What Even Are the Daleks?

The broken, insane Daleks of 2012

In 2008, Davros, creator of the Daleks, announced his newest and most powerful invention, the “Reality Bomb.” He promised, in the Doctor Who episode “Journey’s End,” that he would destroy all matter on the subatomic level using an alignment of planets stolen from time and space. Wow, the Daleks want to destroy all reality! So why, in the 2012 episode “Asylum of the Daleks,” does the Doctor rescue a prisoner from a Dalek POW camp?

Daleks have taken prisoners previously. The 1972 episode “Day of the Daleks” features the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, visiting the distant future, where Daleks have conquered Earth. To prevent this conquest, the Doctor must break a causal loop. We witness the Daleks’ empire in action, as Ogrons, a slave race, whipping human slaves, while those humans lug metal trash cans full of something, possibly corn kernels, into a factory. Still the machines run.

Thus, Doctor Who provides three models of Dalek industry: the 1972 industrial empire, the 2008 nihilistic destroyer, and the 2012 police state. (Further analysis could yield more models, probably.) What, then, do the Daleks want? To standardize everything into one efficient machine? To destroy everything for love of destruction? To control everything and crush dissent from above? The answer, I suggest, isn’t what the Daleks want; they want nothing.

Rather, what does the audience fear?

“Day of the Daleks” shows the monsters channeling power into factory labor. Conquered peoples exist to work. What they do doesn’t matter, probably not even to themselves: humans are shown wearing rags and surviving on distilled food supplements. The empire feeds, clothes, and houses conquered peoples, but only in mean conditions. They use one slave race to control another slave race, because nothing matters but labor. Humans are moving parts for society’s great industrial machine.

This episode’s other plot involves a 20th Century diplomat preventing World War III. Britain, poised between America and the Soviet Union, would’ve been painfully aware of Cold War machinations. Both capitalism and communism wanted to bring all humanity under their sway. Each industrial economy might manufacture cars and tractors and televisions, but the economy served each country’s larger goal: standardizing humanity into a single socioeconomic system. Both Cold War systems must have looked like Daleks.

The uniform, all-consuming Daleks of 1972

By 2008, as the American-British coalition in Iraq became increasingly unpopular at home, the image of a nihilistic killing machine must’ve felt equally timely. Cold War Daleks wanted to standardize reality; Iraq War Daleks wanted to crush reality beneath their implacable selfishness. Just like coalition forces made nominal efforts to preserve Iraqi oil, these Daleks captured worlds for utilitarian purposes. But eventually, either everything had to burn, or someone had to defeat the war machine.

And by 2012, the economic collapse that loomed behind Russell T. Davies, but which he never directly addressed in Doctor Who, had become overwhelming. Much of the English-speaking world lay in metaphorical ruins, and workers could either hug their chains and live like slaves to the economic machine, or starve. “Nobody escapes the Dalek camps,” the Doctor tells a turncoat. Just like nobody escapes the reality of financial ruin. Life had become a POW camp.

In each case, the Daleks represented what might happen if globalized political forces lumbered on unchecked. Whether the bigwigs saw us underlings as workforce, as a reality needing obliterated, or as occupied territory, the Daleks became the most extreme and self-serving version of that vision. Whatever we collectively fear, the Daleks become the mythological giant adaptation. The Daleks become whatever implacable shared monster threatens our society, stripped of details and turned into a monolithic myth.

“Day of the Daleks” features a scene where a human guard, in Romanesque armor, throws a battered Doctor before his fellow quisling controller. “Have you told him what will happen if he doesn’t cooperate?” the controller asks. “I’ve even given him a free sample,” the guard says, whacking his club against his palm. Which means conquered humans still understand commerce and money. The Daleks control humans, but have left them an economy. Conquest alone matters.

These three stories reflect the Daleks’ infinite adaptability. The horrible monsters always reflect us. We have the power to succumb to Cold War conformity, or resist. We can stand for or against anonymous, amoral world-destroying rapacity. We can accept the prison camp, or die escaping. The Daleks, by their existence, remind us what choices we stand between. And in their faceless, obedient uniformity, they remind us what we’ll eventually become, if we don’t stand fast.