Genesis Of The Daleks: Ranking - 101

 Genesis Of The Daleks

(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 8/3/1975-12/4/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Terry Nation, director: David Maloney)

Rank: 101

  ''Touch these two strands together and they’re finished, these alien menaces that have wreaked such havoc on humanity. The final responsibility is mine and mine alone. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations can live without fear and not even know the word...Wait did you say Daleks? I thought you said Spice Girls, oh well that’s different, let them live!' 

Finally, eleven years on form their debut, the Doctor finally goes back to the root cause of the Daleks rather than the symptom in an exceptionally tense, gritty thriller that fans regularly vote the greatest Who story ever made. ‘Genesis’ seems like a natural extension of Terry Nation’s previous Dalek stories, but it took a polite intervention from outgoing producer Barry Letts that while he really enjoyed the latest script breakdown ‘I also enjoyed it the last three times you sent it to me and we turned it into a programme!’ and a discussion between them and script editor Terrance Dicks on what could have been done with a Dalek that hadn’t been done before. Barry then asked Terry the simple question: where exactly did the Daleks come from? And no, it isn’t a stork made of Dalekanium! Nation had already been asked this before, giving three very different and contradictory versions already for three very different audiences – a brief history in the ‘Outer Space Dalek Book’ (1966) which has the Daleks evolving from primordial soup and creating their outer casings themselves and a (not that) short story in the Radio Times 10th anniversary pullout special (1973) named ‘We Are The Daleks’ has the metal meanies turn out to be the results of warped experiments on humans in the far future. However it’s a third go in the Dalek strips from the TV Century 21 comics named ‘The Genesis Of Evil’ (more likely the work of one-time Who script editor David Whittaker but with Terry’s name on it) that sounds like a first draft, with a Kaled scientist with the unlikely name Yarvelling who created the Daleks to end a civil war on Skaro. He isn’t disabled and he isn’t mad and his creations are the desperate last act of a scientist in a war that’s gone on far too long and cost too many lives (Whittaker was probably thinking of the scientists behind The Manhattan project and their moral quandary at dropping nuclear bombs on Japan). Taking this as a starting point Nation shaped his ideas into a whole new story, doing the single most obvious thing he’d never done with eleven years of playing up the similarities between the Daleks and the Nazis: he gave them their own Hitler. 

 We look back at footage of WW2 nowadays and wonder how it could possibly have happened, how someone so small and puny and decidedly not like the Aryan ideal he preached could have created such blind devotion from so many people, most of them good people- for war leaders are no good alone, they need to have a population behind them. Historians have talked openly about how so many people were scared, how good Hitler was at exploiting the prejudices and xenophobia that already existed, even the idea of mass hypnotism and you can kind of see that in surviving footage: Hitler plays every last emotional card as if he’s auditioning for X Factor: his love for his country, his hatred of people that he blamed for all the things that had gone wrong with it, the sheer fright of what might happen to you if you happened to be one of the people on the wrong side of the black and white lines he’d drawn up. Like Davros Hitler was a nobody until war came along and made him a somebody who found he rather liked bossing people around and having people look up to him. Then armistice day came and Hitler was back to being a no one, destitute and impoverished, bitterly angry at the politicians he thought had sold him and his country out and angry at the way the victors were making the German people poor and starving out of punishment and a means of paying back the damage done to their own countries. Hitler’s real strength was in exploiting the genuine hurt and sense of betrayal of a whole people, but then using his words to turn people against a different enemy who had nothing to do with it. We ask now why people didn’t simply overthrow Hitler, who was small and puny, but it wasn’t that simple: right up until he ended up alone in his bunker Hitler was always surrounded by an army who kept him safe, first out of love, then out of fear. Nation, who spent WW2 hiding in a shelter at the bottom of the garden alone listening to war reports on the radio, waiting for his volunteer parents to come home, had plenty of time to ponder how such a being could exist and the lengths people went to in order to protect him. As a result Davros is a very faithful portrayal of Adolf throughout, from the casual cruelty of his words that blind so many, to the guttural fear of what might happen if you spoke out against him, to the genuine feeling amongst the Kaleds that Davros is their last chance of survival in an atomic war they seem to be losing: better to hope that Davros will win and unleash his evil on the Thal enemy than on themselves. By the end, though, Davros can no longer control his own creations and is left to slink off to die a coward’s death alone in a bunker, just like the real thing (though Nation likes Davros as a character too much to kill him off just yet so leaves a loophole for future stories). 

 Nation also makes Davros disabled, hanging on to life through the technology in his wheelchair. He’s halfway to being a Dalek himself with a third eye in his forehead that gives augmented sight to make up for his blinded eyes, a larynx replaced by a voicebox that already sounds quite Daleky (the ring modulator used on Dalek voices started life as a mechanism smokers who’d lost their larynxes used by pressing up against their vocal chords) and even the Dalek-like bumps in the chair are explained away as ‘sensors’ to replace Davros’ damaged skin which can no longer sense touch. Davros has been robbed of all feeling by his experiments, much like the Nazis in labour camps – and that’s basically what Skaro has become. Now the most controversial take of Russell T Davies’ since coming back to take over the programme was that having a bad disabled character was the wrong thing to be doing in the modern age and vowing that, under his watch we would only ever see a pre-Genesis when Davros was able-bodied. Normally I wouldn’t dare to argue anything Who with Russell, a Whovian in every way I am and no doubt more. However this is, I think, a fundamental misunderstanding. When Terry Nation wrote Davros in 1974 he did so to match the puny insignificance of the being it was based on, who talked about the importance of physical exercise and good health but who lived a contradictory life and was in a seriously bad way physically by the time he became Fuhrer in the 1930s. Always small and weak, a mustard gas attack in WW1 weakened his lungs and caused such damage that, by the end of his life, Hitler had a pronounced stoop, a stammer and could barely move his arms; modern doctors largely agree that he was also suffering from degenerative syphilis. Only 56 at the time of his death he seemed like a man thirty or forty years older and the irony is that had Hitler met a copycat of himself as a stranger in a labour camp he’d have been the first person sent to the gas chambers. The joke amongst many allied forces was that they didn’t need to risk an assassination attempt: their enemy seemed on the verge of keeling over at any moment as it was. By the end of the war Hitler was paranoid that he wouldn’t live to see the rise of the third Reich and poured money away from the war effort into schemes to speed the war up, such as deadly new scientific inventions – inventions that Nation knew had been bought up by both American and Russian leaders in fear of WW3 and behind a lot of the Cold war paranoia all his Dalek stories are about somewhere. That’s the Hitler Terry Nation was thinking of when he wrote Davros, imagining how the rest of the war might have gone if Hitler hadn’t retreated to his Berlin bunker but seen out the war perfecting his last inventions and unleashing them on the Western world. The Daleks are the last gasp invention of a dying man, as indestructible as he is frail, as relentless as he is weak, as invincible as he is mortal. The great irony of ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’, as it was in WW2, was that the great leader everybody feared could have died from his own failing health at any time, Davros a mere button away from death – but the people around him who desperately need him to die so they can live are too afraid to press it. Note the use of chemical weapons too, Terry moving on from the weapons the Nazis did use to what everyone feared might have come next (that’s why every man woman and child in Britain was issued with a gas mask). Of course the ‘real’ solution to having a ‘bad’ disabled character is to counteract with a ‘good’ one; UNIT’s Shirley is the ‘right’ response to this debate, we don’t need to change Davros; he was deranged long before he was disabled, just as Hitler was a monster a long time before he started looking like one. 

 The result is a story that lives long in the memory after you’ve finished watching it, a tour de force about man’s capacity for cruelty and the very real weaknesses within us all that allow us to be exploited by such tyrants in the name of war when all most right-thinking people want is peace. This story just feels real in a way few other Who stories do: people hurt in this story, they get damaged when things go wrong and no one is immune from it right up to the Doctor and companions who have a most horrid time (is there any other story where the Doctor and companions suffer as much pain as here? The Doctor is tortured into giving away secrets of Dalek plans in the future, Sarah is left for dead in labour camps that are as close to Auschwitz as they dare get away with on TV in 1974 and Harry is nearly eaten by a giant clam, as only Harry can).This is even one of the few Dr Who stories to use real guns, albeit not real bullets (and with some guns poached from the Drahvins of ‘Galaxy 4’ to bulk things out). There’s none of the occasional larking about you get from Dr Who stories, no ‘it’s only a kids show innit?’ acting: everyone, from the biggest actor to the extras to the costume and set designers to the director treats this as a straight war drama and even the little humour there is in this story is of the gallows type, a last gleeful act of rebellion against a foe who take themselves so seriously they’ll happily kill you for pointing out their faults. The fandom of Dr Who famously never agree on anything and yet uncharacteristically most of them have agreed ever since the day of first broadcast that this story was something special – this isn’t one of those stories that’s risen in importance as the years have gone on (like ‘The War Games’ or ‘City Of Death’) or loved at the moment of broadcast only to have been re-assessed since and found wanting (like ‘The Daemons’ and ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’): all polls called it the greatest Dr Who story give or take one or two others in 1974 and they still say it give or take one or two today. 

 Quite a large part of why ‘Genesis’ has so gripped the fan consciousness where others haven’t is that it was the first story you could own and replay long before the days of home videos and DVDs, albeit only in soundtrack form. The heavily trimmed vinyl cut down all the boring bits from the 135 minute show to make for a highly explosive 90minutes and the record sold bucketloads – so much so I’ve always been amazed the BBC didn’t just keep issuing more soundtracks for the rest of the 1970s starting with their ‘other’ big name stories from Tom Baker’s first all-conquering season (though they’d have struggled to get even half an hour of action out of next story ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’). Whenever there’s been a series of Who repeats it’s never been that long before this story turns up either, with repeats in 1975, 1982, 1993 and 2000 (and those are just the terrestrial channels: BSB and Sky have repeated it lots too). An early video (weirdly paired with ‘The Sontaron Experiment’) and an even earlier DVD, it’s one of the best sellers in the ranges too. Even allowing for the fact that a lot of fans probably watched all five broadcasts and own all three versions (there’s a Blu-ray as well now) it still surely means that more individual people have seen this individual story than any other Dr Who – arguably from all eras, but certainly from the 20th century. As a result Davros now feels as familiar to fans as our own family (and is twice as good looking!) 

I can see why this story created such a splash and is repeated so often: it introduces Davros, who puts, for lack of a better word, a humanoid face to the Daleks and gives the Doctor an equal to square off – a general to talk to rather than a series of soldiers. While later returns and indeed later actors never quite get the layers of Davros right, former Dalek voice and frequent Human guest part Michael Wisher is born for this role, note-perfect in the ways he veers from manic evil cackling tyrant to the vulnerable little boy who created the most evil race in the universe because he was so tired of being hurt. Now Michael Wisher was one of the nicest actors you could ever meet: he helped out with many a low-paying fan production just because he wanted to help, kept everyone laughing in rehearsals by performing with a paper bag on his head (often in tandem with a lit cigar!) and loved teasing children in character (there are many tales of him sitting stock-still when children were on set so that they would think he was a ‘prop’. Until he reached out a bony arm to grab them!) As Davros, though, he’s evil incarnate: you utterly believe that this is a being who would sell his own grandmother in return for his own survival. The fact that Davros is committed to his cause he’s even experimented on himself, inadvertently making himself a victim who deserves mercy at the same time he’s creating a race who don’t have any, is one of those fascinating contrasts Dr Who does so well and Davros is more than just another villain, like a Dalek Emperor or Cyber Controller. Wisher picked up on Nation’s Hitler references without being asked but while he doesn’t try to copy the Fuhrer directly the way Davros starts ranting is very Hitler-esque from nothing, his voice growing from a whisper to a yell. He says he really got the speech from a 1945 one given by philosopher Bertrand Russell and the actor’s horror at how dispassionately he talked about all the suffering that happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The mask too, the creation of respected TV makeup artists John Freidlander, is a thing of beauty for being so ugly (contradictions are big with Davros), rubbery and worn, decaying even while it’s owner is hanging on to life. A lot of this story’s success with viewers is because of these two factors and while Davros has been brought back so many times down the years he’s never as good as here, the only time Michael Wisher played him – and the only time Friedlander was around to make sure the mask fitted properly. The Daleks, by contrast, barely feature at all, with a quarter hour at most out the six episodes. In a way it’s a shame: the Daleks are scariest when they’re all scheming and conniving together, but giving them a boss makes them like every other generic monster in Dr Who. For my money they still get all the best bits though, such as facing up to their creator immediately after being born. 

 One of the other figures working overtime is new script editor Bob Holmes. He wasn’t at all happy to be saddled with a Dalek story as he thought they’d been done to death but having inherited the commission from his friend Terrance Dicks he couldn’t really turn it down. One thing that crops up a lot with Nation’s stories in this book is how much his stories vary depending on who the script editor is: his writing style isn’t to fill the page with ideas and characters but plot beats that lave a lot of room for the people working on his scripts to add their own touches (which is a polite way of saying they often ran short). His stories are all only as good as his script editor; thankfully in this era its Robert Holmes and both bring out the best in the other: Nation’s love of simple plots and sometimes simple people gives Holmes a lot of room to make some barbed attacks against his usual targets of bureaucracy and a lack of empathy, while Holmes’ love of motivation and character means that Nation’s characters feel more three-dimensional than usual. Whereas David Whittaker, the script editor Nation was closest to, excelled at adding more hopeful and more human touches to Nation’s work to make them lighter Holmes is every bit as cynical and paranoid as Terry. A lot Holmes’ stories are filled with bitter humour and poke fun at societal conventions we live by to the letter even though life is more ambiguous than that and the restrictions actively do us harm: Davros is the perfect figure for Homes’ hatred of petty bureaucracy, the person everyone agrees is clearly insane and dangerous and on the verge of wiping them out but they still can’t depose because it wouldn’t be ‘right’. Sadly Holmes will never work with the Daleks again and he never did write a Dalek story from scratch, while Terry Nation will never again have a script editor with quite this belief in his creations – at least in his own lifetime (His one remaining story is ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ and Douglas Adams does not have the same reverence for his creations that Bob does). 

 Talking of people adding bits to Terry’s work it’s no surprise that out of the three Doctors who spoke Terry’s lines (alas Patrick Troughton never got to do a Nation Dalek story)Tom Baker is the actor who seemed to enjoy saying them most. Whereas Hartnell always gave an approximation of lines and Pertwee stuck religiously to every syllable in a script Tom never read a script he didn’t think about embellishing. A lot of writers, script editors and producers tried to wean him off the habit but more often than not Tom will have added something of himself somewhere, arguing that as the person actually playing the part he knew better than any writer how his Doctor should speak. Terry’s scripts are born for this: coming in short, with big bold ideas he could get his teeth into, they give a lot of room for Baker’s additions and Tom is on record as saying this was his favourite of all his stories from his seven years (Douglas is the only other writer I’ve ever heard him openly praise, out of maybe forty). After four stories of warming up this is the one that cemented Tom Baker not just as a worthy successor to Jon Pertwee but the only Doctor in some people’s eyes and he ups his acting no end with a script that gives him a lot to do and a baddy he can really bounce off. In much of this story the Doctor is our one last sane link in an insane world, his flippancy and jokeyness the antithesis of everything Davros-Hitler stands for but he shares the same devotion to his cause and is prepared to risk everything to re-right Davros’ wrongs. So far this Doctor has been an antihero as often as he’s been a hero, ready to abandon his UNIT family and viewing humanity as plagues but here the Doctor is as Human as he’s ever been, the last defence against a monster who lost his humanity a long time ago. Every fan can quote most of the Doctor’s two long speeches in this story word for word, the perfect match of script and delivery. 

 The most famous of these is the Doctor’s mammoth ‘do I have the right?’ speech debating the morality of killing the Daleks before they’ve technically done anything bad and whether he has the right to destroy life when so much good comes out of it, through all the species that learn to work together to stop them. It is one of Who’s most quoted speeches for a reason, recycled in pretty much every Who documentary because it so sums up this series: even baddies might have some good in them and no one has the right to kill another no matter how bad, or we end up just like the Nazis. I’ve always seen it as an echo of the Nuremburg Trials that took place after WW2, when Nazi leaders were put on public trial for war crimes. Seeing these monsters up close as frail increasingly elderly men, not unlike Davros, was quite an eye opener for the public who kind of hoped that they’d be exterminated out of sight behind closed doors. Instead giving them the opportunity to make their own pleas, to become people, was a brave and smart move: it meant that the allies were different to the Nazis by giving them a voice rather than silencing it and it also meant that, unlike WW1, justice was seen to be meted out properly based on individual cases, not as a mass punishment that might cause the rise of another Hitler and the start of a third world war. Notably the Doctor seems quite happy to carry out his mission for the timelords (is this the first salvo in the time war between timelords and Daleks?) until he physically holds these wires together and has to personally make the decision. The Doctor’s queasy questioning whether he has the right to kill another, no matter how wicked or evil, is a question this series has been asking ever since the beginning and neatly mirrors the take on pacifism in the first Dalek story (where the Doctor’s the more bloodthirsty one: he’s been learning by spending more time amongst humanity). The great irony in all of this is that the timelords send the Doctor on this quest because he’s been exiled for interfering in other life forms and released in return for certain ‘quests’. But the Doctor can’t meddle because he has a morality the rest of his own people won’t understand. They haven’t seen life the way he has, close up, to know that good and bad co exist everywhere and that banishing evil isn’t as simple as pressing two wires together. Notice how bloodthirsty Sarah Jane is though: she’s the one urging the Doctor to do it, because she has seen the death that the Daleks would cause (interesting that: the only previous time she met The Skaro scaries was in ‘Death To The Daleks’ where they’re more figures of pity than the tyrants of old). Sarah was always being sold to us as our collective human conscience, who’d react exactly the way we always thought we’d like to at home, so to have her believe in violence is quite a moment. It might too be a comment too on the rise of fascism in the 1970s, the belief that an eye equalled an eye, such a different world view to Dr Who’s very 1960s ideal of turning the other cheek (and then legging it in the opposite direction), of how easily good people can be swayed by bad arguments – much like Germans in the 1930s. In the end the ‘final solution’ is rather taken out the Doctor’s hands. Tom Baker, never afraid of re-writing or rubbishing scripts, agonised long and hard over getting this scene just right and he and Lis Sladen nail it from first word to last. It’s easily one of the high points of the story and the season, maybe even this era of Dr Who as a whole. Perhaps even better than this, though, is the moment in part five where the Doctor takes a rare moment out of his day to actually talk to the baddy and find out what makes them tick: Davros is given the space to put his point of view across, his desperate need to have power over everyone else, where he is effectively tripped up by the Doctor’s arguments and his own words. 

 Perhaps most brilliant of all is the way this story hints at what might come next if we don’t learn these lessons: all Dalek stories are Terry’s fear of the future that might have been had Germany won and many are cold war parables but especially this one. At the same time he was writing this story Terry was working on the first series of ‘The Survivors’, a similarly gloomy take on the end of humanity (which ends in a plague that’s suspiciously like covid, spread by unsuspecting travellers, but even deadlier: typical of my luck to have just started re-watching again at the end of 2019!) A lot of that brutal realism ended up in this story too, with both series featuring scientists unleashing evil from a laboratory, but the difference is that ‘Survivors’ has a light at the end of the tunnel if humanity can re-group with the (largely) good people who are left. There’s none of that in ‘Genesis’ a story written, so Terry said, out of his belief that the people who cold potentially cause WW3 wouldn’t care too much because they were arguably important enough to have their own elite bunkers marked out for them,, cushioned from their own actions; Davros’ troops here are even called the ‘elites’. Mostly, though it works as a reminder than when caught in very bad situations normally good people are still capable of very bad things: a salutary and timeless reminder about the darker side of what it is to be human. In this story mankind has a choice: here in the past even the peace-loving Thals are shown to be brainless thugs as ruthless as the Kaleds. The difference is, though that they learn from the war to value peace, as seen in ‘The Daleks’, something their rivals never do and so are doomed to repeat in a cycle that always ends in failure. More than just another Dalek action story, this plot actually thinks things through and asks bigger questions about the xenophobia that causes the Daleks to destroy everything that isn’t like themselves (including – spoilers – their own creator in one of the series’ most satisfying endings). You get a real sense of the Kaled city as a place that has been through a lot before the cameras ever turned on and the sights of the guards in what is to all intense and purposes SS trooper uniforms, giving what to all intents and purposes are Nazi salutes, is chilling, Nyder is a particularly interesting character: Nation could have picked any or all of the Nazi leaders but he picks Himmler to style his henchman on, the Nazi that most ordinary Germans were most afraid of (Hitler having a warm and cuddly side…at least in theory), cruel and ruthless and openly waiting for his master’s death so he can take over. And yet when it all comes down to it at the end both men are squeamish enough about their own capture that they avoid it through their own hands. Lots of smaller characters are well catered for too. 

 There are many reasons to love this story and it’s one I admire greatly, yet I always come away from it feelings as if its made for fans with tastes different to my own. I like my Dr Whos to be serious but fun; this one is violent and brutal. Practically all the guest cast die awful brutal deaths in this story, even the nice ones who normally survive. Not that they’re as memorable: Nation writes in Mutos in his labour camp (there for no crime other than being ‘racially impure’) and resistance leaders, but Nation’s heart is clearly more in his baddies than his goodies, which makes the whole thing seem uneven. I know we’re in a parallel for Nazi Germany but it feels like everyone we meet is either a figure of hate or a deformed mutant everyone’s trying to kill, on a planet populated by cannonfodder soldiers who don’t even get a name. Blimey it’s grim: without the usual lightness of touch this is a two and a half hour documentary-drama about how evil men can be. If ‘The Tattooist Of Auschwitz’, a film everyone is talking about as I do this re-write, is a tenth as harrowing as this film I’ll be surprised. Which is impressive, but not what Dr Who is for: this show is at its best when it offers hope and a ray of sunshine about our future and makes you feel uplifted with problems solved; this story is dead miserable practically from beginning to end (I mean, the first shot is a bunch of soldiers dying horribly in slow motion) and ends more because the Daleks are even worse than Davros than because anyone else is better. While there are a couple of spots of comedy (I love the long list of items taken from the Doctor’s overflowing pockets, which appear to be bigger on the inside) this story is so bleak it needs a lot more than that to tip the balance. 

 As good as this story is for the Doctor too his companions don’t fare so well. Poor Sarah Jane bears the brunt of a lot of this story’s misery and has a positively horrible time being caged with lepers, being worked to death and falling from gantries; poor Elisabeth Sladen doesn’t get much to do except try to hold back the tears for six episodes (no wonder she’s the bloodthirsty one when the Doctor has his attack of conscience) and is a long way away from the plucky feminist journalist we met the year before. Harry too, the voice of calm and reason and civilisation in most of his other stories, is just in the way here, a bumbling English idiot whose wondered in from a Victorian style of farce into a brutal realist film where everyone else is a monster. There is no civilisation to uphold in this world and all of his attempts seem more futile than ever before. In real life you suspect the pair of them would have been exterminated before the first cliffhanger. Truthfully its Tom Baker, Michael Wisher and Peter Miles as Nyder who keep this story afloat and the story sags when one of the three isn’t on screen. Some of the plotting, too is poor, particularly the cliffhangers: the one of Sarah falling to her doom in freeze-frame is surely the biggest cheat I the entire series (a different camera angle at the start of the following week shows there’s a gantry just beneath her so she barely falls at all). 

 Also, as much as this is a really strong action-based story ultimately it’s not really much more than that – my very favourite Who stories all have an extra layer going on and at times (notably the sag in the middle) this story feels like it needs something extra over and above stopping Davros. After all, there’s so much with this character and his background they could have pursued – and still haven’t done on screen (though Big Finish’s ‘I, Davros’ fills in a lot of those gaps). It also annoys me slightly every time the Doctors’ called in to assist the timelords in some way. This mission is kind of pointless: they don’t see time in the same way; why choose this particular moment to go back and sort the Daleks out? Were the mass past invasions of Earth and other planets down the centuries not enough reason? And surely the Doctor doesn’t need an excuse to get involved and do the right thing? That’s what he does – and what the timelords hate him for – forcing the Doctor to do anything and have him acquiesce cuts so against the grain of the series, of not just blindly obeying rules but considering everybody as a whole, that it feels wrong, especially when there’s no reason for it (after all, it’s perfectly in character for the Doctor to say one day ‘gee, I wonder why the Daleks ended up the way they did? Let’s go see!’) Not to mention the fact that we’ve been told so many times about the dangers of tinkering with time – surely removing the Daleks is going to change the universe so drastically the timelords themselves will lose all control over everything (and they’re a race all about controlling everything: for them the Daleks are the lesser of two evils right up until the time war). The ‘Keys Of Marinus’ style time rings are also a weak plot development to make up for the Tardis not being there and preventing the Doctor from going home before he finishes his quest, but surely it would have been easier just to put a force-field around the Tardis the way we’ve seen the timelords do before? The Doctor misses a trick when being interrogated: why didn’t he make stuff up? (‘…And then I ended up going inside a Dalek ,then there was the time you helped serve humans drinks in WW2, the time we created a load of space pig hybrids in the time of the great depression, ooh and then we ended up going round and round in a warehouse on New Year’s Eve when we were caught in a timeloop, honest!’ Also technically the Doctor never does complete his quest, so shouldn’t he still be stuck on Skaro? As Dalek stories go its frustrating how little they’re actually in this story too and (until the end) are mostly soldiers who do what Davros tells them to do – which is maybe not a problem in 1974 when you’ve had 11 years of nothing but Daleks on screen and Davros is new and interesting but will become a problem (I still say the Daleks are way more interesting than their creator, story on story, at least when he’s not played by Michael Wisher. Davros I mean, not Terry Nation).

 Don’t get me wrong though: doing an ‘origin’ Dalek story was a great idea and long overdue and the fact everyone made it worthy of all the great Dalek stories in the past makes ‘Genesis’ a special story, no matter my minor issues with it. Had this been the pilot for a whole new series I’d have been more than happy. It’s big, iconic and ambitious in a way you wish this series could afford to be every week. You can’t really fault anything on screen (give or take the below entry) and there honestly aren’t that many 1970s Dr Who stories you can say that about. There are none of the worst excesses of the old era here, the so-so acting the boring sets the plot cliches or the high camp that drag so many other stories down, none of the ‘whimsy’ that fans love so much and yet which so confuse the general public. And hey you’ll never get two DW fans agreeing on anything so the fact so many people love this story it must be doing something right (after all, nobody else seems to like my favourite). It’s just that, well, I like the whimsy and the sunshine and optimism and the comedy and the imagination of this series at its best. My favourite Dr Who stories are ones that no other series would ever dream of doing – ‘Genesis’ is a story other series could do and often did, even if few of them ever actually did it this well. Is it the best ever Dr Who story? Not really, not for me: though one of Terry Nation’s better stories it lacks the lyrical-ness and intelligence of a David Whittaker, Malcolm Hulke or a Russell T Davies script to name but three. There is a place, though, in Who for a simple story about pure evil and on those terms this is the best of that genre by a country mile thanks to the definitive performances by three of its stars and the impressive sombre atmosphere it conjures up. Above all else it feels more true to the real brutal experience of living through WW2 than any number of dramas or documentaries on the subject and does a tricky and sensitive subject all the justice it deserves, along with a heavy dose of warning against ever sleep walking into a third world war.

 POSITIVES + Skaro has, till now, been represented on screen by a number of jungles that are obviously sets built in a tiny studio, however well done. But in this story the scarred landscape, following years of nuclear war, is almost a character in its own right and surely one of the best of a long list of quarries in Dr Who. The natural heavy fog at the time of filming really adds to the oppressive atmosphere too. It isn’t so much that nothing lives on this world anymore so much so that you get the impression that life is desperately trying to break through everywhere – and then the Daleks come along and break even that. 

 NEGATIVES - The clam. While every other model effect and prop in this story are spot on, this blip in production is so hopelessly wrong it looks for a second as if the location filming for a brutal WW2 drama has been interrupted by Spongebob Squarepants. Harry, whose really being unbearably thick even for him this story, sticks his ruddy great foot in it even though he’s supposed to be extra careful on an alien planet where everything is out to kill him and the clam happens to be huge and directly in front of him. I mean, I’m the clumsiest person in my timeline (ha Ryan, you think you have problems with your dyspraxia?!) and even I could have avoided it. In the dark. While walking on my hands. Even the Doctor seems to be losing patience with Harry after he does this and much drama is made out of ‘how are they going to get out of this one?’ that ends when the Doctor and Sarah simply walk over them and pull Harry out. It’s not as if the plot revolves around a giant clam either and it’s not even a cliffhanger moment; it’s just an excuse for an extra five minutes of tension in an episode that was under-running and which could have easily been filled up with more Dalek action.

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: While people accept ‘Genesis’ as gospel nowadays (if you excuse the pun) it wasn’t always so: at the time there was great debate as to whether this story took precedent other Terry Nation’s other origin story ‘We Are The Daleks’ – not least because it’s high profile in the Radio Times Dr Who 10th anniversary special the year before means it’s still one of the most owned and read bit of Who fiction of them all. In this entirely contradictory story (at least the origin bit) the Daleks were the invention of a team of respected scientists, not just one mad one, from an unseen planet named Halldon. The Daleks weren’t the last gasp chance of survival by a dying race but an experiment made on primitive locals whose evolution was accelerated in the same sort of casual way humanity messes around with Hadron colliders and particle accelerators now, because they can, to ‘see what would happen’. The plot follows a number of typically dashing Marc Cory types investigating the metal meanies to learn more about the experiment when they’re ambushed by Daleks. The ‘Planet Of The Apes’ twist at the end – and I hope I don’t spoil this but the thing has been around flipping fifty years so you’ve had plenty of chances to read it – is that the primitives were taken from a little known planet called Earth. So we are the Daleks in primitive form and they take all that hate and prejudice from us (‘man is the savagest animal, the most destructive force in the universe…This is where our evolutionary line is taking us –that is what men become!’) Honestly, silly and over-dramatic as the story is, I’d have loved it if the Dalek’s origins on TV had been like that too and while it’s far from the best thing Terry ever wrote (you can tell he got the commission last minute and it was written in something of a hurry) it’s interesting in retrospect because you can see how the cogs were whirring in Terry’s brain about where the Daleks came from, even before Barry Letts made his suggestion. 

 ‘Matrix’ (1998) is one of the ‘Past Adventures’ novels, this one featuring the 7th Doctor and Ace. The Valeyard is out for revenge post ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ in a mad old story that features Jack The Ripper. In this alternate timeline the Valeyard changes the Doctor’s past at some of its most key moments (in much the same was as will happen to the 11th Doctor in ‘Name Of The Doctor’), one of which is ‘genesis’, where we get to see what might have happened if the 4th Doctor really had blown his enemies up. It’s not pretty. ‘Terror Firma’ (2005) is an early Big Finish story starring the 8th Doctor and reveals why you should never, ever give baddies in Dr Who ideas. Remember that scene in ‘Genesis’ where the Doctor asks Davros if he would let a virus kill all of creation and he goes on a rant about holding power over everyone in his hands and that he’d do it? Well, in this story that’s exactly what he does, from his bunker where he flees at the end of episode six, in one of the more direct ‘Big Finish’ sequels. Alas it’s not one of the better Big Finishes – they don’t quite get the tone of the story right I don’t think and Paul McGann struggles with the harder-edged Doctor he’s called on to play, still trying to make him like the Edwardian gent of the TV Movie (he’ll learn!) 

 ‘I, Davros’ (2006) is, for me, the masterpiece of the entire Big Finish range. A sort of scarier, darker ‘I Claudius’ it deals with the corruption at the heart of the Kaled city in the years before ‘Genesis’ and follows Davros from dashing heroic moral scientists whose going to save his people to the desperate angry bitter damaged paranoid soul we see on television. Because his people really are out to get him; the Daleks wouldn’t exist had they been kinder to their needed saviour and Davros is quite a tragic figure. Released in four parts (Innocence/Purity/Corruption/Guilt) it follows the story, stage by stage, as Davros starts off young and hopeful before he’s betrayed (or so he thinks) by his own family and starts feeling the pressure to design a machine to protect his own people who seem to keep turning on him at every opportunity. Given all the awful things Davros has done on TV I never thought I would ever feel any sympathy for him but the scenes of Davros experimenting on his own body (because no one else will work for him) knowing the damage it would do, because he feels he has nothing else to live for, is one of the all-time greatest scenes of audio Whos. By the end of ‘Guilt’, which dovetails into ‘Genesis’ pretty neatly (with an appearance by Nyder), everyone is scared of Davros and what he can do, but perhaps nobody more than Davros himself, secretly shocked at all the lengths he’s gone to in order to survive. The first episode ‘Innocence’ is my favourite though: Davros is almost sweet, a precocious gifted child who has the universe at his feet who everyone loves despite his cruel streak. In keeping with Terry Nation’s scripts it’s not unlike the real story of Adolf Hitler who was never as happy as when he was a general in WW1, barking out orders to people underneath him for the first time in his life and bitterly betrayed at the politicians creating an armistice he didn’t want and his Thal enemies so cruel in defeat they turn him bitter. Terry Molloy was never better, light years ahead of his performance as Davros in the trio of 5th, 6th and 7th Doctor stories, recognisably the same person despite the lack of a ring modulator on the voice (because he’s pure humanoid for the most part of the story). Superb: all four sets of writers/writing teams deserve a bow – sadly none of them have worked on Dr Who for the TV (Lance Parkin is the best known name thanks to his ‘New Adventures’ books). 

 ‘Hunters Of The Burning Stone’ (2013)is an 11th Doctor comic strip first published in Dr Who Magazine issues 456-461 and is a real trip down memory lane, even pairing the Doctor with Ian and Barbara (rather sweetly, he’s best man at their wedding!) The story mostly recycles ‘An Unearthly Child’ but there is a scene that’s just like the one in ’Genesis’ where the Doctor questions whether he has the right to blow the Daleks up and admits to firing ‘the first shot’ in the time war because of events in this story. 

 ‘The Lights Of Skaro’ (2014) is one of Big Finish’s ‘Bernice Summerfield Adventures’ stories that has the time-travelling archaeologist basically adding a coda to this story, discovering a damaged, broken Davros hiding out in his bunker as his own creations hunt him down. The Tardis is kept away from Skaro by a ‘timelock’ so Benny has never felt more alone, not sure what to do for the best and dodging Dalek patrols. There is a lot of Dalek continuity in this one: as well as ‘Genesis’ there is a lot of talk about the ‘hand Of Omega’ as seen in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ and Benny’s friends, Varna and Foster, ‘accidentally’ give the Daleks the idea for static electricity as seen in first story ‘The Daleks’. It’s all a bit of a breathless rush, but it fills in a hole in Who history well and writer James Goss really captures the feel of ‘Genesis’ so fans of this story will find much to enjoy. 

 BEST QUOTE: Davros “Today, the Kaled race is ended, consumed in a fire of war. But from its ashes will rise a new race. The supreme creature, the ultimate conqueror of the universe, the Dalek!” Previous ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ next ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’