The Daleks

Making their first appearance in the Wiliam Hartnell era, at the outset of the Doctor’s intergalactic travels, the Daleks are the most iconic sci-fi monsters of all time. Much mocked  by the sceptical, they don’t necessarily look that invincible. Until very recently, they were famously stumped by flights of stairs, preferring to glide along on flat surfaces (though they have now learned to elevate, albeit at a fairly sedate pace). They see through a single eyepiece on a stalk, meaning that all the Doctor very often had to do was throw his hat over it to confuse one.

Daleks make up for these possible design faults, though, by being the incarnation of evil. They are hell-bent on cosmic domination, and will stop at nothing to achieve it, destroying everything in their path along the way. What made them innovative at the time was that, unlike other sci-fi monsters, they weren’t anthropomorphic (that is, they didn’t resemble human beings in any way).

They are literally machines, but machines that have been programmed with the instinct for conquest. They speak in computer voices, and yet they appear to have an emotional range, albeit an admittedly narrow one. Apart from withering contempt – “Daleks are superior!” – they also seem capable of maniacal fury, as is evident from their progressively hysterical cry of “Exterminate!”.

The Daleks’ debut, in the second serial of the first season, transmitted between December 1963 and January 1964, transformed the fortunes of the new programme overnight. They became a national talking-point, and an immediate obsession of junior viewers throughout the country. Designed by scriptwriter Terry Nation, they evoked a deliberate cultural echo of the Nazi SS, whose machine-like devotion to ruthless conquest had preoccupied the postwar generation ever since the revelations of the Nuremberg trials.

Daleks originated on the war-torn planet Skaro. Following nuclear devastation, the mutant remains of one of its indigenous races, the Kaleds, were preserved and incorporated into a metallic casing by a mutilated Kaled scientist, Davros. They were designed to be entirely without conscience, which is what led them to be able to found their own interplanetary empire, enslaving other species as they went. Since the return of Doctor Who, we have learned that the race was all but wiped out in a final grand battle with the Time Lords, but that the Dalek Emperor had survived it and gone on to breed a whole new strain of Daleks using some human DNA.

When not threatening the universe, the Daleks made very good subjects for satire. Describing somebody as a “Dalek” became a shorthand way of accusing them of soulless, bureaucratic efficiency (as when the late Dennis Potter described the then director-general of the BBC in a lecture as “a croak-voiced Dalek”). On the other hand, it was possible to feel quite affectionate towards them in a mickey-taking sort of way, as was the case with the mercifully forgotten pop single of 1964, “I’m Going To Spend My Christmas With A Dalek” by the Go Joes.

The Cybermen

The Cybermen made their first appearance in 1966, and were the creation of writers Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. In many ways similar to the Daleks, in that they were metallic control freaks, the Cybermen had the advantange of humanoid mobility. They had giant arms in which to crush their victims and, whereas the Daleks simply exterminated their enemies, the Cybermen sought to remake them in their own likeness - they would destroy the physical body of a human being, leaving only the intelligence imprisoned without emotions in a robotic shell.

If the Daleks were based on the Nazis, the inspiration for the Cybermen came from fanciful speculations about what medical science might eventually be able to achieve in the area of transplants, and how that might be perverted for abominable ends. The Cybermen simply absorb those parts of other species they think they can use in order continually to improve themselves. They are an amalgam of all the most advanced bits of their enemies.

When the Cybermen returned to Doctor Who in 2006, they had been refined. They were no longer vulnerable to gold (to which they were originally allergic), and their mouths didn’t drop open as before when they spoke, but instead contained a speech-synchronised, pulsing blue light. On the march, they looked even more terrifying than before, making an insistent crashing noise like the clattering of a million dustbin lids.

Some other monsters

• The Animus, a giant octopus that landed on the planet Vortis and corrupted the previously harmless Zarbi (8ft-long ants) to evil ways, was seen off by the first Doctor, William Hartnell, in 1965.
  
  
• In 1967, Patrick Troughton’s Doctor dispensed with the Macra, overgrown malevolent lobsters with powers of mind control.
  
  
• During Jon Pertwee’s watch in 1972, a race of raspy-breathed aquatic reptiles known as the Sea Devils were involved in attacking shipping, until the Doctor blew up their underwater base.
  
  
• Among the many life-forms Tom Baker’s Doctor had to deal with were the Krynoids - enormous, shapeless, Triffid-like green plants with telekinetic powers. In a 1976 story, they were prevented from germinating on earth when one that had hatched was destroyed in a bombing raid organised by the Doctor.
  
  
• Haemovores were partly decayed humanoids who fed on blood, vampire-fashion, and made their appearance in a 1989 story featuring Colin Baker.
  
  
• The 2005 series with Christopher Eccleston introduced us to the Gelth, a race of gaseous life-forms who had lost their bodies in the great Time War between the Time Lords and their numerous enemies.