We Need to Talk About Davros
Davros is undoubtedly one of Doctor Who’s greatest villains. And yet, we never seen to talk about the clever design logic that underpins his appearance. Worse, this has been ungenerously misrepresented recently.
I refer specifically to the creative processes of writing and design that led to the physical presentation of Davros as we first met him in Genesis of the Daleks, and which remained unchanged, except for some minor cosmetic adjustments, until Russell T Davies’s reinvention of the character in last year’s Children in Need comedy skit Destination: Skaro.
Let’s start at the beginning, with Terry Nation’s original story breakdown for Gensis of the Daleks – then known as ‘Genesis of Terror’. The first mention of Davros is simply a reference to seeing “Davros in a wheelchair”. Later, Nation adds that Davros “is almost a machine himself”. The camera script for episode two expands considerably on these brief notes:
“Davros is contained in a specially constructed self-powered wheel chair [sic]. It has similarities to the base of a Dalek. Davros himself is a masterpiece of mechanical engineering. His chair is a complete life-support system for the ancient creature. A throat microphone and amplifier create the voice he no longer has. (Its sound is not unlike the voice of a Dalek.) A miniature H and L machine keeps his heart and lungs functioning. A single lens wired to his forehead replaces his sightless eyes. Little of his face can be seen. Tubes and electrodes [are] attached to what does show. The upper part of his body is contained in a harness from which great complexities of wires and tubes emerge.
The only really humanoid feature we ever see of Davros is an ancient withered hand that plays across the switch packed surface of the control panel that stretches across the front of the chair.”
Between the breakdown and camera script there would have been draft scrips and rehearsal scripts. Copies of these do not exist, bar the draft script for the first episode, which refers the reader to the second for a description of Davros (as does the first camera script). We therefore don’t know whether the camera script’s description of Davros went through any process of refinement, perhaps after discussion with the team who were tasked with realising the character.
Whilst the Davros mask was the responsibility of John Friedlander, the rest was the work of visual effects designer Peter Day. In interviews, he did not comment on any specific contribution he may have made to the design, only referring to the starting point of the Dalek base, as scripted. Indeed, nobody who worked on the show appears to have commented directly on why Davros was devised to look the way he did. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe has referred to Dan Dare’s enemy the Mekon as a measure of inspiration, but aside from being a seated villain, which Nation’s breakdown had already specified, the Davros design has little in common with the Mekon.
Ultimately, attribution of design elements doesn’t matter. What we do finally see is pretty close to what was written in the camera script. What’s important is the overall design conception. The reason Davros was designed the way he was should be completely obvious, but from my conversations with other fans, and my reading around the subject, it does seem many people have failed to grasp it. It’s often commented that Davros appears to be ‘half-Dalek’. True enough, but why? His design was clearly inspired in part by the Dalek design. But in fact, what’s important here is why should he look partially like a Dalek? Why should he not be of normal humanoid appearance, as in Destination: Skaro and like all the other Kaleds we see?
Terrance Dicks alone of those who contributed to Genesis of the Daleks (he and Barry Letts commissioned the script but moved on before it reached production) has the answer. Talking on the Genesis of the Daleks DVD, he says that Davros “created the Daleks in his own image.” This is what should be obvious: Davros doesn’t look like a Dalek… the Daleks look like him.
The writing and design process backwards engineered Davros from the Dalek design. Why do the Daleks move on a tapered, powered base? Because that’s how Davros moves. That much is pretty obvious as Davros’s ‘chair’ (a word that never seems a good description for the object) is a close approximation of a Dalek skirt section. But the principle goes further. The script extract above specifies that Davros can speak only through a microphone and amplifier which make him sound “not unlike” a Dalek. Why? Because he gave the Daleks the same vocal technology that he uses. The script specifies a single central lens for an eye. Why? Because the Daleks have a single central electronic eye. The description specifies that Davros has only a single hand (and although unspecified in the script, the design makes it his right). Why? Because the Daleks have only a single manipulator arm (on the right).
Davros looks the way he does as an explanation for the design of the Daleks themselves. Davros is an egotist and made his creations in his own image, using the same technologies (presumably also of his own invention) that have kept him alive and helped him overcome his disabilities.
When I watched Destination: Skaro, I initially assumed that the move to make Davros an able-bodied humanoid was a pragmatic one to do with budgets and schedules for such a short adventure, which would be rationalised as representing him before he experienced his disabilities. I felt this misunderstood Davros as a character, as clearly his design of the Daleks had to postdate the onset of his disabilities due to the design logic. This logic might be inverted to suggest that he rebuilt himself in the image of the Daleks instead, but that would have been hard to accept given that the Dalek machine appears to be brand new, whereas Davros in his wheelchair form clearly is not, in Gensis of the Daleks.
But it soon transpired that this was not Russell T Davies’s intention at all when writing Destination: Skaro. In Doctor Who: Unleashed he explained that presenting Davros as wheelchair-user was problematic in the modern world as it associated disability with villainy, something Doctor Who and popular fiction more generally had a history of doing. Consequently, 2023’s Davros was able-bodied.
It was a controversial move to completely redesign a character so integral to Doctor Who lore. Inevitably, some fans hated it while other lauded this move towards better representation in the series. RTD soon gave us Ruth Madeley’s Shirley Bingham as a more positive role model for a wheelchair-user in the series. No doubt we will (quite rightly) see more positive representations of characters with disabilities in the forthcoming series.
Whilst I appreciate the sentiment behind this change to Davros, I feel RTD made the wrong choice. If Davros’s disabilities were simply a nasty visual shorthand for evil, I would have agreed with the RTD redesign. There are certainly other villains in Doctor Who history who embody this problem, but Davros does not. His presentation as a disabled person is not a lazy dramatic shorthand but a fundamental design decision that explains the appearance of the Daleks. Davros’s design is an integral component of his character as egocentric creator of the Daleks and RTD is unfair to those who devised the character in suggesting otherwise. A redesigned version of Davros makes no sense dramatically.
Doctor Who should certainly dissociate the concepts of disability and villainy but it can do so by not creating new characters that embody that combination and not reusing old ones who do. Davros could simply have been retired rather than revamped. Doctor Who doesn’t need him any more and RTD was more than capable of writing a charity skit without the character.
This character redesign suggests RTD may not understand Davros and did not stop to consider the creative decisions that led to the design. He has form for this. In Journey’s End, he has the Doctor explain that the TARDIS was intended to be piloted by six operators based on the console having six panels, which makes no sense at all. In such a large control room, why would all the controls be centralised in a small space if six people were supposed to be using them? The central console wasn’t scripted but was the invention of the series’ first designer, Peter Brachacki, who reasoned that as the TARDIS was piloted solo (as it was in the scripts he had seen), all the main controls had to be centralised to be easily accessible to the single pilot. Story and design logic converge, as with Davros.
But RTD is no fool and is as steeped in the details of Doctor Who history as any of us. He may know all of this and simply have decided to go his own way regardless. It’s his series now and his choice, after all.
So, what’s the takeaway from all this? Simply that the Davros design was never motivated by the simplistic shorthand of ‘disabled equals evil’ but was a carefully considered backwards extrapolation from the Dalek design which we all consider so wonderful. In doing so it created an arresting image and gave an explanation within the fiction of the series for the Daleks’ physical idiosyncrasies.
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty impressive.
Images © BBC
Sources
Terry Nation’s ‘Genesis of Terror’ story breakdown and the Genesis of the Daleks camera scripts – available on the Doctor Who: The Collection – Season 12 bluray.
BBC3’s Doctor Who: Unleashed mini episode about Destination: Skaro (viewable here)
‘Genesis of a Classic’ featurette on the BBC DVD of Genesis of the Daleks
Big Finish’s audio release Daleks! Genesis of Terror (available here)
Interview with Peter Brachacki in TARDIS fanzine volume 1, issue 10
Good article. It's possible Destination: Skaro was written to test whether Davros worked as a non wheelchair-using character, away from the higher level of scrutiny which would occur in a "real" episode.
Did it work? For me, the original design and character are too closely bound together, I'd probably rather have Davros quietly retired.
Nitpicking, I don't think there's a contradiction between Peter Brachacki's TARDIS design and what RTD said. The ship can be designed to operate most efficiently with six pilots on each side of the console and also be flown by a single person.