David Maloney, “Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks” (1975)
Here comes a rare opportunity in “Doctor Who” to explore the potential of time travel to change history and the morality of doing so, or not doing so perhaps. While on their way back to Space Station Nerva from Earth, the Doctor (Tom Baker) and his friends Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and Dr Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) are waylaid by a Time Lord who offers the Doctor a challenge: obstructing the creation of the Daleks or even destroying them altogether. Not one to pass up such a challenge, the Doctor accepts unhesitatingly, and he and his companions find themselves already dumped into the hellhole that is the planet Skaro, scene of a 1,000-year war between its native Kaleds and Thals. The trio end up being separated, with Sarah captured by the Thals and the Doctor and Harry captured by the Kaleds. After various attempts at escape, the three friends are reunited on the Thals’ side but not before the Doctor and Harry have had the pleasure (not!) of meeting chief Kaled scientist Davros (Michael Wisher) who unveils the result of a scientific project he has long laboured over: developing a new race of Kaleds through genetic and other chemical engineering to withstand fantastic amounts of radiation (which has already altered their gene pool and turned them into mutants) and become mighty killing machines with a superiority complex and a desire to conquer the universe and rule it.
After the Thals’ missile hits the Kaled defence dome and kills all inside, Davros accuses fellow Kaled scientist Ronson of giving the Thal enemy the chemical formula to weaken the dome and has him killed by the newly developed Daleks. (In reality, Davros gave the formula to the Thals to get rid of those Kaleds opposed to him.) Davros orders the Kaleds to attack the Thals as revenge. While many Thals are being slaughtered, the Doctor and his friends sneak back to the Kaled bunker while the Thals prepare to destroy it by laying explosives around it.
The Doctor and his friends are captured by the Kaleds and subjected to harsh interrogation and torture. They are then imprisoned but manage to escape. The Doctor rigs a Dalek nursery with explosives but at the crucial moment when he is holding two wires and is about to join them, he hesitates to wipe out all the embryos (even after a few of them try to strangle him in self-defence) as they have not yet done any wrong. Meanwhile Davros allows the Kaled scientific and military elite to vote on whether he should be allowed to continue with his project. Most of the Kaled elite vote no, so Davros has them executed by his Daleks. The Thals prepare to blow up the Kaled bunker and the Doctor and his friends manage to get out just in time before it explodes – though not before the Daleks have turned on Davros and his remaining loyal followers and executed them all.
Once the Daleks are buried within the tomb that was once the Kaled bunker, the Doctor, Sarah and Harry take leave of the Thals and return to Space Station Nerva with the Time Ring given them by the Time Lord. Sarah is quizzical that the Doctor does not seem disappointed by his apparent failure to destroy the Daleks – he has merely set back their development by 1,000 years – and the Doctor replies that, for all the harm the Daleks will cause, their very menace will also encourage other alien races and species to overcome their own differences and resolve their squabbles and conflicts, and unite against the Daleks.
The narrative is grim and tense, and the action flows continuously, with no faltering or moments where people and events seem all at sea. The entire adventure plays out like a war film, with austere sets of grey and black. There are occasional moments where the improbable happens (Sarah falls off scaffolding but somehow has a soft landing?) but overall the sense that, no matter how badly the war is going for both sides, something truly dreadful is about to happen. Sure enough, Davros’s creations, supposedly his crowning career achievement, turn on him and, thanks to the way in which Davros has determined and shaped their psychology, kill him and all his fellow Kaleds, thus subjecting their own makers to total genocide.
The highlight of this story is the ethical dilemma facing the Doctor when he realises he can destroy the Daleks completely by exploding their nursery: this is an example of the famous thought experiment known as the trolley problem, in which one is forced to choose between two unsatisfactory choices. The essence of the trolley problem is that there is no one correct choice, and whatever choice is made depends very much on the context of the problem and the nature of the protagonist who makes the choice. The Doctor’s problem is compounded by his ability to travel in time, and his foreknowledge that the Dalek menace in many galaxies will encourage civilisations in those galaxies to reach out to one another, create alliances and maintain peace and stability in their part of the cosmos. Should he kill the Daleks in their infancy, when they have not killed anything yet, the Doctor himself would be guilty of genocide himself and that guilt would remain with him for the rest of his life through all his future incarnations. Though his dilemma is cut short by the intervention of a Kaled scientist who tells him that Davros has caved in to the demands of the Kaled elite, once the Doctor realises that Davros has deceived the scientist and had him and his fellow oppositionists destroyed, the Time Lord returns to the Dalek nursery to destroy the embryos – so it seems he is prepared to wear the guilt of mass murder of innocents after all. (After all, he did accept the challenge of wiping out the Daleks in the first place – and the Time Lords would not have prepared the challenge for him either, if there had been a good chance that he would have refused the challenge.)
Interestingly, the Doctor had been faced with a similar problem concerning Daleks in a much earlier adventure “The Power of the Daleks”, in which he visits a planet being colonised by humans, and one of these humans, the scientist Lesterson, attempts to revive three inert Daleks found in a crashed space capsule. Despite the Doctor’s warnings, Lesterson revives all three Daleks who act submissively before the human colonists but secretly set up an assembly line producing new Daleks in their capsule. In this adventure, the Doctor allows the humans to revive the Daleks, risking mass deaths and a decimated colony barely able to survive. Again, the Doctor’s decision is based on his foreknowledge and time travel ability: had he stopped Lesterson and destroyed the first revived Dalek, he would have been imprisoned, even killed, and Lesterson would have continued with his project, with the predictable disaster following and the Doctor unable to do anything. By allowing Lesterson to go ahead, at least the Doctor is in a position to do something before the Daleks destroy the human colony completely, and at the same time demonstrate by example the dangers of having Daleks in one’s neighbourhood.
There have been many other stories throughout “Doctor Who” in both the original classic series and the more recent series that began its run in 2005 that have featured variations on the trolley problem, with the Doctor having to choose between two detestable options, and the choice perhaps demonstrating in some way that even the Doctor has trouble living up to high moral standards. This character flaw helps make the Doctor seem more human than alien, and this and other moral imperfections help make the Doctor’s character complex and nuanced, attracting audience attention and discussion.