Russel T. Davies Has Lost His Fast Ball
The savior of Doctor Who has come up with a retcon that rivals the Timeless Child. Aside from keeping that hideous abortion of a storyline canon, Davies is about to destroy one of Doctor Who’s best villains.
Davros.
The Daleks first appeared in December 1963 in the show’s second serial and promptly rescued Doctor Who from ratings oblivion. The cancelation ax had been getting sharpened but was quickly tucked away again when the viewership blew the roof off. “Diving behind the sofa when the Daleks appeared” became a cultural touchstone for British kids.
There is no possible way that modern children can understand what these pepper pots with plungers brought to the party because they have imagination muscles that have atrophied from lack of use. There was a time when kids needed to fill in a lot of blanks themselves and we did. Something like the Daleks or the Klingons weren’t terrifying in and of themselves, they were just imagination building blocks that we would use to build our own elaborate structures.
I went through it myself. When I was a very little kid the Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies showed up on Creature Features Theater. Since I was absolutely forbidden to watch Creature Features, any movie in that timeslot was automatically terrifying, that was where I first ran into them. I can get why the kids from across the pond loved and feared the Daleks. Because it was fun to be frightened of them.
For the next eleven years, the Daleks would show up without fail once a year but by 1975, that had become a problem. The showrunners had done just about everything they could with the Daleks. They were out of ideas and anything they came up with looked a lot like something they had already done. Finally, Terry Nation decided to do one of the most boring things you can do in fiction. An origin story.
Genesis of the Daleks is today regarded as one of the best Doctor Who stories in its entire sixty-year history. It’s still worth a watch.
The feel of the narrative was the product of both post-war worlds. In 1975, The Great War was still the Old Man’s War. The unmitigated horror of the trenches was a living memory. WWII vets were still in their 40s and 50s, for them, there was less time separating them from their war than now separates us from the Gulf War. The thousand-year war on Skaro was a combination of the two.
Audiences for the first time got to see the pre-Daleks. The Kaleds were a race that had already lost its thousand-year war with its enemy race, the “Thals.” Chem-bio attacks had inflicted genetic degeneration on the Kaleds. They were destined to become Cthuloid horrors. The Kaled military scientists had taken over and their chief Davros had conducted acceleration experiments to determine what their future was:
Once that bleak news was absorbed Davros set about creating the Mark III Travel Machine, AKA the Dalek.
Davros started cloning the Kaled mutants en masse but with “improvements.” The Daleks would not be burdened with compassion, pity, mercy, or love. They would not be capable of choosing between good and evil because Davros had turned them into reflections of himself. A creature that was entirely one of super-ego with no Id or Ego at all.
At one point the Doctor poses a question that Davros finds fascinating.
The Virus Question defined the character of Davros. Given a chance, he would commit universal genocide. He’s entirely beyond the pleasures of the flesh. His body is a resented container for keeping his brain alive. He exists solely for the expansion of his mind and the actualization of his ambitions.
He was in short, the first Dalek.
He was a classic Brain supervillain. His physical weakness meant nothing because of the horrifying power of his mind.
And now he’s just a Nazi war criminal because people in wheelchairs aren’t allowed to be villains now. I’m not joking. Russel T. Davies has retconned away the second most iconic villain in the entire history of Doctor Who because its bad representation. People in wheelchairs are now in the protected class of people who aren’t allowed to be people. They may not be engaged with, or treated as someone you can have a differing opinion with.
This is from the Children in need BBC comedy special.
I initially assumed that this was just a pre-accident Davros. Okay, understandable if the props department hadn’t checked on the Davros gear for a while and found it was unusable. But no. This is the new Davros going forward.
“We had long conversations about bringing Davros back, because he’s a fantastic character,” Davies said as part of an interview broadcast in Doctor Who Unleashed, which accompanied the release of the short scene on the BBC iPlayer.
“Time and society and culture and taste has moved on. And there’s a problem with the Davros of old in that he’s a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil. And trust me, there’s a very long tradition of this.”
This. Is. Retarded.
Whatever Russel T Davies had going for him as a creator, the Woke has clearly eaten it.
I thought I was going to be able to skip Doctor Who this weekend but that is obviously not the case. The BBC has the Disney disease, it is ideologically captured and is now fundamentally incapable of providing entertainment. Political cant is all it can bring to the party.
