Slightly peeved DW musing
You know, the more I see of the frankly excellent analysis of various monsters that’s currently on my dash, the more I dislike the assertion in that post tillthenexttimedoctor copied and pasted, that we should find River malevolent and disturbing for the fact that a Dalek was afraid of her.
I mean, the Daleks—they’re a void. Daleks are defined by the things that they don’t have: compassion, individuality, a face to talk to. When you think of all the things that humans spend their days on—art, conversation, work, food, saying, “Ooja booja wooja,” to largely indifferent cuddly animals—for all the myriad things that humans do with their time, Daleks substitute thinking about killing you, planning to kill you, or actually killing you. To make a Dalek, you start by subtracting things. Daleks are smaller on the inside.
Which is, of course, why being the enemy of the Daleks has become an incredibly important part of who the Doctor is. But the Daleks are not just the enemy of the Doctor; they’re the enemy of the universe. You could even say that they’re the enemy of the show; everything that Doctor Who is, from intellect and romance to weirdness and silliness, are all things that the Daleks want to shoot dead and replace with more Daleks. So I hope it makes sense that I’m bothered when someone declares the act of opposing and intimidating a Dalek to be frightening and horrendous—at least, so long as that person is a middle-aged woman and not the Doctor. Antihero, sure. (So is the Doctor.) But horrendous? Really?
I always go back to Terry Nation’s original concept for the Daleks:
Nation grew up during World War II, 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 and complete conformity.[62] The allusion is most obvious in the Dalek stories penned by Nation, in particular The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) and Genesis of the Daleks (1975).
We (the BBC, the fandom, everyone) have sanitized them over the years – made them literally into cuddly toys and so on. Things have changed and evolved and that’s probably okay, I don’t know. But they’re still an alien robot stand-in for actual Nazis, or they started off that way, so I don’t think that anyone violently standing up to them should be a disturbing act. Or an act worthy of the condemnation it sometimes gets in the show (when Ten 2 kills them in Journey’s End, for example.) I even wonder sometimes if Dalek, good as it is, was a bit of a misjudged idea. Because as long as Nazis exist, and they do, the concept of Daleks is a threatening one. So we should be seeing characters stand up to them, even violently, even ‘disturbingly’, even though the show is pretty inconsistent on How You Should Treat A Dalek as well.
(I always thought it was interesting how it was a Jewish woman – Verity Lambert – who originally fought for the Daleks’ inclusion as a horrible enemy.)
