Elizabeth Sandifer

It’s May 20^th, 1967. Between now and July 1^st, a department store in Brussels will burn down, killing 323, 72 will die in a plain crash in Stockport, 34 will die on board the USS Liberty in an accidental Israeli attack, and the Six Day War will happen, which result in a death toll on the order of 14-20,000.  In addition Langston Hughes will die of complications from prostate cancer, both Dorothy Parker and Spencer Tracy will die of heart attacks, and the world will progress closer still to the eschaton. Also, The Evil of the Daleks airs.

For a certain brand of mysticism-obsessed Doctor Who critic that views the show mostly as an excuse to talk about mirrors (and occasionally chairs), The Evil of the Daleks forms something of an apex for the series. And this is entirely fair enough—it’s one of the most overtly magically-focused stories in Doctor Who history, featuring an antagonist whose motivation is literally “I want to do alchemy.” But in their rush to celebrate its magical weirdness there’s a frustrating failure to look with any depth or care at the precise details of what spell the show is weaving here. 

Let’s consider Philip Sandifer’s essay on the subject, in which he contrives to read the story in terms of David Whitaker’s larger alchemical project in which the Doctor defeats the Daleks through his mercurial sorcery. Sandifer is very gung ho about this, spinning out an extended alchemical metaphor out of this, Whitaker’s other stories, and occasionally stories Whitaker had only a partial hand in crafting. Sandifer is here cribbing from Miles and Wood’s entertaining essay “What Planet is David Whitaker” on, and the reading makes a certain amount of sense when applied to Whitaker’s ouvre as a whole. But The Evil of the Daleks is a puzzling place for Sandifer to make his grand stand for Whitaker’s alchemical master plan for Doctor Who. The story features an alchemist, yes, but what Sandifer seems to miss is that he’s the bad guy, and his desire to transmute lead into gold is mad folly. As for mercury, Sandifer’s essay uses the word “mercury” seven times, which is, as it happens, exactly seven more times than David Whitaker’s script for The Evil of the Daleks. Simply put, this rather complicates any efforts to claim that the story is about it, and sentimental references to Whitaker’s larger ouvre don’t actually paper over the gap.

This is not to say that there is no magic involved in this story; it’s just that reading it as a utopian parable about the inventive powers of mercury is wishful thinking. Let’s instead look at what actually is in the story: the distillation of the human and Dalek factors. These are framed clearly as alchemical opposites, with the Dalek factor being found in the negative space of the human factor much as Troughton’s Doctor found himself in the negative space of the Daleks in their last story.…

Continue Reading

It’s June 25^th, 1966. Between now and July 16^th, a three-year-old girl will die at the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, Wisconsin after crawling under a restraining fence and being pulled into an elephant cage. Hundreds will die across the midwestern United States in a six-day heat wave, including 149 in St. Louis, and as many as 650 in new York City. Eight student nurses will die in Chicago when Richard Speck breaks into a dormitory and strangles them. This is in addition to numerous deaths in the Vietnam War, the deaths of Polish poet Jan Brzechwa, French painter Julie Manet, and the world edging ever closer to the eschaton. Also, The War Machines airs.

Looking at it in 2020, the two things that jump out about The War Machines are how prescent it is and how prescient it isn’t. On the one hand, its basic concerns about the destructive possibilities of computer technology are clearly ahead of its time. It’s not that evil computers were unknown in 1966—they started appearing in sci-fi literature in the 1950s, the same decade that Alan Turing broached the subject of whether a machine could think in his landmark paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” But the consequences of artificial intelligence were still firmly a niche concern, and The War Machines focus on them has more in common with the world a half-century later on than a lot of what’s around it in the series. That this is by the same writer as the bewilderingly blackface-based race reversal of The Savages immediately before it and was filmed just before the vapid piratical adventures of The Smugglers after it feels like a more profound juxtaposition than Doctor Who usually manages.

And yet on the other hand, much about The War Machines has aged poorly. The fundamental clumsiness of the computer, with its tediously slow synthesized speech, the even more clumsy War Machines, the weird overlaying of mind control onto the computer plot, all of this feels like an aggressively outdated bit of kitsch, which, to be fair, it unquestionably is. It is ahead of its time, but not nearly far enough ahead to avoid feeling comically outdated. 

On top of this tension, meanwhile, it shares The Daleks’ odd suspension between two apocalypses, although unlike The Daleks it focuses primarily on the ideologies involved instead of on the eschatons themselves. On the one hand, you have a computer named after Germanic gods, a point Ian Stuart Black doubles down on in the novelization by having the first War Machine be named after the Valkyries. Norse paganism isn’t always a marker for Naziism, but when you’ve got men shouting at the camera about their Teutonic digital master’s plan for world domination, well, to quote Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles, “it’s all looking a bit Nazi.”

But as Wood and Miles immediately turn around and note, other factors point towards standard rhetoric about Communism, most obviously Polly’s brainwashed comments about how she loves to work for a cause, and for that matter the brainwashing in general.…

Continue Reading

It’s March 27th, 1965. Between now and April 17th, 470 people will die in a dam burst and landslide in Chile, 20 will die when a car bomb is detonated outside the US embassy in Saigon, two will die when the first aircraft lost in air-to-air combat during the Vietnam War are shot down during a strike on the Thanh Hóa Bridge, and somewhere north of 250 people will die in the Midwestern United States in what are called the Palm Sunday Tornadoes, while Richard Hickock and Perry Smith will be executed by hanging for the murders of the Herbert Clutter family, Princess Mary wll die of a heart attack on the grounds of her estate at Harewood House, and the world will edge incrementally closer to the eschaton. Also, The Crusade airs.

Acclaimed Doctor Who critic Philip Sandifer (whatever happened to him?) once attempted to classify the historical stories into two moulds defined by the Season One writers of the genre. Like most of his work, this is insightful but ultimately over-simplified. The more productive approach is to read the historicals as advancing dialectically between John Lucarotti’s harder edged approach to historicals, in which they are a vehicle for exploring foreign cultures, and Dennis Spooner’s more comedic one, in which they are a vehicle for playing with genre tropes. In this reading, David Whittaker’s script for The Crusade serves as synthesis before the entire genre is ultimately collapsed by Spooner’s own season-ending story The Time Meddler, which short-circuits the entire serious-minded approach by instead synthesizing his own approach to historicals with the sci-fi genre that the show would ultimately settle into permanently. But that’s a discussion for later. 

Whittaker’s approach, meanwhile, is to run two separate historicals in parallel, with limited interplay between them. On one side we have the court of Richard the Lionheart, where the already well-regarded Julian Glover reigns over a bunch of courtiers who at times offer dialogue actually written in iambic pentameter. Here, in other words, we get Doctor Who having a romp in the grand realm of respectable BBC Shakespeare. Barbara and Ian, meanwhile, find themselves on the Arab side in the court of Saladin, where they explore much more uneasy ground and do a more Lucarottian exploration of foreign culture.

Whittaker does much to complicate this division—the Christian side may be a genre romp, but it’s the most respectable and highbrow genre open to the series, while the Muslim side finds plenty of opportunities for feats of derring-do and melodramatic set pieces such as Tutte Lemkow’s villainous thief Ibrahim tying Ian to the sand and threatening him with scaphism. This is, in other words, a true alchemical fusion, in which each of the two sides of the story are not just laid next to each other but tempered with each other to form something new. 

More to the point, however, Whitaker goes to considerable length to parallel the two sides of the story. Both Richard and Saladin are noble, judicious figures, but each has a key advisor who is altogether more unscrupulous and antagonistic.…

Continue Reading

It’s December 21st, 1963. Between now and February 1st, 1964 128 people will die in a cruise ship fire north of Madeira, 25 people will die in riots in the Panama Canal Zone, 100 will die in anti-Muslim riots in Calcutta, three will die when an American fighter jet accidentally strays into East German space and is shot down, while Pamela Johnson will be murdered in Manchester, New Hampshire, T.H. White will die of heart failure, and the world will edge incrementally closer to the eschaton. Also, The Daleks will air on television.

The Daleks sits suspended between two eschatons, the seemingly defeated threat of fascism on one side, the thus-far averted threat of nuclear annihilation on the other. In one sense these are distinct threats, although 1960s Britain remained broadly aware that fascism was not eliminated forever and that it required a perpetual vigilance lest it arise in a period where it could find itself in control of a nuclear arsenal. But the Daleks are both too much and too little to quite fit into the straightforward “what if Hitler had the bomb” framework. It is a truism that pop culture nazis are curiously devoid of substance—an empty pair of jackboots into which any meaning can be shoehorned so long as it’s evil. But The Daleks exists too close to the Third Reich to engage in this amnesia—details like the fact that the Daleks were once a race of teachers and philosophers who live in a conspicuously expressionist city, or their chilling assertion that killing the Thals isn’t murder, it’s extermination make it clear that this is written with a vivid and real memory of Nazi Germany.

And yet other details fundamentally undermine this link. Most strangely is the degree to which the Thals are depicted as, in Susan’s words, “perfect,” and more to the point the degree to which that perfection is specifically rooted in their status as muscular blonde men of the exact sort that Nazis revered as a physical and racial ideal. This is a mere detail, albeit a deeply strange one. More substantial is the Daleks’ status as monsters created by the aftermath of nuclear war, mutated by radiation. This is, to state the obvious, not why the Germans became Nazis. It moves fascism from something that happens within societies as a result of specific social forces to something that happens to them because of external forces.

We could even sharpen this observation, noting the quasi-supernatural nature of radiation here. There is always a touch of the fantastic in our rhetoric around radiation, whether in the chilling and prophetic horror of “this is not a place of honor” or the openly gothic “walking ghost” phase after radiation poisoning. And its nature enables this—insidious, pervasive, and yet invisible, undetectable save for its lethality. It exemplifies the strange divide between Weird and Gothic, existing as a product of physics as it begins to get strange and yet behaving like nothing so much as a ghost. And The Daleks leans into this—the Daleks themselves are firmly Weird, with a design that leans hard into the inhuman by discarding as many vestiges of the human form as is plausible while still being able to stick an actual person inside it, and their city leans hard into this.…

Continue Reading