Black Archive: The Daleks, by Oliver Wake

I greatly enjoyed this shrewd, wide-ranging exploration of the seven-part Doctor Who serial variously known as Serial B, The Mutants or The Daleks. First broadcast over the winter of 1963-64, it introduced us to the outer-space robot people of the planet Skaro.

Wake covers a lot of ground, detailing how the story evolved from Terry Nation’s initial wheeze through storyline, draft scripts and production, and what this process of revision by multiple people did to the resulting drama and its meanings. As he says, in this first serial the Daleks are not and never were Nazi analogues; that came later. He makes an argument that they’re something more like ants in an anthill, and provides good evidence.

A lot of what’s here is his analysis of paperwork from the time and old interviews, sources with which I’m very familiar — I wrote the Black Archive book about The Edge of Destruction, the Doctor Who serial that followed this one, and a biography of the story editor on both stories. What strikes me most is how deftly Wake has taken a great wealth of material and written something so concise and pacy. There are lots of big ideas and we rattle through them. Nation would approve.

Wake is excellent on the serial’s debt to Nation’s 1962 dramatisation of “Imposter”, the short story by Philip K Dick, and what we can glean from the RNID summary of the story — a document I’d not been aware of before — that was clearly based on early versions of scripts. He’s also good on citing his sources, so we can check his claims — though it’s a bit jarring to be caught up in some smart, insightful bit of reasoning and then hit my own name. “Oh no, him.”

I particularly liked the analysis of the direction of two key moments: the cliffhanger at the end of episode 1 where Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) is menaced by a sink plunger and then the sequence in episode 2 where we get a first proper look at the Daleks. Wake is also brilliant in his deductions about the real-world item used for the Daleks’ domed heads, using that to explore the specific aesthetic style of this first iteration of Daleks. I’ll not name the specific style here; that’s worth you paying for the book.

My only quibble, really, is where he says Nation muddled his science, eliding two distinct ideas — that radiation can mutate DNA, and that a species evolves over time through mutations in DNA — so that the neutron bomb makes the Daleks and Thals evolve into very different creatures from what they once were. He also says that real petrified jungles aren’t like the one seen here. I don’t think that’s Nation being wrong, as such. He just didn’t think Earth science applied to his story, where he could set the rules. He said as such in an interview included on the video Daleks: The Early Years (1992):

“You land their ship, the TARDIS, on a planet and from that moment on everything on that planet is your creation. If the rocks talk, fine, that’s my planet. If the creatures have 12 eyes, that’s what happens on my planet. So you have this wonderful freedom to do almost anything you want.”

Nation revelled in things being different and strange, and not as our scientists would think possible. So it was not a mistake but conscious choice. And that meant he could sometimes be ahead of the boffins: as I’ve said before, his Planet of the Daleks (1973) features an “ice volcano” in that “instead of white hot lava … erupts with molten ice” — daft fantasy until, 16 years later, scientists spotted cryovulcanism for the first time in space, and it became science fact.

Wake’s book also prompted what may be a new thought. The appendix discusses a short-lived title for the serial: Beyond the Sun. Wake argues that this suggests a setting far beyond our Solar System, but I wonder if that’s right. “Beyond” means “on the farther side of”; departing from Earth, we’d need to head towards the Sun and keep going past it — to the area of space on Earth’s own orbital path but diametrically opposite. In that sense, Skaro would be a hidden, twin planet of Earth.

We can date the moment this changed: on 23 September 1963, Doctor Who story editor David Whitaker commissioned writer Malcolm Hulke for a story called The Hidden Planet, set on planet in the Solar System previously undetected because it shares Earth’s orbit but is on the far side of the Sun. Unlike Skaro, this would have been a world almost like our own but with a number of notable differences the Doctor and his friends would explore; the setting sparked the story.

The Hidden Planet didn’t make it to the screen, but Whitaker seems to have hung on to the idea: his 1966 story The Power of the Daleks is set on a planet called Vulcan, the name used in (discredited) theories about Earth having a twin.