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The Face of the Devil Himself (Genesis of the Daleks)

28

In one of the least shocking twists in Doctor Who history,
the guy in white is A) the first Kaled we meet not to wear
black, and B) the first one to turn out to be a good guy.

It’s March 8th, 1975. Telly Savalas is at number one with “If,” which, in layman’s terms, means that the star of Kojak is at number one with a spoken word cover of a Bread song from 1971. This lasts for two weeks before the Bay City Rollers clean things up with “Bye Bye Baby,” holding #1 for the other four weeks of this story. Mud, Johnny Mathis, Barry White, Guys ‘n’ Dolls, and The Sweet also chart.


In real news, the UN proclaims International Women’s Day, the Rocky Horror Picture Show debuts on Broadway, Bobby Fischer concedes his world chess championship title to Anatoly Karpov by refusing to play against him, and Bill Gates founds Microsoft. In bigger events, the Vietnam War moves towards its conclusion as North Vietnamese troops close on Saigon. Operation Babylift, an attempt to evacuate children from Vietnam, gets off to a terrible start as the first plane crashes, killing 138. Rio Di Janeiro becomes the capital of Brazil after the state of Rio Di Janeiro merges with Estado de Guanabara. And the body of Lesley Whittle, the teenage heiress kidnapped back during Robot, is found. 

While on television… I mean, what is there to say. It’s Genesis of the Daleks. The latter three words of which are wholly unimportant. There are a handful of stories in Doctor Who history that can be shortened to one word titles where the title is not the monster. But if you talk to a Doctor Who fan about Genesis, they know what you’re talking about, and it’s not Peter Gabriel’s old band. This story is flat-out one of the most iconic stories of Doctor Who. Given that our approach to the series is tinged with the alchemical, and that we do take an actively mystical view of the series at times, we must tread with some care here. This is, if you will, a piece of sacred ground in the psychochronography of this territory.

It’s not that the story is without flaw. Under the hood, it’s still very much a Terry Nation story, with all the attendant problems. But for the first time in decades, it’s also a Terry Nation story with all the attendant benefits. His knack for adventure, his ability to keep a plot moving, his ability to create properly scary villains, all of that is firmly in play here. Even the things that can be hit or miss – his tendency towards tedious moralizing – end up working here, albeit as much because the actors are top notch as anything else. On top of that, the director, David Maloney, is absolutely on fire here, using everything he learned about Daleks last time he did them and then building on it. 

And then there’s the aspect of this story in legend.
…

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On Your Television Screen, You Can Do What Seemed Impossible (The Sontaran Experiment)

12

And yet despite this scene, it was the Zygons who were
brought back in a softcore video nasty in the 90s. 

It’s February 22, 1975. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel are at number one with “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me,” and continue to be through to the next week. The Carpenters, Helen Reddy, and Johnny Wakeland and the Kishasa Band also chart.

In the US, Daylight Savings Time kicks off two months early to deal with the energy crisis that has by now wound its way over there. A fleeing IRA member fatally shoots a chasing London police officer, setting off most of what you’d expect. The IRA member, Liam Quinn, went on to a several-decades long career as a cause celebrate. The Movement 2 June, an anarchist group allied with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, kidnaps a West German politician, managing to secure the release of five of their members from prison doing so. A massive tube crash at Moorgate station kills 43 people. And, on the day the second and final episode of this story airs, Aston Villa defeats Norwich City in the Football League Cup, now known as the Carling Cup.

While on television, it’s The Sontaran Experiment – the only two-part Doctor Who story between 1965 and 1982. This alone should raise some red flags from our perspective, in that it clearly does not quite fit with the normal order of things. Doctor Who, in the period we’re talking about, does four and six part stories. This is the only Doctor Who story from 1972-1981 not to be either four or six episodes long.

The previous two two-part stories had relatively straightforward reasons behind them. The Edge of Destruction existed to fill out an initial thirteen-episode order on the cheap. The Rescue existed because it was the first time the show had tried introducing a new character. And given that both were written by the incomparable David Whitaker, both fulfilled a clear narrative function, dealing with character points. The Sontaran Experiment, however, does not have nearly so lofty a set of goals. Its reasons for existing are entirely technical. Its storytelling is minimal, and ill-paced.

Part of this is the writers. Giving this story to Baker and Martin made sense for the reasons it was actually done, but there are major problems with the decision. Baker and Martin are best at coming up with weird ideas, and at their weakest in the specific mechanics and craft of scriptwriting. A two episode story is necessarily one that prioritizes having one or two ideas but being carefully crafted. Instead we get one that seems to have been written as a four-parter with the first episode done straightforwardly and the last three parts condensed into the second episode. All of this seems to have been to maintain the traditional first episode cliffhanger of the monster reveal. And while I am not among the critics who laugh at the basic idea of holding back the monster reveal in a story named after the monster, recognizing as I do that this is based not around surprise but around the anticipation of the spectacle, it’s also very obviously a dumb and pointless move in a two-parter because of what it does to the pacing. As…

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Monsters are Real (The Ark in Space)

29

I won’t lie. It’s a man with bubble wrap glued to him. But
it’s the scariest man with bubble wrap glued to him ever.

It’s January 25, 1975. The Tymes, a Philadelphia soul group, are at number one with “Ms Grace.” (This is something of a golden age for this genre of music, and it spills over to the UK. In return, David Bowie slips over to the US and records Young Americans – which he’s just putting the finishing touches on now. Young Americans is his version of a soul album – an album that would spawn his first number one single in the US, “Fame,” which merely hits 17 in the UK.) It lasts one week before giving way to Pilot, a splinter group of the Bay City Rollers, with “January,” which stays on top for the remainder of this story. Gloria Gaynor, Marie and Donnie Osmond, The Carpenters, Helen Reddy, and Wigan’s Chosen Few also chart.

In real news, the Weather Underground bombs the US State Department, hurting absolutely nobody and generally continuing their reputation as the fluffy bunnies of the terrorist world. An earthquake takes place in Haicheng, China, killing over two thousand people, but here the real news is that it did so as expected, being as it was the first ever successfully predicted earthquake. An unsuccessful attempt to partition Cyprus following last summer’s Turkish invasion of it takes place. And, for our purposes most interesting of all, Margaret Thatcher defeats Edward Heath to become the new leader of the Conservative Party.

While on television, we have a legend. It is not that The Ark in Space is the best story of the Hinchcliffe era. It’s not. But there are a handful of points in the history of Doctor Who in which an episode airs that clearly marks a sudden leap forward in quality: a point where you can basically say that nothing that has come before is quite this good. The tendency I’ve discussed before whereby storytelling techniques get ever savvier and lead to a general trend of improvement for all television helps make this happen, but the point remains: watching The Ark in Space, it is clear that we have just moved to an entirely new level.

In this regard, what is most striking about the episode is that it’s so much grimmer. Not since Terror of the Autons has the series engaged in such a concentrated and extended effort to be scary. And even there, the fear was wedded to a sense of the spectacular and the emerging glam aesthetic. The last time the show spent a lot of time being scary for its own sake was The Wheel in Space. But here, all of a sudden, the show is all about fear, and lingering in moments of fear. I’d say “again,” but that would obscure things somewhat. Even in the Troughton era, at the height of the golden age of monsters in season five, the show did not go for this sort of unrelenting horror.…

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Where There’s Life (Robot)

14

The real highlight of this story is watching the robot body
catch reflections of the green screen and occasionally blink
out of existence in places. That and singing Kraftwerk
to yourself. Mmmm. Werk. By far Philip Morris’s best
product.

It’s December 28, 1974. Mud are “Lonely This Christmas,” and apparently a lot of people care and are trying to buy their single to make them feel less alone. After three weeks of this they finally plummet down the charts as people realize Christmas has been over for a while, and Status Quo’s “Down Down” takes the number one spot. Also in the charts are Barry White, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Gloria Gaynor, Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes (I promise I did not make that up), and, once again, The Wombles, who make their fifth and final top ten placing.

Since Pertwee’s regeneration, the 1974 FIFA World Cup has happened, sans England, but with Scotland, so that’s nice and frustratingly rarely mentioned when people decide to list England’s failure to qualify as a reason why the Heath government fell. Nixon resigns, essentially kicking off the American sleepy period equivalent to the British one we’ve already discussed. Haille Selassie was deposed in Ethiopia, and Ceefax began in the UK, and Ali defeats Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. More tragically, the Birmingham pub bombings take place, killing 21 and injuring another 182. The exact cause is under some dispute, with the IRA being widely blamed, a Marxist splinter group called Red Flag 74 trying to take the blame despite probably not being responsible, and a group of Irishmen known familiarly as the Birmingham Six ultimately being arrested and, after some truly spectacular police corruption, convicted and sent to prison for sixteen years.

While during this story, the British government abandons another attempt at a Channel Tunnel, Wheel of Fortune debuts, and Lesley Whittle, a 17 year old heiress, is kidnapped by Donald Neilson. Also, International Women’s Year is kicked off in the UK, which I note not because I’m particularly enamored with commemoration-style politics like that but because I haven’t cited a lot of news stories that point to the degree to which these are golden years for feminism, so I figured I should.

I, of course, am still off in 1992, in the basement. I think, though I honestly don’t remember vividly, that I actually marathoned that entire tape in one day, so while we’ve jumped over six months in world history since Planet of the Spiders, I’m pretty sure from my perspective we’ve had lunch. Still, this is perhaps advantageous – it’s not clear that there is any story to date in Doctor Who more suitable for watching when you are A) ten, and B) have no idea what the show is supposed to be like.

Robot is, by necessity, an odd duck. By convention, Doctor Who has, for the past few seasons, banked an episode across seasons. The Time Warrior was actually made immediately after The Green Death, Carnival of Monsters immediately after The Time Monster.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 16 (The Tomorrow People, The Uncanny X-Men)

, 23

Upon its first appearance, under the editorial eye of David Whitaker, the TARDIS was explained via a metaphor of television in which the Doctor justifies his ability to fit a very large room inside a small box on the grounds that the same thing is accomplished via television. Aside from the role this moment plays in setting up the strand of alchemical and mystical thought I’ve traced through eleven years of Doctor Who thus far, this speaks to another crucial metaphor: that of the rabbit hole.

Of course, strictly speaking, if you’re going to talk about connections between Doctor Who and children’s literature in that Victorian tradition (and as I’ve said, there are very good reasons to talk about those connections), the TARDIS owes more to the work of CS Lewis, who, as I never get tired of pointing out, died the day before Doctor Who premiered, almost exactly an hour before the Kennedy assassination, and eight hours before Aldous Huxley. But the basic concept is the same either way – the very first image we had of Doctor Who, where Ian and Barbara fall out of the world.

Of course, that’s any Doctor Who fan’s first image of Doctor Who. That’s what shows like it are. Rabbit holes that we fall into. I don’t mean this according to the utterly banal logic of suspension of disbelief whereby we imagine ourselves endlessly in made-up places. I mean something much more literally. For me, on a weekend afternoon in September of 1992, I fell out of the world. I put a tape into the VCR, and when it was over I was not the same person anymore.

On his blog, after The Doctor’s Wife aired, Neil Gaiman did a little Q&A about the episode, and at one point said, “I like mythologies, and I knew what a Dalek was and what planet it came from, or what TARDIS stood for when I was five, before I knew who Thor or Anubis were.” This is, more or less, exactly it. The significance of Doctor Who, first and foremost, is an entire mythology and system of storytelling that has been unspooling through my brain for nearly twenty years now.

This is the way of fandom. Anyone who lives and breathes in geek culture has their rabbit holes. The books or movies or television shows that grabbed them and began asserting gravity in their minds. Usually the gravity is a subtle thing. Most of us do not embark on too many major life decisions out of fandom. But it is a vast thing. How many Christmases would have had a completely different tenor had the bulk of the presents not been Christmas themed? How would my honeymoon with my ex-wife have gone had we not planned it around seeing David Tennant in Hamlet? How would middle school have gone if the bullying I got for liking something as weird as Doctor Who had been forced to find a different path of least resistance?

This last one is, perhaps, the most interesting.…

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Be Childish Sometimes (Planet of the Spiders)

9

You mean not only is this not Metebelis Three, it’s not
even a planet? And I’m on after Being Human? Crap.

It’s mid-September, 1992. The Shamen are at number one with “Ebeneezer Goode.” At least, in the UK. In the US, somewhat less fortunately, “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men is at number one. As it was for three months that year. Perhaps more importantly, at least for our purposes, in a small town in Western Connecticut, a newly minted ten year old flips through a book he just got from a family friend a week or so after his birthday. By a man he’s never heard of called John Nathan-Turner, about a television show he’s vaguely heard of called Doctor Who, the book is called The Companions. After the friend leaves, and it is no longer rude to do so, he asks his mother what this Doctor Who thing is. She looks around in a drawer, and hands him a VHS tape, which he goes to the basement to watch. The Delia Derbyshire theme, familiar to so many people, plays, and something called Planet of Spiders comes on. And so, in the wrong country, in the wrong decade, but every inch at the right time, I became a Doctor Who fan.

Oh. Um. Hi. I mean, not that I haven’t been obviously skulking about these blog entries for some time now, though I’ve tried not to make a nuisance of myself. But here I am forced to make a somewhat more formal and more permanent entrance. I have talked before about moments in Doctor Who that fans can’t quite see past – the introduction of the Time Lords, or the legendarily (though not actually) bad The Gunfighters. But past that, there’s another horizon that it’s impossible for anyone steeped in Doctor Who to quite see past, and that’s our own growing up with the show. As the slogan emblazoned on countless different t-shirts goes, you never forget your first Doctor.

And mine was Pertwee, with Planet of the Spiders. And I’ve always known this entry would mark a turning point in the blog, not just because it’s an era-divider, but because this is where I enter the story. This is the earliest Doctor Who story that I just cannot talk about or think about without my own childhood memories bleeding into the mix. I mean, he’s not the earliest Doctor I saw as a kid. It’s just that I’d not seen a lot of Hartnell or Troughton  prior to starting this project – I believe just The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Rescue, The Romans, The Web Planet, and The Chase for Hartnell. I’d seen about as much Troughton, but it formed a much higher percentage of the existing episodes – Tomb of the Cybermen, The Mind Robber, The Invasion, The Seeds of Death, and The War Games. As a child, I found Hartnell mean and boring, and Troughton delightful. But both were Doctors I came to late, on bought VHS tapes imported and played on a multi-region VCR.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 12 (Interference, BBC Books, 1996)

, 14


It’s August, 1999. Doctor Who is as dead as dead can be. These are the heady early days of New Labor, two years after Tony Blair managed to end an 18-year stretch of Conservative rule. In the main stretch of the blog, we are a few years from the dawn of the Long 1980s. Here we are a few years past that, in a murky transition into an era that it’s not quite clear we’ve seen the end of yet – something alarmingly resembling the present. The clock ticks closer towards a millennial change stained deep with eschatology. Musically we are in a wasteland of Ricky Martin, Westlife, and Geri Halliwell doing Latin-inspired numbers. These are not days that anyone claims as the glory days of anything, least of all Doctor Who, which is off the air and seemingly never coming back.

In these transitional moments it is sometimes helpful to mine the past for ideas and directions. The shift between historical eras is a vague phenomenon existing more in the realm of ideas than in the realm of material objects after all – one reason that it is easier to track through psychochronography, which allows us the ability to walk and tour the realm of ideas. These dead spaces between eras mark the periods where old ideologies begin to stagger under their weight and break down, and where new ideologies find themselves pushed in from the fringes. In these moments, one turns to the past, looking at approaches that have run aground and sizing up the repair job needed to get them running again.

Enter Interference. On one level, as we’ll talk about when we come back around to it in 1999, this is a desperate (and failed) throw of the dice – a last attempt to get the unmitigated catastrophe that was the Paul McGann era to act like a functional era of Doctor Who instead of a graveyard. And it’s a clever one. The Past Doctor Adventures line took August off, and instead the Eighth Doctor Adventures line released a two-volume novel featuring interconnected Eighth and Third Doctor stories.

For my part, and I apologize for intruding into the narrative before my time, I know little about it. Interference was the last Doctor Who book I actively remember coming out, but I was by then jaded on the 8th Doctor era and was never big enough on the Third to want to read it, so I never did. Actually, prior to this I’d never read a Lawrence Miles novel, though I’d read plenty about them. I suppose, strictly speaking, I still haven’t, since, given both that this post was so requested (though planned practically from day one – this is one of the books the Time Can Be Rewritten entries were created for) and that it seemed like an entertaining choice to make, I read only the Third Doctor and frame novel sections of the book. Again, I don’t pretend that I’m some uncorrupted Miles virgin. I know the basic ideas of the Faction Paradox plot, I read a summary of the other half to make sure I knew who the major shared characters were, and I know well the extremely complex and contested role Miles has in fandom.…

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Too Narrow, Too Crippled (The Monster of Peladon)

17

And of course the other reason Curse of Peladon was great
was the giant green penis. Which they redesigned to look
less obscene, so they even screwed that up. Monster of
Peladon: So bad it couldn’t get a giant green penis right.

It’s March 23, 1974. Paper Lace continue to hold the number one spot with the legendarily execrable “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” a song imploring a lover going off to war to “not be a hero” and, in particular, to “keep your pretty head low.” It is basically one of the worst things ever. After two weeks it finally goes away to be replaced with “Seasons in the Sun,” one of the most upbeat and cheery songs about dying ever recorded, and at only 3:24, not so long that the listener actually wants to. Also in the charts are Paul McCartney and Wings, Ringo Starr, Gary Glitter, The Hollies, and Queen.

In real news, the OPEC oil embargo largely ends, bringing some stability to markets that had been lacking during the energy crisis. A major Palestinian terrorist attack in Israel – the Kiryat Shmona massacre – kills 18. And the Carnation Revolution takes place in Portugal, managing the amusing historical feat of being a military coup organized in part by using the Eurovision Song Contest as a pre-arranged signal to take action.

While on television, and speaking of the legendarily execrable, it’s The Monster of Peladon. Along with The Time Monster, this is generally considered to be the worst story of the Pertwee era (although, inexplicably, The Mutants slots in between them on the Doctor Who Magazine poll, while Death to the Daleks is somehow of at 128, just ahead of The Claws of Axos). And while there are cases where I will defend a hated story to the bitter end (Paradise Towers is excellent, dammit), or where I will opt to look at a story’s virtues in lieu of its flaws… this is not one of them.

The last few entries have involved a lot of pointing out some fundamental failings of the Pertwee era. Actually, most of the entries on the Pertwee era have dealt with this, due largely to my not liking the Pertwee era very much. But I’ve at least generally hedged those with appreciation of the good sides and of what the era was trying to do. Here, then, is where the good will runs out. I have next to nothing positive to say about this story. It is an ugly train wreck at virtually every level.

To start, let’s think about its source material. In particular, let’s consider what it was that made The Curse of Peladon interesting and striking. By and large, it was that the story was so strikingly weird. Peladon was not like what we were used to seeing in Doctor Who in 1972. More to the point, The Curse of Peladon is one of only three stories not to rely on a concept from a previous story in order to generate or justify the plot.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 5 (Countdown/TV Action)

, 8

And once again, it’s time for the Doctorly engagement with the wide world of ancillary merchandising. When last we left this story, back in June, we were noting that the late 60s comics fit firmly in a specific tradition of British comics, and were as accurate a translation of Doctor Who to that medium as was meaningfully possible.

For both the beginning and end of the Pertwee years, the existing Doctor Who comic strip appeared in the same magazine it did in the Troughton years – TV Comic. At the onset, the comics were very much in the same mould as the late Troughton strips only with a grotesque representation of Jon Pertwee instead of one of Patrick Troughton. They shared the same mind-wrenchingly odd sense of plotting, and the same belonging to a different tradition. At the close they were something different. The manic energy of the Troughton years had faded, but it was replaced with a much more taut sense of how to handle action and suspense.

But the real difference can be spotted just by looking. Here – I’ve taken a page from both the early and late TV Comic Pertwee strips and put them below. Have a look:

The earlier page, on the left, is a very straightforward grid of individual images. But the later page, on the right, has a considerably more interesting visual style, with oddly shaped panels. You can see, even shrunk down and without knowing what the story is about, that the panel shape gets weird when the aliens show up. You can also see how the round panel is used as a focus, with the other panels forming a sort of starburst around them. You can also see in the panel of the Doctor’s face that things like light, shadow, and perspective are being used in the later comic in a way that they weren’t in the earlier. In other words, the comic had become considerably more visual. 
To understand how and why that happened, we’re going to have to pull back and look at the British comics industry in general again. We’ve already talked about how the British comics industry is historically based around the anthology magazine in a way that the American comics industry hasn’t been since the 1940s or so. What’s crucial to understand is that for the most part, this meant that people were following brands of comics more than individual stories. Major magazines would have flagships, certainly – 2000 AD has Judge Dredd, Eagle had Dan Dare, etc. But more important was their general tone. A given magazine couldn’t survive by having one good strip and a bunch of filler. Not every strip could be a classic, but any successful magazine had multiple good strips and a fairly consistent tone. 
The big two in the end of the British comics history pool that we care about are, as I’ve said, Eagle and 2000 AD. Eagle’s heyday came and went before Doctor Who, meaning that the deserved “Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea” entry on Dan Dare never really quite had a place to go.
…

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Poor, Pathetic Creatures (Death to the Daleks)

17

I got a bad desire.

It’s February 23, 1974. Suzi Quatro is at number one with “Devil Gate Drive.” A sort of post-glam piece of bubblegum, it holds the spot for two weeks before giving way to Alvin Stardust, another sort of sanitized glam cash-in. It lasts for one week before yielding the top spot to Paper Lace’s “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” widely recognized as one of the worst songs ever recorded. David Bowie, Ringo Starr, The Hollies, Paul McCartney and Wings, and the Bay City Rollers all also chart.

The most obvious piece of news to cite here is the fact that the election that returns Harold Wilson as Prime Minister takes place. Charles de Gaulle Airport opens in Paris. And seven major Nixon aides are indicted in the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

Far from all of this, on television, is Death to the Daleks. There are many Doctor Who stories from the 70s that are well-remembered because they are classics. There are also, however, several Doctor Who stories from the 70s that are well-remembered because they came out on VHS early. The 80s VHS releases were focused almost entirely on classic monsters and highlights from the early Tom Baker years, which meant that both Day of the Daleks and this were among the stories that were widely and universally available on VHS. The logic on this was understandable, if crass – the early releases strongly favored four-parters, which were cheaper (in the UK, six parters got released as two tapes. The US generally condensed them to one, but the result was that in the early days, four-parters were strongly preferred). Within the era favored by the releases – Pertwee and Hinchcliffe-era Baker – these were the two four-part stories featuring the Daleks, so they were shoo-ins for release. (This same logic is why Revenge of the Cybermen was improbably picked as the first release – it had the right Doctor and a monster the show had just brought back.) For American fans, this release seemed particularly common, frequently ending up as the only Doctor Who story that ended up at the local Blockbuster. And so for a generation of Doctor Who fans, this is one we’re intimately familiar with. (Not to impose myself overly on the narrative. Yet.)

As I’ve suggested, the level of familiarity here is oddly incommensurate with the level of quality. It is not that Death to the Daleks is a bad story – although it’s hard to argue with a straight face that it’s a particularly good one. Unfortunately, the weirdness inherent in the odd overwatching of this story tends to obscure the degree to which the story is screamingly weird on its own. Because coming after ten weeks of The Time Warrior and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, this story sticks out like a sore thumb.

I don’t inherently mean this as a bad thing. It’s just that for the past 16 episodes and nine months, Doctor Who has been, seemingly by choice, an earthbound show again.…

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