Image Credit: Colin Smith (CC BY-SA 2.0, Geograph)

Image Description: A 1960s-style Dalek

By Matthew Kilburn

I’ve recently started to watch Doctor Who in order from the beginning, an expedition I’d not undertaken before, while making notes as I go on Twitter using the hashtag #EarlyHoursDoctorWho. At the time of writing, I’ve just finished the second story, nowadays usually referred to as The Daleks, but which has gone by many different names. Its writer, Terry Nation, submitted his storyline under the title ‘The Survivors’. The production team at the time, when they needed an overall name for the serial, called it The Mutants (except for those few weeks when they referred to it as ‘Beyond the Sun’). The titles show that the serial was not so much about the encounter of the Doctor and his fellow-travellers with one malevolent species, but about their interplay with the peoples found on another world and their situation. The Thals are as intriguing as the Daleks, combining a level of familiarity – their banter about jealousy and double meanings feels very early 1960s coffee bar chat, if not full-blown kitchen-sink drama – with experience and history at a remove from the television audience’s. Instead, the Thals are much closer to, but crucially different from, their armoured counterparts in the city.

The defeat of the Daleks by the TARDIS team is just as much a victory for them as for the Thals, and is presented as a turning point in the history of Skaro. The capture of the Dalek city, Susan points out, gives the Thals the potential to move from an agricultural society only a few steps beyond subsistence to one capable of the high technology mass production of food. The Doctor, meanwhile, declares fertility is returning to the soil in the petrified forest. This might almost be a new Garden of Eden, but the continued presence of the city opens the possibility that it might become as illusory a paradise as that of the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. This was a comparison with contemporary resonance, following George Pal’s 1960 film adaptation of the 1895 novel.

As the Daleks die, the Thal leader Alydon announces an end to war on Skaro. William Hartnell’s Doctor comments, flatly, that ‘you’ (whether Alydon or the Thals) will have other wars to fight. Nevertheless, once back in the forest, the Doctor is more ebullient, enjoying the respect paid him by the Thals and dispensing advice despite his proclaimed reluctance to do so. Even before the Doctor says that he never gives advice, he introduces the Thals to a compensator and says that they should never learn to use it, else they end up like their ‘dead friends’ in the city. This is just a minute or two (in episode time) after Susan sings the praises of Dalek technology, especially their fruit-growing. The Doctor and Susan, from their Olympian distance, have presented the Thals with a tree of good and evil and told them to eat selectively. Given that the travellers have awakened the Thals’ curiosity, this situation seems unlikely to end well.

Displaying his most godlike perspective thus far in Doctor Who, the Doctor suggests that while he won’t see his Thal friends again, he might visit their grandchildren. He hopes to find a thriving agricultural community, but the Thals are already likely to have an alternative. They are likely to need Dalek technology for some time before they can grow sufficient crops again on their own. It’s possible to imagine them restoring the power supply, adapting to the city, and some then refusing to move out. A schism might then develop between the city-dwellers and the country folk, and within generations someone might explode a neutron bomb. The cycle begins again.

In the second episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Ian questions how the Daleks can be on Earth when he and the Doctor saw them extinguished on Skaro. The Doctor replies:

 “My dear boy, what [happened] in Skaro was a million years ahead of us in the future. What we’re seeing now is about the middle history of the Daleks.” 

The Doctor assumes the voice of narrative authority, but the viewer needn’t assume that he possesses it. Indeed, the Daleks seen in The Dalek Invasion of Earth build on hints about their future development. In The Daleks Episode Five, Barbara suggests that the Daleks will find a way to escape their city, which the Daleks confirm as an aspiration in Episode Six. Their ambition changes from recovery to expansion, during which environments will be adapted to their use. In The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Daleks can travel in any environment, rising from the riverbed, gliding across ruins and mines, and very probably climbing stairs too. The ambitions the Daleks adopted in their first story seem to have been more than fulfilled. Similarly, the Dalek scheme to adapt Earth into a world they can pilot around the universe is the height of environmental transformation. These details suggest that the Daleks seen in The Dalek Invasion of Earth might be the descendants of beings seen in The Daleks, and not, as the Doctor claimed, their forebears.

If the Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth are descended from the city-dwelling Thals proposed two paragraphs ago, they anticipate a later theme in Nation’s work. Nation’s short story for the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special (1973), ‘We Are The Daleks!’, depicts the Daleks as the result of an experiment in accelerated human evolution carried out on the planet Ameron. Away from Doctor Who, the Blakes 7 episode Terminal (1980) features brutal shaggy-haired apes known as Links, the product of an experiment in human evolution on the eponymous planet. The viewer is encouraged to think that the Links represent the ancestors of humanity, but when one of the eponymous Seven (Cally) articulates this, their antagonist Servalan replies:

 “The planet’s evolution was massively accelerated. It developed through millions of years in a very short time. The creature you saw is not what Man developed from. It is what Man will become.” 

It’s in keeping with a streak of pessimism in Nation’s work that some of the Thals we meet in The Daleks might be the progenitors of the Daleks of The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

This article is speculative, and makes no claims about authorial intent. It does, I hope, show that Doctor Who’s narratives invited viewers to bring their own interpretations at an early date, and that sometimes a textual explanation for an event might run counter to other, less direct evidence which is more in keeping with exploration of a particular story or stories’ themes. 

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