Building Daleks with the UK Science Museum #SciFiSunday
Sometimes great villains have complicated backstories that help humanize their motivations, making them all the more terrifying. And sometimes great villains rely on the performance of a great actor. And sometimes great villains are giant metal pepper shakers with a plunger for an arm who shout “Exterminate!” at every provocation. The Daleks are the greatest villain of the Doctor, the hero of England’s Doctor Who, the longest running science fiction TV show of all time. Doctor Who celebrates its 60th anniversary this month. The Science Museum is celebrating with a display of a fan-made Dalek. Here’s more from the Science Museum:
The arch-nemesis of the Doctor surely needs no introduction, nonetheless: The Daleks are a race of aliens intent on exterminating all life in the universe. As any fan will be able to tell you, they are not robots, but actually cyborgs: soft, frail and tentacled aliens who rely on their pepper-pot style battle tanks to move around, manipulate their environment, and wage war. Created by writer Terry Nation and BBC designer Raymond Cusick they made their debut in the show’s second ever storyline which was serialised into seven episodes aired between December 1963 and February 1964. Much has been written about the genocidal nature of the Daleks, and how powerful this was for viewers in a Britain which, less than twenty years after VE day and the Nuremberg trials, still very much carried the scars of the Second World War. These parallels have only become more explicit as the Daleks have continued to appear, most notably in the now iconic “Genesis of the Daleks” storyline (1975), starring Tom Baker as the Fourth incarnation of the Doctor, in which we are introduced to the mad scientist, Davros, who created the Daleks through genetic as well as mechanical engineering to be a remorseless master race.
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