doctor who

In “The Ambush”, the fourth episode of The Daleks, the Thals and the Daleks, centuries after the war that divided them, finally reunite. It does not go well. The Daleks have laid out food for the starving Thals, but it’s a trap. The Daleks are lying in wait, in the titular ambush, to blast the Thals as soon as they approach the spread. (Which, incidentally, contains several objects that I think are cylindrical white cannisters but which look an awful lot like rolls of toilet paper. Truly ingenious bait for a people who’ve just spent years hiking through the wilderness.)

Temmosus, the Thal leader, argues with Alydon, the Thal who Susan met last episode. Alydon is wary and fearful, mistrusting the Daleks’ offer. He wonders what reason the Daleks would have to help them, and worries that they might have been horrified or jealous to find that they were not the only survivors of the long-past war. Temmosus dismisses his concerns, saying his suspicions are “based on fear, and fear breeds hatred and war.” Not to mention, the Thals won’t last much longer without food – they have to accept the Daleks’ generosity. Temmosus believes that if they approach the Daleks peacefully, then the Thals’ good intentions will be clear, and friendship between the two peoples might grow.

Objectively, Temmosus is right. Forget everything we know about the Daleks from watching decades of cries for extermination. Temmosus’ people are starving, and another group is offering them help. There used to be conflict between them, but that was more than half a millennium ago. He has no reason not to take their offer at face value; in fact, to not do so risks the end of his species.

But narratively, Alydon is right. We, the viewers, know how evil the Daleks are, and we’re meant to see Temmosus as naive for ignoring Alydon’s warnings. Alydon is the wise one for listening to his instincts, which tell him that the Daleks mean them harm. Temmosus is punished for his foolishness with death; he’s the first one killed when the Daleks attack. The moral of this story is clear – don’t trust strangers. Beware of Daleks bearing gifts.

Wait, now. Is Doctor Who really telling its viewers that they should be suspicious of people who are different from them?

Sure seems like it! Later, the surviving Thals are mystified by the Daleks’ behavior. Alydon believes that if they can understand why the Daleks hate them, they can approach them differently and perhaps still make peace. But Ian already knows why – the Daleks dislike anyone unlike them. It won’t make a difference what the Thals do; the Daleks will always hate them. The Thals have difficulty believing this, but the narrative isn’t on Alydon’s side this time. Ian’s correct, of course. The Daleks are space-Nazis, remember, and he’s dead on when he says that their unblinking prejudice is irrational and evil. It’s wrong to dislike the unlike!

Except… wasn’t that Temmosus’ point of view in the prior scene? That Alydon was wrong to mistrust the Daleks just because of their differences? And didn’t the story lead us to believe that Temmosus was mistaken?

So Alydon was right to mistrust another people because they’re different, but the Daleks are wrong to do so. It’s a bit contradictory. I mean, yes, of course, you should definitely mistrust space-Nazis, but Alydon didn’t know they were space-Nazis until they started shooting.

Maybe we can untangle it by hearkening back to what I wrote about the last episode. The Thals are good because they look like idealized versions of us. The Daleks are bad because they don’t. Alydon had learned of the Daleks’ likely horrific appearance from Susan. If Temmosus had been wise enough to judge them based on that, like Alydon was, he’d have survived. It’s wrong to hate others because they’re different, unless they’re very different. In that case, they’re going to hate you, so it’s okay to hate them back first.

Geez. That’s a terrible lesson. I’m not saying it’s intentional; I don’t think Terry Nation was trying to “both sides” the space-Nazis. The intent is clearly that good-hearted Temmosus is deceived by the evil Daleks, and we’re not supposed to see Alydon’s worries as in any way similar to the Daleks’ bigotries. But that reading depends on us ascribing our own external knowledge to the characters. Alydon suspects what we know to be true about the Daleks; Temmosus should too.

It’s hardly uncommon for writers to assume (consciously or not) that viewers or readers will judge characters based on knowledge about the text that the viewers/readers have but the characters don’t. It’s very easy to gloss over that without thinking about it, but if you do, you might be absorbing a message the writers didn’t intend. Yes, the Daleks are killers, and we can feel sorry for poor Temmosus while wishing he had listened to Alydon. But in real life, it’s far more common for people to assume, based on little or incorrect information, that someone is a Dalek when they’re really a Thal. We know the Daleks are evil before they fire a shot, and within the bounds of this fiction, that’s not bigotry. But how many people believe they know some other group is evil, based on nothing more substantial than Alydon’s gut instinct? Isn’t that bigotry?

The real Nazis aren’t waiting in ambush; they let us know who they are, proudly, every day, and they’re the ones who want you to be suspicious of others. When it comes to judging people you don’t yet understand, be a Temmosus, not an Alydon. Like the Thal said, suspicion is based on fear, and fear breeds hatred and war.

In “The Escape,” the third episode of The Daleks, we meet the Thals, the other inhabitants of the planet Skaro, old enemies of the titular monsters. The Daleks had warned Susan that the Thals would be hideously mutated as a result of the fallout from the neutronic war, but when she meets the Thal named Alydon, she’s struck by how perfect he is. He’s tall, white, blond, handsome, and wearing a groovy puffy vest. Though frightened of the stranger at first, she comes to trust him within moments of meeting him. Admittedly, he’s acted in a friendly manner and given her life-saving anti-radiation drugs, but still, from here on out none of the TARDIS team will doubt the Thal’s good intentions. Being hot never hurts.

We never get more than a glimpse of a Dalek outside its casing, but the story makes clear how hideous they are. Alydon says, “If they call us mutations, what must they be like?” (Which strikes me as somewhat shoddy writing, just as an aside – from his tone he obviously means the Daleks must be ugly, but that turn of phrase suggests he means they must be even more beautiful than the Thals. I’ll forgive Terry Nation – he didn’t always have the best attention to detail, but he more than made up for it in other ways.) When Ian and the Doctor get a look at one, they act instantly to stop Barbara and Susan from seeing it; they can barely stand to look at it as they scoop it out of its casing. We only see a single claw sticking out of the coat they’ve wrapped it in, but it’s enough to show us that whatever the Daleks look like, they’re no Thals.

To recap: ugly aliens, bad; pretty aliens, good. It’s… not a great message, and I’d like to think it wasn’t a conscious one on Nation’s part. It’s hardly uncommon to make the evil monsters revolting, after all. But… the Thals aren’t just a group of normal people. They’re all like Alydon – white, blond, hot. (Well, tastes vary, but they’re all intended to be hot.) And they all wear clothing showing off lots of skin. (Stupid sexy Thals.) Why did Nation make a point of the Thals being physically perfect? Or to get more specific, and more troubling, why did he make a point of the Thals being physically perfect according to racist Aryan ideals?

Nation has said that the creation of the Daleks was influenced by the Nazis, and their goal of extermination of anyone who did not live up to their ideas of physical purity. It’s a striking choice, then, to make the Nazi-analogues’ enemies look exactly like the actual Nazi’s self-image (whether that specific choice was made by Nation himself, or someone else on the production team). I’m struggling to figure out if there’s some deeper meaning to it. On the face of it, the theme might be, “The Nazi were wrong about genocide, but they were right about some people being better than others based on physical characteristics.”

Do I think anyone involved in making this story literally thought that? Uh… maybe? The show’s lead actor would have probably vigorously agreed with that statement, since William Hartnell was, by most accounts, racist as hell. And antisemitism was sadly rampant in the UK in the sixties, so making sure the Space Nazis’ enemies looked as non-Jewish as possible might have been a consideration. The most gracious reading of the story is that nobody really thought it through; that making the übermensch the good guys was an unconscious choice. The Thals are the opposite of the ugly Daleks, so let’s make them attractive, and white blond people are attractive. I’m sure you can see the problem with that line of thought – unconscious racism is still racism.

So are the Thals racist? Yes. The show will have worse moments in the future – much, much worse. But making the perfect specimens of goodness based on their physical characteristics all white and blond is racist, whether that was the intent or not.

But these essays are supposed to be exploring what it is I love about Doctor Who. (When I remember that that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, anyhow.) And one of those things is its longevity, and how that allows the show to contradict itself. Doctor Who is large, it contains multitudes. Two seasons after The Daleks, Galaxy 4 will convey the opposite message: the hot blond aliens, the Drahvins, are bad, and the hideous aliens, the Rills, are good. There! Racism solved! Until The Celestial Toymaker a few stories later, when a character says the n-word. (They wisely took that out of the recent animation.) And back and forth it’ll go, throughout its long history.

No easy answers, then. I won’t excuse The Daleks as being a product of its time – that’s always a cop out when talking about past examples of racism, and assumes nobody of that time could have recognized it, much less been impacted by it. I still think it’s a great story, and this is a great episode, but it’s dishonest to acknowledge that without also acknowledging its murky, problematic messaging. So I’ll be troubled by the casting choices, while also enjoying how well Thal Ganatus fills out his puffy vast. I can contradict myself. I’m large, too.

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There’s an interesting exchange between Ian and the Doctor early in “The Survivors”. They haven’t met the Daleks yet, but they’ve been exploring their city and have found a laboratory containing advanced scientific equipment. (The only item they identify is a Geiger counter, which isn’t all that advanced, but presumably the other, unnamed stuff is more impressive.) Anyway, here are their thoughts on the people of this city:

IAN: Hard to imagine what sort of people these are.
DOCTOR: They’re intelligent, anyway. Very intelligent.
IAN: Yes, but how do they use their intelligence? What form does it take?
DOCTOR: Oh, as if that matters. What these instruments tell us is that we’re in the midst of a very, very advanced civilised society.

Ian’s questions are valid, and he’s right to be concerned. In writing The Daleks, Terry Nation was influenced by threats from the recent past – the genocidal policies of the Nazis – and from a possible near future – an atomic war. It’s not surprising that Ian, as a solid English citizen of 1963, would see the dangers in the advanced science of an unknown people. Being a science teacher himself would probably make him even more cautious, not less.

But the Doctor is an alien, and he’d not lived through the Blitz as Ian had, nor played civil defense films for his students, preparing them for nuclear annihilation. Moreover, as I’ve mentioned before, the Doctor is not yet the protagonist of his own show, and his role in the narrative fluctuates between an obstacle and an outright antagonist – moments after this exchange, he decides to leave the missing Barbara to die alone of radiation poisoning in order to save himself and Susan, with only the fact that he’d just handed a key component of the ship over to Ian preventing him from doing so.

So viewers in Britain in 1963 would know right away that the Doctor’s response of “as if that matters” is a red flag; that of course the way in which intelligence is used matters. Being an advanced civilised society doesn’t mean you won’t commit barbarous acts.

As a viewer in America in the early part of 2025, the Doctor’s comment strikes me in much the same way. Our current ruler, Elon Musk, and his sycophants view intelligence – specifically, the type of standardized test intelligence with racist, eugenicist undertones measured by the I.Q. test – as an inherent good, and a signifier of value and superiority. This early Doctor would likely agree, at least until he got a got a good look at what they’re up to.

A big difference between Musk et. al. and the Daleks is that the Daleks, being fictional supervillains, really are as intelligent as Musk only claims to be. There are different types of intelligence, of course – one of the points Ian is making, and which the Doctor dismisses. Musk has smarts when it comes to propaganda, and self-promotion, and strip mining businesses and governments for self-profit; he’s deeply stupid by every other measure. (Seriously. Just… listen to him talk sometime. Not a sound bite. Listen to his answer to a question, any meaningful question, in its entirety. All the ranch dressing in the world couldn’t help you choke down that word salad.)

So in the fictional world of Doctor Who, the bad guys hold themselves superior because of an intelligence that they actually possess. In the real world, the bad guys hold themselves superior because of an intelligence they believe they possess, but don’t. Either way, when dealing with Daleks or aspiring Daleks, the key is not to buy into their narrative. The Doctor will destroy his Daleks, but we can’t be the Doctor if we want to destroy ours. Not this early Doctor, at least. We’ve gotta be Ian. How do they use their intelligence? What form does it take? Understand where they’re actually smart, and where they’re actually stupid, and maybe we won’t wind up dying in a petrified radioactive ruin.

There’s a lovely scene in the middle of “The Dead Planet” where the four main characters linger by the TARDIS’ food machine. They’re settling in for the night, and Ian and Barbara are hungry. The Doctor tells them they can have anything they want, and Barbara asks for bacon and eggs. (Odd choice for dinner, but I suppose time travel throws off your inner clock somewhat.) The Doctor and Susan program the machine and out pop two little bars, which Barbara and Ian are amazed to find taste just like bacon and eggs. The Doctor, pleased by their reaction, explains how it works to an appreciative Ian. The food machine is very ’60s sci-fi and the characters are all getting along and there’s no danger. It’s nice.

Of course, the rest of the episode isn’t so nice. The Doctor has been clashing with Ian and Barbara – they’re angry he’s not prioritizing getting them home, and he’s resentful about these unwelcome passengers telling him what to do. Someone frightened Susan in the forest, and she’s upset that her grandfather doesn’t believe her. The Doctor selfishly sabotages his own ship so that they’ll be forced to visit the city he, and only he, wants to explore. The episode ends with Barbara, lost in the city and separated from the others, being threatened by something advancing towards her – a Dalek, though we won’t know its name, or how dangerous it truly is, until next episode.

Oh, and they’re all getting sick. They have radiation poisoning, but they don’t know that yet.

This is a TV show, so everything will be better in a couple of episodes. The Doctor and his friends will come together and the baddies will be sorted out. Because it’s not real life.

Early in the episode, while they’re exploring the strange dead petrified forest they’ve landed in, Susan finds a flower. It’s stone now too, like all the other vegetation, but it’s beautiful nonetheless. Ian helps her uproot it, warning her to be careful because of how fragile it is. Susan’s excited to take it back to the TARDIS, but then Barbara calls out, and Ian, distracted, crushes it in Susan’s hands. Later, Susan finds a second flower and stops to pick it up, but when she’s frightened by a mysterious hand touching her shoulder, that flower too is destroyed.

I wish we could linger by the food machine a little longer.

But flowers are being crushed, and the poison is seeping in, and the Daleks are here.