Daleks: What Is Inside a Dalek, Skaro and the Time War Explained

The Daleks appeared five weeks after the Doctor did. "The Daleks," the second Doctor Who serial, ran from December 21, 1963 to February 1, 1964, and took the TARDIS to Skaro, a planet turned to ash by a war between two humanoid races, the Thals and the Dals; the Dals had survived in a metal city inside machines, and they were the Daleks. Terry Nation, the writer, gave them a thousand-year war, a poisoned world and a hatred of everything not themselves; the audience gave the BBC its first merchandising craze, "Dalekmania," within a year. The origin was rebuilt in "Genesis of the Daleks" (1975), which introduced Davros, a crippled Kaled scientist in a wheelchair that was itself half a Dalek casing, who concluded that his people's mutation under radiation was unstoppable and engineered its end state: a creature with no conscience in a machine with no weakness.

Skaro has been destroyed twice and rebuilt as often as the plot needed, and Davros has died more often than that. The series' rule about the species is that it cannot be finished. The Doctor, offered the chance in 1975 to wipe out the Daleks at their creation by touching two wires, refuses, arguing that some good has come of the fear they caused; every Dalek story since has been the consequence of that choice, and the show has revisited it in 2015 and 2024.

The casing was designed by a man who was paid nothing extra for it. Raymond Cusick, a BBC staff designer, was given Nation's script, which asked for a creature with no legs that glided and had no human features, and produced the shape in a few days: a tapered pepper-pot body on a skirt of hemispheres, a domed head with an eyestalk, a gun and a manipulator arm that looked like a sink plunger because that was what the prop department had. The legend that he sketched it around a pepper pot at lunch is his own account; the design has been altered only in detail since, and the 2010 attempt to make it taller and brighter was reversed after complaints. Cusick received a Blue Peter badge and, decades later, a credit; the BBC owned the design and Nation the concept, which made the two men wealthy in very unequal measure.

Inside is the Kaled mutant, first shown as a claw in 1963 and in full in "Remembrance of the Daleks" (1988): a green-brown, tentacled body with one eye, a brain exposed, roughly the size of a cat, sustained by the casing's life support and connected to it by nerve links. The casing supplies armour, a death ray, a manipulator, sensors, flight since 1988, a force field, and the voice, produced from the first serial by a ring modulator applied to the actors' speech. Everything the audience thinks of as a Dalek is a machine; the thing that hates is inside it.

Nation said he wrote the Nazis. He was thirteen when the war ended, had grown up in Cardiff under the bombing, and told interviewers that the Daleks were his memory of a machine-like, uniform, exterminating force that could not be reasoned with; the Daleks' salute, their cry, their obsession with racial purity and their extermination camps in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" (1964) are the allegory made explicit. "Genesis of the Daleks" completed it by giving them a creator who is unmistakably a fascist scientist, a state that experiments on its own people, and a security force in black; the Kaleds' salute is the Nazi one with the arm turned. Cusick's casing contributed the other half: a shape with no face, no expression and no way to tell one from another.

The allegory is why the species has never been redeemed. A Dalek that learns compassion, in "Dalek" (2005) or "Into the Dalek" (2014), is destroyed by the experience or by its own kind; a Dalek faction that tries to change, the Cult of Skaro in 2007, is exterminated by the purer strain. Nation's creatures were built to be the thing the Doctor cannot cure, and the series has kept them that way for sixty years, which is longer than the regime they were modelled on lasted.

The Daleks are the Fermi paradox's worst answer with a plunger. If the galaxy is silent because something in it removes civilizations that make noise, the something looks like Skaro's children: a species whose only foreign policy is extermination, that expands until stopped and is never stopped for long. The Time War of the 2005 revival, in which the Daleks and the Doctor's own people, the Time Lords, fought across all of history until the Doctor ended both, is the paradox as a plot: two species so powerful that their war erased everyone else. The Daleks came back; the Time Lords, for a while, did not.

The species also carries the other half of Nation's memory into ufology. The Nazi UFO mythology, which imagines the Reich surviving in Antarctic bases with flying discs, is the same fear the Daleks dramatize, that the exterminators did not lose but left, and the aliens on TV article notes that the Daleks were the first television alien to become a household word, ahead of anything American by three years. British children in 1964 hid behind the sofa from a pepper pot because their parents had hidden from the thing it stood for.