The Day of the Daleks

Dear Gary—

For a serial called The Day of the Daleks, the Daleks are more or less minor characters in this story; however their presence is pivotal to the action, even though limited to simply echoing back from a distant 22^nd Century future. But that’s how powerful the Daleks are; the mere threat of a possibility of an alternate reality ruled by Daleks can reach out through time and space and shape world events of the present.

“It’s a very complicated thing, time,” the Doctor tells Jo, “once you’ve begun tampering with it the oddest things start happening.”

The Daleks are no strangers to tampering with time, but in The Day of the Daleks it is not the Daleks themselves doing the tampering but rather a group of guerillas from the 22^nd Century bent on going back to change the timeline that led to a world overrun with Daleks.

“Changing history is a very fanatical idea;”I am glad to see the third Doctor picking up this mantra from the first. Except this Doctor is not dusting off the well-worn history books of our past; this Doctor is glimpsing ahead into our potential.

It is rather mind bending. The Doctor presumably knows the Earth’s future beyond our parochial present. He knows whether or not an explosion in the 20^th Century leads to World War III and in turn leads to the Dalek invasion. The guerillas come from a future in which this has already happened. This is the stuff of their well-worn history books. They have come back to step on the butterfly.

Interestingly, the guerillas don’t mind instigating the Butterfly Effect but have a problem with triggering the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, or at least according to the Doctor as he explains to Jo.

The butterfly the guerillas are intent on eliminating is one Sir Reginald Styles. Sir Reginald, they believe, lured a group of foreign diplomats under one roof on the pretext of a peace conference and then planted a bomb, killing one and all including him and triggering World War III, in the devastating wake of which the Daleks were free to invade and subjugate all of mankind.

I’ll forgive the guerillas for believing such a preposterous notion that a proper English gentleman would engineer such a suicidal mission against the world; they are from the far future and know only what their history tells them; they don’t have any first hand much less second or third hand knowledge of proper English gentlemen of the 20^th Century.

What I do find maddening is the Doctor’s apparently limited knowledge of Earth’s future history. He has a detailed understanding of Earth’s history up to a point, but anything beyond the 20^th Century becomes a bit fuzzy for him. He can state that Sir Reginald is doubtful as the villain; he is a bit stubborn perhaps, a mite pompous, but no war criminal mastermind he. But the Doctor cannot state for a fact whether or not there was an explosion at Auderly House during a peace conference that started WWIII.

The Doctor can say that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot on June 28, 1914; the Doctor can say that Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939; the Doctor is rather vague about what happened at Auderly House in the late 20^th Century. Wouldn’t the Doctor know whether or not there was a WWIII and when and where it started?

By the way, Gary, not to jump ahead but that is one of the many things I love about the brilliant Waters of Mars—at last we have a Doctor who can commit to an historical fact that takes place in our future.

But then the Doctor would probably argue that Auderly House is not a ‘fixed point.’ “Every choice we make changes the history of the world,” he attests, and he can therefore say that these time travelers might very well change the course of history as he knows it. I would counter, why isn’t Auderly House a fixed point? Wouldn’t a major event triggering a world war become a fixed point? What determines a fixed point?

However, now I am jumping ahead of The Day of the Daleks into the more contemporary world of Doctor Who, and perhaps I am the one missing the point.

“The what’s done what?” Thank you, Brigadier, for getting me back on point. The world of Doctor Who, Gary, is dependent on the action sweeping all of these pesky questions up into the Doctor’s time swirl of action and adventure; and in the end, who really cares what is and is not a fixed point?

Of course, our time traveling guerillas care, on a practical rather than a theoretical level.

The leader of these freedom fighters is Anat, accompanied by Boaz and Shura, and initially they are labeled ghosts. But these are no echoes from the past; they are assassins from the future, and thwarted in their attempt to kill Sir Reginald they kidnap the Doctor and Jo instead.

And since I have been digressing quite a bit here, Gary, I want to say a word about the third Doctor and Jo Grant. They have settled into a nice, comfortable relationship. They have not quite reached the level of, say, the first Doctor with Ian, Barbara, and Susan, or the second Doctor and Jamie, but Jo has definitely softened some of the harsher edges of this third incarnation. I liked Liz Shaw; she was a strong, independent character. But the Doctor could never joke with her while bound and gagged in a cellar that he would prefer her with the gag on.

This third Doctor didn’t need someone to pass him test tubes and tell him how brilliant he is (to quote the Brigadier) so much as he needed someone to look out for and someone to look out for him.

This kinder, gentler Doctor, therefore, can find the time to relax and rhapsodize about a glass of wine: “A most good humored wine; a touch sardonic, perhaps, but not cynical. Yes, a most civilized wine; one after my own heart.” And can reminisce about Bonaparte: “’Boney,’ I said, ’always remember, an army marches on its stomach.’”

However, there is one glaringly anomalous and forbidding act displayed in The Day of the Daleks, and that is that the Doctor uses a ray gun to kill another; granted he kills an Ogron bent on killing him, but this flies in the face of the Doctor’s pacifist, anti-gun philosophy that has become so engrained in his character.

The Doctor self-righteously condemns the Brigadier for blowing up the Silurian tunnels; the Doctor says of the time traveling assassins, “We shouldn’t really judge them until we find out why they’re here;” the Doctor contemptuously observes, “My mistake; I was forgetting the unimaginative nature of the military mind;” and yet the Doctor unthinkingly blasts an Ogron into oblivion.

By the way, I’m not really sure what the Ogron part is in The Day of the Daleks. They seem to be a sort of hired thug, but why do the Daleks need hired thugs?

The Daleks come late to the action, preferring to let the Ogrons and their human quislings do most of the exterminating and exploiting for them. However once they firmly establish that their enemy the Doctor is involved and that their underlings are unreliable, they roll to action.

Unfortunately for them, as they advance on Auderly house so does the fanatical Shura with his bomb of Dalekanium intended for Sir Reginald, and so does the Doctor in the nick of time to convince the peace delegates to evacuate.

Bang goes Auderly House, but it is not Sir Reginald or the world diplomats who go up with it—it is the Daleks and their Ogron thugs. No longer are the time traveling freedom fighters trapped in a temporal paradox of their own making; they have not stepped on their butterfly. World War III is averted.

“The what’s done what?” Well, exactly, Brigadier. What exactly has done what? Only Blinovitch probably knows; Blinovitch and the Doctor. But they’re not telling. And why should they? That’s not the point.

I hope, Gary, that somewhere out there you get the point . . .