Terry Nation: A Thematic Analysis by Phil Fenerty 18/10/04
Were it not for Terry Nation's seven scripts for Serial B, it is unlikely that there would be Doctor Who in any form at all, forty-one years later. The arrival of the Daleks, the most original and terrifying screen alien up to that time, secured both the series' future and Terry Nation's reputation.
It would be churlish to suggest that Nation was not a talented writer: his putative association with Tony Hancock would not have been open to a less capable writer; his later series for BBC television (Survivors and Blake's Seven) are wonderful creations, original and complicated pieces of story-telling capable of operating on many levels.
And yet, consideration of his work on Doctor Who shows that, almost without exception, Nation's scripts strayed into one of two basic templates. Even within one of these templates, there were occasions where elements of the second kind resonate into the first base.
Perhaps Nation's main problem stems from the format adopted by Doctor Who in the earliest years. As a "loyalty show", designed to ensure families would be tuning in each Saturday evening, the initial regular cast had to be put upon in a variety of ways to tempt the viewers back next time. So the party would be split up, kidnapped, chased, threatened, tortured or sentenced to death, all in the cause of viewer loyalty. Accommodating these requirements into an original and fresh script can be demanding. The notes on the story structure accompanying the script book for Anthony Coburn's abortive story The Masters of Luxor point out that the story scheme is similar in a number of ways to that of the Daleks (a journey into the citadel in a cave system being one such similarity, for example).
It is unsurprising that, after the success of The Daleks, Nation stayed with tried and tested formulae for the next ten years.
The first, probably most successful of the templates is the Journey Story, seen originally in The Daleks. Here, the Doctor and his companions explore a strange world. Captured by the Daleks, they use intelligence to engineer a cunning escape, but must overcome the planet's perils and endure a journey to the enemy stronghold before finally defeating them.
This outline certainly covers the plot of The Daleks succinctly. In order to write to the required seven-episode length, Nation adds in to the explore-escape scenario the requirement to covertly insinuate the regulars into the Dalek City which conveniently splits the TARDIS crew at the same time. As pointed out by Stammers and Walker in the analysis in The Television Companion, the journey does not become an interlude in the story - it IS the story. Indeed, the first season historical Marco Polo is the story of a journey, almost as if the early production team had spotted the virtue of using journeys as a convenient form of narrative.
Perhaps, less obviously, The Dalek Invasion of Earth follows the same pattern (as noted in my review of the story). Here, the Dalek base is the saucer, moving from central London out to the Berkshire mine; The Doctor is captured and uses intelligence to escape (before being selected as a Roboman!); the regulars are split up and separately journey to the saucer. The window dressing of the story - setting the action on Earth rather than the alien environment of Skaro - distracts attention and prevents the viewer from realising that the story is a rip-off of the previous Dalek epic.
In between these two stories, Nation had written The Keys of Marinus, a six-part story utilising his second story template - The Episodic. Each of the six episodes is, in essence, a complete story, set within an overall framework (similar to The Key to Time season, only in miniature). The individual stories (City of Morphoton, Ice Soldiers, etc.) present a definite challenge to the regulars: it is only when (together or separately) their challenges are complete can they overcome a final obstacle.
This template, within the overall series structure, would have worked well at the time: there were no overall story titles (or indication of how many episodes each story would last) the viewing public were never certain when each story would be completed. The use of these self-contained episodes would, perhaps, be some form of escape from the longer narratives (most stories at this time were six or seven episodes long).
So successful was the episodic template that Nation's final contributions to the Hartnell era both fit into this scheme. In The Chase, the plot (such as it is) involves the Daleks pursuing the Doctor through time and space to avenge previous defeats. In The Daleks' Master Plan, the Doctor attempts to halt a Dalek attempt to conquer the Solar System by stealing the core of their Time Destructor: the Daleks chase the TARDIS through time and space to reclaim their property.
Both stories contain episodes which, virtually, stand alone inside the overall plot. The Daleks' Master Plan meanders through Liverpool, Hollywood, Ancient Egypt and the prison planet Desperus before using the navigational circuit from the Meddling Monk's TARDIS as a convenient plot device for returning the Doctor to the era of the (almost forgotten) Master Plan. In The Chase, the Daleks catch up with the Doctor on Mechanus, where he and his companions are forced to make a stand. The Doctor uses the Daleks' time machine as a convenient plot device for returning Ian and Barbara back to the era of their (almost forgotten) origin.
These stories contain other plot elements which would be re-used in the future: an android duplicate from The Chase (seen in The Android Invasion); a robotic enemy for the Daleks (Mechanoids in The Chase, Movellans in Destiny of the Daleks); and a hostile jungle with deadly plants (Kembel in The Daleks' Master Plan becoming Spiridon in Planet of the Daleks).
After the effort of co-writing a twelve part epic (Dennis Spooner was credited on half of the episodes), there would be a gap of seven years before Nation's next script for Doctor Who. This was Planet of the Daleks, the second half of a "12-part storyline" (started with Frontier in Space), produced for the tenth anniversary season. Many comments have been made regarding its similarity to The Daleks: the escape from the Dalek Base; the illness caused by the planet and cured by the natives; the need to convice a group of Thals that they need to take action against Daleks; and the Dalek threat to unleash devastation on the planet (a neutron bomb in The Daleks, here transformed to a virus).
Both Planet of the Daleks (unsurprisingly, given its resonances with The Daleks) and its successor Death to the Daleks use a (form of the) Journey Template. The journeys in Planet of the Daleks are not as long as those from the original, and (as in The Daleks) highlight the pitfalls of the planet. Whilst Death to the Daleks fulfils the basic tenets of a Journey Template, it is mostly confined to the journey through the Exxilon citadel. The intelligence tests (as seen in The Dalek Invasion of Earth) reappears as well. In fact, Death to the Daleks is the most original of Nation's Dalek stories since The Daleks, with well-written scripts and a strong back-story.
The last of Nation's stories to fit into one of the two templates is The Android Invasion. The journey here is interplanetary - from Oseidon to Earth - and the story also includes android duplicates and the release of a virus into the atmosphere (still a major concern in Nation's writing, after Planet of the Daleks and Survivors), and the first episode (like The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth) involves exploration of an apparently deserted location (in this case the Kraal training ground). The story is not the best of Season 13, but contains some wonderfully chilling moments, proving that Nation could still produce a memorable and exciting set of scripts.
Neither of Nation's final two Dalek stories fall into one of the templates noted above. Destiny of the Daleks sees his creation looking to become more organic, seeking to regain their "humanity" (a theme explored in some of the early episodes of Blake's Seven). Also in this story, we see a robotic monster to rival the Daleks, the Movellans in this case.
The best of all Dalek stories, Genesis of the Daleks, showed how far both Doctor Who as a series and Nation as a writer had come since 1963. This is ground-breaking stuff, throwing away the previous templates in favour of a moral and ethical workout. Davros is the Doctor's antihesis, an amoral scientist with the drive and desire to perpetuate his species. Taking the Dalek parallels with fascism which had been only lightly sketched on previously, and placing the Doctor in a hostile, war-filled environment, Nation creates a stunning depiction of how brutal war is and the effects of the wrong sort of scientific research.
A world-destroying virus re-appears, this time in a discussion between the Doctor and Davros; and the travellers are unable to escape easily (their Time Ring having been captured by Davros in the same way that the fluid link had been retained by the Daleks in the 1963 story), but for all that, there is a freshness and vibrancy in the narrative.
It would be easy to accuse Nation of simply re-hashing his earlier works with a different Doctor and companion. In reality, it is more likely that the original constraints within which Nation worked in 1963-64 became embedded in his consciousness and were used as the framework on which hung other stories. Certainly, for all their similarities, it is not impossible to watch both The Daleks and Planet of the Daleks and not take some enjoyment out of them, nor to spot new ideas and scenarios depicted in the latter. This is perhaps more the fault of an over-burdened production team than a poor writer.
Terry Nation's writing, even within the confines of the templates described, is fresh and innovative, with exciting action and entertaining dialogue. When working outside the shackles, his work is genuinely great and his more original stories can justifiably be regarded as classics.