1. The Overall Design
Ray Cusick died in February 2013, just shy of 50 years after he designed the creature that immediately became so iconic that the success of the nascent new children's sci-fi series, Doctor Who, was suddenly and firmly ensured. What did Cusick do that made the Daleks work so well onscreen that they became even more famous than their implacable enemy, the Doctor, and stayed that way for half a century?
Almost every monster race, whether on Doctor Who or on other contemporary series like Star Trek or Space: 1999, has one thing in common with all the others: it looks like a guy in a rubber suit. What are the most famous monsters in classic Who? Cybermen, Sontarans, Silurians, Zygons. They all look like an unfortunate actor inside a rubber suit sweating into his socks. Even the giant vegetable from "Seeds of Doom," the Krynoid, looks like a guy in a suit once it's in motion.)
Terry Nation, who wrote the seven-part story introducing the Daleks (aired only five weeks after Doctor Who first premiered), had no idea what the mechanized race living on Skaro looked like; but Cusick, who'd taken over the design position not long after the departure of Ridley Scott for directors' training, was determined to make them unique. His choices, taking into consideration not only aesthetics but his extremely limited budget and practical efficiency on set, changed the future of Doctor Who.
To make the Daleks more frightening and alien, Cusick wanted to consciously ditch the idea of a human with stuff stuck to him.
The Dalek has no face, no arms, no legs. The stalks erupting from its steel-clad outer surface are utilitarian expressions of some of those functions, as if an alien mind had observed the specific actions necessary for interacting with the external environment and had produced extremities specifically to accomplish those things.
As a result, the enclosed object with the bare minimum of appendages conveys an unconscious sense of being insular. The Dalek isn't a machine: it's a sealed container. Its malice is not merely preserved and protected within, but opaque, completely unrevealed by any human features or indeed anything recognizable at all. The unnerving vastness of his inhuman capacity for harm is left to the imagination.
2. The Way They Move
According to Doctor Who anecdotal history, the one usable idea that Cusick got out of a phone conversation with Terry Nation was Nation's remark that traditional Georgian dancers, when wearing costumes that touch the floor, move so smoothly that they seem to be gliding, not walking. This dovetailed nicely with Cusick's desire to avoid recognizable human appearance and behavior.
As a result, the Daleks glide.
This is most effectively shown in their 1963 debut story, because their shown in their own city on Skaro, designed to allow the Daleks to coast effortlessly across the frictionless surface, powered by the city's supply of static electricity. In this context, the Daleks are even more unsettling because in such a place it's a perversion to walk, and it's jarring to see the Doctor and company stomping through the Dalek city on two legs like animals. The Daleks, in their element, seem like an evolution over the Earthling primates intruding into their domain.
3. Their Manipulator Arm
The Daleks normally (but not always) have two arm-like appendages on the front of their casings: their energy weapon and their manipulator arm. The former is pretty fearsome but the latter is often treated as a joke, because it looks like a sink plunger. Even the new series, when it first brought back the Daleks, referenced this ludicrous attachment by having a technician taunt an disarmed Dalek, "What are you going to do, sucker me to death?" (Answer: Yes.)
Many consider the manipulator arm a visual liability, but any detriment comes from later designers and producers who did not know how to use the Daleks effectively. The fact is the manipulator arm is brilliant because it is not a hand, and therefore suggests to the mind during (and especially after) not only a profoundly different technology -- when correctly designed Dalek consoles are full of rolling spheres and other interfaces geared toward this kind of operator -- but shockingly different patterns of thinking. After all, how much about the way we view the world is based around hands, fingers, the number 10? Writers sometimes imagine other races as thinking radically differently because they have different numbers of digits. How unrecognizably alien would the thought patterns of an alien race with no digits be?
The manipulator arm is the first part of the Dalek we see in "The Daleks" episode 1, groping toward Barbara from under the camera and presenting a disturbingly undecipherable, almost absurdist image.
There's a reason that's what we see first: in some ways it's the most alien thing about them.
4. Inhuman Amidst the Human
The story that cemented the success of the Daleks was "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" in season 2, in which the Daleks, well, invade Earth. What's obvious about this story is how unsettling it is watching the Daleks roll around achingly familiar human landmarks, presenting a visual contrast between what we code as "home" and what is alien and most assuredly "unhome." But there's more to it than that.
In "Dalek Invasion," the Daleks' inhuman aggression and systematic exploitation and genocide of the conquered humans (most of the human race is destroyed prior to the story even beginning, with the fraction left intended as an enslaved worker class) runs along lines that echo the Nazis. Far from humanizing the Daleks by giving them recognizably human patterns of behavior, though, this aspect of the story has the alarming effect of allowing us to see our actions in these unnatural mutant abominations. The worst part about the Daleks is the extent to which we are like them.
It's not until season 12 in 1975 that the backstory of the Daleks is thoroughly explored in "Genesis of the Daleks" (even before the Time Lords are fully revealed in all their moral squalor in season 14). And in this Terry Nation gives us, along with a great deal of forgettable things and things best forgotten (this is the story with the giant carnivorous clams, after all), his second great future-altering contribution to Doctor Who -- Davros.
And once again, the design has a great deal to do with Davros's effectiveness, along with the casting of the excellent Michael Wisher. Nation provided the suggestion that Davros had created the Daleks in his image, leading to the impressive half-Dalek bottom half; his green, dome-like head was the suggestion of producer Philip Hinchcliffe; but the gold star goes to BBC prosthetics designer John Friedlander, who created a mask that's human and yet most decidedly not, because your gaze keeps going to that wrinkled skin where the eyes should be.
Born of a writer's desire to give the Daleks a spokesman, Davros indeed gives voice to that dark side of the Daleks that's most unsettlingly recognizable as human.
The Daleks might look like "stupid tin boxes," as the Master once referred to them in a delightfully angry slur on his temporary allies, but the Daleks are far from mere robots. Inside their armored casings the Dalek mutants have nothing to do but plot and plan. And as a result the Daleks are not only cunning but devious.
Their ruthlessness is not the simple use of destructive violence or binary betrayal of anyone who trusts them.
The Daleks play a long game, and undermine their enemies in the most efficient way possible at the end of their usefulness and in a way to be least expected. And it's because of the effectiveness of their alien minds, reinforced by the alienness of their outer shells, that the Daleks conquered vast swaths of the universe in Doctor Who, and wormed their way into the cultural consciousness in our world.
They're inside us, and there's no getting rid of them.
Ray Cusick died in February 2013, just shy of 50 years after he designed the creature that immediately became so iconic that the success of the nascent new children's sci-fi series, Doctor Who, was suddenly and firmly ensured. What did Cusick do that made the Daleks work so well onscreen that they became even more famous than their implacable enemy, the Doctor, and stayed that way for half a century?
Almost every monster race, whether on Doctor Who or on other contemporary series like Star Trek or Space: 1999, has one thing in common with all the others: it looks like a guy in a rubber suit. What are the most famous monsters in classic Who? Cybermen, Sontarans, Silurians, Zygons. They all look like an unfortunate actor inside a rubber suit sweating into his socks. Even the giant vegetable from "Seeds of Doom," the Krynoid, looks like a guy in a suit once it's in motion.)
Terry Nation, who wrote the seven-part story introducing the Daleks (aired only five weeks after Doctor Who first premiered), had no idea what the mechanized race living on Skaro looked like; but Cusick, who'd taken over the design position not long after the departure of Ridley Scott for directors' training, was determined to make them unique. His choices, taking into consideration not only aesthetics but his extremely limited budget and practical efficiency on set, changed the future of Doctor Who.
To make the Daleks more frightening and alien, Cusick wanted to consciously ditch the idea of a human with stuff stuck to him.
The Dalek has no face, no arms, no legs. The stalks erupting from its steel-clad outer surface are utilitarian expressions of some of those functions, as if an alien mind had observed the specific actions necessary for interacting with the external environment and had produced extremities specifically to accomplish those things.
As a result, the enclosed object with the bare minimum of appendages conveys an unconscious sense of being insular. The Dalek isn't a machine: it's a sealed container. Its malice is not merely preserved and protected within, but opaque, completely unrevealed by any human features or indeed anything recognizable at all. The unnerving vastness of his inhuman capacity for harm is left to the imagination.
2. The Way They Move
According to Doctor Who anecdotal history, the one usable idea that Cusick got out of a phone conversation with Terry Nation was Nation's remark that traditional Georgian dancers, when wearing costumes that touch the floor, move so smoothly that they seem to be gliding, not walking. This dovetailed nicely with Cusick's desire to avoid recognizable human appearance and behavior.
As a result, the Daleks glide.
This is most effectively shown in their 1963 debut story, because their shown in their own city on Skaro, designed to allow the Daleks to coast effortlessly across the frictionless surface, powered by the city's supply of static electricity. In this context, the Daleks are even more unsettling because in such a place it's a perversion to walk, and it's jarring to see the Doctor and company stomping through the Dalek city on two legs like animals. The Daleks, in their element, seem like an evolution over the Earthling primates intruding into their domain.
3. Their Manipulator Arm
The Daleks normally (but not always) have two arm-like appendages on the front of their casings: their energy weapon and their manipulator arm. The former is pretty fearsome but the latter is often treated as a joke, because it looks like a sink plunger. Even the new series, when it first brought back the Daleks, referenced this ludicrous attachment by having a technician taunt an disarmed Dalek, "What are you going to do, sucker me to death?" (Answer: Yes.)
Many consider the manipulator arm a visual liability, but any detriment comes from later designers and producers who did not know how to use the Daleks effectively. The fact is the manipulator arm is brilliant because it is not a hand, and therefore suggests to the mind during (and especially after) not only a profoundly different technology -- when correctly designed Dalek consoles are full of rolling spheres and other interfaces geared toward this kind of operator -- but shockingly different patterns of thinking. After all, how much about the way we view the world is based around hands, fingers, the number 10? Writers sometimes imagine other races as thinking radically differently because they have different numbers of digits. How unrecognizably alien would the thought patterns of an alien race with no digits be?
The manipulator arm is the first part of the Dalek we see in "The Daleks" episode 1, groping toward Barbara from under the camera and presenting a disturbingly undecipherable, almost absurdist image.
There's a reason that's what we see first: in some ways it's the most alien thing about them.
4. Inhuman Amidst the Human
The story that cemented the success of the Daleks was "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" in season 2, in which the Daleks, well, invade Earth. What's obvious about this story is how unsettling it is watching the Daleks roll around achingly familiar human landmarks, presenting a visual contrast between what we code as "home" and what is alien and most assuredly "unhome." But there's more to it than that.
In "Dalek Invasion," the Daleks' inhuman aggression and systematic exploitation and genocide of the conquered humans (most of the human race is destroyed prior to the story even beginning, with the fraction left intended as an enslaved worker class) runs along lines that echo the Nazis. Far from humanizing the Daleks by giving them recognizably human patterns of behavior, though, this aspect of the story has the alarming effect of allowing us to see our actions in these unnatural mutant abominations. The worst part about the Daleks is the extent to which we are like them.
It's not until season 12 in 1975 that the backstory of the Daleks is thoroughly explored in "Genesis of the Daleks" (even before the Time Lords are fully revealed in all their moral squalor in season 14). And in this Terry Nation gives us, along with a great deal of forgettable things and things best forgotten (this is the story with the giant carnivorous clams, after all), his second great future-altering contribution to Doctor Who -- Davros.
And once again, the design has a great deal to do with Davros's effectiveness, along with the casting of the excellent Michael Wisher. Nation provided the suggestion that Davros had created the Daleks in his image, leading to the impressive half-Dalek bottom half; his green, dome-like head was the suggestion of producer Philip Hinchcliffe; but the gold star goes to BBC prosthetics designer John Friedlander, who created a mask that's human and yet most decidedly not, because your gaze keeps going to that wrinkled skin where the eyes should be.
Born of a writer's desire to give the Daleks a spokesman, Davros indeed gives voice to that dark side of the Daleks that's most unsettlingly recognizable as human.
The Daleks might look like "stupid tin boxes," as the Master once referred to them in a delightfully angry slur on his temporary allies, but the Daleks are far from mere robots. Inside their armored casings the Dalek mutants have nothing to do but plot and plan. And as a result the Daleks are not only cunning but devious.
Their ruthlessness is not the simple use of destructive violence or binary betrayal of anyone who trusts them.
The Daleks play a long game, and undermine their enemies in the most efficient way possible at the end of their usefulness and in a way to be least expected. And it's because of the effectiveness of their alien minds, reinforced by the alienness of their outer shells, that the Daleks conquered vast swaths of the universe in Doctor Who, and wormed their way into the cultural consciousness in our world.
They're inside us, and there's no getting rid of them.