The Fact of Fiction

Revealing the secrets of the Doctor’s adventures – scene by scene.

Davros remembers the first half of the 2015 series opener… and so does Alan Barnes.

Davros (Julian Bleach) in his Skaro sick room.

"Do I have the right?” the Doctor (Tom Baker) famously agonises to his companions at the start of the final episode of Genesis of the Daleks (1975). Given the opportunity to blow up the nascent Daleks in their cradle, he posits a hypothetical: “If someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?”

In their notoriously impenetrable tome Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (Macmillan Education, 1983), the academics John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado compared this to a passage from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), in which the rationalist atheist Ivan ponders creating a perfect future founded upon the death of “one tiny creature – that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance…”

Whether or not Terry Nation was a devotee of 19th-century Russian fiction is by the by; the sheer potency of the words he gave the Doctor has made them last.

Long enough, in fact, for 21st-century showrunner Steven Moffat to construct an entire adventure around the Doctor being forced to face exactly that dilemma, albeit with the juvenile Davros in his sights. The raddled, older Davros (Julian Bleach) replays that Genesis footage directly into his first confrontation with the raddled, older Doctor (Peter Capaldi) in The Magician’s Apprentice – although how Davros has acquired the footage isn’t clear, since he wasn’t actually there at the time. Kaled bunker CCTV?

“Davros made the Daleks, but who made Davros?” the Doctor muses, earlier. It might even be a statement: Who made Davros. Because when he finds the boy Davros (Joey Price) trapped in a minefield, he’s clearly caught him at a formative moment. He might even pause to wonder if Davros’ horror at finding himself surrounded by grasping ‘hand mines’ resulted in the Daleks being given suckers?

The decision to not give them digits was alluded to in dialogue cut from their Magician’s Apprentice confrontation, after Davros orders his henchman Colony Sarff (Jami Reid-Quarrell) to untie the Doctor’s hands. “I trust you are undamaged,” said Davros. “One hand, two hands, yep,” said the Doctor, checking his digits. “Look at that – four fingers and a thumb, but oh no, let’s stick on a sucker instead. Be honest, was it really late on a Friday?” The 2023 Children in Need sketch Destination: Skaro would reveal that, in fact, the future Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) substituted the prototype Dalek’s “multi-claw” for a plunger – something Davros found pleasing.

Still, The Magician’s Apprentice accounts for that otherwiseunaccountable preference… doesn’t it?

Replaying the moment when the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) considered destroying the Daleks at their genesis.

The Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) gives the first Dalek an alternative attachment in Destination: Skaro (2023).

First broadcast Saturday 19 September 2015

Biplanes strafe soldiers running over a battlefield… with laser bolts.

00m 21s The vintage 1940s biplane featured – a bright yellow de Havilland DH82a Tiger Moth (registration G-ANRM) – was specially shot at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford.

Soldier Kanzo (Benjamin Cawley) levels a bow and arrow at the departing plane. Soon, we’ll discover that we’re on the Daleks’ planet of origin, Skaro, for the first time since Destiny of the Daleks (1979) – albeit at an earlier epoch than ever before, during the thousand years’ war ongoing at the time of Genesis of the Daleks. If Kanzo is a Kaled, as would appear to be the case, logically the plane is piloted by a Thal.

Kanzo’s weapon alludes to an observation that TARDIS traveller Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) made about the combatants’ anachronistic armature in Genesis: “At this rate they’re going to finish off with bows and arrows.”

Next, Kanzo tries to stop a boy from running further, despite a comrade (Jonathon Ojinnaka) warning him that “clam drones” are on the way. Perhaps these are examples of magna peloris, as Harry termed the outsized mollusc that tried to eat him in Part Three? If so, the Fourth Doctor had been wrong to presume that it was one of Dalek creator Davros’ experiments (as is about to become apparent).

Kanzo scans the ground for ‘hand mines’ – then discovers that one has hold of his ankle; moments later, it drags him under the mud. In the first draft (dated 9 January 2015), the hand mines only showed the “single, unblinking eye” in the centre of their palms while revolving “like radar masts”. When they finally detected something: “The fingers close for a moment, the hand clenching into a fist – and when the fist opens, the eye is now a snapping, fanged mouth.” As with the clams, the existence of the hand mines strongly implies that genetic experimentation was underway on Skaro long before Davros created the Daleks (and that maybe the Thals were doing it, too).

03m 02s Surrounded by hands, the boy calls for help – whereupon the sonic screwdriver lands at his feet, thrown by the Doctor from the far side of the minefield. When the boy picks it up, a hand is beside his left foot – one that wasn’t there when the screwdriver landed.

“I don’t understand,” says the boy, when the Doctor asks what planet he’s on. In the first episode of Genesis, Nyder (Peter Miles) reports hearing Davros say that there is no intelligent life on other planets…

Some recorded lines were cut, after the Doctor said he had an open mind. The boy asked what the Doctor was doing here.

“Saving your life,” came the reply. Why, wondered the boy? “Because I like you,” said the Doctor. “You’ve never met me,” said the boy. “Well how am I ever going to meet you if I don’t save your life?” replied the Doctor. At this, the boy gave a small laugh – which was good, said the Doctor: “Humour is the decadence of reason, so that means you’ve stopped panicking, and started thinking.”

The boy gives his name as Davros. Aghast, the Doctor vanishes into the mist.

06m 07s We’re in the Maldovarium, the outer-space outpost owned by Dorium Maldovar in 5145, at the time of The Pandorica Opens (2010; which the establishing shot is regraded from), but which he fled during A Good Man Goes to War (2011). When we are, relatively, isn’t known – but certainly its interior seems a lot dingier and dirtier than before. (Different locations were employed for all three of its appearances – in this case, it was the disused Customs House on Bute Street, Cardiff.)

The sound of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds performing The Weeping Song (1990) cuts off as the robed and hooded Colony Sarff glides into a bar area, demanding to know the Doctor’s whereabouts. The first draft noted there was no apparent movement from under Sarff’s robe: “it just slides along, almost Dalek-like…” (In the event, Jami Reid-Quarrell rode a Segway transporter under the robes.) As originally conceived, a faint hiss could be heard, and Sarff left a “silvery trail” on the ground. Sarff’s eyes were described as glassy and unreal, with unmoving pupils; when it spoke, the “perfectly formed mouth simply opens, like a letter flap, and stays open till the end of the speech, never articulating.”