In “The Escape,” the third episode of The Daleks, we meet the Thals, the other inhabitants of the planet Skaro, old enemies of the titular monsters. The Daleks had warned Susan that the Thals would be hideously mutated as a result of the fallout from the neutronic war, but when she meets the Thal named Alydon, she’s struck by how perfect he is. He’s tall, white, blond, handsome, and wearing a groovy puffy vest. Though frightened of the stranger at first, she comes to trust him within moments of meeting him. Admittedly, he’s acted in a friendly manner and given her life-saving anti-radiation drugs, but still, from here on out none of the TARDIS team will doubt the Thal’s good intentions. Being hot never hurts.

We never get more than a glimpse of a Dalek outside its casing, but the story makes clear how hideous they are. Alydon says, “If they call us mutations, what must they be like?” (Which strikes me as somewhat shoddy writing, just as an aside – from his tone he obviously means the Daleks must be ugly, but that turn of phrase suggests he means they must be even more beautiful than the Thals. I’ll forgive Terry Nation – he didn’t always have the best attention to detail, but he more than made up for it in other ways.) When Ian and the Doctor get a look at one, they act instantly to stop Barbara and Susan from seeing it; they can barely stand to look at it as they scoop it out of its casing. We only see a single claw sticking out of the coat they’ve wrapped it in, but it’s enough to show us that whatever the Daleks look like, they’re no Thals.

To recap: ugly aliens, bad; pretty aliens, good. It’s… not a great message, and I’d like to think it wasn’t a conscious one on Nation’s part. It’s hardly uncommon to make the evil monsters revolting, after all. But… the Thals aren’t just a group of normal people. They’re all like Alydon – white, blond, hot. (Well, tastes vary, but they’re all intended to be hot.) And they all wear clothing showing off lots of skin. (Stupid sexy Thals.) Why did Nation make a point of the Thals being physically perfect? Or to get more specific, and more troubling, why did he make a point of the Thals being physically perfect according to racist Aryan ideals?

Nation has said that the creation of the Daleks was influenced by the Nazis, and their goal of extermination of anyone who did not live up to their ideas of physical purity. It’s a striking choice, then, to make the Nazi-analogues’ enemies look exactly like the actual Nazi’s self-image (whether that specific choice was made by Nation himself, or someone else on the production team). I’m struggling to figure out if there’s some deeper meaning to it. On the face of it, the theme might be, “The Nazi were wrong about genocide, but they were right about some people being better than others based on physical characteristics.”

Do I think anyone involved in making this story literally thought that? Uh… maybe? The show’s lead actor would have probably vigorously agreed with that statement, since William Hartnell was, by most accounts, racist as hell. And antisemitism was sadly rampant in the UK in the sixties, so making sure the Space Nazis’ enemies looked as non-Jewish as possible might have been a consideration. The most gracious reading of the story is that nobody really thought it through; that making the übermensch the good guys was an unconscious choice. The Thals are the opposite of the ugly Daleks, so let’s make them attractive, and white blond people are attractive. I’m sure you can see the problem with that line of thought – unconscious racism is still racism.

So are the Thals racist? Yes. The show will have worse moments in the future – much, much worse. But making the perfect specimens of goodness based on their physical characteristics all white and blond is racist, whether that was the intent or not.

But these essays are supposed to be exploring what it is I love about Doctor Who. (When I remember that that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, anyhow.) And one of those things is its longevity, and how that allows the show to contradict itself. Doctor Who is large, it contains multitudes. Two seasons after The Daleks, Galaxy 4 will convey the opposite message: the hot blond aliens, the Drahvins, are bad, and the hideous aliens, the Rills, are good. There! Racism solved! Until The Celestial Toymaker a few stories later, when a character says the n-word. (They wisely took that out of the recent animation.) And back and forth it’ll go, throughout its long history.

No easy answers, then. I won’t excuse The Daleks as being a product of its time – that’s always a cop out when talking about past examples of racism, and assumes nobody of that time could have recognized it, much less been impacted by it. I still think it’s a great story, and this is a great episode, but it’s dishonest to acknowledge that without also acknowledging its murky, problematic messaging. So I’ll be troubled by the casting choices, while also enjoying how well Thal Ganatus fills out his puffy vast. I can contradict myself. I’m large, too.

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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.

There’s a lovely scene in the middle of “The Dead Planet” where the four main characters linger by the TARDIS’ food machine. They’re settling in for the night, and Ian and Barbara are hungry. The Doctor tells them they can have anything they want, and Barbara asks for bacon and eggs. (Odd choice for dinner, but I suppose time travel throws off your inner clock somewhat.) The Doctor and Susan program the machine and out pop two little bars, which Barbara and Ian are amazed to find taste just like bacon and eggs. The Doctor, pleased by their reaction, explains how it works to an appreciative Ian. The food machine is very ’60s sci-fi and the characters are all getting along and there’s no danger. It’s nice.

Of course, the rest of the episode isn’t so nice. The Doctor has been clashing with Ian and Barbara – they’re angry he’s not prioritizing getting them home, and he’s resentful about these unwelcome passengers telling him what to do. Someone frightened Susan in the forest, and she’s upset that her grandfather doesn’t believe her. The Doctor selfishly sabotages his own ship so that they’ll be forced to visit the city he, and only he, wants to explore. The episode ends with Barbara, lost in the city and separated from the others, being threatened by something advancing towards her – a Dalek, though we won’t know its name, or how dangerous it truly is, until next episode.

Oh, and they’re all getting sick. They have radiation poisoning, but they don’t know that yet.

This is a TV show, so everything will be better in a couple of episodes. The Doctor and his friends will come together and the baddies will be sorted out. Because it’s not real life.

Early in the episode, while they’re exploring the strange dead petrified forest they’ve landed in, Susan finds a flower. It’s stone now too, like all the other vegetation, but it’s beautiful nonetheless. Ian helps her uproot it, warning her to be careful because of how fragile it is. Susan’s excited to take it back to the TARDIS, but then Barbara calls out, and Ian, distracted, crushes it in Susan’s hands. Later, Susan finds a second flower and stops to pick it up, but when she’s frightened by a mysterious hand touching her shoulder, that flower too is destroyed.

I wish we could linger by the food machine a little longer.

But flowers are being crushed, and the poison is seeping in, and the Daleks are here.