There’s an interesting exchange between Ian and the Doctor early in The Survivors. They haven’t met the Daleks yet, but they’ve been exploring their city and have found a laboratory containing advanced scientific equipment. (The only item they identify is a Geiger counter, which isn’t all that advanced, but presumably the other, unnamed stuff is more impressive.) Anyway, here are their thoughts on the people of this city:
IAN: Hard to imagine what sort of people these are.
DOCTOR: They’re intelligent, anyway. Very intelligent.
IAN: Yes, but how do they use their intelligence? What form does it take?
DOCTOR: Oh, as if that matters. What these instruments tell us is that we’re in the midst of a very, very advanced civilised society.
Ian’s questions are valid, and he’s right to be concerned. In writing The Daleks, Terry Nation was influenced by threats from the recent past – the genocidal policies of the Nazis – and from a possible near future – an atomic war. It’s not surprising that Ian, as a solid English citizen of 1963, would see the dangers in the advanced science of an unknown people. Being a science teacher himself would probably make him even more cautious, not less.
But the Doctor is an alien, and he’d not lived through the Blitz as Ian had, nor played civil defense films for his students, preparing them for nuclear annihilation. Moreover, as I’ve mentioned before, the Doctor is not yet the protagonist of his own show, and his role in the narrative fluctuates between an obstacle and an outright antagonist – moments after this exchange, he decides to leave the missing Barbara to die alone of radiation poisoning in order to save himself and Susan, with only the fact that he’d just handed a key component of the ship over to Ian preventing him from doing so.
So viewers in Britain in 1963 would know right away that the Doctor’s response of “as if that matters” is a red flag; that of course the way in which intelligence is used matters. Being an advanced civilised society doesn’t mean you won’t commit barbarous acts.
As a viewer in America in the early part of 2025, the Doctor’s comment strikes me in much the same way. Our current ruler, Elon Musk, and his sycophants view intelligence – specifically, the type of standardized test intelligence with racist, eugenicist undertones measured by the I.Q. test – as an inherent good, and a signifier of value and superiority. This early Doctor would likely agree, at least until he got a got a good look at what they’re up to.
A big difference between Musk et. al. and the Daleks is that the Daleks, being fictional supervillains, really are as intelligent as Musk only claims to be. There are different types of intelligence, of course – one of the points Ian is making, and which the Doctor dismisses. Musk has smarts when it comes to propaganda, and self-promotion, and strip mining businesses and governments for self-profit; he’s deeply stupid by every other measure. (Seriously. Just… listen to him talk sometime. Not a sound bite. Listen to his answer to a question, any meaningful question, in its entirety. All the ranch dressing in the world couldn’t help you choke down that word salad.)
So in the fictional world of Doctor Who, the bad guys hold themselves superior because of an intelligence that they actually possess. In the real world, the bad guys hold themselves superior because of an intelligence they believe they possess, but don’t. Either way, when dealing with Daleks or aspiring Daleks, the key is not to buy into their narrative. The Doctor will destroy his Daleks, but we can’t be the Doctor if we want to destroy ours. Not this early Doctor, at least. We’ve gotta be Ian. How do they use their intelligence? What form does it take? Understand where they’re actually smart, and where they’re actually stupid, and maybe we won’t wind up dying in a petrified radioactive ruin.
