Doctor Whosday: Nazis vs. Aryans

Looking back, the Daleks really are perfect sci-fi villains. They are unashamedly evil, completely duplicitous, obsessed with exterminating anything that isn't Dalek, and based on the Nazis. How could villains based on the Nazis fail?

Pictured: The greatest terror known to Britain.

Indeed, the second Doctor Who serial, generally known as "The Daleks", was the beginning of Doctor Who's massive popularity. It turns out the things which frighten children the most are Nazi R2-D2s.

And the Daleks were Nazis. From their stilted, clipped voices (so reminiscent of the accents of "German" television and movie villains), to their advanced technology and mechanization, to their ideological desire to exterminate any and all beings different from their "purity", the Nazi overtones are obvious.

Less than twenty years after the end of World War II, the symbolism could not have been lost on the parents of the children who breathlessly hid behind the couch. Many of them had fought, or had known those who fought, in the war. But why then were the enemies of the Daleks, the Thals, so stereotypically Aryan? They were tall, blond, broad-shouldered, and quite Caucasian. Wouldn't a collection of diverse people be a better analogy for the fight against fascism?

No, really, they are a genetically perfect race.
That's pretty much the plot.

Perhaps... if Terry Nation had been writing a grand symbolic epic. But the creator of "The Daleks" was not. He was writing a science fiction yarn, and worse, a seven-episode-long science fiction yarn. That is nearly three solid hours, not of a weighty and meaningful movie, or an epic adaptation of an epic fantasy series, but of sixties action sci-fi. I do not know for certain, but I suspect Terry Nation was far too concerned over how to keep audience attention for seven episodes than he was on the symbolic vision of his design.

Indeed, on the surface it's sort of difficult to figure out why this serial caught on so well. Oh, the first four episodes are gripping. Captured by the inhuman Daleks, the Doctor and his crew are forced to use their wits to escape, before they are poisoned to death by the planet's deadly radiation. That's nice and exciting! And for all the camp that we now attribute to them, the initial appearance of the Daleks was rather frightening, if you didn't think too much about it.

No no no no no no no no no no no!

Which is really no worse than any other monster. Except for giant bugs. Giant bugs get worse the more you think about it.

Ah, but as great authors have said, the secret to good storytelling is knowing where to end. And the ending of this one should have been around episode four or five. Seven episodes are too much. The Doctor and company must convince the peaceful, perfect, and genetically superior Thals to fight the Daleks in order to protect themselves, and then they have a final assault on the Dalek base. But what should have taken one episode is stretched out into three, with interminably padded scenes of trekking through a swamp and spelunking through a cave, until you are reminded of Roger Corman movies.

And yet, while I don't think Terry Nation intentionally meant for his serial to be particularly meaningful, certain themes are apparent, even if subconsciously. For modern viewers, the ultimate "pacifism allows evil, so be militant and attack your enemies" message strikes a very dissonant chord. But for sixties Britain, less than twenty years after World War II and in the midst of the West vs. East politics of the Cold War, militarism was not about enforcing the West's way of life on the weaker others, it was about protecting the West from its equally powerful enemies.

This symbolizes the Anglo-Polish alliance.

The pacifist Thals play the part of Britain under Neville Chamberlain, first extending the hand of friendship to our Nazi Daleks, then refusing to interfere even after the Daleks ambush them and kill many of their number. It takes Ian, with his brilliant reasoning (and ability to take a punch), to find the flaw in their pacifist policy and convince them that some things are worth fighting for, at which point the Thals get all gung-ho for war. Britain under Chamberlain becomes Britan in the war, doggedly willing to sacrifice greatly for victory.

But if that's so, one question remains: Why are the Thals the vision of Aryan perfection, if they are meant to represent Britain's resistance to Nazi Germany? Well, I have a theory about that.

I would have added a scarf, but that would look silly.

The Daleks are obsessed with their superiority. They hate anything not like them. Like hipsters. Evil, tin-can-wearing hipsters with laser guns and plungers, because hands are too mainstream. Yet what is the result of this superiority? When Ian and the Doctor finally discover what a Dalek looks like, it is a twisted, mutated, disgusting thing. Their obsession with their own isolation has led them to become hideous outcasts. Also like hipsters.

Meanwhile the Thals never considered themselves superior. Indeed, they are quite humble, dedicated (at first) to pacifism out of horror at their own complicity in the nuclear war that devastated their planet. They too have mutated, but their mutations have resulted in them being visions of perfection, the Aryan ideal.

Get the message? In insisting on their own superiority, the Nazis became nothing but twisted creatures. It was the rest of the world, which lived in humility and friendship, that were the true master races, not from genetic superiority, but through a superiority of ideals.

I like that message. I have no idea if Terry Nation intended it or not, but that is what I get out of "The Daleks". May we all be as beautiful on the inside as the Thals are inside and out.

Why isn't this in the review? Because it is completely unimportant.