Why the Dalek was in the Thames
Viewers of The Dalek Invasion of Earth often ask: “What was the Dalek doing in the Thames?” Maybe I’m being uncharitable if I suggest that perhaps they haven’t been paying attention but I would argue that the explanation is contained in the story itself, it just isn’t spoon-fed to the audience.
The Thames sequence spans the end of part one and the start of part two of the adventure. Some of the information that enables us to deduce why the Dalek is in the river is seeded in part one and the rest follows in part two’s dialogue. Putting it all together furnishes us with a complete explanation of this fantastic piece of visual storytelling. Here I’m going to draw that explanation out, examine why the sequence is important and suggest how later Dalek stories tried similar tricks.
When the Doctor and Ian find the dead Roboman earlier in the first episode, they learn that his headset contains a radio for personal communication. When the pair are later captured by Robomen, the Dalek clearly doesn’t arrive coincidentally. We can infer that the Robomen radioed their Dalek masters resulting in a Dalek being sent to attend. Logically, the nearest Dalek would have been despatched.
In the second episode, Jenny explains: “There aren’t that many Daleks on Earth.” Therefore there isn’t going to be a Dalek around ever corner in London and in this case the nearest one happens to be on the opposite side of the river. The quickest way between two points is a straight line if there are no obstacles, which is the point here: the river is not an obstacle. So the Dalek goes for a swim rather than wasting time finding a bridge (and note that Susan has recently pulled down the nearest bridge!).
But that’s a rationale within the episode’s fiction. The production team’s reasoning for including such a scene is more interesting. This sequence doesn’t appear in Terry Nation’s original draft, in which Ian and the Doctor first meet the Daleks when arriving at the saucer, and it was almost certainly added by story editor David Whitaker. Whether this was agreed in conversation with Nation (or with Verity Lambert as producer), or was wholly Whitaker’s idea, is not known. Nation’s draft was heavily rewritten for the final version and also doesn’t include the Doctor and Ian finding the dead Roboman or Jenny’s (Saida in the draft) line about the small number of Daleks. I contend that these were additions by Whitaker intended to both enhance the general set-up of the story and to support the logic of his new cliffhanger, which itself has an important function beyond providing an arresting final image for the first episode.
The point of the new Dalek in the Thames sequence is to establish that not only are the Daleks on Earth, but that the geography of our world is no impediment to them. In their first appearance the Daleks were defined as creatures dependent upon the environment of their metal-floored city, unable to move outside. Whitaker cannily recognised that to credibly extend the Daleks’ threat, their enhanced mobility had to be promptly demonstrated. That is what the sequence does: showing that not only can the Daleks now move outside their city but that they are so mobile that even a ruddy great river is no barrier to them. Again, episode two puts this into the dialogue, with Ian reminding the Doctor of their previous immobility and positing that it’s the new dish on the Daleks’ backs that has enabled them to move outside. This too was likely Whitaker’s addition as it does not appear in Nation’s draft.
The sequence of the Dalek emerging from the Thames both establishes that the Daleks have overcome their previous mobility restrictions and that the specific terrain of Earth poses no challenges to them. This extends their threat and pre-empts and defuses jokes or remarks amongst the audience about the Daleks’ design limitations making an invasion of Earth an unlikely prospect. It’s a neat moment of visual storytelling that supports the entire premise of the adventure and strengthens the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
Although he doesn’t appear to have written this moment himself, Nation seems to have learned from it, deploying similar sequences in his later Dalek stories. Perhaps most notably his next one, The Chase, closes its first episode with a Dalek emerging from a sand dune, demonstrating that, contrary to what we might expect, a desert and a sand storm are of little hindrance to the Daleks. Similarly, in the same story Nation combats the joke about the Daleks’ inability to climb stairs, showing them twice to have negotiated stairs (on the Mary Celeste and in the haunted house) between shots, despite Ian’s awkwardly knowing comment that “Daleks don’t like stairs”.
Planet of the Daleks offers another similar scenario, with further Dalek abilities being revealed at the first episode’s cliffhanger, this time the power of invisibility countering the idea that a Dalek could never sneak up on you. Later in the same story, Nation introduces the Daleks’ ability to levitate thanks to an anti-gravitational disc, again extending their mobility. Cleverly, he reverses this tactic in Death to the Daleks to shake things up, depriving the Daleks of an ability rather than adding one. Their temporary inability to kill shows them in a new light and brings their pragmatism and duplicity to the fore.
In Nation’s Destiny of the Daleks, the Daleks smash through a wall (admittedly a rather pathetic one) for the first cliffhanger, to once more demonstrate their ease in overcoming physical barriers. This is slightly undercut by the later scene in which the Doctor taunts a Dalek for being unable to pursue him up a ventilation shaft (no anti-gravitational disc this time).
Nation didn’t write for Doctor Who again after that but the baton was picked up by Ben Aaronovitch, who attempted to rehabilitate the Daleks in Remembrance of the Daleks. With nobody having noticed the botched attempt to show a flying Dalek in Revelation of the Daleks, Aaronovitch deliberately wrote a spectacular set-piece of a Dalek hovering up a flight of stairs, to again extend the Daleks’ mobility (and address the common joke about Daleks and stairs) in another part one cliffhanger.
Although without a cliffhanger, Robert Shearman does much the same in Dalek. To establish the Daleks as a credible threat for the twenty-first century audience, many of whom may never have seen them before, he not only features just one of the creatures to demonstrate their individual power, but pre-empts jokes about their design and mobility. The ‘sink plunger’ is shown to be a weapon and multipurpose tool and, as in Remembrance, an apparent escape up stairs is thwarted by the Dalek’s ability to levitate.
All of this establishes the Daleks as a credible threat, unencumbered by what might initially seem to be obvious barriers and design deficiencies. Just as in The Dalek Invasion of Earth’s first cliffhanger.
That’s what the Dalek was doing in the Thames.
Images © BBC
This is a revised and updated version of an article originally published in Panic Moon in October 2011.
Thanks to Andrew Pixley