Which showrunner has the best take on the Daleks? Three opposing sides battle this question out in a Doctor Who Debate!
1 show. 3 fans. 1 question. 3 perspectives. This is Doctor Who Debate, where we each take a side, and tackle a controversial question about Doctor Who — but it’s up to you to decide who won the debate!
https://youtu.be/9p8-W7AJIEM
https://archive.org/download/2022-21-doctor-who-debate-4/2022%20%2321%20Doctor%20Who%20Debate%20%234.mp3
- TIMECODES
- TRANSCRIPT
- INTRO:
- INTERLUDE #1:
- TOMTIT — ARGUMENT #1:
- INTERLUDE #2:
- INGIGA — ARGUMENT #1:
- INTERLUDE #3:
- NEO — ARGUMENT #1:
- INTERLUDE #4:
- TOMTIT — ARGUMENT #2:
- INTERLUDE #5:
- INGIGA — ARGUMENT #2:
- INTERLUDE #6:
- NEO — ARGUMENT #2:
- INTERLUDE #7:
- TOMTIT — CONCLUSION:
- INTERLUDE #8:
- INGIGA — CONCLUSION:
- INTERLUDE #9:
- NEO — CONCLUSION:
- INTERLUDE #10:
- DEBRIEF 2021:
- INTERLUDE #11:
- DEBRIEF 2022:
- SOURCES
TIMECODES
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:20 Tomtit: Argument #1
00:07:37 Ingiga: Argument #1
00:12:14 Neo: Argument #1
00:18:09 Tomtit: Argument #2
00:23:22 Ingiga: Argument #2
00:28:25 Neo: Argument #2
00:34:31 Tomtit: Conclusion
00:40:38 Ingiga: Conclusion
00:45:53 Neo: Conclusion
00:52:00 Debrief 2021
01:01:16 Debrief 2022
TRANSCRIPT
Sources are listed at the end of the page.
INTRO:
Three fans, and three perspectives!
This is DOCTOR WHO DEBATE, where we all take a side…and tackle a controversial question about Doctor Who. Is there any other kind?
This time we’re asking does Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, or Chris Chibnall have the best take on the Daleks?
On RTD’s side, me, Tomtit, arguing his take on the Daleks was the best.
On Moffat’s side, me, Ingiga, arguing Moffat’s take on the Daleks was supreme.
And on Chibnall’s side, me, Neo, arguing that Chris Chibnall has the best Dalek take of all.
Each of us will take turns over two rounds where we each have five minutes to argue our case. Then we’ll all give our closing statements and rebut each other’s points.
There will be no judges present…because that’s where you come in! Yes! You, dear viewer, choose which side convinced you the most. The quality of our arguments, how well we use our time, anything that you deem worthy of judgement.
We would love to hear any and all of your thoughts, so please sound off in the comments and join the debate! Now, let’s begin the Dalek debate.
INTERLUDE #1:
RUSSELL T DAVIES: They’re just killers. Very functional. They’re very brutal. It’s hardwired into me that they are scary. It’s like, it’s a bit like asking why is the dark scary. I don’t know! It just is.
TOMTIT — ARGUMENT #1:
‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ The words are those of Theodore W. Adorno, a cultural critic of the 20th century, whose influential work discussed the risks of abstracting history through art. What Adorno did was argue against the prevalence of art which is divorced from physical experience — against art that is contemplative, or metaphorical, the things which relieve us from having to consider the true reality of horrors like the Holocaust. In that particular quote, Adorno takes the bold step of naming his aesthetic enemy as ‘poetry’; a sacred cow of high art — to hammer home the serious radicalism of his idea. For an aesthetic declaration which is so confrontational in nature, Adorno’s powerful argument is impossible to ignore, and his influence has rippled across the way we represent history in art in the years since.
Which brings me to science fiction, itself a mutant strain of historical fiction. And I don’t mean like the First Doctor stepping into historical periods. I’m talking about science fiction at large — our speculations on the future, more often than not, are really reflections on our past; our dystopias based on perceived past mistakes, our utopias built on perceived former glories. Just as our historical fiction can be hugely speculative — just how much of what we see of the Tribe of Gum is based on historical evidence, for instance? So can our speculative fiction be hugely retrospective. The boundary between science fiction and historical fiction is far more permeable than can be said for many other seemingly competing genres.
And so we come to Daleks: from the landscape of postwar Britain arises these figures who are obsessed with racial purity, who live in the fallout of a nuclear war, who could be seen on the big screen using gas-based firepower, and on the small screen mimicking a Nazi salute in the streets of London. Following this on-screen saturation; or more accurately, causing it, is their immense popularity among the public. Here we have villains which directly derive from the perpetrators of the great atrocity of recent history. And we also have children in playgrounds mimicking their battle cry, and buying merchandise with their image plastered on it.
Now, writers since then have used the Daleks as allegories for fascism, or specifically Nazism, to varying degrees since their opening appearances. But the fact remains that the very nucleus of the Daleks is based on a very real-world evil, and no matter how far removed from their specific influences they become, I doubt that they can every really shake that. What I’m getting at is that Daleks, fundamentally, are a troublesome idea, and that’s putting it lightly. And that’s not just because kids in playgrounds say ‘exterminate’, it’s because of those ideas Adorno discussed — when you use an allegory like this you strip something like Nazism or fascism of its specific and real horror. You remove its authentic characteristics and turn them into a faceless cartoon used to tell oversimplified stories that ultimately exist to cheaply lionise and pump up the Home Front in useless jingoistic narratives, underselling the horror so that we can oversell our virtue.
And I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to dramatically expose some never-before-uncovered secret crime at the heart of Doctor Who here — these are well-trodden roads of criticism that can be found even within some Doctor Who stories themselves, like Rob Shearman’s Jubilee being exhibit A. And I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that I won’t necessarily agree with the overall ideas of Doctor Who, science fiction itself being something a bad idea factory. What I’m trying to get across is that no Dalek writer is innocent, so to speak — none of the three showrunners we’re dealing with today — just as Truffaut said there’s no such thing as an anti-war war film — I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Dalek story that I would classify as ‘tasteful’. Only the hyper-metafictional Jubilee really comes close.
With all that in mind — with the inherent vice of Dalek stories hopefully established — it doesn’t mean that all takes on the Daleks have to be equally barbaric, to use Adorno’s term. Therefore I think it’s high time we start to reconstruct specific takes on the Daleks, piece by piece, Dalekanium girder by Dalekanium girder. So, I think Russell T Davies had the best take on the Daleks, though I’d forgive you for thinking I was never going to get there, so let’s not waste any more time! I’m going to use these sixty seconds to establish some criteria for what makes an effective depiction of the Daleks, and why I think RTD executed them so skilfully.
First and foremost, what I mentioned before about shallow Dalek stories ultimately serving to boost jingoistic narratives for Britain against a sanitised, abstracted foe? We’ll call that the Pertwee pitfall for, for, for simplicity’s sake. That’s my first criterion — don’t just use Daleks to absolve the human race or to absolve Britain, that’s way too easy, way too abstract. Like literally all fiction, Daleks are the product of human imagination anyway; we’re the ones who gave them the cool guns. Russell T Davies was the best at avoiding this. This should be no surprise, as he is someone whose writing has always had a fascination with the lengths and limits of human cruelty. Firstly on this score, he up and hired Rob Shearman to bring them back, and I know what you’re thinking — 2005’s Dalek is nowhere near as radical a critique of human society as Jubilee was. And you’d be right! But still, look at that episode. The reason the Daleks are back is because of the actions of a corrupt, powerful human being, one Henry Van Statten, who is obsessed with collecting and cataloguing things, stripping them of context. The echoes of Jubilee are there, the moral rot at the heart of a human as the catalyst for horror.
But, that’s nothing Professor Lesterson didn’t already do in The Power of the Daleks.
So, I raise you RTD’s self-penned, genuinely innovative Dalek masterpiece, the series 1 finale. The Daleks are utterly terrifying here, not because of their grand entrance, but because the thing that sets the stage for it — a drip feed of bad, pacifying television. There’s no shallow and half-hearted condemnation of fascism here. We see how our own world sets the stage for the entrance of the fascist actors, how individuals are trained to see the world through a lens of Big Brother and the Weakest Link — social competition, every man for himself —, and the episode shows how the humans on the game station have learned to think of this vicious game as something which helps THEM. The massacre on floor zero in The Parting of the Ways is frightening for so many reasons, but chief among them is that while those humans are hiding for their lives, the character of Roderick is still screaming, DEMANDING for his cash prize. And THAT is the thing that sets the stage for the Daleks. There’s no absolution there, no cheap scapegoating there, just the machinery of our now-perverted democracy, the true shadow of the Daleks, plain for all to see.
Then, there’s the openly imperialist Torchwood in series 2 — NOT let off the hook. The roaring 20s excess in Series 3 that helped set the stage for the second world war itself — the Daleks profit off it, and again, not let off the hook. Series 4 even begins to deconstruct the myth of the Doctor. Davros presents him as a coward who uses human beings like soldiers and leads them to oblivion. Obviously not WORSE than Davros, but importantly, not let off the hook either, or lazily lionised.
By placing human beings directly in the shadow of the Daleks, Russell’s take extends a tentacle that little bit closer to something three-dimensional.
INTERLUDE #2:
HOST: What did they do to make Daleks so scary?
STEVEN MOFFAT: I don’t, well I don’t know, I can’t take any credit for it. I wasn’t, I was about one year old at the time, when they did that. And they didn’t phone my house a lot. I mean it’s, they are rather beautiful things. It’s hard for me to look at Daleks. They’re so wired into my brain. But people who’ve never seen Daleks, from other countries, will stare at them in fascination. There’s something very good about that, and very satisfying about that design.
INGIGA — ARGUMENT #1:
I consider Moffat to have the best take on the Daleks because he uses them in ways that only Daleks can be used. He engages with specific things about them in order to consistently illuminate characters and themes in his own stories. They play a firm and confident role in the system of symbols that make up Moffat’s drama.
It’s no coincidence that, once the initial blip of Mark Gatiss’ Victory of the Daleks is out of the way and Moffat takes more direct stewardship of them, Daleks come into focus specifically at points when they’re emotional accompaniment to conflicts for the main characters, rather than just showing up with another sensationalised scheme to take over the world.
So, in Asylum, for example, their inability to love echoes the fractured relationship between the Ponds and the Doctor. In The Time of the Doctor, the Doctor is struggling with his own mortality, and the Daleks form something of a final boss, in other words an ultimate representation of death. In Into the Dalek, the Twelfth Doctor is struggling with this inner conflict with his new persona, and of course the nature of the Daleks comes into question there. And then in The Magician’s Apprentice, we’re delving into the Doctor’s pathological relationships with Clara, Missy and of course Davros himself.
Now, Into the Dalek is one of the most key examples because, in depicting the Doctor trying to “fix” a Dalek by sharing part of himself with it, we not only get insight into his struggle with his own feelings of hatred, of rage, but we also see how the Doctor uses the Daleks as something to define himself against. Quite elegantly, the fact the Daleks are the original villains of the show is incorporated into a character beat rather than merely a continuity reference. He says “I called myself the Doctor but it was just a name, until I went to Skaro, I met you lot and I understood who I was, the Doctor was not the Daleks”. Of course, the irony of this is that he’s more similar to them than he likes to admit, but ultimately later on he’s able to come to terms with that as part of his arc. The Daleks form an interwoven, intertwined piece of his character arc.
Conversely, in The Magician’s Apprentice two-parter, we get the flip side of that because the Daleks are here used to explore Davros’ character. Something axiomatic the Doctor says to Davros about the Daleks here is “everything you are, they are”. In other words, their defensive shielding of themselves in tanks is analogous to Davros’ own paranoia and fear of the outside world; Davros’ fascistic belief in a struggle between races is what informs the Daleks’ quest to dominate other species; and his refusal to face death with dignity is also theirs. Moffat never forgets that everything Daleks are comes from people first and foremost.
And that notion of a fascist worldview is where the other component of the Daleks comes in, what they represent ideologically. And Moffat particularly stands out in exploring this thematic content. So, for example, a key point in Into is that Daleks have an engineered device in their brains that actually filters their memories in order to make them more efficient. In other words, they function better if they deliberately shut themselves off from inconvenient realities, and isn’t that a potent metaphor for fascism if you’ve ever heard one. Moffat really makes a point of characterising Daleks as stunted, psychologically malformed; we see in Witch’s Familiar how complicated concepts like love or tolerating difference don’t even exist in their emotional vocabulary.
But what they do have, interestingly, is nostalgia – they literally make Skaro great again, rebuilding a classic themed version of it – and, even more interestingly, Moffat depicts them with a degree of class solidarity. While, for example, Into the Dalek shows them at perhaps the height of their powers, Witch’s Familiar looks at what Daleks are like in deep decline, and while certain other interpretations of Daleks often have different types bickering among themselves and descending into backstabbing, Magician’s Apprentice’s declining Skaro has all the Daleks fraternise together against a more fundamental threat – the passage of time. Just like the real-world ruling class, the forces of imperialism and capitalism, when the chips are down, their allegiance to each other supersedes any superficial divisions. So we get this fetishistic, and also nostalgic, merchandise-like Dalek collection. And this whole conceit adds nuance to those past stories of Daleks fighting each other, rather than simply ignoring them, and it deepens the overall metaphor. And also, just like the real world social order, we see the Daleks depicted as sitting atop a huge base of suffering.
Now the sludge sewer Daleks are brilliant for reasons I’ll get into later, but the thematic importance is that they represent what the Daleks are in denial of – the waste they create, despite their insistence on purity, and their own impermanence – so, naturally, Moffat has the story conclude with the Daleks being consumed by that very thing. And there’s nothing remotely like this in the other showrunners’ Dalek stories; Moffat is willing to engage poetically, philosophically, and politically with Daleks not as just vague forces of death or memories of war, but symbols for types of human behaviour.
INTERLUDE #3:
CHRIS CHIBNALL: The moment you think you’ve destroyed them, they keep coming back, and as the Doctor says; ‘I’ll never be rid of them’.
NEO — ARGUMENT #1:
Are you afraid of the Daleks? Have you ever been afraid of the Daleks? When were you afraid of the Daleks? What made you afraid of the Daleks? And what stopped you being afraid of the Daleks? Are you excited by the Daleks? Are you weary of the Daleks? When you see a Dalek, how do you feel? Is Russell T Davies afraid of the Daleks? Is Steven Moffat? Is Chris Chibnall?
I’m sure that 2005’s Dalek episodes scared many of us. That lone Dalek methodically wrestling control away from those who thought they had it completely under their thumb. The crazed cultish Daleks sinking their tendrils into media manipulation of a population they would later cull and sift and pulp. Did they scare you much after that?
Did their ‘banter’ with the Cybermen scare you? Did their spawning of a phallus-faced American-accented gangster scare you? Did the Daleks made to twirl comedically around by Donna scare you? Did their cameo in The Waters of Mars scare you? Did their skittle colours scare you? Did it scare you to see a Dalek sassed by River Song? Did it scare you to see the Doctor dismantle a Dalek with ease? Did it scare you when they scuttled around a little parliament of their own and bleated at the Doctor for assistance? Did their lasering and oops accidentally hitting each other in the 50th anniversary, did that scare you? Did the Dalek tank in Matt Smith’s last story scare you? Seeing a Dalek infected by the Twelfth Doctor’s own hatred of them was pretty interesting. Did it scare you? Series 9 opens with a fascinating exploration of Dalek and Davros ideology, ending with a symbolically potent resolution of decomposed sewer Daleks eating away at the healthy ones. Yeah. Was that scary to you? Did a trapped Dalek in Hell Bent scare you? Did their cameo in The Pilot scare you? Did the Twelfth Doctor’s friendly Dalek chatting with him in Twice Upon a Time scare you?
I think you know what I’m skirting around here. It’s a refrain we’ve probably all heard. Chris. Chibnall. Made. The. Daleks. Scary. Again. Yes, this is what I am arguing, though perhaps not entirely in the way you might think. Chibnall made the Daleks scary. I am not arguing those prior Dalek episodes are bad, I am not arguing Chibnall is necessarily a superior writer to RTD or Moffat. All I am arguing is that Chibnall has the best take on the Daleks, and that take is to make them scary, and to make them immediate, and to make them close to our lives, to induce discomfort, apprehension, and fear.
Resolution and Revolution of the Daleks have gruesome scenes demonstrating the destructive power of the Daleks. A lone Dalek lays waste to heavily-armed British soldiers. New Daleks abruptly and indiscriminately murder untold British citizens with ease. This isn’t Daleks swarming around the sky as an intangible threat, this isn’t banter, this isn’t philosophising with the Doctor, this isn’t jingoistic propping up of Britain or any of those that oppose the Daleks. This is immediate and visceral violence and terror.
But what makes that take superior? Why is making the Daleks scary a better take than using them more as vehicles to illuminate characters and themes of Doctors and their friends, and as stakes-raisers for finales more about the companions, and so on? There are certainly good episodes doing those things, as Tom and Gig highlighted. So why is a Dalek take centred around making them scarier, what makes that better? To answer that, I want to pull back to how Tom opened this debate.
Tom quoted Adorno in saying ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Evidently, there are some horrors so real that cultural aesthetics and existential life disconnect in their wake, making some art becomes an inadequate way to channel the reality of the world. I think the following clarifying clause of Adorno’s is useful here. It reads ‘After Auschwitz no further poems are possible, except on the foundation of Auschwitz itself’.
What this says to me isn’t that poetry after the Nazis is insufficient, so much as poetry after the Nazis cannot be indifferent. There are some horrors so great and so terrible and so real that they cleave history. There is a before and there is an after. And, as Tom and Gig have articulated, the Daleks bubbled up out of a representation of the horrors of Nazism, fascism, these real-world evils. And so I argue that the best take on the Daleks is therefore one that actively recognises the immediacy of that horror they represent, one that imbues them with fear and with real-world relevancy.
As Gig very perceptively highlighted, some previous episodes do explore the politics of Daleks and what they represent in an intelligent, nuanced, and admirable way, I do not contest this in the slightest. But I’m reminded of how George Steiner once responded to Adorno’s quote we’ve been discussing. He pointed to how ‘Gieseking was playing the complete Debussy piano music’ on the very nights people being transported to the Nazi extermination camps, and how ‘there’s not the slightest witness that he didn’t play magnificently or that his audience wasn’t wholly responsive and profoundly moved’. So he sees Adorno’s meaning as formalising outcries against Nazism into art as still adding a ‘mystery of acceptability to the phenomenon’. I agree that the series 9 premiere is an intelligent and scathing exploration of the fascist death cult ideology and the type of class solidarity underpinning it. Yes.
But where does that get us? What does it achieve? What does it do beyond soar over the heads of some fans, and just make other fans nod and murmur about oh what an intelligent and well-written story it is? What has been achieved? And so here I argue that it is not enough to make the Daleks a representation of horror, but in good conscience they must be made as terrifying and immediate themselves, if they’re even to approach some justifiability in adorning the world with hyper-commercialised exceedingly popular merchandise and marketability based around these Nazi icons. And next I will argue just how Chibnall made the Daleks scary, and why it is so much more immediate, arresting, and thus justifiable than RTD’s and Moffat’s approaches.
INTERLUDE #4:
RUSSELL T DAVIES: It’s absolutely vital that in the middle of Time Wars and ‘we will conquer the Earth!’ and ‘we will defeat the Doctor’ — in the middle of all that epic stuff, there’s something really indiscriminate and savage, and they go and slaughter a room full of innocent people who are just there. They slaughter them because they’re there. Because they’re human. That is what the Daleks are.
TOMTIT — ARGUMENT #2:
I started my argument showing how Russell’s Daleks always intrude on the human world, whereas, really, Steven Moffat’s Daleks are so far away, stuck in their bubbles where they can’t hurt us ,and Chibnall’s Daleks are really pawns in reactionary narratives that celebrate the status quo — but I’ll leave that for you guys to discuss. I believe Russell T Davies’ Daleks achieve that vital equilibrium — their horror is tactile, real, FELT. If their narrative presence becomes too intellectual, or too shallow, then they’re neutralised as different forms of that poetry that Adorno condemned. But by placing human beings directly in the shadow of the Daleks, Russell’s take extends a tentacle that little bit closer to something three-dimensional.
So RTD’s Daleks juxtapose them with corrupt human systems, while absolving the usual pitfalls of letting them off the hook or losing their inherent horror. They’re actually OBSESSED with humans. The word ‘symbiotic’ comes to mind, with the mutual aid humans and Daleks provide for each other in RTD’s stories, even becoming part of the Daleks’ essential genetic makeup, much to their chagrin. But if that’s the content, what about the form? What is it about RTD’s writing style, and the visual work of his team, that puts his Daleks above the rest?
I’ll start with the work of Joe Ahearne, the director of both Dalek stories in the first series.
A large part of the episode Dalek is dedicated to showing how good it is at killing. One by one, popular myths and jeers about the Daleks are dispelled. The plunger is put to horrific use, its midsection is shown to rotate quickly, it flies up stairs again, and finally it demonstrates creativity by using overhead sprinklers to electrify the floor space of the underground base.
All this stuff is extremely functional for the episode, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. It’s about showing how scary a Dalek is so that we’re frightened when lots of them turn up in the finale. In these sequences it’s really more of a slasher film than a serious reflection on evil.
But crucially, when our perspective shifts to Rose in the episode’s second half, we see the camerawork shape up to Shearman’s writing in the episode’s climax. Totally static shots of the corpses the Dalek has left in its wake, the edit is slideshow-like in its patient pacing. There’s no pleasure whatsoever to be derived from these images. We’re effectively with Rose for the rest of the episode, and Ahearne focuses more on the Dalek’s sheer incongruity as an actor among organic life. Think of the way Rose has to dodge its eyestalk when it turns to look at her in the cramped lift, the way it steamrolls Van Statten in his loft, and finally the ultra-theatrical staging of its closing scene, a single spotlight shining down on it, the self-cannibalising nature of evil laid bare in all its grotesqueness. Stark and prosaic. This direction is diametrically opposite to the way the Dalek is shot in, say Resolution, the sequence Neo touts as imbuing the Daleks with their deserved horror, where the camera never moves beyond positively ogling the Recon Dalek as it explosively fights the British soldiers. Boom! Pow! Helicopter shot! Creatively bankrupt.
Coming back to the finale and the floor zero massacre sequence — it’s a case study for how you show Dalek brutality on screen. First there’s the setup with Roderick obstinately demanding his cash prize, but also crucial to the sequence is the fact that the Daleks don’t have to descend to floor zero and kill those people. If anything, it’ll only hinder their apprehension of the Doctor at the top. No, the massacre is an entirely gratuitous, emotionally-spurred act of sheer chaos — as all wanton acts of violence ultimately are. But to have it set out dramatically by Davies and Ahearne just rams home the abject horror of it. These Daleks are like a force of nature, and they come flooding through those doors like a torrential flood.
Another sequence, the death of Lynda Moss, has a similar effect, when you see its headlights flash four times — the syllables of EX-TER-MIN-ATE becoming an unshakeable pulse running through the series, a dark inversion of the four pulses that RTD recognised from the series theme tune and framed as the heartbeat of a Time Lord. When we see the Dalek lights silently flash, Lynda doesn’t understand it, but she knows it means death. Which is a perfect encapsulation of the sheer evil at work — we can never really understand it, but we know it means death.
Finally, in terms of storytelling techniques, what RTD really lends the Daleks is what he lent to Doctor Who as a whole — he imbued the Daleks with sophisticated characterisation of the kind you’d see in genres outside of science fiction — your dramas, your soap operas. Not to say that Daleks have never had personalities, but, for example, Russell T Davies was the first to suggest that the Daleks’ anger comes from their environment, rather than written in their genetic code. In Doomsday, the Doctor posits that the Daleks are ‘locked inside a cold metal cage….No wonder [they] scream’. This is such a welcome innovation, because entertaining the idea that the Daleks’ personalities are genetically hardwired, it effectively legitimises fascist lines of thought — the Daleks aren’t just a totally evil ideology, they’re a totally evil RACE! But hey, science fiction is science fiction and it will probably keep using these messy allegories until the end of time. Indeed, what Gig recognises as a key part of Moffat’s take on the Dalek is how their traits are ordained by Davros, legitimising him as their God. Moffat in all probability intends this as a take on how dictators influence their followers’ perception of the truth, but nothing can shed the diagetic truth of the Daleks’ genetic engineering — the stench of allegory is all over this! Davies’ take is better, and doesn’t have the side effect of legitimising the Daleks’ own ideology.
INTERLUDE #5:
STEVEN MOFFAT: That voice is amazing. Also, just the idea of — they’re so emotional! And screechy, and panicky, and horrible. And yet they’re sort of robots. That’s fascinating. And the very minimalist animation they have is very, very cool. People just love those things. They are still by far Doctor Who’s most popular monster. I think they’re the best monsters ever, in anything.
INGIGA — ARGUMENT #2:
“We need to make the Daleks scary again” – it’s something you hear so often from so many fans, so often preoccupied with the conundrum of how you make something so inherently quirky like a Dalek – something that’s become so overfamiliar over the decades, a toy – into a source of horror that recaptures both their original strangeness and, of course, the sheer evil that inspired them.
Robert Shearman’s ‘Dalek’ made a huge impression on fans. It seemingly achieved this ‘scary again’ goal by depicting the Dalek as an extremely efficient killer in a big action movie, basically, and as a result, fans now often like to praise Chibnall for doing the same thing whenever he has a Dalek rack up a big body count. Firing a CGI laser has become like a ritual, a piece of sensationalised gossip basically.
I’m of the opinion that Moffat is greatly helped by his willingness to mine the Daleks for conceptual and existential horror. Just as earlier on I discussed how Moffat delves into the ideas behind the Daleks, there are various examples of how – rather than simply having them kill a load of people, atomise them – he suggests that their abject evil may be associated with things that go beyond death, even worse than death.
The sewer sludge Daleks are one surprising example, revealing that it may be even scarier to exist as a Dalek than to be killed by one – Daleks are doomed to decay into formless, constantly aware slime, constantly screaming; it’s the ultimate endgame for a life form that spends its existence consumed by hatred and refuses to accept the cycle of life and death. It’s an angry image, a condemnation. Witch’s Familiar really reframes Daleks as these gothic entities with vampiric aspects, which goes a massive way towards distinguishing them from the bland killer robot shells they have often functioned as in past stories.
Elsewhere, as Moffat builds out a picture of the Daleks’ presence in the universe, including Dalek camps we never quite see, perhaps because they’re scarier to imagine, one thing he introduces is those eyestalk servants that they convert humans into. And the Doctor tells one of them “you had a daughter” and she brilliantly replies, “I know, I’ve read my file”. What fascinates me here is that rather than Cybermen with no emotion, these puppets of the Daleks’ can easily deploy their old memories and emotions, but only as a tactic, a calculation; their souls become like toys for the Daleks, something else I think could be considered a fate worse than death. And in tandem with bringing back the human-to-dalek conversions from Classic Who in that episode, Moffat stresses the Daleks’ capacity to not merely end lives but also ruin them.
But when it comes to the more traditional phenomenon of scary Dalek scenes, obviously the moments when the Daleks actually attack people are the most important, and what comes immediately to mind there is that unforgettable sequence in Magician’s Apprentice where Moffat generates immense tension from the Daleks doing nothing. They aren’t screaming, they aren’t shouting, they’re not even moving, they’re just waiting for Clara to run. And this is a rare moment when we see the Daleks as truly animal. The extent of their bloodthirsty cruelty comes out when all the usual bluster disappears. Moffat has Davros narrate this scene with a speech that, true to form, explores the horror of the Daleks as ideas, as a state of mind – “they need her to run”, “their blood is screaming kill”, “hunter and prey locked in the ecstasy of crisis, is this not life at its purest?” – reaffirming, again, that the Daleks are expressions of a scary ideology. Not just a scary monster.
And even earlier than that, Moffat is interested in making a Dalek attack feel different; there’s that unique moment in Asylum where the Doctor is trapped in a room with a group of barely lucid PTSD-addled Daleks who all recognise him, in other words a situation he can’t verbally weasel his way out of in the manner that has so often defanged the Daleks in their past appearances. As they slowly encroach on him with their plungers – and note, by the way, the lack of shame Moffat has for the plungers, not attempting to give them cool CGI plunging powers like RTD or just removing them like Chibnall – as they approach, the Doctor panics. He is absolutely screaming at Oswin to get him out of there. It’s a rare moment for Smith and an instance of intense fear from usually the most confident character. It’s one thing to have human characters cowering in fear of Daleks, like in The Stolen Earth, as a means of making us feel that fear, but when it’s the Doctor himself suddenly exposed like that, we have to take it even more seriously.
Because, as every Dalek writer has to eventually confront, very little about the Daleks as a physical presence is scary on its own – making them scary means challenging our imaginations, using the unique assets of fiction and performance to convey the idea that they are scary, because our imaginations are capable of scaring us in ways no mere picture on a TV screen can. ‘Intangibility’ is not something to be sniffed at; not all trauma is obvious, tangible, or visible. Moffat has spent his whole career tinkering with the possibilities of fiction, and what he gives us are Daleks who are scary to think about, well beyond the moment we stop seeing them on the screen.
INTERLUDE #6:
NIKKI WILSON: Chris’ vision for this episode was always that we would do a Dalek story, but in reverse.
CHRIS CHIBNALL: What I wanted to do was just tell a story of a single Dalek. How strong an opponent that is, but also start from the creature inside a Dalek, and how much that is intent on surviving, how good it is at surviving, how it’s its main purpose.
NEO — ARGUMENT #2:
Earlier, I talked about making the Daleks scary. You both seem quite fixated on mocking Chibnall’s scenes of visceral Dalek violence as either ogling or superficial. My friends, Chibnall’s take on the Daleks goes so, so much deeper than wanton violence. Let’s talk how he makes that fear immediate, and applicable, and real.
To frame this, let’s dwell a second on music. Where previous Daleks were announced with things like choral refrains or arpeggiated synths, Chibnall’s Daleks are announced with
[OVERDRIVEN ELECTRIC GUITAR PLAYING A B NOTE, ITS OCTAVE, THEN AN F NOTE]
the clearest musical marker of evil and terror there is, the tritone, first interval to the octave to the diminished fifth. You might recognise it from a lot of heavy metal; it’s the basis of Black Sabbath’s song Black Sabbath, from their first album, entitled Black Sabbath. Using it for the Daleks is an arresting announcement, a musical way of saying ‘something is WRONG.’
So, what, specifically is wrong? Most Doctor Who fans would agree that Nazism is wrong, and therefore that the most tangible signifiers of the Daleks – a desire to exterminate those unlike them, obsession with ideas of racial purity, a cruel and malevolent disregard for the sanctity of life, that those sorts of things are wrong.
What’s particularly unique to Chibnall, is examining why and how this sort of ideology bubbles up and proliferates in the first place. RTD showed a sci-fi horror of these Nazi parallels pacifying humanity through media control in the far future. Moffat explored the internal class aspect and inherency of decay to a Nazi mindset in a revived Skaro. But Chibnall’s domain is present-day Earth, where all this is immediate and actively matters.
Both Resolution and Revolution of the Daleks abound with wrongness. To bring back musical thinking, imagine both episodes are littered with out-of-key notes, offtune instruments, our devil’s tritone. These elements raise our hackles, they make us alert, they make us question, they prevent us from sidling purely into the entertainment and escapism that so many Dalek episodes offer. I speak not of supposed errors in the storytelling, I speak of ultra-realistic nuances in ideology.
The most striking wrongness comes in the Doctor’s conceptualisation of the Daleks in Resolution. Twenty-eight minutes into the special, the Doctor realises that episode’s Dalek is a reconnaissance scout, the first type of Dalek to leave Skaro. A scout is, of course, soldier or employee sent ahead of a larger force to gather information about an enemy and their residence. Three minutes later, the Doctor calls that selfsame Dalek ‘a refugee from the planet Skaro’.
A refugee is a person who has been forced to leave their country to escape some type of disaster or persecution. The Doctor calling a Dalek, a Nazi parallel, a refugee, that would be bad enough, but it’s minutes after she correctly realised it was in fact a type of soldier. This sort of targeted xenophobic categorisation calls to mind the way some people in this day and age use the word refugee. It speaks to a hypocrisy of the Doctor. If this Doctor is a pillar of hope and symbol of morality we should follow and look up to, what does it mean for them to make a xenophobic slip, to make a racist conflation between malevolent soldiers and persecuted refugees?
In Revolution of the Daleks, Trump-esque-figure Jack Robertson tells the scientist who recreated the Daleks that ‘You know what your problem is, Leo? You’re too clever. This is why people don’t like experts’. I believe the Doctor’s hypocrisy calls to mind the type of hypocrisy, inconsistency, and self-righteousness that angers those that feel alienated by such platitudes of hope and an ever-progressing just world, that the Doctor expresses. Tom says Chibnall’s Daleks reinforce reactionary status quo narratives. What I am saying is that Chibnall highlights these very narratives and thus confronts us with the reality of how Dalek-esque ideology survives and is, perhaps unwittingly, reinforced. Chibnall emphasises the inadequacy of so many that style themselves enemies of ‘the Daleks’; their inadequacy to oppose them.
When the Doctor thinks she’s defeated the Dalek in Resolution, it instead simply takes a new host. All she can say for herself is ‘I’m sorry, I miscalculated’. When she confidently tells the Dalek it’s no threat because it lacks weapons, it informs her she’s wrong and it does indeed have weapons, to which all she can respond is ‘Right. Okay. Well, whoop-de-doo’. I’m reminded of a viral image over the last four years.
The Doctor only defeats the Daleks in Revolution of the Daleks by sacrificing a TARDIS, something the show has gone to pains to communicate to us are sentient and living beings, with no thought or mention of its welfare. This is wrong, and the complicit billionaire that allied and sold out humanity to these Nazi parallels gets away with it, to the point where it’s suggested he may even win the presidency through the dishonest way he frames his treason.
I don’t deny the strengths of RTD and Moffat’s takes on the Daleks, but seeing the UK government ally with a technocrat uncaring of how their work affects humanity, and a shady American businessman with a keen eye for public relations, seeing them unleash a new kind of quasi-police force in the shape of a Nazi parallel monster upon protestors, and see them basically get away with all that because our hero the Doctor, who constantly insists on the power of hope and that ‘fascists never win’ — seeing her downplay and deflect and miscalculate this threat, and only succeed in destroying it by betraying, selling out, and sacrificing a living ally we’re perhaps meant to forget about the sentience and humanity of — yeah, that scares me a lot more than what RTD and Moffat brought to the table, thoughtful recontextualisations of Daleks’ hatred or high-minded musings on their ideology. Chibnall’s Daleks are scary not just because of the threat they represent, but because Chibnall shows us how vague ‘resistance’ to them is no protection from their evil.
INTERLUDE #7:
HOST: While the episodes may vary, there is one thing they all have in common.
MAN: Can I introduce Murray Gold, the composer of Doctor Who?
Everyone knows the music’s important in Doctor Who.
Easy on the applause — you haven’t heard it yet!
And I didn’t have to think twice about whether I wanted to be part of that.
I just want to say thank you to you all for coming at fairly short notice, and for putting the work in, and for providing the operatic score for the first unveiling of the new Dalek.
TOMTIT — CONCLUSION:
What is happening? What is happening? What is happening?
That is the lyric of Murray Gold’s Dalek leitmotif, translated to English and originally sung in Hebrew. It can be read as the voices of the Daleks’ victims, or even from the Daleks themselves, their own confused and contradictory existence causing them internal pain. Either way, the swelling melody and repetition of it shows the creeping and unrelenting way a force like the Daleks intrudes and upends peaceful ways of life.
The tritone used by Segun Akinola to reveal the Daleks in Resolution — it’s big, it’s exciting, sure it conveys a bit of wrongness, translates the grandiosity of metal music onto a Dalek story…but what do the chugga chugga sixteenth notes in the Dalek car chase, in that same story, convey? It seems to owe a lot to punk rock…does it convey rebellion? Can we see the Dalek as a rebel, running away from the repressive state apparatus of the police? If that’s the case, then gee, that Dalek seems pretty awesome!
I kid, but that’s the problem of reading Chibnall’s Dalek stories as the Doctor and the humans being weak, and that’s it’s a cautionary tale for how not to behave, lest the Daleks take over! Chibnall’s Doctor is one of the most didactic we’ve ever seen, very rarely portrayed as being wrong, and if they are seen to contradict themselves, it’s a cute character quirk rather than a moral failing.
For a Dalek story about neglect giving way to Dalek intrusion that’s actually in the text…look at how The Long Game leads to the series 1 finale! The Doctor arrogantly dismantling their state apparatus without actually understanding it leads to the acceleration and increased brutality of the Daleks’ control of the Human Empire.
Speaking of things being in the text…The Witch’s Familiar. I agree with Gig’s take on the Daleks in that episode, being that the Daleks are united in a kind of class solidarity, and that the episode hinges on their denial of death. But I have a few problems with the points surrounding this. Neo said that it’ll go over most fans’ heads. I agree with this. The motley crew of Dalek models in that story can be seen as illustrating a move away from racial purity on the Daleks’ part, and the resurrection of Ray Cusick’s take on Skaro architecture can be seen as a move towards nostalgia. But all this is undermined by the fact that we as viewers fundamentally take pleasure in these things (or at least we’re supposed to). The fan reaction to the downplaying of old Daleks in Asylum was very loud…the simplest assumption, therefore, is that their prominence in Series 9 is nothing more than an apology for that, and the fact that their presence is never actually commented on in dialogue seems to support that.
And as for the Dalek city, I believe it’s a safe assumption that that design was revived because Moffat…wanted to revive a great design! Ray Cusick’s city design is iconic, unmatched in its inherent hostility to humans, its austerity, that retro-futurist minimalism that screams DALEK! If there was a salient point to be made about a retreat into nostalgia, maybe they could have had some of the sets wobble, show the shoddy craftsmanship —masking the façade beneath. Instead the city argues FOR its own inclusion by virtue of its own sheer beauty.
On the point of Moffat’s Daleks again, it’s true that his Dalek stories work to enrich the characterisation of the Doctor…because the Doctor is clearly Moffat’s focus. But I would argue that by exclusively defining the Daleks by their relationship to outside actors (the Doctor and Davros, for instance), he strips them of their agency within the narrative. In Moffat’s Daleks I see a divorce from immediacy, they’re viewed entirely on their own terms, in their Parliament, in their houses…they’re always fighting a sexy space war! They’re so far away from us in their terrariums, it’s slightly hard to believe we could ever really worry about them.
If Moffat’s Daleks are animals, as the hunter/prey scene in Magician’s Apprentice shows us, to that I say…we know animals. We understand animals. This planet is brimming with wildlife and what we do with that is abuse it. We tear down their habitats, systematically slaughter them for food…I’m terrified of crocodiles. But if I step into the river where I know there are crocodiles…then it’s my fault. And it being my fault is not something that I want to map onto a Dalek, with all its associations.
I said earlier about RTD lending sophisticated characterisation and individuality to the Daleks — and if a fascist collective having individuality seems a contradiction, Russell T Davies understands this intimately. His Daleks are full of contradictions — they cherish order but they’re hyper-emotional and frantic, they’re disgusted by humans but require them to survive, they claim to be removed from decadent emotions but clearly relish in talking down the Cybermen, they worship tradition but they have a secret cult dedicated to covertly devising innovative ways of killing. There are shades of the occultism of Nazis, definitely, but more appropriately for an invention like Daleks, RTD is really incorporating more shades of what we’ve come to understand as the common elements of fascism as posited by Umberto Eco. The embrace of different traditions despite internal contradictions, and the cult of being born to be a hero — think of how the Dalek in Evolution of the Dalek excitedly declares ‘I will be the destroyer of our greatest enemy!’, and of course, the way he risked offending audiences by explicitly portraying the Daleks as religious fundamentalists.
RTD’s portrayal of Daleks avoid poesy and jingoism — a more fittingly prosaic portrayal than ever seen on screen. The writer who is fascinated with pleasure vs pain, faith and faithlessness, and the capability of the collective to perpetrate serious horror under the influence of societal inertia — Russell T Davies is the best at writing Daleks, simply because…he’s the best at writing humans.
INTERLUDE #8:
CHRISTEL DEE: Not everything you introduced was successful. You introduced a new design for the Daleks. How – there we go, on our mugs over there. How hard is it redesigning an icon?
STEVEN MOFFAT: I would appear to make it look extremely difficult. It was a salutary lesson and, let’s just be clear, in talking about the redesigned Daleks, that the fault resides entirely with me, and not any of the brilliant team that made the new Daleks. They were beautiful in many respects. It was my mistake and a completely unnecessary one.
But I tell you what was interesting about it. It was a fascinating lesson that I sort of never forgot. We made the Daleks huge. What a stupid idea. Why?
You make the Daleks huge, you just move the camera further away and you make the Doctor smaller. Now if you’ve seen those actual props, they’re gorgeous. If you go and see them in real life or you’ve seen them on stage, they look amazing. Where they don’t look good is on television, the only place where it matters!
INGIGA — CONCLUSION:
It’s not lost on me that when we consider the virtues of Davies’ Daleks we hear a great deal about Series 1 but only a gloss on their later, arguably more famous appearances. RTD uses his big Dalek ideas straight away and then from that point on, the Daleks’ chief significance is as continuity, being that thing the Doctor thought he’d destroyed but — gasp — they’re back again, and occasionally fanwank like them bantering with Cybermen. And when it comes to illuminating ideas and theme through Daleks, eventually we arrive at these empty moral challenges from Davros to the Doctor, and some handwringing from the Doctor about whether it’s right to kill all of the Daleks.
Particularly in light of how much of the stories that work hinge on humanity and human foibles, as Tomtit noted – plus factoring in that had the Nation estate not given the rights, we’d have had a series about Toclafane – I cant help but think they don’t really need to be Daleks for a lot of these stories to work, to the extent that the post Series 1 ones work at all, which for Evolution of the Daleks is not a great deal. You know, a few notes that ring true to Eco’s characterisation of fascism get swallowed in this incoherent finale, a mishmash of humans with Dalek DNA and accusations of genocide flying around like paintballs.
And over the years, this devaluation of Daleks that occurs over the course of successive Tennant seasons rather dampens their fulfilment of any ethical responsibility. By Journey’s End their plan is literally just to vaporise all universes, which is so utterly removed from anything true to life or how institutional power has operated.
See, one may talk about Moffat being distanced from humanity by not literally writing stories about Earth, but these narratives about fighting Cybermen from the Void, face penises, reality bombs, they’re distanced on even the metaphorical level. And setting them on Earth simply disguises that.
By contrast, Moffat embracing what you call the visual pleasure of retro Dalek designs and architecture is, phrased another way, embracing artifice, fakeness, unreality. Distance, or Verfremdungseffekt as the theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht put it, is tool for allowing us to consider a story on levels beyond raw emotion.
And frankly, I object in the strongest terms to the idea that ideas going over some viewers heads’ makes them meaningless – we’re talking about these episodes YEARS after they aired, because thinking about them beyond the moment of transmission is how they have longevity, it accounts for most of their existence.
As for Chibnall, his presentation of this ethically broken setting does not inherently give it the excuse of being satire. I mean, would you say the same thing about Wonder Woman 1984? Media legitimises its worldview when it fails to express any resistance to it. And if you want to talk about music conveying wrongness, whenever 13 wins in these stories, her incredibly optimistic and bouncy theme starts playing in the background. The episodes encourage us to see Daleks as wrong, but never the Doctor. Even her decision to destroy a TARDIS in Revolution is not actually critiqued by the narrative, it’s something that we as fans – if it doesn’t go over our heads – have to think about.
And, of course it doesn’t help that both RTD and Chibnall ultimately pop massive holes in the idea of taking the Daleks seriously at all, because with Chibnall letting one be completely manhandled and strapped to a microwave, or RTD leaning fully into their silliness by having Donna spin them around like dodgems, it cuts sharply against the way the stories spend most of their time presenting the Daleks as these things to take incredibly seriously, these sources of massive threat and danger.
See, by contrast, Moffat is a master of thematic unity. He draws on specific observations about the role of the Daleks in the programme over time – for example, Asylum has those fascinating comments that it’s in fear of the Doctor that the Daleks have grown so powerful, and equally that it may be a strange admiration of him that makes them so bad at killing him – this idea of an intrinsic, inseparable relationship from day one, indeed the Doctor bearing a certain degree of responsibility for the Daleks, functions as something of an answer to that problem of using the Daleks to absolve our idea of goodness or heroism.
And essentially the existence of Daleks as this villainous presence that has a fandom, it’s what’s perpetuated this problematic idea as you put it, being perpetuated. And Moffat’s take on the Daleks embeds an answer to that into the show, and it problematises that relationship and that presence, by putting some of the implications onto our idea of goodness and being a good man. And I think that helps strengthen the idea.
So, rather than nostalgic pandering, Moffat makes a point of giving the Daleks new material, delving into them in ways that keep them interesting in their own right, rather than simply a ritualised part of the cultural landscape, shooting people with CGI lasers, blowing up the universe, or doing other completely…things that are devoid of thematic content. He refuses to let the Daleks become settled or safe, and that, more than anything else, is crucial to ensuring they continue to mean anything.
INTERLUDE #9:
NIKKI WILSON: Right from the word ‘go!’, Chris had a vision in his head for this setpiece. He knew he wanted this showdown between the Dalek and the army.
WAYNE YIP: The soldiers have been, they’ve been transported in, and they have a standoff, and then they meet a swift and brutal end. Because they don’t know what they’re dealing with.
DALEK: The Dalek race is supreme!
NEO — CONCLUSION:
We live in the real world.
Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat wrote some great episodes with the Daleks in them. But when it comes to Daleks, representative symbols of Nazism, evil obsession with genetic purity and death cult ideology and exterminating anyone different from them, I think seriousness is due.
The Daleks banter and speak in unconvincing American accents in RTD’s era, and in Moffat’s era, the Doctor seems unphased by talk of literal ‘Dalek prison camps’, and is never seen to make any real attempts to try and extinguish genocidal Dalek armies after they escape his grasp in Victory of the Daleks. We’re just reset to a status quo where, yeah, there are genocidal Dalek armies in space, even on a revived Skaro, with prison camps, and the Doctor just occasionally has a brief tiff with them.
Should we be comfortable with this? I’m not just questioning whether it fits the Doctor’s characterisation to be so relatively chill with armies of Daleks doing their thing offscreen, after we had years where the Doctor was justifiably livid new surviving remnants of Time War Daleks popping up. I’m questioning whether having the Daleks as those enemies we love to hate, forever there, happily secure and extant in the status quo of the show is appropriate, given how clear a parallel to Nazis they are.
Chris Chibnall’s take on the Daleks is actionable. It inspires activity. Things are not neatly-wrapped up, things remain to make us question and argue and hash out the politics that feed into what the Daleks represent. You can split hairs over satire and the internal consistency of these fictions and the intended effects of scenes and formal effectiveness, but we’re not debating who the best showrunner is, and we’re note debating what the best episodes are. We’re arguing what the best take on the Daleks is, the best take on these Nazi parallels.
What Chibnall does, dragging the horror of the Daleks, and the terrifying inadequacy so many of our leaders and institutions have in dealing with existential and insidious threats like the Daleks. What that can be used to represent, that is the best take on the Daleks. It’s scary, and it makes you think. The very fact that Gig argues the monstrousness of the Doctor destroying a living TARDIS isn’t in the text is what I’m talking about — Chibnall’s Dalek episodes get us talking about morality. Tom critiquing the bounciness of some of the Resolution Dalek’s music, and thus opening us a conversation about whether the Daleks are depicted with too much glee, this is what I’m talking about. Tom misinterprets me when he suggests I’m arguing Chibnall’s Dalek episodes are cautionary tales about letting the Daleks take over. I’m arguing Chibnall’s Dalek take is superior because it invites these very sorts of discussions. Gig says the Series 9 premiere has us talking about it years later. Yeah, it does. Did it have us debating material 2015 politics when it came out, the way Revolution of the Daleks has spurred this discussion?
One fan might think Chibnall is a great showrunner, and interpret the vague protest scene with the corporate Dalek drone pacifying protestors as canny political commentary, and take away the scariness and relevance of Daleks that way. Others might think he’s a terrible, terrible showrunner, and point to the Doctor’s inadequacy in dealing with humanity-betraying Robertson as woeful ineptitude in dealing with her time-honoured enemy, the Daleks.
My point is that in both, and in every situation, the viewer is considering the potency and the politics wrapped up in the Daleks. This is Chibnall’s victory. One cannot just sit back and be entertained by his Dalek episodes. They grab the viewer by the head and force them to look at the terror of the Daleks and the horror that they represent. The quality of the episodes in the minds of viewers is immaterial, because the politics are immediate and unavoidable.
I say that inspiring viewers to argue about the Daleks, to argue about the Doctor’s morality in combating them, to argue about how she and her companions talk about them, I say this is a thousand times more appropriate than viewers nodding their heads and enjoying a Dalek romp or dramatic character-based finales with Daleks, no matter how well-executed they may be. This stuff is serious. The Daleks are serious. We can’t so clearly parallel them with the Nazis if we’re not prepared to entertain that seriousness into the actual show and discourse surrounding it. We can’t escape into these Chibnall Dalek episodes. Their taking place in the modern day, with parallels of real world leaders, with very material ideological blind spots and deficiencies in those opposing the Daleks. These force consideration of our real material world and politics. I argue this is the most appropriate take on the Daleks, to inspire these very sorts of discussions.
In Revolution of the Daleks, the Doctor and her companions self-righteously screech at Robertson for supposedly pretending to not know what a Dalek is. They don’t actually define what a Dalek is to him. They moralise and shout at him. They never once explain tangibly what the threat of a Dalek is, let alone how to combat it. This is commentary that means something to our actual lives in which it is argued Dalek-esque threats materialise. It’s not a brilliant redefinition of the Doctor’s character like 2005’s Dalek, and it’s not a dazzlingly clever exploration of internal Dalek politics like Series 9’s premiere. What it is, is real, meaningful and identifiable and applicable to us in the real world. It gets us talking, and it gets us thinking.
Look, I don’t expect listeners to necessarily enjoy Chibnall’s Dalek episodes more than RTD’s or Moffat’s. I’m not even arguing he had the best Dalek episodes. I’m arguing that, one way or another, he has the best take on the Daleks, through spawning these very sorts of discussions, from preventing us from escaping into entertainment and escapism other Dalek episodes might very well offer.
All I am asking is for you to consider that Chibnall’s take on the Daleks — however it’s arrived at — is the superior take, because it best channels the evils the Daleks are inspired by, it best channels the reality of how such evils proliferate and persist in our very real world, it gets people talking about these political and moral issues that Daleks are based on, and it compels us to consider the deficiencies with, and thus how we should focus on improving, the ways what we might call ‘Dalek-ism’ is materially being fought.
INTERLUDE #10:
RADIO TIMES: Oh, uh, double Doctor Who—
RUSSELL T DAVIES: The thing is, Doctor Who was rubbish after I left, is really what’s going on! Now, it carried on for a few years, and it managed, it stumbled along…get my coat, would you, darling?
[RUSSELL T DAVIES AND STEVEN MOFFAT LAUGH TOGETHER]
RUSSELL T DAVIES: Hooray! Look, together at last!
STEVEN MOFFAT: Yeah, we are!
RUSSELL T DAVIES: Hooray!
DEBRIEF 2021:
Note: the debrief conversations are not transcribed here. Immediately following the recording of the debate, the three of us had a quick debrief conversation where we went over the stances we took in the debate. This is where we shared some thoughts on our arguments and our positions, what wasn’t said in the debate, and so on.
As these were organic conversations, I don’t have working notes to finish up a transcription.
The first debrief conversation starts at 00:52:00 in the video. The YouTube video does have the automatically-generated YouTube captions.
INTERLUDE #11:
BBC INTERVIEWER: But will the Daleks still be scary, have they still got the sink plunger at the front?
RUSSELL T DAVIES: They have, but you’ve never seen a sink plunger be so deadly. All the things people laugh at – it’s a great episode, I didn’t write it, it’s from a man called Robert Shearman, who is a brilliant writer – and everything that everyone laughs about with the Daleks is addressed in the script and turned on its head, and turned deadly. As, you know, the fact they can’t get up stairs – ooh, they fly! I mean it’s a great, fun episode, and it’s like, it’s very much for people who remember the Daleks from old, but also if you’re eight years old, it introduces them as the most deadly enemy from scratch. It’s great fun, it’s one of my favourite episodes.
DEBRIEF 2022:
Note: this second debrief conversation was recorded in November 2022, after Chibnall’s era had ended. Like the first debrief conversation, there are automatically-generated YouTube captions on the video, but no transcript.
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Wilson, Nikki, and Chris Chibnall. “A Dalek Re-Formed.” Doctor Who: Resolution, 01:20-01:45. BBC, 18 Feb. 2019, Blu-ray.
12.
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Farrar, Jesse [@BronzeHammer]. “Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,”
Twitter, 1 Oct. 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20170712160722/https://twitter.com/bronzehammer/status/782408312730095616
13.
~00:33:51
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Coats, Michael. “Asylum of the Daleks: In Perspective.” DoctorWhoTV [fan website], 1 March 2013, https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/asylum-of-the-daleks-in-perspective-45795.htm
Massey, Daniel. “Unpopular Opinion: Asylum of the Daleks.” DoctorWhoTV [fan website], 11 April 2014, https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/unpopular-opinion-asylum-of-the-daleks-62371.htm
“Asylum of the Daleks – Into the Madhouse.” Sacred Icon, 5 Sep. 2017, https://sacredicon.blog/2017/09/05/asylum-of-the-daleks-into-the-madhouse/
15.
~00:38:55
Eco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism.” The New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
16.
~00:39:40
Moffat, Steven, and Christel Dee. “Steven Moffat On Matt Smith’s Era, Writing The 50th Anniversary & MORE! | Doctor Who: The Fan Show.” YouTube, uploaded by Doctor Who, 18 Jan. 2018, https://youtu.be/ZOfIIqb8Uhg
17.
~00:41:19
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18.
~00:42:32
Brecht, Bertolt. “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964, p. 91.
19.
~00:45:25
Wilson, Nikki, and Wayne Yip. “A Dalek Re-Formed.” Doctor Who: Resolution, 04:47-05:15. BBC, 18 Feb. 2019, Blu-ray.
20.
~00:51:42
Davies, Russell T, and Steven Moffat. “Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat on life after Doctor Who.” YouTube, uploaded by Radio Times, 1 Feb. 2019, 00:00-00:14, https://youtu.be/EDLjf05ODM0
21.
~01:00:43
Davies, Russell T. “Russell T Davies on Taking Over Doctor Who (2005) | Wales Today.” YouTube, uploaded by DWhoUnreleased, 19 Oct. 2022, 04:39-05;12, https://youtu.be/zQfhsx2uons
Who Cares? - Dr. Who Fans Talk TV is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://whocaresdw.wordpress.com/
