Genesis of the Daleks

Chapter the 278th, where critiquing one of Who's biggest stories ever is like critiquing Hamlet: nobody wants my opinion, and probably someone's said it before me anyway. Nonetheless, I'll try... 

Plot:
The Time Lords intercept the Doctor, Sarah and Harry when they are mid-transmat travelling from the Earth to Nerva Beacon. They have dragged them off course to Skaro in the past, around the time of the Daleks' earliest beginnings, to give the Doctor a mission to avert the creatures' creation. Skaro is towards the end of a thousand-year war that has destroyed the planet and transformed the people. Both sides, Thals and Kaleds, feel they cannot now stop until they've achieved the total annihilation of the other. Sarah gets separated from the Doctor and Harry, is captured by the Thals, and press-ganged into loading a missile with dangerous explosive. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Harry are captured by the Kaled military ("Why, that's an anagram of -! How interesting."). The military are not really in command on the Kaled side, as the power is held by an elite group based in a separate bunker away from their main dome, and the Doctor and Harry soon find themselves imprisoned there. The leader of this group is a scientist called Davros. The Kaled Elite have forecast that the mutations caused by the weapons of this war will only get worse. Davros's research has therefore focussed on building a travel machine that will be used by the mutated forms that the Kaleds will eventually become; he calls this machine a Dalek. He has created many mutated lifeforms to test these machines, but others in the bunker are worried about his work: instead of just accelerating the mutation, Davros has genetically-engineered the embryonic mutants to remove emotions and make them more aggressive, essential - as he sees it - to their survival.

One of the Elite helps the Doctor and Harry to escape, and they go to the Kaled government and persuade them to halt Davros's experiments. They then travel to the Thal dome to rescue Sarah. Hearing of his government's moves against him, Davros goes to the Thals and gives them a formula that will help their rocket destroy the Kaled dome. He would rather sacrifice every Kaled outside the bunker than stop working on the Daleks. The Doctor gets everyone out of the launch area and then tries to sabotage the rocket, but is knocked out by a guard. When he awakes, the Kaled dome is destroyed and the Thals are celebrating the end of the war. He helps a Thal called Bettan escape when Davros's new Daleks arrive and start exterminating the Thals. The Doctor goes back toward the Kaled bunker, meeting Sarah and Harry en route. On re-entering the bunker, the TARDIS trio are captured by Davros, but later released by the anti-Davros contingent of the Elite, who are now in the majority. While these rebels confront Davros, the Doctor wires up the embryo room to explode, but has second thoughts wondering if he has the right to interfere. The Daleks return from the Thal dome and exterminate all the rebellious members of the Elite, but they don't stop there. They also kill those loyal to Davros, and even Davros himself. Bettan leads a resistance group of survivors who blow up the entrance to the bunker, just seconds after the TARDIS trio escape. Travelling back to the TARDIS using a Time Ring that the Time Lords provided, the Doctor muses that even though they did not stop the Daleks from being created, that they didn't really lose as some good will come from the Daleks continuing existence, but he's fooling himself really.

Context:

I couldn't get anyone in the family interested in watching this with me, and then I had a couple of false starts when - after everyone had gone to bed - I pressed play on the blu-ray disc (from the very first collection box set for season 12, released in 2018) and after a few seconds of theme tune decided I was too tired and went to bed. In the end I watched it over a couple of late afternoons and evenings during a rainy week in late September 2023. The Better Half sat in for the first couple of episodes, but this was mainly because she was feeling under the weather and couldn't find the energy to leave the living room. Wrapped in a blanket, she sat on the sofa making the occasional comment. The most interesting was an observation that you never see electricians or plumbers at work in science fiction stories, but they must be needed. She has a point. I could only think of the one scene in The End of the World that contradicted her assertion, and that was a last minute addition to pad out the running time. I then started to wonder who does the plumbing for terrestrial military bases during conflicts. I'm guessing that they didn't get Iraqi contractors in to fix the toilets in the Green Zone, and instead it would have been members of some mechanical engineering corps or other, but I don't know for sure. Maybe this is a topic for future study. The reason why will become more clear in the Reaction section below, but it is instructive to understand that these musings only occurred to me during the early episodes; by the end, I wasn't thinking about plumbing.

Milestone watch: This post completes season 12, which is the 14th out of the current 39 series of Who new and old for which I've blogged all the stories. It's the fifth of seven Tom Baker seasons completed, with only two of his many, many stories remaining to cover. Gosh!

First Time Round:

In the early days of the Doctor Who VHS range, from its beginnings in the 1980s up to around 1991 (the year that Genesis of the Daleks was released), one could not guarantee that one would be able to find a shop stocking the tapes on their day of release. Just finding the things at all was reward enough, the timing was secondary. As the 1990s progressed and the range established itself, things became more reliable and - for this fan at least, and I suspect from behaviour of others that I've witnessed over the years that it isn't just me by a long way - obtaining the story as early as possible became very important. This is one of those things that fans get obsessive about maybe even despite themselves. Thinking back about the early 1990s, I am probably projecting myself indulging in this behaviour, which I was definitely doing by later in the decade, before I truly did. Reading old diaries I recently rediscovered (see blog posts passim) made it clear that funding and personal organisation did not always allow this. In early October 1991, Genesis of the Daleks came out in a double pack with preceding story The Sontaran Experiment, and on the same day another classic Tom Baker story The Deadly Assassin was also separately made available. And I didn't purchase them for months afterwards. The reason for this, and a broader explanation of some of the obsessive behaviour of fans, I will cover below in the Deeper Thoughts section.

Reaction:

As the anecdote goes, Barry Letts - the outgoing Doctor Who producer who commissioned this story before Philip Hinchcliffe took over in the role - read the initial storyline that writer Terry Nation had submitted, and in a script meeting said to Nation "It's great; the only snag is that you've sold it to us twice already". This refers back to a brace of Dalek stories Nation had written in the previous two years. Both were straightforward adventure tales where Daleks and Doctor would land on a hostile planet full of perils overcome one by one, with an arbitrary plot eventually foiled. It was the basic formula for every Nation-penned Dalek story after his first couple in the early years; only the locales would really change. This time, Letts wanted something different. To his credit, Nation took this with good humour, and he, Letts and outgoing script editor Terrance Dicks brainstormed together and came up with the idea of showing the Daleks' origins. Watching the early episodes of Genesis of the Daleks, I wonder whether some remnants of that original storyline made it into the final product, though. There are tell-tale signs of the sort of Saturday morning cinema serial plotting that Nation loved to sample, and which was a major inspiration for early Doctor Who. Such plotting is never very joined up. A wasteland features in episode one that's dangerous with explosions, gas and gunfire; by episode three and four, people cross it with ease. Soldiers talk about how they must conserve ammo, and then seconds later are spraying bullets all over the place. Sarah has to load a rocket with dangerous material that will definitely kill her one week, but when she's finished loading the rocket it resolutely doesn't kill her the next week. In fact, she suffers no ill effects at all, and that danger is never mentioned again.

This sort of logical inconsistency wouldn't matter as much if it was just a simple adventure plot. Indeed all those scenes work in isolation, probably because they are staged and shot with gusto by director Davis Maloney and the crew. From the opening sequence of a brutal slo-mo attack on masked soldiers onwards, Genesis of the Daleks looks and feels excellent. There's a very generous eight and a half minutes of film before the first studio set, and even what's in studio is made, dressed and lit well. Production fell to the new team of Hinchcliffe and incoming script editor Robert Holmes, and they gave Maloney the latitude to bring more darkness (both literal and figurative) to proceedings, as well as - presumably - a bit more money than other stories that year. This is essential, as the remainder of the script apart from the perilous adventure stuff needed to be treated more seriously than the brighter and more colourful house style of the Letts and Dicks years would probably have allowed. It is after all a story heavily influenced by the horrors of the Second World War that examines the morality of eugenics during a major conflict. This subtext is laid on so thick you could almost lose the sub- and just call it text, with the Kaleds wearing Nazi-style uniforms and giving Nazi-style salutes (Nyder even wears an iron cross in the earlier episodes, before someone realised that was a bit too much and it was removed). For many years, people believed such material was probably suggested (maybe even written) by Robert Holmes, so different is it to what Nation usually delivered. But Nation was a very good writer, he just tended towards a certain expediency when scripting Doctor Who. When given a challenge, he needed no help, and the character of Davros and the narrative of the Daleks' creation is his best work for the series.

If Genesis has a significant flaw, though, it is that mix between the external, environmental threat of the adventure stuff, mostly in the earlier episodes, and the interpersonal and philosophical threat of the later material with Davros and the Kaled elite, mostly in the later episodes. The story is equal parts Buster Crabbe and Josef Mengele. That's an odd mix to begin with, but then those logical lapses in the earlier material make it even less likely to gel by undermining the later material. If this is a dangerous story universe where Davros's experimentation needs to be taken seriously, then you just can't have a toxic material illogically turn out not to be toxic at all. It's also a bit tiresome - at least to an old and jaded viewer like me who's seen the story a number of times before - to have scenes of exciting escapes and chases that turn out to be pointless as escapees are captured again and put back exactly where they were. I accept this, though, as part of Doctor Who; it's exciting for people watching the first time, it provides nice cliffhangers, it makes the story reach its six episodes in length - fair enough. There's no excuse for the toxic material stuff, though. It's frustrating. Either it should have been removed altogether, or Nation ought to have worked in some antidote. Instead, he seems to just assume viewers will forget what happened the week before. Genesis of the Daleks gets away it, though, as it's just so well made, and the later material so good, that these inconsistencies are forgiven. While intellectually, I can see I might enjoy a four-part version of this story that just concentrates on the Davros material, I know in my gut that it wouldn't be nearly as popular as the poll-topping behemoth that the story became.

What makes Genesis of the Daleks so good that its flaws are forgiven, apart from the way it's shot and designed? The most obvious thing is the conception and character of Davros, and Michael Wisher's performance bringing life to the Dalek creator. Wisher's work has long been celebrated, and I'm not going to contradict what's obvious: he is superb. The soft, sly delivery when he's being a political plotter, the brittle terse exchanges when he's dealing with people he knows to be his intellectual inferiors, the ranting where he sounds more and more like one of his creations - all these choices are so good they look obvious in retrospect and set a template from which nobody who'd play the character later could possibly deviate; it is impeccable and indelible. The mask and make-up are first rate, and the ideas that underpin all this are perfect. The Dalek travel machines are based on a similar life-support and wheelchair he's designed for himself. He sees the Daleks as an extension of himself ("We - I - will go on") which makes the irony of the ending where they turn on him, as he's programmed them to hate anything unlike themselves, even more powerful. This wouldn't work if he was the hackneyed mad scientist character - the story and the ending works better because his point of view, although extreme, is rational: in order to survive, he feels the Daleks must be the apex predator of the universe, and cannot afford to have any qualms about that. What's also refreshing is that - probably uniquely in classic Doctor Who - Davros as the villain wastes no time in disbelieving the Doctor is who he says he is, a time traveller from another world, and instead turns it immediately to his advantage.

The interesting POVs provided for the characters facilitate another big strength of the story, some big scenes. Aside from the ending (which continues after Davros is killed with a magnificent BCU of a Dalek - the new power on Skaro - facing right into the camera, ranting its credo of universal domination), there are two that are rightly famous. Whenever they occur, it's similar to when a production of Hamlet reaches 'To be or not to be'. Firstly, the Doctor and Davros in conversation, with the Time Lord trying to persuade the Kaled that his creations are like a virus that will eventually wipe out all other lifeforms. Wisher has Davros picturing the scene vividly, and even chillingly acting out the holding of a capsule containing the virus "To know that the tiny pressure on my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything: yes, I would do it!" and snapping his fingers closed, already bringing about galactic devastation in his warped imaginings. The other scene is the Doctor poised with two wires to touch together, asking if he has the right to change the future. Just those would be enough to push this story to the top reaches of fan polls, but there are so many great lines and moments (my favourite is Nyder's line about the Doctor and Harry "We'll find out what's different about them... by autopsy"). The performances aside from Wisher are all top drawer: Peter Miles, Tom Georgeson, Dennis Chinnery, Stephen Yardley, Guy Siner...

The regular actors are solid too, though at this early stage Nation hadn't quite got a handle on their characters. Baker's Doctor as written is a bit more lightly rather than broodingly eccentric, and Harry is written as solid and intelligent, without the humorous ineffectuality he had elsewhere. These are minor things, though. A clumsier bit of scripting is that scenes towards the end have to be broadcast on convenient screens so that characters who aren't present can still be aware of what happened. This might have been okay once, but unfortunately Nation has to pull the same trick twice as he's written himself into a corner. The introduction of the Thal rebel leader character Bettan feels a bit tacked on; she should have been featured earlier in a slightly bigger role given how she becomes the leader of another significant alien race in Doctor Who history (it's interesting and important - for a fan at least - to see the origins of the other tribe that lived on Skaro too). The story is remarkable for slotting neatly into established continuity without contradicting what came before. The origins as retold in the very first Dalek story are consistent with what we see in Genesis, bar a misremembered name or detail; only that those very first Daleks couldn't move outside the metal floors of their city does not fit, and that hasn't fit with any Dalek story made since - Nation must have cursed himself for ever including that limitation in 1963. Anyway, minor continuity issues, clumsy moments of plotting, or sub-optimally integrated character introductions cannot seem to dent enjoyment of this story, nor its reputation,

Connectivity:

Both Genesis of the Daleks and The Witchfinders feature at least one character appearing near the beginning in a mask, and each story sees the baddies attempt unsuccessfully to execute the Doctor; that's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

Blue about Blu - the emotional perils of collecting. Genesis of the Daleks is one of those stories that has been analysed rigorously over the years, both in terms of the content (was this the opening salvo of the Time War?!) and the making of. As such, I am going to concentrate instead on a topic I come back to again and again, probably as a form of self-therapy so apologies in advance: the mentality of the collector and the fan. In some ways, I think it is an addiction, and that I am an addict. Let me tell you the story of the Collection, the range of classic series box-sets, each containing one season of Doctor Who, on Blu-ray. This range started with Genesis of the Daleks and the other stories from season 12 coming out in an elegant limited edition box in the summer of 2018. This was obviously not the first ever range making Doctor Who available to buy. From 1986 onwards, I collected all the available Doctor Who stories on VHS tape, until the range was complete in 2003. By that time, it was also possible to collect them all again on shiny disc, most of them on DVD, but also a few more as audio CDs of the soundtracks, which existed even when the moving pictures were lost). Every classic story was released eventually, and many of them had included animated episodes to plug gaps, married to those surviving soundtracks. The DVD range petered out around early 2014, with only one single surviving episode that existed in the archives not yet released. In late 2015, when I'd started this blog, that final episode was included on the DVD release for The Underwater Menace. I wrote about it here, thinking it would likely be the last classic series physical media release ever (streaming and non-physical pay-to-own looked to be the models that would take over completely then).

There was a definite sense of relief. I'd already taken a big step in combatting my addiction by declining to collect a new and expensive magazine partwork that had started to come out a month before The Underwater Menace (see the Deeper Thoughts of another early post for more details). Would I finally be able to kick the habit altogether? In short, no. It took a year, but a new source for collectibles on shiny disc was found - wholly animated stories. The first full story to be animated was The Power of the Daleks and jolly good this new version was too. I collected that one, as it was something brand new and interesting; I also knew that any other stories animated in the future I would be compelled to collect, but there didn't seem much harm in that. Realistically, they weren't going to be able to produce more than one or two animations per year. In 2018, though, came the Collection. As well as one or two animations a year, there would be up to three box sets of full seasons on Blu-ray to buy. It would mean collecting all the classic series episodes yet again from scratch, on yet another medium. Did I have the stomach for it? Most of Who made before the 21st century was not going to look that much better on Blu-ray as it wasn't captured in high definition. It would give another opportunity for restoration, though, and techniques improved year on year. The episodes would look better even though it wouldn't be the sort of leap in quality as that between VHS and DVD. There would also be new extras. Was that enough to tempt me? I ummed and ahhed, and eventually the presence on that season 12 set of a feature with Tom Baker that had only previously been available on VHS swayed me (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details).

I might have left it that, but the next set (season 19) was a run of stories that was particularly close to my heart, so I plumped again. By then, the BFI events had started up that tied-in with each box set's release, screening episodes from the sets (often in special editions with updated effects) and featuring panels of people starring in or working behind the scenes on the sets. The events were always a fun way of meeting up with fan friends, so we would usually go. If I was attending, it seemed wrong somehow not to also get the set being advertised. This could just be an example of the addict making any excuse to indulge in his addiction; but, alas, I think it's worse than that. I actually do feel at some level that it would be cheating. It's a completely irrational thought and yet it's one I can't quite shake off; clearly it's part of my individual fan pathology, and it might just be me. Every fan's got something, though. As I touched on in the First Time Round section above, many of us get bent out of shape if we don't get our new Who purchases on the day of release. A glance down the social media feeds of fans on a release day will show you, barely concealed, a collective angst along the lines of  'If I don't get this shiny new thing now, and everyone else does and is watching it and commenting on it when I can't, I will die'. This scenario did indeed happen to many, myself included, for the box set release in the third week of September 2023.

After I had collected a few of the box sets, a tipping point was reached, and I was committed (at least in my own mind) to seeing things through. The sunk cost of purchasing every new set as they've come out since 2018 has made it increasingly more difficult to just stop. The sets are also limited editions, and at first there was no hint that they would ever come out as standard versions once the initial run was completed; this put even more pressure on me to get each new set ordered as early as possible. The sets are now being rereleased in less deluxe packaging, but I've collected 14 of the limited versions now; if you think that I'd be able to accept having a set in amongst them on the shelf that didn't match, then you possibly will never understand Doctor Who fandom (or at least my particular version of it). I hope some of this explains why on 18th September 2023, after having pre-ordered the thing before the ink was even wet on the press release announcing it was coming out, it was a far from fun experience when my Season 20 set did not arrive. Other fans on social media were reporting that they were going through the same thing, or worse that their orders were being cancelled altogether. Amazon were not helpful, and after talking to their Customer Services I became convinced that my set wasn't going to arrive at all. In a panic, with visions of a line of irregular spines looking ugly on a shelf, I ordered the set from another retailer, and now I have two. One has been left in the sealed wrapping so I can return it, but I've opened the other and started watching some of the content. A few extras feature the cast (Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton) just sort of mucking around, being friends joshing with each other, brought together by Doctor Who, and sharing some of that love and joy with fans. This is an indication of the more positive foibles of fandom.

Why did I wait so long in 1991 to buy Genesis of the Daleks? In October, I started at university in Durham, many many miles away from my home on the south coast. I travelled up with one suitcase of stuff (accompanied by friend and fellow Doctor Who fan Zahir). I can't remember the exact date term started, but even if it was after the videos came out, it would have not been worth buying them and carting them northward up the country, as I didn't know I'd have had anything to play them on (one of the first friends I made in college Mike was soon discovered to have his own TV and video and a single room, so viewings became possible later, as recounted many times previously on the blog). I also had new expenses I didn't have when living at home, and there were no more videos scheduled for release that year (the next ones came out in mid-January 1992). As best I can recall therefore, I would have bought Genesis when back home for the Christmas holiday, and would have left The Deadly Assassin until later (as another friend made in that first term David had lent me a home-taped copy of that later story). December 1991 was the first time I'd seen Genesis of the Daleks, as I'd somehow missed the summer repeat of it in 1982. I remember my friend Alex telling me all about it when we were back at school in September. It's no coincidence that memories of watching these stories is tied up in memories of old friends like Alex, Zahir, Mike and David. I hope that makes up somewhat for the ridiculous obsessiveness. A collection might seem like just a bunch of things, I know, but they're things that spark happy reminiscences.

In Summary:

Equal parts Buster Crabbe and Josef Mengele.