Inspirations - Genesis of the Daleks

As Tom Baker was going to be eased in with a season of popular monsters, it was only natural that this would include an encounter with the Daleks. Terry Nation had, after all, been contributing an annual script for the past two seasons. He duly delivered another one for Season 12. Terrance Dicks had a look at it, then went to see Barry Letts, telling him it simply would not do. Letts read it, and agreed. Nation was contacted and told that, whilst it was a very nice script, it just happened to be the same one he had sold them the year before. And the year before that. Nation went back and looked at it, and said something along the lines of "You know, I think you might be right...".
Letts, Dicks and he had a meeting and threw some ideas around, and it was the producer who suggested to Nation that he had never shown us how the Daleks came into being. Nation liked this proposal, and what he came up with was "Genesis of Terror" - which ultimately became Genesis of the Daleks, as it was felt important to have the D word in the title.
This would be the penultimate story recorded for the block of six, though broadcast fourth. The director chosen was David Maloney, who had recent experience with the Daleks (having directed Planet of the Daleks). He and new script editor Robert Holmes would have significant input in developing Nation's story.

For instance, Nation had written that the Doctor met the Time Lord agent in a perfumed garden. Maloney elected to film it instead in the middle of a war zone, setting the meeting in a mist shrouded wasteland, after showing us some gas-masked soldiers being gunned down in slow motion. Mrs May Whitehouse, the evangelical champion of the nation's morals, would soon be referring to the programme as "tea-time brutality for tots". This is the first time we have mentioned her - but sadly it won't be the last.
The Doctor was on his way back to space station Nerva by transmat, but the Time Lords have diverted his journey to Skaro - the third time he has visited the Dalek homeworld on screen. They have a mission for him again - just as they had at times during his exile on Earth (Colony in Space and The Mutants explicitly, and The Curse of Peladon implicitly). Such missions will actually come to an end in the next season. The Time Lords want the Doctor to stop the Daleks from being created, or at the very least alter their evolution in some way, so that they become a less aggressive race. They have foreseen a time when they will become the dominant species in the universe - so a threat to their own power. Prefiguring The Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords are seen to be not as aloof as they have previously been portrayed. They will interfere - provided they aren't seen to be doing it. In hindsight, this act will lead eventually to the Time War.
The transmat diversion continues the season story arc, as the Doctor fails to be reunited with his TARDIS.

We learn that we are on Skaro during the thousand year war between the Daleks' forebears and the Thals, as referenced way back in their first appearance. Many people have thought that this story contradicts established Dalek history, but this is not necessarily the case. In The Daleks, the Doctor was told about the war by the Thals, who were the distant descendants of the conflict. Their historical records tell of the war which destroyed Skaro in a day, and the Doctor sees evidence of neutron bombs having been deployed. Over such a long period of time, the history is almost certain to have become garbled somewhat. Even the name of the race whom the Thals were fighting has become corrupted - Kaleds becoming Dals. The war may have lasted for a thousand years, but both civilisations do get destroyed (almost) in a day, as we witness in this story. Both cities fall within a few hours of each other.
What Genesis of the Daleks does contradict, wholesale, is the earlier origins tale which Nation co-wrote with David Whitaker. This appeared in the TV Century 21 comic in 1965.
In the first 3-part story - titled "Genesis of Evil" - the Daleks (not Dals. If Terry Nation can forget what they were called after just 18 months, then the Thals can be forgiven for getting muddled up after decades or more) are diminutive blue-skinned humanoids, and their chief scientist Yarvelling designs the Dalek machine to act as a weapon in the war against the Thals. He's ordered to do this by the new leader Zolfian, who has usurped power from the pacifist ruler who wanted to make peace with the Thals. The latter do not appear in the strip. Zolfian also has Yarvelling create a huge arsenal of neutron bombs. Unfortunately for them, a meteorite crashes on top of the arsenal and wipes out the surface of the entire planet. Only Zolfian and his scientist survive, and they find an active Dalek machine amidst the ruins. It explains that it is a mutation caused by the radiation, which is slowly killing the two humanoids. Before they succumb, it orders them to build more of the machines to house more Dalek mutants. Zolfian and Yarvelling die, leaving the new race of Daleks to take over the planet and plot to conquer the universe. That first Dalek will command its underlings to build it a new casing, and it becomes the gold, domed Emperor of the later strips.
Just to muddy continuity further, Nation later wrote another origins story, which appeared in the Radio Times 10th Anniversary Special. This claimed that the Daleks were actually our descendants, and that Skaro was a future Earth.

As we said when looking at the first two Dalek stories, they were always supposed to be analogous to the Nazis. You'll recall that Nation grew up in Cardiff during the Second World War, with the city being bombed and the threat of invasion almost constant. From the very start they have been obsessed with racial purity, with talk of exterminations and final solutions. The ones patrolling London even appear to give "Heil Hitler" type salutes with their sucker arms. Ian Chesterton described their motives as "a dislike for the unlike".
Genesis of the Daleks takes this Nazi imagery and runs with it. Not only are the Daleks fascistic, they derive from a fascist race - the Kaleds. We see this in the uniforms, and they even give the Sieg Heil type salute. The boy general, Ravon, delivers a speech about wiping every last Thal from the face of Skaro. Then Nyder - Davros' henchman - turns up wearing an Iron Cross. You'll notice that it disappears quite quickly, as the director thought it was taking the Nazi parallels a little too literally.
Whilst short, dark haired Adolf H believed in the Aryan ideal - typified by tall blond folks - this is actually the description for the Thals. As presented here, the Thals are no different to the Kaleds. They are just as genocidal and racist, happy to use slave labour to build missiles, and we see individual acts of extreme cruelty from them - such as when the guard makes Sarah believe he is going to drop her from the top of the rocket. The Thals we saw in The Daleks were pacifist by nature, something which they would have developed as a response to the events of the war, but we can see how they have already become militarised again when we get to Planet of the Daleks.

The humanoid Daleks of the comic strip seemed to be slightly based on the Mekon from Dan Dare, having quite large heads on small wiry bodies. Davros was originally envisaged as looking like the Mekon as well. When writing Journey's End, Russell T Davies toyed with the idea of including a flashback sequence that would have shown us how he came to be the way he was - crippled and confined to a wheelchair. As it is, his origins have never been shown on screen, or even explicitly described. In his next Dalek script, Nation will have the Movellans describe him as a "Kaled Mutant", rather than just a plain old ordinary Kaled. We know that his wheelchair is based on a Dalek, but in story terms it is obviously the other way round. He's creating the Daleks in his own image.
With six episodes to play with, and actors of the calibre of Tom Baker and Michael Wisher, we have the luxury of time to witness the Doctor and Davros debate - either with each other or with themselves. The two classic scenes which everyone remembers from the story are the discussion about just how far Davros would go in pursuit of scientific knowledge - the release of the deadly virus - and the Doctor anguishing over whether he has the right to commit genocide. In the latter scene, the Doctor mentions the famous "would you kill a child..." conundrum. The Doctor refers to the hypothetical child as growing up to be a tyrant, but most examples of it usually specify the child growing up to be Hitler, so we're back to Nazi references again.

As it is, the Doctor is saved from making his decision as it looks like Davros is about to be beaten in a coup by a group of his scientific elite. A little later, a Dalek accidentally triggers the explosives in the nursery anyway - but this does not destroy the Daleks, so the Doctor would not have been committing genocide anyway.
The Daleks eventually turn on all the Kaleds - and then Davros himself, as he had made them hate everyone who was not like them. We don't get to see if they would have kept him alive in order to help them, however, as the actual reason they shoot him is because he is about to blow up their production line. The Thal survivors then seal up the bunker. The Doctor states that he thinks he has only delayed the Daleks' emergence - by a thousand years. A blocked tunnel isn't going to take a millennium to clear, so he must be referring to the fact that their creator is no longer around to refine them. Some fans have assumed that this story then changes Dalek history as we have seen it up to this point, and we should push the dating for all the stories forward by one thousand years, if they happened at all. This change in history is also why we get Davros in all the subsequent stories of the original run, when he wasn't even mentioned, let alone seen, before. This theory is easily shot down. Perhaps all of the Daleks stories we have seen already took place one thousand years after they were supposed to have happened. The delay has already happened.
One other continuity irritation this story throws up is the fact that these are the more advanced Dalek design - capable of already moving around outside. The way round this is to assume that the Daleks in the bunker eventually regress in some ways, without their creator to help them.
The story arc gets back on track when the Doctor uses a Time Ring, given to him by that Time Lord agent at the beginning of the story, to get back to Nerva where the TARDIS will be waiting...
Next time: the Cybermen return for the first time in 6 years, in a story which is written by their co-creator, who has been away from the programme for even longer...