Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  29

  The Evil of the Daleks

  ROBIN BUNCE

  TEMMOSUS: I believe the Daleks hold the key to our future.

  From the very beginning, the Daleks were a triumph. The design, the voices, and the scripts all contributed to the genesis of an iconic villain. The Daleks are undoubtedly the most alien and most menacing alien menace ever to have invaded the small screen.

  Doctor Who fans owe the Daleks a great deal. The Daleks transformed Doctor Who into a national phenomenon. In fact, Dalekmania, as it was called, was bigger from 1963 to 1966 than the Power Rangers at the height of their success in the 1990s. The Daleks gave the Doctor an arch-enemy, and the show a super-villain that boosted the ratings and ensured Doctor Who’s survival.

  The Daleks may be one of science fiction’s best known villains but what is it that makes them villainous? Certainly, the voice is chilling and the shape is strange. But beyond this, and perhaps more importantly, there’s a moral dimension to the Daleks that’s recognizably bad or, to use a stronger term, evil. Evidently, evil comes in different flavors. Catwoman, for example, is bad, but in a very different way to Ming the Merciless, Darth Vader, the Mekon, or for that matter, the Daleks. Why then do we recognize the Daleks as evil? What’s it about them that’s morally repugnant? And how did Terry Nation go about creating a creature with a moral dimension?

  First, what is evil? The magnitude of this problem can hardly be overstated. Philosophers have wrangled over this issue for millennia, and will doubtless continue to do so. Secondly, how’s it possible to understand the meaning of a complex text such as Doctor Who? This question may seem a little easier. Even so, it’s still a tricky one, after all the Daleks have made numerous television appearances, featured in two films, and a host of books and comic strips not to mention fan fiction. It’d be foolish to assume that the Daleks are always the same. How should a philosopher proceed in the face of two such intractable problems?

  Looking at the script of “The Daleks” (1963), focusing on the author’s intentions and situating them in their historical context, should give us a consistent account of the Daleks as Nation originally conceived them. In this way we can recover the Daleks as their original audience saw them. In writing “The Daleks” Nation tried to create a story that would be intelligible to the audience of the early 1960s, and therefore, he uses language, imagery, and ideas that meant something to the audience of the time. Nation appeals to cultural knowledge, such as the smell of dodgem cars, which originated outside Doctor Who and outside “The Daleks.”165 With this in mind, we can see what Nation was trying to do when he originally created the Daleks, and we see that the evil of the Daleks is bound up with what it means to be human.

  Evil, Rationality, and Dehumanization

  Nation presents the Daleks as evil by emphasizing their lack of humanity. This general approach is far from new. The renowned philosopher Richard Rorty argues that, traditionally, there’ve been three strategies by which we turn others into enemies. First, we choose to think of others as animals rather than human. Secondly, we describe others as childlike and therefore, assume that they’re incapable of governing themselves and suppress any attempt they make to assert their independence. Finally, we feminize our opponents; we equate humanity with masculinity and refuse to recognize the humanity of those we deem to be effeminate.166

  Each of these strategies is a strategy of dehumanization. Significantly, each strategy equates humanity with rationality. Animals aren’t rational; women and children (according to traditional prejudices) aren’t fully rational—consequently, they aren’t fully human. Moreover, rationality is the key to moral action, since only rational people can understand moral truth and discipline themselves to act ethically. Therefore, our irrational enemies are both less than human and evil.

  Nation, too, made the Daleks villains and enemies by dehumanizing them. But Nation’s specific strategy is novel because his understanding of what it means to be human is unconventional. The Daleks aren’t enemies because they’re animals who are less rational than us; they’re enemies because they’re more rational. This is obvious even before we properly meet the Daleks. From the very beginning, the Doctor is clear: the unknown creators of the dead city are “intelligent, very intelligent ... What these instruments tell us is that we’re in the midst of a—a very, very advanced, civilized society.”167 The Daleks have become inhuman and immoral because their emotions have withered. They feel no pang of remorse when plotting to annihilate the Thals, no compassion for the suffering of the Doctor and his companions, and they’re apparently indifferent to the fate of the Daleks who are perishing due to the effects of the Thals’ drugs.

  Nation’s insight is counter to the dominant tradition of western philosophy—the tradition that extends from Socrates to Kant, which argues that rationality is at the heart of what it means to be human. Nation appeals to a new set of metaphors for dehumanization which emerged in the twentieth century. The first is the metaphor of human as a robot or computer. The second is the human who has become a product of a mechanized process. This second metaphor is best-known from novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) in which humans become dehumanized as the result of a scientifically ordered society.

  These metaphors are rooted in a new philosophical understanding of reason. In both cases, rationality is considered a danger to authentic humanity rather than the part of our nature that makes us human. This twentieth-century view of humanity suggests that being human is about feeling rather than thinking. As Rorty puts it, we’re different from other animals because, “we can feel for each other to a much greater extent than they [other animals] can.”168 According to Rorty, it’s our emotions and our imagination that makes us human and ground our potential to be good. This idea is bound up with the notion that humans are individuals. Reason, at least in theory, leads all rational people to the same conclusions. What reasonable individual could doubt that two plus two equals four? Feelings, on the other hand, don’t conform to logic. Consequently, there’s a much greater scope for individuality in a moral philosophy rooted in emotions. The rational Daleks have lost any sense of individuality. Nation makes this plain in a conversation between Susan and a Dalek about a letter she has written:DALEK ONE: What is the last word here?

  SUSAN: The last word?

  DALEK ONE: Sew-san? (Susan giggles, which alarms the Daleks.)

  DALEK ONE: Stop that noise!

  SUSAN: Well, it’s ... it’s ... it’s what I’m called. It’s my name. (p. 77)

  Through this exchange Nation underlines the alienness of the Daleks. The Daleks have no conception of an individual name. It’s also significant that they don’t understand laughter. The Daleks can understand the Doctor’s rational desire to survive and get the Thals’ drugs, but they can’t comprehend the irrational, emotional, human aspects of their captives. “The Daleks” shows Nation’s villains at their least individual. Later stories introduce clearly individuated Daleks such as the Black Dalek, the Dalek Emperor, and the Dalek Supreme. There are no such distinctions in the dead city of “The Daleks.”

  The Daleks are morally repugnant because they’ve lost the ability to feel as we feel. They’ve lost the sense of themselves as individuals and due to this, have ceased to be human. This is why they’re horrifying: we know that once they were better, and we dread becoming like them!

  The War, the Bomb, and the Survivors

  The Daleks are the product of their environment, which, in turn, is the product of an apocalyptic war. We discover this through a fictional history, in fact, three fictional histories: an oral history which the Daleks reveal to the Doctor, a written history which the Thals possess, and a natural history which the Doctor and his companions piece together from observations of the dead planet. Central to each of these histories is a war and a bomb:Ov-er five hun-dred years a-go there were two ra-ces on this pla-net. We, the Da-leks, and the Thals. Af-ter the Neu-tronic war, our Da-lek for
e-fath-ers re-tired in-to the city, pro-tect-ed by our ma-chines. (p. 77)

  The consequences of the nuclear war dominate “The Daleks.” Indeed, with the exception of the scene around the TARDIS’s food machine the Doctor and his companions talk about little else for the first two and a half episodes.

  Nation constructs the Dalek’s moral character by appealing to the audience’s knowledge and fear of nuclear war. “The Daleks” was written at a time of intense nuclear hysteria. The Cuban Missile Crisis has brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust just a year before “The Dead Planet” (1963) was shown. The crisis in Cuba was the third time in five years that the world had faced nuclear oblivion. Between 1958 and 1961 there was a tense standoff over West Berlin; and prior to this, the USA and USSR deployed nuclear weapons to support their allies on either side of the Taiwan Strait. President John F. Kennedy stoked public apprehension of all-out nuclear war during the Berlin crisis by publically committing $207 million to the construction of fallout shelters.169 Kennedy described the period from 1958 to 1962 as the years of “maximum danger” (p. 79). Bomb “biographer” Gerard J. DeGroot concurs, arguing that the late 1950s and early 1960s was a uniquely perilous phase of the Cold War.170 This period of maximum nuclear danger is the immediate context for “The Daleks” and is essential to an understanding of Nation’s villains.

  Nation’s description of Skaro clearly appeals to popular knowledge regarding the effects of nuclear war. “The Dead Planet” is laced with clues about the nuclear horror that the planet has witnessed. The soil has been scorched by “indescribable” heat and the Doctor and his companions soon feel dizzy and weak—showing symptoms of radiation sickness.171 These aspects of nuclear war were well-known in the early 1960s. Less than two years before “The Daleks” went into production, the Soviet hydrogen bomb ‘Tsar Bomba’ created the biggest artificial explosion in history, resulting in a fireball almost five kilometers in diameter. Radiation sickness had also come to the public’s attention in during a 1958 US bomb test over the Bikini islands. The Japanese boat, Lucky Dragon, which had been fishing ninety miles from the test sight, was showered with radioactive ash. As a result, the fishermen developed radiation sickness. Those who survived were hospitalized for more than six months. Western newspapers covered the story, horrifying the public with details of an invisible radioactive killer.172

  Public knowledge of nuclear warfare was also based on the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the grotesque effects of nuclear war proved fertile ground for science fiction. Nuclear weapons and atomic war were consistent themes in films such as X The Unknown (1956), On the Beach (1959), The Time Machine (1960), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), and Doctor No (1962); in books like Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955), Peter George’s Red Alert (Two Hours to Doom) (1958), and Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960); and in pulp sci-fi magazines such as Amazing Science Fiction and If.

  Nonetheless, “The Daleks” contains an unusual element that clearly locates the story in the world of the early 1960s. Skaro had been devastated by a “neutron war.”173 The bombs used were not the atomic bombs, in the conventional sense; Skaro was destroyed by a neutron bomb. This reference may be lost on the modern audience and therefore the nature of the device and the public’s knowledge of it in the early sixties needs to be considered carefully. The phrase ‘neutron bomb’ seems to have come into popular usage in 1959.174 The nature of the bomb was discussed in the British and American press fairly extensively between 1960 and 1963. For example, the May 1960 edition of US News and World Report carried the following description: “The weapon—in one possibility being discussed—could be built as a ‘light-weight’ device able to send out streams of poison radiation greater than those produced by today’s big ‘conventional’ nuclear bombs.”175 Similarly, the US periodical News from November 2nd, 1962, described them thus: “‘death ray’ bombs-which would kill without leaving wide destruction.” 176 In Britain, The Times tackled neutron bombs on a number of occasions in the early 1960s. The Times’s correspondent in Washington described the neutron bomb as “a devastating weapon which would destroy life but would not destroy matter.”177

  The neutron bomb creates much less blast and heat than a uranium, plutonium, or hydrogen bomb. However, it emits a much more powerful dose of radiation. Consequently, within days of a detonation all life in the effected area is destroyed, but buildings, remain undamaged. Nation’s script contains a great deal of evidence that Skaro had been ravaged by a neutron bomb. The trees in the forest are “brittle,” they’ve been turned to stone.178 Clearly, Nation imagined that the neutron radiation had knocked out all of the tree’s living cells, but left the solid parts of the organism intact. The Dalek city, too, is dead but unscathed. The Doctor describes the effects of the neutron bomb in terms immediately recognizable from the 1960s debate: “... neutron bomb. Yes, it destroys all human tissues, but leaves the buildings and machinery intact” (p. 49).

  The link between the Daleks and the bomb is central to their nature. Their bodies have mutated due to the bomb’s radiation. What’s more, they’re physically dependent on the bomb as without its radiation they can no longer survive. Most importantly of all, the Daleks are evil because they’re the embodiment of the bomb. The Daleks have internalized the unfeeling reason that led to the creation and use of the bomb. The neutron bomb after all was the product of brilliant minds, but minds that were devoted to the remorseless extermination of entire nations. This inhuman reason has become the Dalek’s defining moral characteristic.

  The Mutants: Possible Futures: Evolution and Degeneration

  The moral character of the Daleks is bound up with the future. One way in which we think about morality is in terms of the consequences of our actions. If our actions create a better future we consider them morally good; whereas if they make the future worse we think of them as bad. Nation makes the Daleks bad by linking them to popular fears about the future. “The Dead Planet” followed “100,000 B.C.” Consequently, many of the original audience assumed that while the first story was about the origins of humanity, the second story was about humanity’s fate. They assumed that “The Dead Planet” was a vision of the Earth following a nuclear war. Nation played on this perception repeatedly in the script. The ambiguity of the location is reinforced by Ian’s skepticism regarding the Doctor’s claim that they’ve landed on another planet (p. 26). Immediately, then, Nation pushes us in the direction of considering ourselves and our own future.

  The Daleks as we encounter them in the story are the products of an evolutionary process. They weren’t always soulless creatures who lurked in metal shells. They were once much like us (p. 74). However, the neutron bomb changed them, turning the humanoid Dals into mutant Daleks. “The Daleks” leaves the appearance of the mutant creature unclear. Nonetheless, Nation’s vision of the creature is embodied in a production sketch of the Dalek creature that dates from 1963. Essentially, the Dalek mutant is like an octopus. Its body comprises a large brain and tentacles.

  The mutant nature of the Daleks played on popular fears of a post-holocaust future. Moreover, they also appealed to popular understandings of evolution. “The Daleks” is part of a science fiction tradition, extending back to Victorian times, which plays on the fear that evolution might turn human beings into monsters. Nation’s conception of evolution and the nature of the mutant creature owes much to H.G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895) is Wells’s best-known tale of human evolution gone wrong. Wells paints the unsettling picture of humanity evolving into two separate species the Eloi and the Morlocks. There are undeniable similarities between the Eloi and the Thals on the one hand, and the Morlocks and the Daleks on the other. This resemblance is widely acknowledged. 179 Nonetheless, the philosophical similarities between The Time Machine and “The Daleks” have been ignored.

  In general terms, Nation follows The Time Machine’s characterization of evil. Wells’s novel explicitly argues that both the Eloi and the Morlocks have evolved int
o something that is inferior to humanity. The Eloi have lost their knowledge of science and technology, their inquisitive spirit and their initiative. The Morlocks, on the other hand, retain their ability to use technology and still display curiosity but they’ve become cannibals. Yet, Wells’s sympathies lie with the Eloi. In the final analysis the Eloi have retained their ability to feel love and sympathy for one another and consequently, Wells argues, they’re more human than the ingenious but unfeeling Morlocks.180

  The two debates, the nuclear debate and the Victorian debate about evolution, are linked by the film The Time Machine, which Nation saw in 1960. The film mixes Wells’s story of evolution gone wrong with a nuclear war. In so doing, it explains Wells’s bleak vision of the future with popular concerns about the possibility of a nuclear war. Nation takes this a step further by mixing Wells’s vision of evolution with more contemporary science fiction, such as Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, which explores mutation following a nuclear war. In this sense, “The Daleks,” like The Time Machine, is a vision of our future.

  “The Daleks” also owes a massive debt to Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1899). This novel, too, contains a description of human evolution. In fact, Wells’s Martians, the villains of The War of the Worlds, bear an uncanny resemblance to “The Man of the Year Million,” an essay on human evolution which Wells published in 1893. By the Year Million, Wells suggests, human beings will have evolved in such a way that their bodies will have shrivelled and all that will be left is tentacle like “hands” attached to a massive brain. The Martians, too, have huge brains and enfeebled bodies largely made up of tentacles.181 What’s more, Wells’s Martians sit inside metal war machines armed with ray-guns. This could easily be a description of the Daleks. Evidently, Wells’s Martians are the Daleks’ closest fictional relative. Moreover, the Daleks, like Wells’s monsters, have become evil through a process of evolution.182 Their brains have expanded as their bodies have shriveled. Their physical appearance perfectly matches their moral character. The growth of the brain emphasizes the dominance of reason, and the withering of the body parallels the fading of their emotions.