The Tarot of Evil

I’ve frequently said that one of the most striking things about the original run of Doctor Who and the revived version of the series we enjoy today is not the difference between them, but the level of similarity and continuity – and that’s continuity on a thematic and tonal level, rather than in terms of in-universe history (though this is also true).

Nevertheless there have been changes, and probably the most central and important is the genuine shift in the emphasis of the storytelling. Original-run Doctor Who is, like practically every other action-adventure-fantasy series of the sixties and seventies, a plot-driven enterprise – stories aren’t initiated by or derived from the characterisation of the regulars, or indeed anyone else. The revived series, on the other hand, is much more character-driven: exploring the relationships and personalities of the characters is the primary motivating force behind many of the episodes. The Doctor’s Daughter was written mainly to explore the Doctor’s attitude to parenthood, The Girl Who Waited is a fairly off-the-wall character study of Amy Pond, and Doomsday – seemingly a vehicle for the long-awaited Dalek-Cyberman showdown – merely uses this as a spectacular backdrop before which the Doctor and Rose say their somewhat protracted farewells.

The closest original-run Who gets to anything like this is in a few of the later Andrew Cartmel-commissioned scripts, and – much earlier on – The Green Death, which is the old-style series’ most creditable attempt at writing out a companion in a satisfying manner. Most of the rest of the time, the plot is paramount, with the characters just there to serve its demands more often than not.

Characters in old-style Who are really defined by their plot functions, which is why so many of them end up feeling a bit samey once you dig past the surface detail. There’s a case for arguing that most old-style stories are populated by characters drawn from a Tarot deck of archetypes: the Renegade Time Lord, the Plucky Girl, the Scientist Destroyed By His Own Hubris, and so on. Look at the Brigadier, and then compare him to Captain Hart from The Sea Devils, Lieutenant Scott from Earthshock, and Group Captain Gilmore from Remembrance of the Daleks: these characters are all variations on the same theme (most of them even have the same moustache): the Military Ally.

Nothing very exceptional there, I suppose, but given that the characters are there to serve the needs of the latest story’s plot, it’s not very surprising that – in the earliest stories at least – many elements of the series are jarringly different, in some cases so as to be unrecognisable.

For example, the TARDIS, these days, is a wondrous, almost unquantifiable piece of alien magic-tech – internally vast, sentient, indestructible, possessed of near-mystical powers on occasion. Other than the sentience, most of the rest of it doesn’t really get established until a few years into the show. It suffers dismayingly banal circuitry problems in Marco Polo, there’s a casual reference to searching ‘everywhere’ inside the TARDIS in another of the first Doctor’s stories (which doesn’t seem to take that long!), while in The Sensorites the eponymous aliens happily cut the lock out of the TARDIS door (one of those awkward moments people seem to avoid talking about).

The Doctor, also, famously undergoes a radical and fairly swift transformation across the course of the first two seasons – the hostile, cantankerous, startlingly ruthless and self-interested alien of the initial couple of stories rapidly mellows into someone much more approachable, and finally into a genuinely heroic figure whose first impulse upon meeting the Daleks on 22nd century Earth is to ‘pit [his] wits against them and destroy them’.

But it’s with the Daleks themselves that the demands of the plot-driven approach become clearest. Doctor Who monsters seem to have their own section of the Tarot deck of archetypes, from Slavering Beast (Aggedor, the Magma Beast, and so on) to Robotic Servitor (Vocs, Chumblies, Quarks, etc) to Belligerent Vegetation (Krynoids, Vervoids, Vaaga Plants, et al).

What is the Daleks’ place in the deck? For most fans the answer will come with a reflexive speed that should make us suspicious, to say the least: they are the embodiment of unthinking racial hatred, an allegory for Nazism and the horrors of ethnic cleansing. The overriding obsession of the Daleks, we are assured, is to kill all other forms of life, and they will go out of their way to exterminate any other living creatures they encounter.

This is the modern characterisation of the Daleks – well, up to a point, and this is something I’ll come back to – but, upon going back and looking at many of their older stories, what’s striking is how little this is referenced, and how often it is directly contradicted.

I would argue that the Daleks’ place in the hierarchy is simply as the Chief Recurring Monster. As such they are the quintessence of the Shorthand for Evil which I discussed in the early installments of my look at the Natural History of Evil: when what the monsters are doing is more important than who and what they are, or indeed why they’re doing it, then you can call in the Daleks.

Of course, I may be getting that backwards in terms of how the scripting process worked, but the end result is more or less the same: Terry Nation’s later Dalek scripts, with one obvious exception, aren’t that interested in the Daleks themselves except as a sort of all-purpose menace. He hasn’t put any thought into the creatures themselves, about how their essential nature influences their behaviour and makes them monstrous.

It is interesting, though, that exactly the same can often be said of the Cybermen, and it is surely indicative that the Cybermen have only really been successful as a recurring adversary during those periods when the Daleks have been off the scene: the five year gap at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, and again in the early 80s. Both races are cyborgs, both (usually) appear robotic, both epitomise conformity. Surely it’s arguable that they both default to the same archetype, and as a result can’t both prosper at the same time? With the Daleks on the scene, the Cybermen really are superfluous to requirements (which the Daleks’ easy slaughter of the massed Cyber-forces in Doomsday may be an acknowledgement of).

(Which also leads me to wonder if something similar may be the case with the Ice Warriors and Sontarans: both essentially default to the Alien Warrior Race archetype, and one makes their debut in the same year the other makes their final appearance. But I digress.)

In terms of imagery, of course, the Daleks and the Cybermen are quite different, and this does a splendid job of hiding just how similar they really are in terms of their narrative function (often, but not quite always). I would go further and argue that it is the imagery of the Daleks – that iconic casing, that unforgettable vocal treatment – which is central to the creatures’ success, and indeed the only constant in their presentation across nearly 50 years of TV.

They have had wildly different origins, philosophies, motivations, and plans in this time – the essential nature of what supposedly lies inside that armoured shell has also been radically reconceived at least once. By modern standards, the characterisation of the Daleks has been shockingly inconsistent, and yet still they endure. It is because of that design, and that voice, more than anything else.

Possibly I may sound as if I’m overstating a point. But I don’t think I am, and in the second part of this essay I’ll try to prove it. We will start by going back to examine the first Daleks ever encountered, and observe how they are very different creatures to any others later fought by any of the Doctors…