Dalek
The Daleks are a fictional extraterrestrial race of extremely xenophobic mutants principally portrayed in the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. They were conceived by writer Terry Nation and first appeared in the 1963 Doctor Who serial The Daleks, in casings designed by Raymond Cusick.
Drawing inspiration from the Nazis, Terry Nation portrayed the Daleks as violent, merciless and pitiless cyborg aliens, completely absent of any emotion other than hate, who demand total conformity to the will of the Dalek with the highest authority, and are bent on the conquest of the universe and the extermination of any other forms of life, including other "impure" Daleks which are deemed inferior for being different to them. Collectively, they are the greatest enemies of Doctor Whos protagonist, the Time Lord known as "the Doctor". During the second year of the original Doctor Who programme, the Daleks developed their own form of time travel. At the beginning of the second Doctor Who TV series that debuted in 2005, it was established that the Daleks had engaged in a Time War against the Time Lords that affected much of the universe and altered parts of history.
In the programme's narrative, the planet Skaro suffered a thousand-year war between two societies: the Kaleds and the Thals. During this time-period, many natives of Skaro became badly mutated by fallout from nuclear weapons and chemical warfare. The Kaled government believed in genetic purity and swore to "exterminate the Thals" for being inferior. Believing his own society was becoming weak and that it was his duty to create a new master race from the ashes of his people, the Kaled scientist Davros genetically modified several Kaleds into squid-like life-forms he called Daleks, removing "weaknesses" such as mercy and sympathy while increasing aggression and survival-instinct. He then integrated them with tank-like robotic shells equipped with advanced technology based on the same life-support system he himself had used since being burned and blinded by a nuclear attack. His creations became intent on dominating the universe by enslaving or purging all "inferior" non-Dalek life.
The Daleks are the series' most popular and famous villains, and their returns to television over the decades have often gained media attention. Their battle cry, a staccato "Exterminate!", has entered common usage as a popular catchphrase.
Creation and development
The Daleks were created by Terry Nation and designed by the BBC designer Raymond Cusick. They were introduced in December 1963 in the second Doctor Who serial, The Daleks.Wishing to create an alien creature that did not look like a "man in a suit", Terry Nation stated in his script for the first Dalek serial that they should have no legs. He was also inspired by a performance by the Georgian National Ballet, in which dancers in long skirts appeared to glide across the stage. For many of the shows the Daleks were operated by retired ballet dancers wearing black socks while sitting inside the Dalek. Raymond Cusick was given the task of designing the Daleks when Ridley Scott, then a designer for the BBC, proved unavailable after having been initially assigned to their debut serial. According to Jeremy Bentham's Doctor Who—The Early Years, after Nation wrote the script, Cusick was given only an hour to come up with the design for the Daleks and was inspired in his initial sketches by a pepper pot on a table. Cusick himself, however, states that he based it on a man seated in a chair, and used the pepper pot only to demonstrate how it might move.
In 1964, Nation told a Daily Mirror reporter that the Dalek name came from a dictionary or encyclopaedia volume, the spine of which read "Dal – Lek". He later admitted that this book and the associated origin of the Dalek name were completely fictitious, and that anyone bothering to check out his story would have found him out. The name had simply rolled off his typewriter. Later, Nation was pleasantly surprised to discover that in Serbo-Croatian the word "dalek" means "far" or "distant".
Nation grew up during the Second World War and remembered the fear caused by German bombings. He consciously based the Daleks on the Nazis, conceiving the species as faceless, authoritarian figures dedicated to conquest, racial purity and complete conformity. The allusion is most obvious in the Dalek stories written by Nation, in particular The Dalek Invasion of Earth and Genesis of the Daleks.
Before he wrote the first Dalek serial, Nation was a scriptwriter for the comedian Tony Hancock. The two men had a falling out and Nation either resigned or was fired. Hancock worked on several series proposals, one of which was called From Plip to Plop, a comedic history of the world that would have ended with a nuclear apocalypse, the survivors being reduced to living in dustbin-like robot casings and eating radiation to stay alive. According to Hancock's biographer Cliff Goodwin, when Hancock saw the Daleks he allegedly shouted at the screen, "That bloody Nation—he's stolen my robots!"
The titling of early Doctor Who stories is complex and sometimes controversial. The first Dalek serial is called, variously, The Survivors, The Mutants, Beyond the Sun, The Dead Planet, or simply The Daleks.
The instant appeal of the Daleks caught the BBC off guard, and transformed Doctor Who into a national phenomenon. Children were both frightened and fascinated by the alien look of the monsters, and the idea of "hiding behind the sofa" became a popular, if inaccurate or exaggerated, meme. The Doctor Who production office was inundated with letters and calls asking about the creatures. Newspaper articles focused attention on the series and the Daleks, further enhancing their popularity.
Nation jointly owned the intellectual property rights to the Daleks with the BBC, and the money-making concept proved nearly impossible to sell to anyone else, so he was dependent on the BBC wanting to produce stories featuring the creatures. Several attempts to market the Daleks outside the series were unsuccessful. Since Nation's death in 1997, his share of the rights is now administered by his former agent, Tim Hancock.
Early plans for what eventually became the 1996 Doctor Who television movie included radically redesigned Daleks whose cases unfolded like spiders' legs. The concept for these "Spider Daleks" was abandoned, but it was picked up again in several Doctor Who spin-offs.
When the series revival was announced in 2003, many fans hoped that the Daleks would return once more to the programme. The Nation estate, however, demanded levels of creative control over the Daleks' appearances and scripts that were unacceptable to the BBC. Eventually the Daleks were cleared to appear in the first series. In 2014, Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat denied that their numerous appearances since were a result of a contractual obligation.
Physical characteristics
Externally, Daleks resemble human-sized pepper pots with a single mechanical eyestalk mounted on a rotating dome, a gun-mount containing an energy-weapon resembling an egg-whisk, and a telescopic manipulator arm usually tipped by an appendage resembling a sink-plunger. Daleks have been known to use their plungers to interface with technology, crush a man's skull by suction, measure the intelligence of a subject, and extract information from a man's mind. Dalek casings are made of a bonded polycarbide material called "Dalekanium" by a member of the human resistance in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and the Dalek comics, as well as by the Cult of Skaro in "Daleks in Manhattan".The lower half of a Dalek's shell is covered with hemispherical protrusions, or 'Dalek-bumps', which are shown in the episode "Dalek" to be spheres embedded in the casing. Both the BBC-licensed Dalek Book and The Doctor Who Technical Manual describe these items as being part of a sensory array, while in the 2005 series episode "Dalek" they are integral to a Dalek's forcefield mechanism, which evaporates most bullets and resists most types of energy weapons. The forcefield seems to be concentrated around the Dalek's midsection, as normally ineffective firepower can be concentrated on the eyestalk to blind a Dalek. In 2019 episode "Resolution" the bumps give way to reveal missile launchers capable of wiping out a military tank with ease. Daleks have a very limited visual field, with no peripheral sight at all, and are relatively easy to hide from in fairly exposed places. Their own energy weapons are capable of destroying them. Their weapons fire a beam that has electrical tendencies, is capable of propagating through water, and may be a form of plasma or electrolaser. The eyepiece is a Dalek's most vulnerable spot; impairing its vision often leads to a blind, panicked firing of its weapon while exclaiming "My vision is impaired; I cannot see!" Russell T Davies subverted the catchphrase in his 2008 episode "The Stolen Earth", in which a Dalek vaporises a paintball that has blocked its vision while proclaiming, "My vision is not impaired!"
The creature inside the mechanical casing is soft and repulsive in appearance, and vicious in temperament. The first-ever glimpse of a Dalek mutant, in The Daleks, was a claw peeking out from under a Thal cloak after it had been removed from its casing. The mutants' actual appearance has varied, but often adheres to the Doctor's description of the species in Remembrance of the Daleks as "little green blobs in bonded polycarbide armour". In Resurrection of the Daleks a Dalek creature, separated from its casing, attacks and severely injures a human soldier; in Remembrance of the Daleks there are two Dalek factions, and the creatures inside have a different appearance in each case, one resembling the amorphous creature from Resurrection, the other the crab-like creature from the original Dalek serial. As the creature inside is rarely seen on screen there is a common misconception that Daleks are wholly mechanical robots. In the new series Daleks are retconned to be squid-like in appearance, with small tentacles, one or two eyes, and an exposed brain. In the new series, a Dalek creature separated from its casing is shown capable of inserting a tentacle into the back of a human's neck and controlling them.
Daleks' voices are electronic; when out of its casing the mutant is only able to squeak. Once the mutant is removed the casing itself can be entered and operated by humanoids; for example, in The Daleks, Ian Chesterton enters a Dalek shell to masquerade as a guard as part of an escape plan.
For many years it was assumed that, due to their design and gliding motion, Daleks were unable to climb stairs, and that this provided a simple way of escaping them. A cartoon from Punch pictured a group of Daleks at the foot of a flight of stairs with the caption, "Well, this certainly buggers our plan to conquer the Universe". In a scene from the serial Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor and companions escape from Dalek pursuers by climbing into a ceiling duct. The Fourth Doctor calls down, "If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us?" The Daleks generally make up for their lack of mobility with overwhelming firepower; a joke among Doctor Who fans is that "Real Daleks don't climb stairs; they level the building."
Dalek mobility has improved over the history of the series: in their first appearance, in The Daleks, they were capable of movement only on the conductive metal floors of their city; in The Dalek Invasion of Earth a Dalek emerges from the waters of the River Thames, indicating not only that they had become freely mobile, but that they are amphibious; Planet of the Daleks showed that they could ascend a vertical shaft by means of an external anti-gravity mat placed on the floor; Revelation of the Daleks showed Davros in his life-support chair and one of his Daleks hovering and Remembrance of the Daleks depicted them as capable of hovering up a flight of stairs. Despite this, Daleks have often been mocked for their supposed inability to climb stairs in the press, and their inability to climb stairs has even been used to placate children who are frightened of the Daleks. In response to this, a character escaping up a flight of stairs in the 2005 story "Dalek" mocked the Dalek as "defeated by a flight of stairs", and was shocked when the Dalek began to hover up the stairs after uttering the phrase "Elevate!", in a similar manner to "Exterminate!" Along with hovering, the new series depicts the Daleks as fully capable of flight, even spaceflight.