Once
you read a few of these projects you start to see some patterns
emerging. For instance, just about everyone falls in love with
Jacqueline Hill; everyone concludes that Susan was a flawed idea; and
everyone ends up a bit down on Terry Nation.
This
last one isn't entirely unfair. Nation's writing (and occasionally
his work ethic) had some severe problems but he also had a writing
career on Doctor Who extending from 1963 to 1979. Yes, this is mainly
due to the fact he held the copyright on the Daleks and had first
refusal on writing the script whenever the BBC wanted to use them but
there are other factors. He was commissioned to write a second script
for the series before anyone decided the Daleks needed to return.
And
you know what? I don't want to be down on Terry Nation. The first
Doctor Who story I ever saw was Planet Of The Daleks and that story
made me fall in love with the series. So here as we meet him and his
most famous creations for the first time (sorry if you're the world's
only massive Kraal fan) let's forget about the future and just enjoy
ourselves. And that isn't difficult, there's a lot to like here and
much of the Terry Nation Cliché Bingo Card fails to make an
appearance (if nothing else it would be hard to self-plagiarise on
your first script).
So
let's give Nation some props because one thing he is absolutely
fantastic at is set pieces. This is because his approach to
science-fiction is very much the 1950s Flash Gordon movie serial
form. Luckily, Nation's script is paired with a designer who realises
this and turns in a bunch of sets and monsters that were a bit retro
even in 1963 and so aged oddly well. Lucky for Nation, for us fans
and for the survival of the series but considerably less so for
designer Ray Cusick. Cusick was a fantastic designer who did a lot of
work in the early years of the series, not least of which were the
TARDIS console room and the Dalek casing. Everyone counts him as one
of the series' most important visionaries. Everyone, that is, except
Terry Nation, Terry Nation's lawyers and the BBC Royalties Payments
Department.
Yes,
it was a work-for-hire job and so he got a small bonus (£50, I
believe) because it was great work and received not a penny or even
an on-screen credit since.
So
the production is on the same page as the writer and in some cases
several pages ahead. We're doing movie serial sci-fi from ten years
ago here, which is probably a good thing to be doing on TV when no
one had really done ongoing science-fiction before. On this note its
probably time to note that my theme of “early Doctor Who was more
modern than I thought” pretty much curls up and dies here because
no modern series would have Ian suggesting they all split up to
search the seemingly deserted city without a post-modern joke asking
if he'd ever seen a horror movie.
Good
set pieces are a very important part of adventure serials, arguably
the most important part. You get the set piece then a pause when some
talky stuff happens that sets up the next big set piece and after
that cycle repeats a couple of times you get the cliffhanger. Nation
turns in some very pacey numbers here: escaping the Dalek cell, the
lift scene, and the expedition party leaping across a very modestly
proportioned chasm. Another very movie serial element of the plot if
that there are basically two stories here. The first four episodes
are about the four regulars exploring Skaro, encountering and being
captured by the Daleks and then escaping whilst quickly helping out
some more photogenic locals. It could have ended right there at the
end of episode four but then Ian reveals that the Daleks took the
fluid link from him when he was captured and now they can't leave.
Thus begins adventure two: an arduous journey through the wilderness
of Skaro so they can enter the city from an unexpected angle, beat
the baddies and go home. Well, try to get home.
The
reason I link this to the Flash Gordon movie serial format is because
those serials tended to reuse sets, either by using them for
different places or by setting a couple of stories in the same place.
Don't get me wrong: this works, especially at this stage where
individual episode titles mean we're dealing with a continuous series
rather than separate stories.
It
works because a lot of effort is made to build the world of Skaro
before our eyes. As previously noted this world-building is enhanced
by the set design and the fantastic, dry ice shrouded model of the
Dalek city but it all extends from the decision to start with an
episode featuring only the four regulars with nary a Dalek, Thal or
ostentatiously camp schoolboy to distract us from the exploration of
Skaro. Other characters are introduced slowly: first a Dalek sucker
menacing Barbara (there will never be a better Doctor Who scream),
then the Daleks themselves followed by Susan meeting the Thal
Alydon...
Actually,
best to stop there a mo. More Thals turn up later but the scene
between Susan and Alydon requires some short examination because it
contains the very first racefail in Doctor Who. I'd completely
forgotten the scene and expected to start talking about racism two
essays from now in Marco Polo but there it is: a Jewish girl kneeling
on the floor, staring fascinated at a towering Aryan man and
declaring him “perfect”. An Aryan whose people will later be
involved in an act of genocide. This is especially problematic as one
of the qualities that got Carole Ann Ford the job was her “Unearthly”
elfin appearance or, to put it another way, her non-standard beauty.
Oh,
there's far, far worse to come but monsters are born in this scene
when we find out that the mechanical Daleks share their planet with
pretty people and guess who ends the story annihilated and who gets
to rebuild civilisation?
Not
that even the Daleks are monsters yet. I mean, they clearly eat. This
might seem like an insignificant detail but at this stage we're still
looking even at the bad aliens as creatures who have civilisation and
needs such as food and shelter. The whole plotline with the Thals is
about them suffering a bad harvest and striking out in search of new
food supplies. There's a sense of history to the two societies and
not just in the scene where the Doctor is treated to a short history
and astronomy lesson from Diony (Terry Nation Bingo Card: cross out
Sole Female Guest Character). There's also the nature of the Thal's
pacifism.
The
story requires that the Thals end up fighting the Daleks so,
obviously, they're going to come around but the story allows that
pacifism might not be a mistake here. Ian and Barbara argue the point
with Barbara pragmatically pointing out that if the Thals don't fight
she and Ian can never leave Skaro whilst Ian is more sympathetic to
their beliefs. It all comes down, in the end, to whether or not the
Thals really believe in pacifism or if its a fear of conflict brought
on by the consequences of the last war. This is a world where food is
hard to grow because most of the planet has been devastated by
neutron bombs so its not difficult to understand the perspective. Ian
proves to Alydon there are things he'll fight for when Ian threatens
to take Diony to the Dalek city as a prisoner, whereupon Alydon
proves that even in pacifist societies they have action movies as he
delivers a leading man uppercut to Ian's chin. It's that realisation
that spurs Alydon to action and to recruit volunteers to aid him in
storming the city (Terry Nation Bingo Card: cross out Prosaic Speech
About Bravery).
I'm
not going to argue that this story is entirely respectful to
pacifism, it does largely reject the philosophy, but it at least
phrases it as a debate and floats the idea that there are
circumstances where pacifism is a reasonable response. There are
worse ways to treat pacifism, we'll be dealing with some of them
later in the '60s.
And
then there are the Daleks, did I mention them? One of the things
about Nation's 1960s scripts are that the Daleks are very much a work
in progress and will vary quite a bit between stories. It won't be
until The Daleks' Master Plan that Nation will settle on the default
characterisation the Daleks become known for and even then the last
few steps will be taken by David Whitaker in Season Four. That's the
future, though, and we'll never see these Daleks again: Daleks who
refer to themselves as “I” an awful lot, who grow vegetables for
food and have large stores of toilet paper (bit weird, that one). The
static electricity thing gets a token mention in their next story but
pretty much disappears from there, mainly because it is very, very
limiting.
The
Daleks are almost people here, very alien and well on their way to
being monsters but essentially still people. Doctor Who doesn't do
monsters just yet. Even when monsters start to be a thing, when the
series resurrects the Daleks for a rematch, they're very much a
unique case for the rest of the Hartnell era. That's one of Nation's
enduring legacies in the series: he created the first monsters and
when he took his ball and swanned off to America the series began to
generate more and more monsters in an attempt to capture the magic
again.
Like
most of Nation's legacies, it's a mixed one.
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