I’ve outed myself as a Doctor Who fan in this space before. As a TV show, even if it is a record-breakingly long-running TV show, it’s not really within the remit of this blog—but then again, Doctor Who has been wearing its cinematic ambitions pretty openly on its sleeve lately. Movie directors like Nick Hurran, Ben Wheatley and Douglas Mackinnon are directing the current season, with no less than Peter Jackson in talks to direct an episode next year; tonight’s season premiere is showing in movie theaters around the world, and that’s not even the first time this has happened. I’ve blogged here about one of the 1960s big screen adaptations, and so for parallelism’s sake I’m returning today to finish the cycle and talk about 1965’s Dr. Who and the Daleks.
First, a remark about canon:
Part of the reason Doctor Who is still going strong after 50 years is that, unlike other big franchise properties, it’s a single narrative. I mean, yeah, it’s entirely episodic, and the periodic replacement of the production team and cast has meant a continual cycle of reboots over the years, so you can pretty much jump on at any point and not worry about what’s gone before. But if you do choose to watch it all from the beginning (barring the gaps caused by missing episodes) you will find that the current version starring Peter Capaldi isn’t just the latest iteration of the idea, like Benedict Cumberbatch being the Sherlock du jour, but that Capaldi is actually playing the same man that William Hartnell played in 1963.
And the consequence of this bizarre conceit is that obsessive fans who have watched it all, or lots of it, feel compelled to try to match up all the story bits in their head, to forcibly reconcile the current show with the one 50 years ago, and everything in between. Which means that all those reboots I mentioned get mentally calibrated to make internal sense of them. The actual fact is, every couple of years new creative teams take over and decide to do new stuff to suit current audience tastes and their own interests. There is no grand master plan linking it all up. But we make one, in our heads. I imagine this is how a lot of religion works—with the inconsistent and poorly translated ancient texts being forcibly reconciled by divinity scholars determined to make it all make consistent sense.
But every once in a while, there’s a stray bit that doesn’t fit. The bit that, no matter how hard you try, just doesn’t seem to connect with the rest. By and large, fans reject these as non-canonical (I told you it was like religion). And if the stray unreconcilable bit hails from spin-off material rather than the broadcast series, all the easier to reject it.
Hence, the 1960s films starring Peter Cushing are “non-canonical.” Which is a shame, because they show a crucial thought process in one of the show’s original creators, and highlight what has made it such a lasting program.
Dr. Who and the Daleks is a big-screen remake of a 1963 serial that was itself a rip-off of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine: a post-atomic dystopia in which the survivors of nuclear war have evolved into two discrete races. One are the Beautiful People, who are also effete and useless cannon fodder. The other are the Monsters, the survivors who are gonna eat the Beautiful People for lunch. Or at least they would, if it weren’t for the time traveler(s) who show up and help bolster the Beautiful People against the Monsters.
Terry Nation wrote the script for the TV serial. This serial is legendarily the thing that made Doctor Who a hit—galvanizing a generation of Dalek fans overnight and turning this scrappy little sci-fi show into Must Watch TV. But Nation gets too much credit for this, when the credit properly belongs with the designer who gave them their iconic look, Raymond Cusick.
All Nation did was write his own take on The Time Machine, which is a risky move when you think about it. The Time Machine is arguably the most well-known sci-fi book ever written, and so it’s not like people won’t see the similarity. If you want to come off as having done anything other than a rip-off, you need to bring something new to the party. But instead of adding much, Nation took away—Wells’s story is about the future of Earth, and can be read as a statement of political intent on the part of its author, warning the reader to turn away from the path of militarism that he saw as threatening the future. The Doctor Who version is set on another planet—there’s no direct lesson to be learned. There are plenty of indirect lessons, sure, and those may be smarter in their own way, but there’s no direct cause and effect between how we live our lives and whether we can avoid a future overrun by Daleks.
The key difference then lies in the central protagonist. The Time Machine has a generic everyman protagonist, and in the film version he was capably and blandly played by Rod Taylor. Bland being an essential component of capable, since any personality quirks in his performance would make him too much of an individual, not enough of an everyman. He returns to the future at the end of the story with the three books he will use to rebuild civilization—and Wells doesn’t tell us which three books they are. Telling us would make them specific—instead you’re to fill in your own answers. (A much later Doctor Who story from 1986 returned to this idea, and depicted a future world rebuilt on the basis of just three books: Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, and UK Habitats of the Canadian Goose by HM Stationary Office. The third being “the most mysterious of all the sacred texts.” If you don’t enjoy stuff like that, Doctor Who isn’t for you)
The Doctor Who version does not throw an everyman into this… except actually it does, in the form of Ian Chesterton, a science teacher caught up in the Doctor’s adventures. The creators of the show wanted audience identification figures to help connect the weird stuff to the viewer’s perspective. But in the TV version, things initially went off the rails a bit.
Far from being written or played as an ordinary everyman caught up in weird adventures, the TV Ian was a hyper-competent action hero who somehow always knew what to do and always kept his cool whether being dropped into ancient times, the French Revolution, a plague-riddled alien planet, or the world of the Daleks. Meanwhile, the supposed star of the show, the Doctor, was being written and played as a man more concerned with getting back to his time machine and moving on, and who only gets caught up in adventures by accident when he gets separated from his ship.
A couple of years later and these kinks were worked out, and a new formula emerged that would carry the enterprise forward for many decades and counting, but you can see that thought process at work in Dr. Who and the Daleks.
The screenplay was mostly written by an uncredited David Whitaker, who was the TV show’s original head writer. Whitaker did not develop the TV series—he inherited the premise and the first couple of scripts when he was hired, and so his stamp on the show was necessarily a product of trial and error as he went. Here he was once again handed a set of facts on the ground and asked to make them work—this movie company has licensed the right to make some Doctor Who movies, and they want to start by remaking the Terry Nation serial The Daleks. Go do that.
Some of the changes are superficial: the movie runs almost half the time of the TV serial and so is paced much faster. Also, as you’d expect when something that was used to the confines of low-budget 1960s B&W TV suddenly gets a ‘scope ratio, Technicolor, and a decent wad of cash to spend, it decides to go all splashy: the colors are intense enough to induce seizures, the music is lush, certain scenes are played for maximum big-screen spectacle just for the joy of it.
But it’s in the characters that Whitaker’s changes make all the difference.
First he turns Ian into a comic relief figure. He’s still heroic, but in a more human way—here’s a guy who is clearly in over his head, and scared out of his wits, but he’s holding it together and doing what he can because he’s decent, and good, and brave. Another later Doctor Who story puts forth the idea that bravery isn’t fearlessness, it’s being scared but doing what you have to do anyway. Comedy-relief Ian is a step in that direction—and augured the way the male side-kicks would tend to be upstaged by the Doctor in the future TV show as well. It’s been joked that the makers of the 1963 series made a mistake in not calling the series Ian. Here, the balance is restored.
And the changes made to the Doctor’s character are even more pronounced. When we first see Peter Cushing in the role, he’s delightedly reading a comic book—while his family are studiously reading serious books on history and science. When Ian accidentally engages the controls of the time machine and propels them randomly through time and space to an unknown destination, the Doctor’s response isn’t horror or anxiety, it’s giddy glee.
And throughout the film, Cushing’s enthusiasm is matched by his granddaughter Susan’s (Roberta Tovey). The TV Susan was a perpetual wet blanket, rarely very interested in traveling the Universe and generally kinda mopey. The movie Susan is much younger—a child instead of a teenager—but she’s as much a thrill-seeking daredevil as her crazy time traveling grandfather. The two of them may have stumbled into a post-nuclear wasteland on the verge of genocide, but by golly if that doesn’t sound like fun.
And this is what Nation’s story was missing—what Whitaker eventually worked into the DNA of the series, what would keep it alive and thriving to the present. He jettisoned Everyman for Who—replacing the generic with the bizarrely, unaccountably specific. Week after week you could tell stories of gloom and nightmares, but have them navigated by a giggling madman who’s having fun.
Pop culture doesn’t believe much in fun anymore. Even comic book movies, once the last bastion of mindless escapism, are determined to prove their serious worth by being heavy and somber. But there’s still a hero who believes bravery is being scared but going off and having fun anyway.