Daleks and the First Doctor

[dbskyler]

I'm currently watching the First Doctor story "The Daleks" and enjoying it quite a lot. The Daleks have never been my favorite monsters, but I think I "get" them now for the first time. They really are creepy with the way they glide around, and the way their eyestalks move to look at you when they talk. Plus, it's so fun to see the "firsts":



-- The Daleks use the word "exterminate"!
-- A Dalek is blinded by putting something on its eyestalk (mud, in this case)!
-- We get a hint of what's inside! (I'm glad to learn that right from the beginning, Daleks were not machines, but creatures inside the machines.)

I'm looking forward to the rest (I'm right in the middle of part 4 right now), but I just had to stop here and post because guess what the Doctor just said? The Thals are walking into an ambush, Susan wants to warn them, and the Doctor said, and I quote:

"The Thals are no concern of ours. We cannot jeopardize our lives by getting involved in an affair which is none of our business."

I'm like, who is this???? Because it's certainly not the Doctor! It's fascinating to see how much his core character has changed since these very early days.

Comments

[lolmac]

We can give the idea, and the insistence, to Nation, and the specific image to the Georgians, who will be very happy and proud.

The plunger arm was because the Don't Make These Things Look Humanoid aliens had to be able to hold things; so, suction. Even if they'd been able to do mechanical hands at the time, that would have gone against the mandate to be non-human.

I also remember the debate over the name -- Nation had originally told the press that he got it from looking at a multivolume London phone book (or encyclopedia, or dictionary) with the letters on the spine DAL-LEK. He later pointed out, in a different article, that you only have to look at the publication in question to see that the answer was rubbish; there never had been volumes with that breakdown of letters.

Quite a bit later, I read a fascinating article by a fan, who had looked at the London phone directory at the time. It was in four volumes:

A-D
E-K
L-R
S-Z

The fan then drew a little diagram showing the books on a shelf, with the first two volumes on their sides and the third and fourth upright next to them.

D-A L S
E-K R Z

She concluded that Nation had, at some point while writing, looked up and seen the letters, and his mind had gone "DALEK! That works!" He'd had some notion that the phone book was involved, mentioned it in the initial interview, and then recanted when he realised it couldn't be true. The sudden popularity of the critters caught everyone by surprise and provoked a media frenzy, and how much success does one usually get when interviewing an author about the creative process?

It's pure speculation, but the phone book lettering is correct, and I think it's entirely likely.

An almost entirely unrelated item: Terry Nation moved from the UK to Hollywood in 1980. Blake's 7 was still on the air, but he was no longer involved (I believe he jumped, rather than being pushed, as they say). One of the shows he worked on was . . . MacGyver. *g*

He never wrote any episodes for it, but the first season included short standalone sequences that ran before the credits, known as "Opening Gambits". He wrote three of them (out of seven total).

[dbskyler.livejournal.com]

Ha, the phone book thing is great! I love that someone went to all that trouble to figure it out, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were right.

Yay for Terry Nation and MacGyver! I'm kind of sad to learn that he didn't write an episode, though, because I'd like to see what he would have done with it.