The Dalek Paradox

Why a completely ridiculous villain works in spite of itself, and you can, too

I’ve been getting ready for the Long Island Doctor Who convention, where I’ll be interviewing Katy Manning, who played Jo Grant on the show. That’s meant watching a lot of her era and related materials, including “Planet of the Daleks,” one of the many, many tales featuring the show’s most iconic villains.

(As with my Strange New Worlds post, I promise you don’t need to be a fan to follow this post!)

If you’re not familiar with Daleks, they’re basically giant pepper pots on wheels, armed with a rubber plunger/suction cup and a gunstick that bears an uncanny resemblance to a kitchen whisk—only this whisk can kill you as the Dalek shouts “EX-TER-MI-NATE!!!”

These are Daleks at a con, so somewhat less dangerous…maybe.

In any case, they’re easily the Doctor’s greatest foe, created in 1963 as a robotic stand-in for the Nazis, and the most recognizable symbol of Doctor Who outside of the TARDIS. They strike fear into every other species in the universe and are the incredibly destructive embodiment of pure hatred.

They also… make no sense. People have been making fun of them for years, out of context:

That said, having been up close to them at cons, there’s no denying they’re intimidating as all get out in person.

Now, I’ve been watching this show since about 1985. I’ve seen (and heard) more than my fair share of Dalek stories. “Planet of the Daleks” isn’t significantly different from the others, but watching it about a week ago was the first time I noticed how truly ridiculous they are in terms of story logic.

Specifically, there’s a scene in which the Daleks claim to have searched a human body. A dead one that was on the ground. And I thought, “….how??”

Daleks can’t reach the ground. They can’t bend. They have no way of searching a body except to have someone else do it for them.

From there, I started to wonder about their science experiments (Daleks are always trying to create some exciting new way to destroy things). Maybe if you squint and turn your head sideways just right, you can convince yourself that that plunger arm might be able to hold onto a test tube, but that’s as close as they can come to opposable digits, and they each only have one. I can’t imagine them getting very far that way.

For a long time, they couldn’t even handle a flight of stairs, though in their last appearance in the classic series, they gained the ability to levitate.

And then to fly

The Daleks shouldn’t work. And yet… they do. Maybe not in actual practical terms, but for the purpose of the story, they work even though the logic is often sorely lacking.

So what gives? Am I just contradicting myself? Well, yes and no.

Certainly any 15-year-old could (and probably has) spotted details like these that destroy verisimilitude and yank us right out of the story, and spouted them along with an impatient eyeroll. Most of us don’t, though, or don’t care, for one very very good reason:

For the last sixty years, the show has been absolutely committed to the bit. The Daleks really are all that and a bag of hate. They’re terrifying. You don’t want to come across one, much less be captured by them. They’re evil masterminds who want to kill everyone who isn’t them, and have been quite successful.

There’s never a moment when you’re given any reason to question it. The actors are all in (as you’d expect them to be). The music reinforces the menace, as do the script and the direction. Even with the dodgier special effects from the classic series, the Daleks are the most terrifying evil in the universe because everything in the show works in unison to convince you that they are.

The new series has souped those effects up just a teensy bit.

That’s all helped, of course, by our willing suspension of disbelief (which is ruined, I’ll admit, by things like me noticing they couldn’t possibly have searched a body). We go into a show like Doctor Who wanting to be taken on an adventure in time and space, not to play a game of “spot the errors,” and so, unless the errors are really obvious, a lot of the time, we don’t, because we don’t want to.

My question, then, is this: if it works for the Daleks, why can’t it work for the rest of us?

I immediately started to think about ways in which I’ve failed to commit to the things I’ve wanted to be/do/try, and how that stopped me from getting where I wanted to go.

I’m not alone. A lot of us get in our own way because we fail to believe in ourselves completely, and end up undermining our dreams instead of achieving them. We don’t commit to the idea that we can do the things we want to do because we see too many potential holes in the story logic and decide it’s not worth it—or that we’re not worth it. It’s “just not who we are.”

Granted, most of us don’t have a script laid out and a studio full of professionals dedicated to making it work, but we do have friends, family, and other sources of support. They may vary in number and type depending on our circumstances, of course, but they can still believe in us and help us stay the course. Your people may have laid the groundwork for your disbelief in yourself, and if that’s the case, it’s time to find new people who’ll help you undo that.

And as we’ve seen, commitment makes up for a whole lot of imperfection.

We also have the ability to take on a persona to help us explore the idea of committing to the bit with a sense of impunity; if it doesn’t fit, we can just shake that persona off and try another one, or apply what we’ve just learned in a different way. David Bowie used personas very well—Ziggy Stardust was a character he committed to in large part so he didn’t have to deal with the terror of being on stage as himself.

You don’t necessarily have to take personas as far as a complete character—you can come up with another version of yourself, maybe even the version you eventually want to be, to play until the change you want to make feels comfortable enough that it becomes real.

Regardless of how you approach it, and especially if it brings up impostor syndrome in the process, just remember: underneath all the bluster the Daleks are actually helpless, incompetent, tantruming toddlers in tin cans— the ultimate impostors.

The only real difference between them and you (aside from the perpetual murderous rage, of course) is the commitment that makes it work.