The Man Who Invented the Daleks (36 page)

It’s a great episode, as good as
Doctor Who
ever got, and arguably Terry Nation’s finest achievement. There are some of his characteristic touches, but they are given new and violent twists. Sarah Jane is separated from her companions, as ever in a Nation story, but only because she’s been left for dead in a trench full of corpses; the familiar iconography of the Second World War is invoked, but is fused with images both from earlier periods and from the future to create a picture of perpetual conflict (Nation cited Wells’s 1936 film
Things to Come
as an influence here); even the traditional final-scene reveal of a Dalek is trumped by the debut appearance of Davros the Creator.

The figure of Davros dominates the remainder of the tale. He is the leader of the Elite, a group of scientists who are housed outside the main city dome in a place known as the Bunker, and who represent an alternative centre of power in Kaled society, a sort of scientific SS. Through his research on the genetic mutations thrown up by the chemical weapons used in the war, he has concluded that there is no way back for his race. He has therefore accelerated the workings of evolution, as a Kaled explains, ‘to establish our final mutational form. He took living cells, treated them with chemicals and produced the ultimate creature.’ He then developed the travel machines that would house these creatures and thus bequeathed to the universe the Daleks. He’s a magnificent addition to both the Dalek mythology and
Doctor Who
more generally, following on from the likes of Mavic Chen, Tobias Vaughn (in the 1968 story ‘The Invasion’) and the Master and raising the stakes still higher as the ultimate in deranged but charismatic megalomaniacs.

As Nation pointed out, ‘any crazy old mad professor is wonderful to have around’. Such characters had been stock figures in horror and science fiction since Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, but Davros also has some very specific associations. Most immediately, the image of a wheelchair-bound deranged Nazi scientist drew on Peter Sellers’s title role in Stanley Kubrick’s film
Dr Strangelove
(1964). There’s a hint too of Leslie Charteris’s Dr Sardon from ‘The Man Who Liked Ants’, another scientist who was keen to speed up the evolutionary process. But even closer is another of the classic H.G. Wells novels,
The Island of Dr Moreau
(1896), in which, on an isolated island in the South Pacific, the eponymous scientist pursues a combination of vivisection, plastic surgery and education to turn animals of various sorts into passable imitations of human beings, almost in parody of evolution. The resulting creatures live wild on the island, but are in constant danger of reverting to their animal natures, kept in line only by fear of Moreau and by constant recitation of the Law he has imposed on them: ‘Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’ they chant. ‘Not to eat flesh nor fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’ Much of this is echoed in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, both with the Mutos out in the wastelands and with artificially created monsters. ‘Davros’s early experiments were with animals,’ we are told. ‘Some of the things he created were horrific. And they’re still alive.’ When Sarah is captured by Mutos, one of them insists that she is what they term a Norm, and must therefore be killed: ‘Kill her! It is the Law. All Norms must die.’

A common thread running through the tradition of the mad scientist had been the implication that creator and created share a single nature. That was, for example, the basis of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the first film version of
Frankenstein
(1910) had acknowledged the element of the doppelganger with a scene in which the monster fades away while standing in front of a mirror, though his reflection remains; when Frankenstein subsequently looks in the mirror, he sees only the monster’s reflection looking back at him. Davros – ‘This thing that was half-man and half-Dalek,’ as Nation described him – takes the shared identity to a logical conclusion. The description of him in the script was quite explicit: ‘Davros is contained in a specially constructed self-powered wheelchair. It has similarities to the base of a Dalek.’ We never discover what it was that so scarred and destroyed the scientist’s physical body, but the chair has been developed as a life-support mechanism, leaving him effectively a cyborg. ‘The only really human feature we ever see of Davros is an ancient, withered hand that plays across the switch-packed surface of the control panel that stretches across the front of the chair.’ (The focus on the hand also echoes
Dr Strangelove
.)

The realisation of Davros – designed by Peter Day, with the face created by sculptor John Friedlander, both from the BBC Visual Effects Department – followed that prescription, adding a hint of the Mekon, Dan Dare’s archenemy, in the expansive cranium. It was a superb piece of work. Since the commissioning of the serial, both Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had left the show, replaced by producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, neither of whom had any fondness for the Daleks at all. They were, however, stuck with the story. ‘So I thought that we’d better do something bloody good with the Daleks,’ said Hinchcliffe, ‘because people had seen them ad nauseum. They were silly things, running around on castors. So I just tried to inject more atmosphere.’ The strength of the design was complemented by the performance of Michael Wisher, the first and best of the actors to take the role. In his hands the character emerged as a worthy opponent for the Doctor, a Professor Moriarty to his Sherlock Holmes. ‘The courage and resourcefulness of a hero figure,’ Nation once wrote, ‘is directly related to the strength and ruthlessness of his opponent.’ Nowhere was this more true than with Davros. And from the Doctor’s point of view, he at last had a representative of the Daleks with whom he could engage, the first one with a face, a name, and a voice capable of expressing an emotion beyond insecure hysteria.

The conflict between the two reaches its peak in the second half of the story, which, as in other Dalek tales by Nation, features discussions of morality. The Doctor attempts to reason with Davros as a fellow man of science: ‘If you had created a virus in your laboratory, something contagious and infectious that killed on contact, a virus that would destroy all other forms of life, would you allow its use?’ Davros replies, thoughtfully at first but with increasing levels of self-abandon: ‘Yes. Yes. To hold in my hand a capsule that contains such power, to know that life and death on such a scale was my choice. To know that the tiny pressure on my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything. Yes. I would do it. That power would set me up above the gods. And through the Daleks, I shall have that power.’

For he is not at heart a scientist at all, but the ultimate arch-villain of the thriller tradition, the power-crazed would-be dictator, who dismisses his opponents as weak-willed and feeble-minded: ‘They talk of democracy, freedom, fairness. Those are the creeds of cowards, the ones who will listen to a thousand viewpoints and try to satisfy them all. Achievement comes through absolute power. And power through strength.’ Intrigued though he is by the Doctor, ultimately he dismisses him for the same reason: ‘You have a weakness that I have totally eliminated from the minds of the Daleks so they will always be superior,’ he sneers. ‘You are afflicted with a conscience.’ He is even prepared to betray his own people to the Thals, in order to thwart an attempt by higher-minded Kaleds to curtail his activities: ‘Today the Kaled race is ended, consumed in a fire of war, but from its ashes will rise a new race, the supreme creature, the ultimate conqueror of the universe – the Dalek!’

We have encountered his kind before in Nation’s writing. The character Croft in ‘The Fanatics’, an episode of
The Champions
, for example, with his suicide squads and his lust for power. Or the professional revolutionary Theron Netlord (John Carson) in ‘Sibao’ in
The Saint
, who seeks world domination through organising the oppressed nations of the world: ‘For a thousand years they have been searching for a leader to take them to their rightful place in the world.’ Or possibly Curt Hoffman (Robert Hardy) in ‘A Memory of Evil’ in
The Baron
, a neo-Nazi whose ambitions might seem to make him a candidate for the presidency of the European Union: ‘The whole of Europe. A dozen countries, all scrambling for the seats in the halls of power. If they were one country, with one leader, then they would have enough manpower and resources to conquer the world.’ There were to be more such figures to come, but never was the character manifest in such pure, unadorned form as Davros.

All of this is building towards the climactic scene in the final episode. The Doctor places explosives in Davros’s laboratory, with the intention of destroying the genetically mutated Kaleds who will become the Daleks, but then hesitates over whether to detonate the charge. ‘Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other and that’s it: the Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations can live without fear, in peace, and never even know the word “Dalek”.’ As Davros has correctly identified, the possession of a conscience brings with it moral uncertainty. ‘If I kill, wipe out a whole intelligent life-form, then I become like them. I’d be no better than the Daleks.’ He spells out the dilemma in its simplest form: ‘If someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?’ The quandary is resolved when he is distracted from his task and a Dalek subsequently passes over the wires, making the connection that detonates the explosives. As Tom Baker pointed out: ‘It’s the villains exploding them-selves because, of course, the moral hero which I play can never actually press the button. He just sets up a situation in which they actually take the decision because good conquers evil in melodrama. It’s not like in real life.’

But there are sufficient numbers of Daleks already in existence to ensure that the race will survive, and as the Thal forces blow up the entrance to the bunker, sealing the creatures inside, the creations turn on their creator in time-honoured fashion, apparently killing Davros himself. Through a television monitor, the Daleks are seen accepting their fate in the sure and certain knowledge of their survival: ‘We are entombed, but we live on. This is only the beginning. We will prepare. We will grow stronger. When the time is right, we will emerge and take our rightful place as the supreme power of the universe.’ Unusually for
Doctor Who
, the story ends on a note of failure. The Doctor had been sent to prevent the emergence of the Daleks, and the best he has managed to do has been to delay them a little, by no more than a thousand years in his own estimation. As a rule,
Doctor Who
opted for happy endings, for the restoration of normality after the removal of a deadly threat; here there was simply a temporary cessation of hostilities.

The bleakness of the ending was fully in keeping with a serial that had been resolutely downbeat for much of its course. Suitably exercised by the third episode, Mary Whitehouse wrote publicly to the BBC to complain about the story: ‘Such was the level of violence that I believe this particular episode should not have been screened before 9 pm. It is difficult to imagine the effect it must have had on any pliable mind under the age of fourteen.’

As ever in the six-part serials, there is a certain flabbiness around the middle, sequences of action that detract from rather than augment the main story. And there are absurdities that have to be endured for the sake of the plot. We are expected to believe that the main Kaled and Thal cities are still, after a thousand years of war, linked by a network of service ducts, allowing the Doctor and his companions (and even Davros) to pass between the two with the same ease that Biggles’s arch-enemy, Erich von Stalhein, displayed when moving between German and British camps in
Biggles Flies East
(1935). There is also an unfortunate encounter with some giant clams, the fruits of one of Davros’s experiments. Despite the flaws, however, the great majority of the serial works splendidly, eclipsing not only the recent Dalek adventures but also the classic stories from the 1960s.

It also contradicted entirely the history of the Daleks as seen in previous television serials and elsewhere. In the 1960s comic strips, the equivalent of the Kaleds, though they were not given that name, were short humanoid figures with blue skin, and the scientist who created the machines was named Yarvelling. An alternative account of the origins was offered by Nation in ‘We Are the Daleks!’, a short story he contributed to a
Radio Times
special, published to mark the tenth anniversary of
Doctor Who
in 1973; here alien scientists were said to have taken early humans to a planet named Ameron, accelerated their evolution and created from them the Daleks.

None of this related to ‘Genesis’. But then
Doctor Who
was not at this stage particularly obsessed with consistency. Explaining the programme’s attitude, Terrance Dicks cited the maxim ‘history is what you can remember’, from the anti-history textbook
1066 and All That
by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, commenting: ‘Continuity on
Doctor Who
was what I could remember of the past and what future script editors could remember about what I’d done.
Star Trek
, I believe, had a bible, in which everything was laid down. We never did that on
Who.
There are varying accounts of almost everything. And I really don’t care. I always say: if they’re asking questions about inconsistencies, the show’s not good enough. They shouldn’t have time to think about that.’ Of course, he was quite right; the discrepancies made no difference to viewers’ entertainment, and this new account of the origin of the species became happily accepted as the correct version.

Reinvigorated by the possibilities opened up by ‘Genesis’, Nation was quick to talk up his creatures to the press, suggesting that he hadn’t entirely abandoned his dream of a stand-alone series. ‘I see no limit to their lifespan,’ he enthused. ‘I would think that it’s possible the Daleks could survive even beyond
Doctor Who.
This is something we’ve talked about: if he ever runs out of steam the Daleks could have a programme of their own.’ The passion wasn’t shared by others on
Doctor Who.
In keeping with their dislike of the creatures, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes next commissioned a non-Dalek story from Nation, which became ‘The Android Invasion’, screened later in 1975. Before that was broadcast, however, he had finally realised his long ambition to see a credit that read: ‘Series created by Terry Nation’.