Imaginary Worlds - Behind the Daleks

Episode Date: February 22, 2018

They may not look scary to you, but the monsters on Doctor Who have scared generations of children to the point where hiding "behind the sofa" has become a meme in the UK. When I first started watching the show, I was baffled by one particular villain -- The Daleks. I didn't understand why they were The Doctor's arch nemesis, or why they were such a cultural phenomenon. After I learned more about their backstory, I began to realize that Doctor Who wouldn't work without them. Featuring Robin Bunce, Frank Collins, Nick Randell, Alyssa Franke, and cognitive scientists Deirdre Kelly and Jim Davies -- who debate whether it's worse to face a Dalek invasion or an invasion by the other big bad in the Doctor Who universe, The Cybermen. (This is the last episode in a three-part miniseries on Doctor Who.)Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky, and this is the last of my three-part series on Doctor Who, so once again I must warn you, spoilers ahead. Now, as I've mentioned before, the experience for American Doctor Who fans is very different than fans in the UK. In the 1970s, American kids really had to discover Doctor Who on their own. Some stations played it late at night, and so some of the first fans here were actually college students. Even today, BBC America plays new episodes at 9 o'clock, which is very much adult prime time. But in the UK, Doctor Who has always been a mainstream family show.

Very often, kids are introduced to Doctor Who because their parents grew up on the show and the merchandise is everywhere. And that means for a lot of kids in the UK, Doctor Who is their first experience being scared by something on television. In fact, hiding behind the sofa because of the monsters on Doctor Who is such a common experience in the UK, the phrase behind the sofa has become a meme on its own. Oh yes, to the extent that I can even remember the texture of my parents' sofa, as we say in the UK. I can even remember the texture of it to this day

because of the hiding behind it. Robin Bunce teaches culture and history at the University of Cambridge. He raised his daughter to be a Doctor Who fan and he actually found it endearing to watch her be scared by the show. in history at the University of Cambridge. He raised his daughter to be a Doctor Who fan, and he actually found it endearing to watch her be scared by the show. Unfortunately, when she was growing up, the room with our television was too small

to get behind the sofa, but she certainly buried her head in cushions. Don't worry, she is not traumatized. She is now a teenager who has cosplayed as a Doctor Who alien. But what fascinates me most about these aliens is that they're not traditionally scary looking. They're kind of campy and weird, but that doesn't make them any less effective as villains. Now, at first, the campiness was not done on purpose.

Doctor Who has never had enough money to pull off the ambitions of the writers. So they often had to come up with these low budget solutions, some of which were ingenious. on purpose. Doctor Who has never had enough money to pull off the ambitions of the writers. So they often had to come up with these low-budget solutions, some of which were ingenious, way ahead of their time. And some were laughable. Mac Rogers recaps Doctor Who on Slate, and he says the first alien that scared him as a kid came from a 1970s storyline called The Ark in Space during the Tom Baker era. A crew member on a ship realizes that he's been infected by an alien parasite called a Waren. He's got his hand in his pocket. He's hiding his affliction from people. Then when he's by himself, he pulls his hand out of his pocket to sort of show that he's turning green and slimy.

He's clearly got bubble wrap that has been painted green, wrapped all around his arm, and he's looking at it. And the actor plays the scene for complete and utter aghast body horror. Take command. Now hear me. You take command. When I was a little kid watching that scene, I was totally scared and I was totally repulsed. And I was like, oh, that is the worst fate in the universe to be turning into a Wyrin larva. I didn't know until I was an adult that that was considered like one of the great punchline scenes of all time because he pulls his hand out of his pocket and he's wearing green bubble wrap. Most of the reoccurring aliens in the show are guys wearing full body rubber suits,

like the Suntarans, who are a race of warriors with dome-shaped heads that make them look like Humpty Dumpty in spacesuits. I am Steyr, Field Major Steyr, as you would address me. And your opinion of my looks is of no interest to my program. Or the Zygons, who wear purple rubber costumes with giant cone heads covered with octopus suckers. This one they call Doctor is a threat to us. Already he has found out too much. Now since they were working with a limited budget,

the costume designers relied on a really key principle of good design. They always used basic shapes like triangles, circles, and squares. And that's why when you look at a silhouette of a Doctor Who monster, you know exactly which one it is. Now, the modern series of Doctor Who has a bigger budget, but nothing compared to like a Hollywood studio. So they've had to come up with their own ingenious low-budget solutions through editing and sound effects. My favorite is the weeping angels, which are statues that move when you're not looking at them. So a character sees a statue, looks away, looks back, and suddenly that statue is like right up in their face.

The angels are coming for you, but listen, your life could depend on this. Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They are fast, faster than you could believe. Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They are fast, faster than you could believe. Don't turn your back. Don't look away and don't blink. There are also human-looking villains as well. Most famously, the Master was a childhood friend of the Doctor that went rogue. In the modern series, the Master regenerated into a woman called Missy, and they form a closer, even more destructive bond as the only Time Lords left in the universe. And that is what makes the villains unique in Doctor Who. It's the Doctor's relationship to them. Because he doesn't want to destroy them.

He tries to reason with them, figure out what they want, and broker a deal. And if that doesn't work, he doesn't think, all right, well, luckily I've got this arsenal of weapons to fight you with. He just outsmarts them, but often spares their lives. The Twelfth Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, I think really put this best when he was breaking in a new set of companions. So how do we know this water thing is actually dangerous? Because most things are.

Oh, that's true. Why? Is everything out here evil? Hardly anything is evil, but most things are hungry. Hunger looks very like evil from the wrong end of the cutlery. Or do you think that your bacon sandwich loves you back? But there is one villain that the Doctor is afraid of, that really gets under his skin, and they are his arch nemesis. And even before I started watching Doctor Who, I mean, there were two things I knew about the show. I knew there was that blue police box he travels around in, and I knew these were his bad guys. And I even knew that this was the word they were most

famous for saying. That's right. It's the Daleks. And like the best Doctor Who villains, the Daleks are designed with simple shapes. They have a very easily recognizable silhouette. Their body looks kind of like a salt shaker that extends out in the bottom like a cheese grater. Up and down the side of the Daleks are these bumps that look like candy dots made out of chrome. Their head is a dome with a long stick jutting out like a nose, but it has a camera on the end. And their heads have these two lights on the side that, to me, look like ears. And the purpose of the lights is just to let you know which Dalek is speaking when, because they all look the same. And then coming out of its side are its two main weapons.

One is a sink plunger. The other one, I think, is an egg beater. It's not an egg beater. I'm sorry. Egg beaters look very different, although I think that might look good as a third arm, possibly. That is Nick Randall from the BBC. It reminded me they're not egg beaters. It's actually a paint roller with a foam cover pulled off.

I asked Nick Randall why the fans have strongly resisted every attempt to redesign the Daleks when all the other villains have gotten major design upgrades. Because at the end of the day that classic design has sort of terrified generations of children and the plunge I guess is a little bit obvious but then they've had it quite animated in recent series and suffocating people and all sorts of stuff. in recent series and suffocating people and all sorts of stuff. Speech is not necessary. We will extract brainwaves.

No, don't! The Daleks were baffling to me for a long time. I mean, everything else about the show I got right away. I'm actually jealous of people that got to experience certain moments in Doctor Who history when they were first broadcast. But I didn't understand why the Daleks are the Doctor's archenemy and why they're such a cultural phenomenon. So I started looking into this, and I discovered that the story of the Daleks, on screen and off screen, is surprisingly weird and complicated. And they actually do relate to some pretty scary things in the real world. In fact, you may want to hide behind the sofa for this one.

All right, so let's step into the TARDIS and go back in time again to the origin of Doctor Who right when the first show went on the air. It was November 23, 1963. And if that date sounds familiar, it's because President Kennedy was assassinated the day beforehand. People around the world were glued to their TV sets to watch the news. Nobody was watching this strange new children's show called Doctor Who on the BBC. And behind the scenes, the production was off to a really rocky start.

And they just faced about just about any challenge that you could throw at it. Alyssa Franke writes the blog Whovian Feminism, and she says the woman who was in charge of Doctor Who, Verity Lambert, had her hands full. And Verity really had to fight for the show's survival. You know, she faced a very challenging environment. She was a young Jewish woman, and she was the first producer, the first woman producer that the BBC had. And she was the first producer, the first woman producer that the BBC had.

You know, she had to fight for respect and still does. You know, that we still have to fight as a fandom to get her the respect she deserves, that she got this position based off her merits. And it's largely because of her that the show succeeded to be what it is today. The first batch of episodes were not very promising. The Doctor brought his companions to prehistoric times. They met some cavemen. The next set of episodes had to fulfill the other promise of the series. They needed to go into space and meet aliens.

And those aliens were the Daleks. Now, the Daleks used to look like humans, but they became distorted by radiation until they're nothing but a brain with an eye and tentacles. But we don't see the Daleks themselves, the actual aliens, very much, because to survive, they have to live inside these metal shells. Without radiation, the Dalek race is ended. We need it as you and the fouls need air. Now, Verity Lambert really believed in the storyline. She really put her whole career on the line for this. Her boss, Sidney Newman,

was dead set against it. In fact, their conflict was dramatized in a 2013 made-for-TV movie on the BBC called An Adventure in Space and Time. Verity Lambert was played by Jessica Raine, and Brian Cox played Sidney Newman, who was Canadian. I don't much like the way the show's going. First, goddamn cavemen. No choice. And then these Daleks. Daleks.

Exactly what I wanted to avoid. Cheap jack science fiction trash. Have you read the script? Yes. Really? Well, enough to know garbage when I see it. Jesus. Daleks.

Daleks. Whatever. Bug-eyed. They're not bug-eyed monsters. They used to be like us. Radiation has made them retreat inside these impregnable metal shells. And now they hate everything that isn't like them. All they know how to do is lash out. The doctor and his friends turn up and try to

make them see differently, to understand other people and make peace. It's good stuff. It's strong stuff, Sidney, and I really, truly believe in it. And she was right. The Daleks were a huge hit. In fact, that storyline literally saved the show. Now, Robin Bunce, who teaches history and culture at the University of Cambridge, is a big Doctor Who fan, but he's always wondered why the Daleks made the show into a cultural phenomenon. So he wrote a paper on the origin of how those episodes came together. And he says the first weird thing about the Daleks is that the writer who invented them, Terry Nation, was not a sci-fi guy. In fact, Terry Nation was a comedy writer.

As far as I understand it, Terry Nation took on the script for Doctor Who on the basis that his central heating had broken down, and therefore he needed to make some money very quickly. But there's nothing funny about the Daleks. In fact, the conventional wisdom is that Terry Nation based them on the Nazis, since he would have grown up during the London Blitz. So I started out thinking what everyone thinks, I think, which is that the Daleks are based on the Nazis. And that would make sense in the context of the show, because obviously it's a show made in Britain. And one of the myths that we have as a nation, not a founding myth,

is that we're the country that beat the Nazis. We kind of overlook the contribution made by the Americans and the Russians to that project. I'm afraid to say in Britain we kind of forget all that. So that's what I was expecting to find. But when Robin read the first script, it was clear to him that Terry Nation was not thinking about 1940.

His mind was very much in 1963. I was really interested in two things in the first script. One was the, what's the word, the petrified forest. And the other one was the reference to the neutron bomb, because I didn't really understand why Terry Nation would introduce this idea of a petrified forest. And I didn't really know what a neutron bomb was, because, you know, I was born in the 70s and no one was talking about neutron bombs in the 70s. The neutron bomb was invented by an American scientist named Samuel Cohen, who claimed that he had come up with,

quote, a sane and moral weapon that could be used as an alternative to the atomic or the hydrogen bomb. Because the neutron bomb is a supremely brilliant scientific invention, and it's an extremely brilliant solution to a series of impractical problems. The big problem with nuclear weapons is that as well as destroying your enemy, you also destroy all of the good things that your enemy has. You destroy their cities and their technology and their infrastructure. The neutron bomb is designed not to destroy matter, but it destroys organic life. In fact, that's exactly

what the doctor says in the show. Neutron bomb. Yes. It destroys all human tissues but leaves the buildings and machinery intact. And this is why Robin thinks the Daleks are scary. Not because they seem very alien, but because they were all too human. And he thinks that the Daleks really set a template for villains in Doctor Who. They're not these sort of angry, screaming barbarians. They're so rational, they have no compassion. What Terry Nation is doing is he is, in a sense, commenting on the people who had created the neutron bombs. And I think there is something that is uniquely chilling and uniquely morally evil about the neutron bomb,

which is not true of other kinds of weapons technology, if you know what I mean. You don't hear much about neutron bombs today, but we are surrounded by technology more than ever. I mean, when I look at the behavior of vicious, nasty trolls online, I feel like social media has turned people into empathy-deprived Daleks. And Robbins says Terry Nation's description of the Daleks, the actual aliens inside that metal casing, are based on a theory that H.G. Wells put forth on how human beings might evolve. Before he writes The War of the Worlds, he writes an essay called The Man of the Year a Million, in which he's imagining what human evolution is going to do between now and the year a million.

And what he thinks is that the bits of humanity which are useful are our brains and our hands. Okay, he thinks the bits of humanity which are kind of just getting in the way is the digestive system and the genitals and all of these bits. So he's imagining that as human beings get more and more, you know, evolutionarily sophisticated, the brain will enlarge and the fingers will enlarge and the other bits of our bodies which don't serve any useful function as far as H.G. Wells is concerned, although bits of our bodies which can be replaced with machines will be. So the man of a year a million, according to H.G. Wells, the final point of human evolution is something which looks very much like a Dalek creature. Back in 1963, the BBC was completely unprepared for what was going to happen.

The Daleks were not just a hit. They were a sensation. Kids were running around their neighborhoods yelling, exterminate, exterminate. We played Doctor Who. That's how much Doctor Who meant to us as children. We would go out and recreate Doctor Who. Frank Collins blogs about Doctor Who in the UK.

And I think as children as well, they are very easy to imitate. And I think that was the appeal originally when children were watching the Daleks for the first time. And it was just everywhere. They were kind of the thing you had as a toy in the 60s that you got bought for you at Christmas. One Christmas, which was called the Dalek Christmas, because they were everywhere. It's amazing how they took off. In fact, this little song hit the top of the charts in 1964. I bring you greetings from all Daleks.

I'm gonna spend my Christmas with a Dalek And hug him underneath a mistletoe And if he's very nice, I'll feed him sugar spice Now at this point, the producers of the BBC must have been kicking themselves because they did not own the full rights to the Daleks. They shared those rights with Terry Nation, the writer who came up with them. Unfortunately, the guy that actually designed the Daleks, Raymond Cusick, did not get any of the royalties from those toys, even though it was his design that the kids were so crazy about.

Meanwhile, Terry Nation went to Los Angeles, and he tried to pitch the Daleks as a monster in Hollywood movies. I guess he was thinking they could go up against all sorts of different heroes. It would have been a huge cash cow for him. But the studios weren't interested. But in the meantime, he continued to write more Dalek stories for Doctor Who. And, you know, Terry Nation has resisted any attempt to really nail down exactly where his inspiration for the Daleks came from. But he has said that during this period, a lot of people went up to him and told him that the Daleks reminded them of Nazis. And as he continued developing them through the years, they started acting more like Nazis. years, they started acting more like Nazis. They were giving Nazi salutes with their extended sink plungers, and they became fanatical about their genetic purity and racial superiority over every other species in the universe. I think the executives in Los Angeles were not interested in the Daleks because they just don't make sense outside Doctor Who.

They are the perfect nemesis for the Doctor. He thinks his way out of problems. They can't reason. He's eloquent. They're barely verbal. He's full of compassion. They're full of hatred. He is a quirky loner. They are an endless army of monsters that look and think the same. But Mac Rogers thinks that the Daleks are scary for a much simpler reason. All the actors who have been cast as the Doctor have been really good actors.

The weight of the Daleks has to be carried by the actor playing the Doctor. It's that actor's job to sell the audience on the idea that the Daleks are the worst thing in the universe. I've noticed that, actually. In fact, it's often a rite of passage for each actor playing the doctor to be utterly freaked out in a way we have not seen them yet when they have their first scene with the Dalek. Right, there's no other monster they look at

and have that same reaction of fear with. Christopher Eccleston, though, is pretty much agreed by everyone as the person who utterly aced that. He's the one who has set the bar. Now, this is back in 2005 when Doctor Who was rebooted on the BBC. The Doctor was played by Christopher Eccleston, and he's often referred to as the PTSD Doctor because he thought he had committed double genocide by wiping out the Daleks and his own people to save the universe from being sucked into an all-consuming war. And then halfway through the first season, he discovers to his horror that one Dalek made it out alive. I am a soldier. I was bred to receive orders.

Well, you're never going to get any. Not ever. I demand orders. They're never going to come. Your race is dead. You all burn, all of you. Ten million ships on fire. The entire Dalek race wiped out in one second. You lie. I watched it happen. I made it happen.

You destroyed us! Now, Eccleston made the choice to take the Nazi parallels much more literally. In fact, when he was rehearsing the scene, he told the voice actor, who was playing the Dalek, I want to play this like a concentration camp survivor confronting a Nazi. It's almost like, well, I guess that's almost over the top for Doctor Who, but he went all the way. I know what you deserve. Exterminate.

Why should I? You never did. And so inside your head, this kind of stupid-looking salt shaker with a whisk and a toilet plunger on it kind of gets transformed in your mind because of Christopher Eccleston's reaction to it. And, of course, in the end, it turns out that was not the only Dalek left in the universe because the BBC had to fight really hard with the estate of Terry Nation to get permission to use Daleks again in the new rebooted Doctor Who. And since the Daleks are the most popular villain in the show's history,

they were not going to underplay that hand. Now, as I was looking for different interpretations of the villains in Doctor Who, I came across a fascinating article by a pair of cognitive scientists at Carleton University, Deirdre Kelly and Jim Davies. In their article, they argued that each Doctor Who villain represents a different aspect of human psychology that has gone too far.

Like, here's Deirdre. I find villains to be really compelling characters because often villains are doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Now, the villains that fascinate them the most are the Cybermen. Now, they are, after the Daleks, the Doctor's second biggest enemies. Like the Daleks, the Cybermen are metal on the outside and organic on the inside. But the human body parts inside the Cybermen are just there to make the cyborg bodies run more efficiently. If the Daleks are obsessed with racial purity, the Cybermen are obsessed with self-improvement. We have been upgraded. Into what?

The next level of mankind. We are human point two. Every citizen will receive a free upgrade. You will become like us. Cybermen are my favorite too. They're not cruel. Here's Deirdre's colleague, Jim Davies. They're not some mustache-twisting villain that just wants to cause chaos and awfulness.

From a certain point of view, you can really see their point. So at one point, Deirdre, Jim, and I were discussing this really crazy episode from 2006, where the Cybermen faced off against the Daleks because they were both invading the Earth at the same time. But consider, our technologies are compatible. Together, we could upgrade the universe. You propose an alliance? This is correct. Request denied.

Hostile elements will be deleted. Next story date. And that's when our conversation took a strange turn. Even stranger than Daleks and Cybermen shooting lasers at each other in an office building. Until that point, Jim and Deirdre were totally in sync. I mean, they're practically finishing each other's sentences. And then Jim said something which turned our conversation into an argument. And this discussion kind of goes on for a little while,

but I want to play the whole thing. Well, I'd rather the Cybermen get their plan in place than the Daleks. Well, I think the Daleks would rather they win. Well, I mean, I think it'd be better for people. I mean, I think it'd be better if- There wouldn't be people. Well, if all humans became Cybermen,

I think it'd be a better universe than if all humans were destroyed by Daleks. Really? Wow. That's so interesting. I feel like they're both equally bad. Well, yeah. Neither are better for humans because humans cease to exist.

Well, if you consider Cybermen to be non-human, yes, rather than a hybrid. Well, the Cybermen, they take sort of the raw genetic. I mean, we're just meat to stuff inside a cyberman. But I feel like the things that make humans unique, the qualities that make humans human, they are, you know, the first things to get rid of. I think I would agree. I think that, for example, the reason we look at psychopaths as strangely, among others, is a lack of affective empathy, this idea to feel with other people. Or if you see someone not reacting when you cause someone pain, it's weird. So if we get rid of our

ability to feel pain and suffering and in so doing, yeah, we don't suffer anymore, but how human are we? I think it's very funny how you guys are getting so essentialist about this. You know, like to me, I would much rather be an entity that can think and not feel anything than not exist at all. Are you still Jim Davies without your emotions? How about this question? If someone through brain injury lost all emotional affect, would you say they're better off dead and we should kill them? Well, no, but I think the thing with the Cybermen is that they don't really have a freedom of choice either. You are just one of millions of Cybermen that are doing whatever the collective hive mind wants you to.

So I feel like that's a little bit different. I don't know about hive mind, but they've got different goals that you would then pursue. And yeah, they might be a little more uniform than human goals. So that's what I'm thinking, right? But I don't think I would exist.

I think I'd be so far removed from who I am right now that it would be kind of irrelevant. Yeah, that's unfortunately not a scientifically answerable question. No, unfortunately not. There is something very recognizably human about these alien villains. And what makes the Doctor stand out as a hero is his kind of gift for gab. I mean, he has a remarkable ability to talk them out of their evil plans. So in a sense, I feel like the show is a dialogue

between different parts of ourselves. Kind of like when you dream, every character in your dream is really just an aspect of you. I think the Doctor's ongoing battles with these monsters is really a conversation about what makes us human and what makes us inhumane. And who better to have that conversation than a bunch of aliens? Well, that is it for this week and my mini-series on Doctor Who.

Thank you for listening and for all the social media shout-outs. Special thanks to Nick Randall, who, by the way, has his own podcast. It's called SNS Online. Jim Davies, Deirdre Kelly, Frank Collins, Alyssa Franke, and Robin Bunce, who says his paper on the history of the Daleks almost got him an interview on the BBC. So about four o'clock, I get a phone call and I'm hoping they're going to say, jump on a train, come to London, you're going to be on television tonight. And what the woman said to me is, oh, we'd love to have you on, Dr. Bunce,

but actually we got some breakdancing Cybermen, so we're going to put them on instead. So I got bummed for breakdancing Cybermen. And, you know, I'm never, ever going to forgive the BBC for that. An extra special thanks to Stephanie Billman, who helped me with the production process. She was actually the first Whovian who convinced me to start watching the show. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. And if you've got a favorite gif of a Doctor Who villain,

there is a gif out there of the breakdancing Cybermen, let me know. I tweet at emulinski and also at ImagineWorldsPod. My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.