-link… And in the very next story, The Edge of Destruction, we will see the TARDIS crew beginning to wonder if there is an unseen intelligence controlling the TARDIS from within, which can't help but remind one of the wonderings in The Dead Planet about whether there are "people like us" inside the machines. 

Next week, we delve into the Daleks' first, forgotten, surprisingly evocative jump into what one might term the Doctor Who expanded universe, with the "Give-a-Show" Projector Screen comic story The Daleks Destroy the Zomites. …But wait. How did they even jump anywhere, if they're dead as doornails?

“The enormity of their crime” (The Survivors)

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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. 

[Source]

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. 

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. 

***

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?