Familiarity Breeds... Daleks!

Genesis Of The Daleks poses a challenge, in that I’d be hard pressed to find anything new to say about it. It’s brilliant. And I’m pretty sure that will have been said before. For one thing, I used to think that and having watched it again over the past few days, I still do.

Fact is, I was afraid to watch it. It’s one of the Who stories I know very well. A little too well, I feared. It may have been the most-repeated story of the lot – it may not have been, but there were times it felt like it. I’m not sure when it was last repeated on BBC TV, but enough time must have lapsed since I’d last seen it, because although it was all very familiar, there wasn’t an ounce of contempt. I’d intended to watch an episode a day – as a sort of lunch-break treat. But I got through it a little faster than that because twice I caved and allowed myself “just one more”.

It’s not flawless – it’s Doctor Who. But it’s one of those “why don’t they make them like that any more?” stories. Well, we all know why: Mary Whitehouse won. We’re an audience of wusses and we certainly couldn’t let our children watch this sort of horrific material.

My parents let me watch it – I watched it with the family when I was seven – and yes it scared me. Woohoo! But it didn’t scar me. And boy, it fed my imagination. As we’ve already established, my imagination had already enjoyed a diet of giant maggots and spiders. Throw in the likes of Davros and of course it was bound to grow up strong.

This is a serial that revels in its darkness and is all the richer for it. The only thing that might make it darker is if it was lit like The West Wing. And now that I’ve said that, someone should really do a West Wing on Skaro, exposing the ins and outs of the Kaled corridors of power. As it is, we have corridors aplenty and the lighting helps paint a consistently claustrophobic atmosphere. Even the radioactive wastes of the Skaro No-Man’s Land is generally enclosed by smoke or fog.

The lighting only really gets it wrong at one point when it inadvertently allows us a glimpse of a very human-shaped head inside one of the Daleks. It’s a nit-pick and, like most nits, it’s not easy to catch – it surprised me, and I don’t recollect noticing it before. Who knows, maybe I did and forgave it, trundling swiftly on, along with the action.

Because, rather like The Green Death before it, this is a story that makes highly effective use of its six parts. Sure, it doesn’t have the breathless, almost desperate pace of some modern TV, but it strikes a terrific balance between keeping things moving and taking the proper time to explore its themes and situations. Allowing itself to breathe, while maintaining that wonderful claustrophobic atmosphere.

A couple of the cliffhangers aren’t as well-judged as The Green Death’s: Sarah plummeting to her death is a gasp out loud moment (certainly was when I was a nipper and had to wait a week to find out what happened to my favourite companion!), but the pay-off is weak – it needs Sevrin to lunge and grab her or something; and the Doctor being electrified is fair enough, but the sight of the Kaled dome being destroyed, when the Doctor knows he has sent Sarah and Harry into the holocaust, would have been a much more suspenseful moment for the break and considering it only comes all of two minutes into the next episode, I wonder why a trim wasn’t made here or there to accommodate that.

Still, in all honesty, it’d be difficult to know what to trim. Okay, we could afford to lose the giant clams. And we could afford to lose the image of the Doctor, Sarah and Harry flailing around in space at the end. But they’re the sort of flaws – again, nit picks – where we’d only want something else in their place. In the former case, the rejected experiments serve as a useful illustrator – a misstep in the – and I hesitate to use this phrase – evolution of the Daleks – as well as a decent slice of additional horror. A bit like the Slyther in Dalek Invasion Of Earth. In short, they didn’t have to be clams. And in the latter case, all we’d need is the same scene with a better visual – a warpy, swirly vortex effect or something not off the top of my head.

Ultimately though, it comes down to flaws shmaws. The nits, if you choose to pick them, are massively outweighed by the riches on offer. The best – blatant – use of WW2 imagery (uniforms and gas masks – and we all know how creepy those can be!) in sci-fi, pre-Star Wars – and, in any case, forget the Imperials, these Kaleds embrace the Nazi ideology and the ‘personality’ as well as the dress code. Peter Miles as Nyder, is exceptional, a brilliantly cold and memorable second to Davros himself. The Doctor agonising over the morality of genocide as he holds two wires an inch apart. Surely (one of?) the best hero-villain sit-down discussions ever (and obviously there’s going to be no wrestling over the Reichenbach Falls for these two – it wouldn’t be fair and wheelchair access is a bitch). Genuine shivers when Davros’ Dalek half boils over into the upper half and explodes out of him in a 'Fuhreristic' rant. He truly dominates, in the way all the supreme villains do.

At the time, I gather there was some disappointment that Davros hogged the action and the Daleks didn’t feature much. Well, d’uh. The fact that this was their creation story should have been a giveaway. In spite of that, the Daleks themselves make a significant stamp on the story – all the more effective, I think, because they are held in reserve – and when they do appear are more of a force to be feared and reckoned with. Apart from the regulars (naturally), they are the only characters in the piece whose future is assured. As they assert themselves, they will survive – and that is a powerful guarantee that lends them the commanding presence of a bona fide unstoppable force.

It’s not their fault they’re destined for a downhill slide after this.

And there lies the chief, significant problem with Genesis Of The Daleks. In terms of what followed, no Dalek story comes close. Even Davros – a supreme creation (who would have been eminently horrific even if I hadn’t had a grandmother who constantly reminded me of him) – becomes the elected representative of the law of diminishing returns. The mask is a cheap imitation of John Friedlander’s, the performances poorer cousins of Michael Wisher’s and the role steadily reduced to the dregs of what Terry Nation had cultivated. Their creation story should have granted them with a new lease of life, but instead their beginnings heralded a creative dead end. But the blame doesn’t rest on the shoulders of Genesis. That lies squarely with the writers/script editors/producers who couldn’t rise to the challenge laid down by this story: i.e. simply put, "Go on, do better than this, I dare ya."

Fortunately, its real legacy – the one that counts – is in the lasting impression it left on me and, probably, one or two others. And I’m glad to say, as familiar as the story is, that legacy is very much alive and well. And who knows what ideas I have, bubbling away in the incubation chamber of my imagination, that will ultimately owe their existence to this one monumental slice of Doctor Who from my childhood.