This, on the other hand, feels ridiculously faithful, right down to the ending with the Time Ring and the tumbling through ‘spinning blackness’ to the Doctor’s final ‘echoing’ lines (3). Where The Revenge of the Cybermen cut out water-based escapades and brought in added political machinations, Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks feels like it’s painstakingly preserved every capture, every escape, every trip between Kaled and Thal city via clam-infested tunnels, every where’s-the-time-ring?-there’s-the-time-ring moment. Even the Doctor-on-a-landmine scene, described by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood as ‘pointless messing about’ which the viewer can ‘safely fast-forward’ (4), remains.

    Actually, the issue isn’t so much that Dicks keeps all these ‘adventure-serial moments’ (5), as Miles and Wood term them, but that he takes them for granted. That landmine scene, for example, gets stripped down to barely a page, losing all tension (6). While I’m (half-)sure Terry Nation threw the scene in because chucking in a dozen incidents per episode is how he scripts Who (7), in the actual broadcast episode, it functions, just after the Doctor’s accepted the mission to wipe out the Daleks, to highlight how much of a challenge even the basics of navigating a warzone are.

    Not that Dicks is just stripping the six episodes down until they fit his page-count. He does, for example, add a line in to fix the timings of Davros’s visit to the Thal council. It turns out the scientist was able to arrive before the Doctor and Harry because they had to grab something to eat before rushing off to rescue Sarah (8), an explanation which is so much worse than a simple plot hole. 

    He also uses all those saved up words to really ram home the horror of deformity, which is nice of him – Sevrin the muto, for example, is ‘a hideous shapeless something’ (9) and the Dalek creatures are ‘hideously deformed’ (10). The insistence on the hideousness of anything mutant, and, in the case of the second quote, the attribution of that perspective to the Doctor, is bad enough, but it’s pretty fatal in a story that’s supposed to be busy demonstrating the dangers of Nazism. It’s a bit rich the Doctor reacting to Nyder’s insistence that ‘The Kaled race must be kept pure’ with ‘horror’ (11) when he’s already described mutations to Harry as the stuff of ‘nightmares’ (12).

    This all gets especially problematic around Davros. Miles and Wood suggest that, in the script, the genetic purity-obsessed Kaleds’ deference to their great scientist is ‘a deliberate contradiction, in much the same way that Hitler wasn’t an Aryan’ (13), so it’s a bit odd that the novelisation decides to use Davros’s appearance as significant source of unease. Apparently ‘the most horrifying thing about [him] was his face’ (14), a charming phrase rivalled only by the reference to his ‘ghastly skull-like head’ (15). At least the disgust he provokes is better than the suggestion that, being wheelchair-bound, he should properly be ‘pitiful’ (16). As far as Harry is concerned, Davros’s injuries, despite his still being mentally capable and physically independent (bar the odd idiotically-placed safe), have reduced him to an existence to which ‘death would surely be preferable’ (17). Does Dicks think the biggest problem with Nazism was that their racist ideals were undermined by a leader who didn’t fit them?

    Extraordinarily, despite all this, the novelisation does achieve something worthwhile. The Doctor enters the story eager ‘to defeat his oldest enemies once and for all’ (18) before being thrown into what on TV constituted a four-parter of grim nastiness culminating in the destruction of the Kaled city. Dicks goes further than the broadcast episodes in emphasising how like the ending of a war film this all is, with ‘Corridors, streets, squares and walkways […] jammed with excited revellers’, people going to kiss random strangers and food, drink and parties everywhere (19). And the Doctor stands apart ‘appalled’, confronted by the way ‘the corrupting brutality of war’ has turned the Thals into people who can cheer the deaths of ‘Thousands of their fellow-creatures’ (20).

    Then the Doctor has his little chat with Davros. Unlike on TV, he paraphrases Davros’s insistence that ‘The Daleks are the power not of evil but of good’ back at him before proposing the ‘virus […] that could destroy all life’ (21). This sets the discussion up as a test of Davros’s sincerity (22), and it’s one Davros gleefully fails, too exhilarated by the prospect of eradicating all life – just look at all those exclamation marks – to maintain the pretence of ‘reasoning’.

    Obviously, he’s mad but more is done than on TV to suggest his worldview is a product of his context. His near-death to an ‘atomic shell’, which it seems he survived through sheer force of will alone (23), has led to a desire to ‘perpetuate himself’ forever through the Daleks (24), and the self-reliance in how he ‘clung to life, and himself designed the mobile life-support system in which you see him’ bred an aspiration to ‘total power’ (25). His campaign to ‘set [himself] among the Gods’ is a battle against the dependence and vulnerability war threatened to inflict on him.

    Beyond that, he’s at the tail end of a thousand-year war (26) that has persisted in stalemate for generations, and would have continued to do so without Davros’s interventions, so his craving for its end trumping all other concerns is hardly extraordinary. This is a war in which being ‘afflicted with a conscience’ truly would be a weakness (27), an active obstacle to finding a way to end it. No wonder there’s even a suggestion that he’s operated on himself to make himself more ruthless. His inability to see any tension between ‘good’ and ‘death on an enormous scale’ is not so different from the Thals’ joy at mass slaughter, indeed they are actually celebrating a mass slaughter he designed.

    After all this, the Doctor finally gets his chance to wipe the Daleks from the face of history. Crucially, it’s not just ‘the moral issue’ (28) holding him back, as it seems to be on TV, but also ‘sadness’ at the prospect of what he’s about to do (29) – he refuses to be like the cheering Thals, who he presumably views as ‘no better than the Daleks’ for (as far as they know) wiping out ‘a whole intelligent life form’ (30), and he refuses to be like Davros, using the end of war as justification for any act. Sarah tries to persuade him he’s wrong to feel such qualms, insisting he wouldn’t hesitate confronted with a ‘bacteria’ (31), but he’s learnt not to depersonalise the enemy in that way anymore. Dicks has turned ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ into an anti-war text. Good on him. Only problem is that it seems to end with the Doctor just going back and trying to blow up the Daleks later…

    Presumably, there’s a deliberate echo in Sarah’s argument of the Doctor’s earlier proposition to Davros of ‘a virus […] that could destroy all life’. A lot is made of how the Daleks are ‘machine’ creatures (32) ‘without feeling or emotion’ (33) and, in that context, Sarah’s verdict on them as akin to a ‘disease’ makes sense – their only purpose is to perpetuate themselves at the expense of others so their existence will always threaten the universe, and wiping them out’s not going to make them suffer because they can’t feel anything. But a lot is also made of how that’s a design choice on Davros’s part. Indeed, he’s shown still in the process of making the ‘changes’ necessary to reduce them to mere ‘weapons’ (34), less a species more ‘the supreme war-machine’ (35).

    That’s why the Doctor favours Gharman’s solution, preventing what the scientist terms ‘enormous mental defects’ (36) from being introduced to the Daleks in the first place, to the option of blowing up a room of mutants that could still become anything. And that’s also why, when it becomes clear Ghaman has failed, he returns to try and blow up the incubators without a moment’s hesitation. Yes, with hindsight, Sarah is right to lament that, had Gharman just ‘arrived a moment later[,] The Doctor might have decided to set off those explosives after all’ (37) and everything would have been nicely done and dusted, but it is only once Davros has succeeded that her analogy with ‘bacteria’ becomes accurate and blowing up the tanks stops being mass slaughter and effectively becomes dearmament.