Oh dear, Doctor Who makes its first (albeit understandable) big mistake. The Daleks are back and, by returning, set in motion a chain of events that will lead to despair, fights and a true sense of utter defeat. But enough about fans trying to piece together the Dalek timeline, it’s time to highlight the real issues that the story creates, some of which are nearly always overlooked. No, not the absolutely absurd plot to remove the core of the planet to turn it into a spaceship (see “The Tenth Planet” for my thoughts on this!) but a) invading a planet isn’t going to be as easy as you think b) the Doctor’s didn’t get a say in the invasion ending and c) if he DID get a say then the invasion is going to unhappen anyway which means d) whatever’s going to happen to Susan Foreman??
Let’s begin with the invasion part. To give the story some credit, it tries to give a convincing backstory to how the Daleks managed to pull it off. It also suggests that the Daleks of Classic Who are an exceptionally patient species, far more so than the revival Daleks ever seem to be. According to episode 2, the invasion started ten years prior to the events on screen with the Daleks apparently bombarding the planet with plague bombs. This is likely around the 2164 of the calendar in the warehouse. Apparently whole continents were wiped out (England, naturally, somehow seems to have survived far better than the rest of the planet). This means we have to ask two questions (along with why weren’t the scientists able to find a cure and where the hell did the Daleks launch the plague bombs from for us not to spot them in orbit??), namely how many people survived and is it actually true. In 1961 the population of the planet was a little over 3 billion people. In 2022 it was just under 8 billion. Therefore, by 2164, we’re going to have to assume that it’s just slightly more than 8 billion. There’s a huge range of estimates out there about what the population will be but purely for the sake of “it works out pretty neatly to make a point” we’ll take it as doubling a couple of times between now and then which gives a world population of about 35 billion people by the time things start (some estimates out there say over 250 billion by 2150 to give you a more extreme set of figures to think about). We’re also told that it was just six months after the “meteorites” that the Daleks landed and razed cities to the ground. So in that six months, just how many people died? If the plague somehow, in six months, had a 90% success rate then that still leaves about 3.5 billion people alive (conveniently the population of the planet in about 1963, hence the number I went with for the 2164 population, remember some people think it would still leave 25 billion!). Of course, we don’t know the location and talents of these people but given how paranoid the military forces around the world are, chances are some of them have access to seriously advanced weaponry (well that and clock making skills, as a priority seems to be the rather pointless getting Big Ben to chime asap). So just how many saucers were involved? In episode 6 the Doctor says that the saucers were all caught in the upward thrust of the explosion, but given how close they are to it when it happens, surely that can’t have been more than three or four at absolute most? Oh but there’s the robomen keeping people under control? Except, just how many robomen are there to keep what is potentially still a few billion people under control, especially given that the saucers can seemingly only process a few at a time (unless, somehow, IKEA style flat pack processing plants were set up all around the globe and, as that brings to mind Daleks trying to make self assembly furniture, let’s not contemplate that). On top of all this, you need to throw into the mix a HUGE amount of foreplanning and research needed (just exactly when did the Daleks come to the conclusion that they’d found a planet that was “unique” in having the ability to be hollowed out and driven around the universe? How long did they take to make the plague bombs, or did they buy them off the universal equivalent of Acme ready made? And did they do the geological survey before or after launching the plague bombs to work out that, weirdly, the best place to dig was the UK…. though of course see “Inferno”). Basically nothing about the scale of the invasion makes sense. It’s as though, before the meteorites came, there had already been some sort of global catastrophe that we don’t know about yet that had done severe damage to humanity which would have made the scale of the invasion force needed significantly smaller. And this leads us to the other major problems with the story, questions b through to d.
In season one, in stories like “The Aztecs” (and, to a lesser extent, “The Reign of Terror”) there was a lot made of the fact that you simply cannot rewrite history. If it’s happened then it’s happened and you can’t make it unhappen no matter what you try and do. This is fine IF (and only if) you don’t ever go forward in time, only backwards. This is where things get really tricky. Does “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” take place in the past or the future? This seems a really dumb question until you factor in “The Sensorites”. For Ian and Barbara, “The Sensorites” is the furthest forward in time that they’ve been (the 28th century). In it, we learn that there hasn’t been a London for four hundred years and the whole of the lower half of England (which seemingly does still exist) has the grand name of central city. So, according to “The Sensorites”, the Earth was still around and in one piece in the 2300s which rather heavily suggests that there wasn’t a successful invasion by the Daleks in the late 2100s. This gives us our two standard options. Firstly, everything in the universe is fixed as having happened and thus the Doctor and co have no free will and are just being moved around in time to keep everything as it should be and it’s not really the Doctor and co who end the Dalek invasion but more “the force of time that put them there to ensure they did what was needed to in order to stop it”. That’s the depressing option as it means the Doctor’s never in “danger” in the stories as time will ensure he survives and everything he does or will do is set in stone anyway. Hopefully the universe allows us option 2, that we have free will and can fight to prevent invasions happening, whether or not time “wants” them to. So yay, this means the Doctor and co are genuine freedom fighters and yes, they put a stop to the invasion. The trouble is, unless the Doctor is somehow a unique in their ability to change things (which the show strongly states is not the case) then we have one last bizarre pair of questions to deal with and neither of them have particularly easy solutions.
It’s London, 1965 and the closing moments of “The Chase”. Ian and Barbara have been returned home (more or less… the less part we’ll deal with when we get to the chase) and this means that there are people around in 1965 who know that in 200 years time, billions of people are going to be killed. And in 1965 there’s the beginnings of several organisations that are set up to deal with the problems caused by aliens. What do you do if you are in Ian’s shoes? Do you accept that billions upon billions of people are going to be killed and simply let it happen, even though you know it’s going to cause misery and pain for the survivors OR do you approach the very definitely not Top Secret UNIT organisation and try and get them to set long term plans in motion by name dropping the Doctor? Admittedly they’re about to have more than one or two other invasions on their hands to deal with which, again, raises massive questions about the nature of time but we’ll save those for “The War Games” as this then leaves us with one VERY difficult question to face. Suppose that, somehow, the invasion IS stopped. Suppose somehow (and over the next 60 years we’ll see that there’s a LOT of ways this can happen) the invasion doesn’t even take place. Will Susan just wake up one morning to find that her whole world is totally different, that she never married David etc Would she even remember the invasion, would she be happily settled with someone else and not know how close the Daleks came to victory? Or, by letting her stay in the late 2100s, has the Doctor condemned her and the rest of the planet to being invaded and billions of deaths happening that could have been avoided. There WILL be a suggested answer to this… but not just yet. We need more clues first of all, more of the bigger picture needs to be filled in and, in the cruellest twist of writing, some of that will come up in the very next story.