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| The most fearsome creature in the universe is known for its love of setting off the fire alarm and toilet papering houses. |
Dalek
(Serial 1.6. One Episode, 30th April 2005.)
Which One Is This? To the general public and to long-standing fans, the return of the Daleks. Or, at least, one Dalek. To newcomers, the one where the Doctor inexplicably freaks out at a robotic salt shaker.
Firsts and Lasts: In new series terms, it’s the first appearance of the Daleks, the first story set in the near future, the first time the TARDIS is pulled off course, the first earthbound story set outside the UK, and the first mention of the Doctor having two hearts. It’s also the first new series appearance of the Cybermen, albeit not one that “counts.” In overall terms it’s the first appearance of quasi-companion Adam Mitchell, the first appearance of the Davies-era Dalek design, and the first time on television that they’ve been voiced by Nicholas Briggs. Visible only to fans, it’s the first time a story from the wilderness years has been reworked for television. And to the general public, it’s the first time that Daleks ever climbed stairs, since nobody ever actually saw Remembrance of the Daleks. And for production personnel, it’s the first of three stories directed by Joe Ahearne.
Two Things to Notice About Dalek
1. The list of debuts masks the fact that, more than any other story so far, this one is crafted to work simultaneously on two levels. To established fans - which is to say anybody reading this - the obvious focus is the perversity of the Dalek doing things like having its eyestalk droop in sadness while it says “I am alone…”, while Eccleston’s performance, while solid, is nothing less than they’d expect from this Doctor meeting the Daleks. To new audiences - and they do exist - what’s striking is in fact the Doctor goes completely unhinged here, and begins torturing what appears to be a trapped robot. The effect is similar either way - a sense that fundamental rules are being broken and that something very wrong is happening here.
{What are the Metafictional Alchemical Resonances of Dalek’s Psychochronographic Emboitments?
Dalek is haunted by the series’ past. “The stuff of nightmares reduced to an exhibit.” It’s telling that the Cybermen, i.e. the inadequate second rate Daleks, actually make their first new series appearance before the Daleks do. The Daleks are not just symbolic of their usual connotations, but of the still-lurking terror of what the series was. Van Statten represents the way in which Doctor Who and its past were generally considered, particularly in the 1990s. He’s an egotistical, overly privileged asshole who collects Doctor Who props without understanding the beauty of any of them. He’d probably give you that life-sized Dalek prop he owns in exchange for a missing episode. (But see The Lore for other people with their own personal Daleks.)
So the Dalek emerges out of the series’ dead past. And, of course, it signifies the Time War. This is first and foremost a metaphor for the series’ cancellation; the traumatic event that separates the classic series from the new. The Dalek is what has festered in the wound of the series’s diseased past. They are death and narrative collapse, yes, but they are also simply nostalgia: the past. The Doctor, when confronted with them, becomes a fairly straightforward action hero with a BFG. That is to say, he becomes a normative, Americanized action hero of the sort that people might have expected out of a big epicked-out production of Doctor Who. “Lock and load” indeed.
This is narrative collapse. The Doctor, in order to survive, has to kill off the two symbolic poles of the classic series: the Time Lords and the Daleks. Or, put another way, in order to emerge from its collapse into the cult ghetto it has to abandon the apparent premises of the show, jettisoning them for lift as it tries to flee its dying universe. And this past is ultimately dropped in the form of a giant parody of what people expected Doctor Who to be. This is, of course, the big joke of the Time War: it’s crap. It’s unfilmable and untellable. It’s the archetypal wilderness years story in that regard. The Time War is The Ancestor Cell and Lungbarrow and Zagreus and the Leekley draft. It’s every awful piece of fanfic ever. (And it echoes within the story in the Dalek-kills-everyone sequences, done as cod-Terry Nation, which, in a sort of Doctor Who version of Poe’s Law, distinguishable from the real thing only in that it has no disease weapons.)}
2. It is adapted from Shearman’s Big Finish audio Jubilee, one of the more acclaimed pieces from the wilderness years. In fact all of the writers on the first series were veterans from the wilderness years to some extent, highlighting the extent to which those years really were formative and influential on the new series. Both Shearman and Cornell were hired specifically to recreate their wilderness years work, although Cornell, unlike Shearman, was not tasked with adapting a specific script. In practice Jubilee and Dalek are radically different stories, with only the central image of a lone, chained Dalek and a few of the Dalek’s more cutting remarks being retained. The new frame of Van Statten and his bunker was Davies’s invention.
The Continuity
The Doctor. Definitely a bit odd in this episode. He’s initially curious and game for helping out a stranded alien, but quickly turns into an angry and terrifying persona the likes of which we’ve never seen, at least in the new series, and rarely in the classic series. Savvy with computers, he seems not to need any introduction to the base’s security systems. Has a frighteningly thorough knowledge of alien technology, and is able to identify at a glance any alien object that’s shown to him.
Ethics. Surprisingly brusque. The Doctor has few thoughts or qualms about getting a very large gun and trying to kill the Dalek, and it’s only Rose’s appalled intervention that pulls him back. Lucky escape, given that he willingly sacrificed Rose in an attempt to stop the Dalek, though he thinks better of it when given a second chance to make the decision. [This is fairly obviously a special case of it being a Dalek.] He also, obviously, took extreme actions in the War. [This is pitched pretty explicitly as an extreme measure justified by the sheer horror of the war - a point that’s made absolutely explicit in later stories, particularly The End of Time.] Perhaps most intriguingly, the Doctor shows what sounds almost like empathy for the Dalek’s ideology, taking care to explain how it thinks to both Van Statten and Rose. The Dalek, tellingly, suggests that he would make a good Dalek. Interestingly, the event that sparks this observation on the Dalek’s part is the Doctor attempting to order it to kill itself.
Background. The Doctor is finally revealed as the one who destroyed Gallifrey, where previously he had appeared to be a witness to it. Simultaneously he wiped out all of the Daleks, or at least tried to. The experience has clearly traumatized him. [In marked contrast to his attempted genocide of the Daleks in 25.1 Remembrance of the Daleks, though this is perhaps mainly due to the genocide of his own species.] The climactic event is described as everything “burning.”
The Supporting Cast
Rose. Quickly takes up the Doctor role in trying to help the poor tortured alien, showing the extent to which this is becoming normal for her. Traveling through time has apparently altered her DNA, but we’ll leave that rather remarkable event for Things That Don’t Make Sense. She visibly fancies Adam, but in a way that seems based largely on showing him up.
{What are the Metafictional Alchemical Resonances of Dalek’s Psychochronographic Emboitments?
And so we lose everything that ostensibly made Doctor Who into Doctor Who - all the mythos and lore. That doesn’t mean we start fresh - erasure is not the same as non-existence. We start with the ghosts of the past throughout the series. And, of course, we start with what we might call its true premise - its cultural role. This is an oddity of the wilderness years - if you asked any of us to explain the premise of Doctor Who we start with crap like “Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous,” all of which comes years into the program. If we actually start from An Unearthly Child its all Susan and mysteries. We never just did “there’s a man with a magic box, and he can travel anywhere.” And that’s what the new series does - it starts from there, albeit haunted by the ghosts of the accreted and slain premise.
Tellingly we replicate the exact structure of the classic series. The fifth episode of the new series is World War Three, ending with the sight of this strange new monster. The sixth is Dalek. These two episodes match “The Dead Planet” and “The Survivors” perfectly - a tease of the Daleks at the end of week five, the actual things as unknowable horrors in week six. We’re symbolically recrafting the beginning of the series itself, recreating the actual incantations that created this thing. The Daleks at once come out of the repressed traumas of the past series and come out of the very fabric of the thing.
We even recreate the beats of it. Within Dalek we first see a Dalek from within its own perspective, exactly like we do when it menaces Barbara at the end of “The Dead Planet.” But there’s a horror within this - as there should be, really. The scene of Barbara being threatened by the unseen thing in unsettling. As is first seeing a Dalek from its own perspective as it screams in agony. The screaming Dalek is a significant detail in part because it highlights the way in which the Daleks are themselves horrifying. At first the entire substance of a Dalek is auditory - a robotic, incoherent shriek.
Because, of course, the Daleks are the thing that can’t be erased from the series. Even when they’re deleted from the episode they persist, albeit in the cheeky and surely never making it to the screen title Absence of the Daleks. The fact that the episode is obviously a rewritten Jubilee means that the Daleks’ presence would always have haunted it. The Toclafane draft would have failed not, I suspect, because of anything Shearman did (by appearances he was doing them in the vein of The Holy Terror as a creepy and evil child monster, which is right up his alley), but because any monster in there was going to be the Latter Day Cybermen: the monster that are there only because Terry Nation got a bit stroppy. From the grave.}
Adam. Thinks himself a genius. [Not enough of one that UNIT thinks him worth hiring.] Doesn’t actually evince any interest in going to space on his own - it’s more or less entirely projected onto him by Rose.
The TARDIS. Is drawn off course by a signal emitted by the Daleks. [Presumably some thing related to the Time War - either TARDISes being set to track down Daleks or Daleks having developed TARDIS-derailing weapons, although if either were the case it’s a bit of a surprise that the Doctor doesn’t recognize it. Perhaps he just considers it unthinkable that a Dalek could survived.]
The Non-Humans
The Daleks. Have been redesigned, and apparently acquired a wealth of new tricks. Several seem unique to this model: the swiveling midsection, the Matrix-like bullet stopping, and the enhanced plunger are all one-shots. [This is the only Dalek we ever meet that was built for the Time War. Daleks for those purposes were built to “advanced” specifications that prior and future models don’t have.] We’re back to Daleks defined by an obsession with racial purity, which actually follows up nicely from their last appearance. The “Dalek bumps” on its casing appear to be a self-destruct mechanism. [They’re more likely some further sort of weapon that the Dalek has opted to turn against itself - this was, at least, Shearman’s intention.]
The Cybermen. Just the one - a severed head in a display case. It’s in Revenge of the Cybermen livery - subtly different from the livery in The Invasion. The label on the case - unreadable in the actual episode - says that it was found in the London sewer in 1975. [This is presumably meant to be The Invasion - 1975 is the date that BBC continuity announcers and the Radio Times picked for that story. Those dates are next to unsupportable by the episode itself, but the intent is clear enough. That said, it is the wrong head, and this may be more easily traced to an unseen adventure.] It’s “stone dead,” and the Doctor seems surprised to see it. [This and the fact that the new series eventually provides a new origin for the Cybermen suggests that the Mondasian set may have perished. Then again, if it is from The Invasion he may just be surprised to see an artifact from such an old adventure - he does comment on how he’s getting old.]
The Slitheen. Rose confidently identifies a Slitheen claw in another case. [More straightforward - this is presumably a bit of carnage left-over from the end of World War Three. Though there’s no reason it couldn’t be some other Raxicoricofallapatorian family. The display case is illegible and not, in this case, offered in close-up by the BBC as a promotional image.]
Other Exhibits. Secondary sources suggest that the exhibit opposite the Cyberman is a decayed Sea Devil (see 9.3 The Sea Devils), and that the large object seen in wide shots is a Mechanoid (see 2.8 The Chase). [The former is plausible, while the latter would require both a major redesign of the Mechanoids and a heck of a missing adventure.]
History
Dating. We’re told it’s 2012. It must be early in the year, as Van Statten speaks of replacing the President, and, more importantly, debates between a Republican or a Democrat, suggesting that he intends to unseat the President during the primary season. [The possibility that a third party candidate won in 2008 can be discounted on the grounds of what is very obviously Barack Obama appearing in The End of Time.]
[But there’s a much larger issue here, which is that nobody knows what a Dalek is despite their rather massive mid-2008 invasion in The Stolen Earth. Eventually that invasion got retconned out of existence in Victory of the Daleks, but that’s a function of Series Five’s plot. Still, it seems to provide the best explanation here, suggesting that the big rewrite of history actually takes place at a definite time.
The fact that Van Statten doesn’t know anything about the Daleks also throws open questions as to his relationship with UNIT, as their records from Day of the Daleks could also prove significant. Certainly he clearly has some UNIT connections, having obtained at least two if not three artifacts from UNIT stories (depending on whether you buy the Sea Devil claim). But that knowledge doesn’t extend to basic details like knowing what the Cybermen are - the case doesn’t identify a species. More to the point, he doesn’t know who the Doctor is. The suggestion is that Van Statten got access to a set of UNIT artifacts, but not to any essential databases of information. Adam’s comment about the stuff the UN tries to keep quiet, however, hints at some awareness of what’s going on.]
Wi-fi is based on technology found in the Roswell spacecraft. [Surely this is just some detail of transmission and antennas, as the alternative would require that networking technology be found on an alien spacecraft, which immediately raises the question of what the network was connected to and how anybody understood it. Interestingly, the Doctor is able to casually identify the Roswell spacecraft, which suggests that whatever happened he was involved in it.]
The Analysis
Where Does This Come From? In the most literal sense, it comes from Jubilee, the 2003 audio play Robert Shearman wrote for Big Finish, and which he was explicitly hired by Davies to rework for television. Jubilee’s plot featured lots of perverse Dalek moments, several of which are lifted directly for Dalek (the Dalek’s obsession with orders, the idea of one lone and mad Dalek, and the equation of the Doctor and the Daleks most notably), but it also featured an elaborate plot involving the British empire and time paradoxes, all of which is cut out of this. It also featured Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres as a psychotic couple straight out of Eastern European absurdism (think Ionesco’s The Chairs, for instance).
This is a subtler link, as Dalek features nothing overt in that direction. You can see the legacy of it in scenes like the exaggerated cruelty of Van Statten, or, perhaps most obviously, in the basic focus on perversity and strangeness. (And, perhaps most obviously, in the fact that the final scene basically takes place in a bare set with a single spotlight) But this is very much the tradition Shearman, as a playwright, comes out of. What’s key to realize is that this is yet another instance of Doctor Who subsuming past traditions of television; televised plays were the bread and butter of the BBC for years in timelots like Play For Today. It’s a style that’s intersected Doctor Who before - it’s also the tradition Philip Martin came out of in the 1980s, and was one of the first traditions Doctor Who drew on, coming to it right after the Daleks when it did a two-episode bottle story with The Edge of Destruction. British theater, and particularly televised theater, draws heavily from two main theatrical traditions: the social realism of things like Cathy Come Home and the absurdist tradition, which is what Dennis Potter really comes out of.
Both of these are extremely political traditions - Play for Today was aggressively so, and Dalek, in that regard, is no different. The American setting and the Dalek being tortured makes this in part a clear meditation on American foreign policy, and specifically the bits of it that involved torturing people. The important thing to note here is that the torture is absolutely useless. Even though the Dalek is, in fact, a monstrous killer it doesn’t have any useful information to give, and there’s nothing to gain by torturing it. In this regard it’s both socially current and cynically absurd.
The two traditions are instructive in part because the social realist tradition is very much the one Eccleston came out of. This is the first time in the new series that Eccleston’s Doctor has appeared in the sort of thing that viewers might have expected him to be in, albeit with deeply strange co-stars. The scenes between him and the Dalek are, for all their seeming perversity, oddly exactly what you’d expect Eccleston to be doing on television, only, you know, with a depressed robot. It’s been easy to ignore as Eccleston has previously flitted between mania and anguish, but the link to a tradition of plays lets Eccleston uncover a new facet of his Doctor that is at once a radical break and an obvious extension of the character.
Van Statten, meanwhile, is blatantly out of The X-Files. Davies intended him as a Bill Gates parody named Will Fences, but Shearman smoothed him over into the 1% parody that made it to the screen. All of the trappings are there - the fuzzy cyberthriller elements, the idea that there’s a secret owner of the Internet, and the pate of sci-fi americana, most obviously in the invocation of Roswell. But in this case The X-Files are largely standing in for something else: the legacy of the series, and particularly its equation with 90s cult sci-fi. It would be going a hair too far to suggest that this is taking aim directly at the X-Files inflected TV movie, but only a hair. But it’s telling that the first place we really encounter the series’ past en masse is in a story that allows for it to be compared to the American cult shows that everybody assumed that Doctor Who was. In this regard it’s telling that trivia about the past such as the fact that the Doctor has two hearts is, quite literally, torture to hear about.
But more than anything this comes from the generation of fandom that discovered portions of the classic series in hindsight, and the way in which they re-evaluated old stories and upended the Peter Haining-authorized received wisdom. The story’s central inspiration - Daleks behaving perversely - is the creation of David Whitaker (one of the most theatrical of the classic series’ writers) in Power of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks. But appreciating that fact required the release of audios and reconstructions of those two stories, as opposed to just trusting the program guides and the Nation-estate approved John Peel novelizations - ones that overtly tried to “correct” Whitaker’s supposed misunderstanding of the Daleks.
Dalek cribs from Power of the Daleks repeatedly and on the level of individual shots - the fussing over a lone Dalek in the lab, for instance, and the manipulativeness of the Dalek (where the story has its cake and eats it too, remaining ambivalent on whether the Dalek is tricking Rose into freeing it or is, in fact, being completely sincere) are all right out of that story. As is the basic fun of having Daleks say terribly inappropriate things. All of this is a very specific engagement with bits of the program’s past that are obscure even to fandom. This isn’t the Spotters Guide version of the Troughton Dalek stories (which lumped them in with all the other “classic” Troughton monster stories), but rather one based on rescuing the past of the program from its fans. Given this, it’s revealing that the Dalek’s big rampage is a shameless Terry Nation parody.
The Doctor as last of the Time Lords, on the other hand, is so blatantly Obi-Wan Kenobi as the last of the Jedi that it hurts.
{What are the Metafictional Alchemical Resonances of Dalek’s Psychochronographic Emboitments?
Which, in point of fact, is the case. The Time Lords may be disposable - realism suggests that eventually someone is going to get lazy enough to bring them back, but that point can be deferred indefinitely. But the Daleks are, in fact, essential to the series. They are the series’ second launch, and, more to the point, are the one that worked. The Daleks got ratings high enough that the series survived, initially on a production model of “we’ll make a bunch of weird crap nobody’s going to like and subsidize it with twelve weeks of extermination per year.”
That makes it sound worse than it is. It’s not that the Daleks are bad. They’re actually an absolutely lovely premise. Because they’re so gloriously simple. All monsters are in fact attempts to complicate the glorious straightforwardness of the Daleks as a premise: things that want to kill you. That’s the whole concept. They’re things. They want to kill you. No matter what you add to it, that’s what they come down to. You can have them steal the Earth to drive it around as a giant spaceship, but they’ll still just be doing it to kill you.
The Dalek is not merely fascist but singular - an absolute unity and coherence. It is ontological in its homicidal tendencies: a fixed point in narrative. In this regard it gestures towards narrative collapse - a familiar structure for Davies. Look at how Rose performs her usual “disrupt the narrative” function, running through the military scenes. And, most obviously, when she finally applies the age-old extra-diegetic trick of running up stairs. But equally, the Dalek simply rejects the disruption and levitates because its narrative structure is the one narrative structure that simply cannot be disrupted: death.}
Things That Don’t Make Sense. It’s played as a joke within the episode, but explaining how Van Statten’s ownership of the Internet works is difficult. The Dalek’s instantaneous absorption of the enter Internet is physically impossible with any existent storage and transmission protocols: there’s nothing that can shift exabytes of data in seconds. [We might assume that Van Statten has alien technology-based storage media working, and that the entire Internet is secretly hosted out of a bunker in Utah. But this can’t be true either; surely if the entire Internet is based in this bunker they’re not just going to seal it up with cement and abandon it.] Also, as Lawrence Miles has pointed out, the Dalek spends the overwhelming majority of the story full of pornography. Whether this counts as something that doesn’t make sense is largely a personal matter.
Similarly baffling is the Dalek getting through the keypad lock. First of all, it’s a mechanical lock. The Dalek’s plunger appears to be physically pushing buttons, which can only be done so fast without superheating the buttons from all the friction and just blowing the lock up. The lock also engages in that classic incompetent security tendency of confirming partial guesses on the combination. And what kind of lock doesn’t shut you out after five failed attempts? [The Dalek is presumably hacking the lock in some fashion, but the CGI of the plunger pushing buttons is weirdly misleading in this regard.] We also might ask why it’s just assumed the Dalek can’t get through the bulkhead, given that you apparently have to hit an enter key.
We addressed it fleetingly in The Continuity, but how Van Statten’s relationship to existing authority works is puzzling. He’s powerful enough to select the President, but knows nothing about UNIT or alien invasions, and in fact seems to have been singularly unable to recruit any of the vast number of British personnel who know anything about UNIT. This despite having the entire Internet, which, as we found out just last story, has considerable details about UNIT. Some of this is clearly willful ignorance - Van Statten is, among other things, a Bush parody - but any theory that attempts to fit Van Statten into the larger narrative of Doctor Who is going to involve ignoring something.
So, let’s talk about extrapolating the DNA of a time traveller, shall we? The prospect that travel in the TARDIS actually reshapes your DNA is unnerving, although the link between DNA and the TARDIS is made repeatedly in the classic series. But what’s really strange is that whatever it is that’s in Rose’s DNA is a power source such that the Dalek could regenerate itself when previous things, including raw electricity (which the Dalek later drains) don’t do it. So what does the Dalek get out of Rose? [Lawrence Miles’s theory of biodata seems like it should work here, but suggests that the Dalek in some fashion eats Rose’s future, a theory with difficult implications for the rest of her tenure as companion.]
Critique. The title says everything. Dalek. Just the one, singular and inviolate. The basic trick of this story - making the Daleks terrifying by having just one of them be the scariest monster Doctor Who has ever seen. This, in turn, is accomplished by making them the most perverse monster Doctor Who has ever seen. For long-standing fans and those who know what a Dalek is, this is a factor of the way in which the Dalek acts wrong and spits out all sorts of disturbing suggestions like that the Doctor would make a good Dalek. For new audiences it’s the fact that the Doctor is so unhinged by this monster such that even when crippled and bound it terrifies him. Either way the message is chillingly effective, establishing this thing as a fundamental threat like no other story.
All of this works, and works compellingly. Eccleston is on fire here, putting in more of an effort than he ever has before or, actually, ever will again. The scene in which he discovers what’s in the vault is in many ways the definitive one of his tenure, and single-handedly justifies, not that any justification is needed, why casting a real actor as the Doctor makes sense. Nicholas Briggs is never so happy as when he gets to recreate classic monster voices in perverse ways. And Piper has the confidence to play her role as someone who really has no idea what the Daleks are about, which is a difficult task in a story where everything else is screaming out how iconic these monsters are.
There are flaws - the supporting characters are silly and childish where Jubilee’s were sick and twisted. This means that the texture of the world isn’t up to the weight of what it has to portray. Much of the episode is trying mightily to be adult absurdist drama that happens to feature an evil salt shaker, but every time Van Statten has to do anything the air goes out of the story. But this is a nitpick: the point of the story are the scenes where the Doctor and the Dalek confront each other, and they’re glorious.
The problem comes in basically any other scene. Which unfortunately make up an awful lot of the episode. In these sequences it is not the lone, terrifying monster but a representative of an entire race. The magic tricks - climbing stairs and actually suckering someone to death - are good fun for the public, but the fact remains that they’re there to cover the fact that the sight of Daleks casually slaughtering things are not actually the gripping television that people imagine.
All of which is to say that far from establishing the Daleks for a new generation, this story marks their high water mark. No attempt to portray the Daleks since has risen to this level because in practice the role of the Daleks isn’t to provide perverse literary psychodrama, it’s to exterminate stuff. Subsequent attempts to make them crazy and dangerous don’t work nearly as well because this is the only time we have sufficient question marks over the nature of the show, the Daleks, and the Doctor to get away with it.
But the fact that it can never again be repeated is not in and of itself an argument against doing it. If anything it’s the braver option. Dalek has the same relationship to Rose that “The Survivors” has to “An Unearthly Child,” providing a second launch for the series - something that Davies deliberately structured the series for, fighting adamantly against executives who insisted the Daleks should appear in the first episode.
So yes, this is the peak of the Daleks and they become predictable afterwards. But no more than the way in which the austere metal things that lurked in the abandoned city on Skaro became the familiar exterminating pepper pots that everybody wanted for Christmas. Unlike The Daleks itself, this still works years later, and it’s tough to imagine it losing its punch entirely, simply because it has that secondary structure of being unnerving because of our familiarity with the Daleks. It may only be possible within the context of the series’ relaunch, but it nevertheless makes itself the definitive Dalek story in a fundamentally durable way.
The Facts
Written by Robert Shearman. Directed by Joe Ahearne. Ratings: 8.6m (15th for the week). Audience appreciation was 84%, a series high.
Supporting Cast. Steven Beckingham (Polkowski), Corey Johnson (Henry van Statten), Anna-Louise Plowman (Goddard), Bruno Langley (Adam), Nigel Whitmey (Simmons), John Schwab (Bywater), Jana Carpenter (De Maggio), Joe Montana (Commander), Barnaby Edwards (Dalek Operator), Nicholas Briggs (Dalek Voice).
Working Titles. Absence of the Daleks (see The Lore), Creature of Lies
Cliffhangers. Cold open of soldiers surrounding the Doctor and Rose and readying their weapons. Lead-in to the next episode features Adam Mitchell leaving in the TARDIS, but no active cliffhanger.
What Was In The Charts. Tony Christie featuring Peter Kay, “(Is This The Way To) Amarillo”; Bodyrockers, “I Like the Way”; Will Smith, “Switch”; Caesars, “Jerk it Out”; Nine Inch Nails “The Hand That Feeds.”
Hey, Isn’t That…
Bruno Langley. The episode’s big celebrity guest star, best known for playing Todd Grimshaw on Coronation Street, where he was the first openly gay character. Those attentive to the overall themes of this project will recognize the humor in Rose getting a boyfriend who’s actually from a soap opera, but who is probably just not that into her.
Anna-Louise Plowman. Recognizable for a several year stint on Holby City, but if we’re being honest she’s probably more familiar to the sorts of people who will read this for a seven-episode set of appearances in Stargate SG-1.
Nicholas Briggs. The Daleks are, of course, voiced by Nicholas Briggs, man about town for countless Big Finish productions and occasional writer and director of them, but who has made quite a career in the new series as the go-to voice of all of the monsters.
{What are the Metafictional Alchemical Resonances of Dalek’s Psychochronographic Emboitments?
And so their irreducibility from the narrative is oddly satisfying because they are themselves irreducible. If you had something as oversignified as the Cybermen as your irreducible monster you’d be up a creek. But the Daleks are gloriously well-suited to this. They work as a haunting and unkillable menace within the overall structure of Doctor Who - the point where complete and nihilistic oblivion is situated within the narrative, a gravity that the TARDIS is endlessly trying to escape.
We might try to imagine an alternate version of Dalek - not the doomed Absence of the Daleks, but one in which it was the last word on the classic series. The Daleks are finally dead, we know what killed them and the Time Lords, and while we’re left with the Doctor’s guilt over the Time War we aren’t actually left with any clear reason why we have to revisit the Time War. But, of course, nobody seriously thought the Daleks weren’t going to come back again. They’d been reintroduced to the premise. Such that it’s not, in fact, that the Doctor committed genocide against the Time Lords and the Daleks so much as that he used a part of his own narrative premise to destroy a second rotting part of it. The Daleks become, in other words, the series’ autoimmune system - a narrative force whose presence forces the series to clean out the debris of its past. They become the agent of the series’ regenerations. As, fittingly, they were in the series’ first regeneration, which, again, this story is blatantly modeled upon.
But what saves it from narrative collapse is, of course, Rose. Look at the final scene. Between Murray Gold’s decision to pick music that, as most of his music does, forces the audience to feel a particular way and the fact that he picks a feeling that is utterly, diametrically at odds with the script it becomes the most perverse thing in the episode. On the one hand it’s shot theatrically - bare stage, single spot - and is done as an aggressively bleak piece about a dying and irredeemable fascist. On the other, it’s scored and edited as a love scene, right down to the hilarious shot of the Dalek reaching a single tentacle out to Rose. It’s Daleks mashed up with the emotional excess of soaps or, if we want to go more cinematically, Titanic. The Dalek tries to absorb a Doctor Who companion and gets EastPowellEstate. Fatally.
And this is the true exchange of the Time War. It’s not just that the Doctor uses the Daleks to amputate a gangrenous limb of the series, but that the series regenerates, gaining access to the emotional tools of soap operas as part of its narrative bag of tricks. This is the central problem the Time Lords always had - they were, as a premise, rather bigger on the outside. Instead we get the business of depicting people, a subject with virtually limitless interiority.}
The Lore
- The Cyberman was inserted at the insistence of Julie Gardner. Shearman was originally going to do a museum entirely of new series monsters, which was, actually, a fairly limited set of options. This is characteristic of the series at large in this period - all of the writers save Davies were nervous about references to the past and prone to treating it like a de facto reboot. The torture scene was also Julie Gardner’s request, as she felt the episode was a bit too macho and wanted a shirtless Eccleston in it.
- Shearman’s difficulty in adapting Jubilee to television hinged in part on the fact that Jubilee was based around the problem of overfamiliarity with the Daleks, whereas Dalek is about introducing them fresh. Shearman took this to extremes, attempting to get through the entire episode without naming the Daleks, and wanting to call it The Creature of Lies. Davies was unimpressed with this approach. Shearman’s earlier drafts also, like Jubilee, focused extensively on the supporting cast, taking much of the episode for the Dalek to be released. Davies was, again, unimpressed.
- It was not clear how much violence the BBC would allow in the Saturday teatime slot these days, and at one point Shearman was trying to have a Dalek that only stunned people. Later he went to the other extreme, having the sucker death involving violently throwing Simmons around and burning off his face.
- Shearman didn’t expect Eccleston to play the Doctor so monstrously, having expected more brash and self-aware bravado in the performance. Eccleston loved the cellar scene, buttonholing Briggs and rehearsing it over lunch. Eccleston viewed the scene as a Holocaust survivor confronting a Nazi, which alarmed Briggs with its seriousness. Eccleston’s focus on the Doctor’s monstrosity is also responsible for the wad of spit on his lip at one point, which he insisted on keeping in.
- Over the fourteen drafts of the script many things changed. Originally there was more of a focus on the Van Stattens as a family, with Van Statten having a wife and Adam being their kid. The entire supposed motivation for torturing the Dalek was to be to get it to say “Happy Birthday” to Van Statten. Other drafts featured Van Statten mutating into a Dalek. The only item to remain in every draft was the “hair dryer” joke.
- Shearman was coming off a not entirely pleasant experience on Born and Bred, and had decided he wasn’t going to do TV besides his own concepts. His agent thus dutifully turned down the offer to write Doctor Who. Shearman was quick to get it straightened out.
- One of the big tabloid stories in the lead-up to the new series was caused when an extra on this story leaked a photo of the new Dalek design to the redtops. It's possible to have him pointed out to you at conventions, particularly if you remember that he got paid more than most of the people working on the episode and buy them a drink accordingly.
- Shearman was told that, when doing publicity material, he had to pretend the stairs scene was the first time the Dalek climbed stairs, which distressed him, since he’d nicked it from Remembrance of the Daleks. This isn’t the only lift from the McCoy era - Shearman notes that the structure of “trying to get to the surface” came from Paradise Towers. The scene where the Doctor yells at Van Statten about the stars, meanwhile, was pinched from The West Wing, specifically “Galileo.”
- Shearman viciously resisted notes from the BBC insisting that the Dalek be humanized in the final scene, proclaiming Rose its friend. Shearman was adamant that the Dalek remain a fascist, and wanted the focus to be on how it would rather die than be like us.
- After several drafts were completed Shearman was informed that the negotiations with the Nation estate for use of the Daleks had gone poorly, and, in fact, he was going to have to come up with an entirely new story. He called upon Russell T Davies to work on ideas, and was greeted at the front door, ironically, by Davies’s own full-sized Dalek prop (later seen in Asylum of the Daleks). The Daleks were eventually re-secured in part by the quiet intervention of Steven Moffat’s mother-in-law.
- Bruno Langley was not, apparently, much of a Doctor Who fan, and did not realize until recording DVD commentary that the TARDIS was bigger on the inside, which explains how he sold Adam’s confusion over the point in the episode itself.