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The Daleks: A Motion Picture · The Difference Engine Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: The homeworld of the Daleks is planet Skaro.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Survivors of a nuclear war, the Daleks have re-engineered their species
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: from human-like beings into cyborgs.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Their tank-like robotic shells and the Nazi behaviour of the beasts inside are
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: the brainchild of a mad scientist called Dabros.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Davros is the boffin-in-chief of the Khalids, the race that became the Daleks.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, keen listeners may already have noted that the word Dalek is an anagram of Khalid.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: So Davros was charged with the task of finally ending the Thousand-Year War
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: with the neighbouring Thals.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: The first Dalek story was simply called, rather imaginatively, The Daleks.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: As the plot develops, we learn about their retreat into the metal shells,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: their hiding place in which their emotions start to shrivel.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: This idea that they were once better people makes them even more horrifying,
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: as we may dread becoming like them in the future.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: For viewers of Doctor Who in 1963, of whom I was one, the script seemed more scary than today.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in viewers' minds,
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: and the surface of Scarrow looked like the world after the nuclear war.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: In 1963, the Daleks were a very real nightmare,
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: the kind of creatures that would drop a nuclear bomb without the blinking
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: of an eyestalk.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Later we discover Davros the Badass.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: He spends his time weaponising a way in which the race can live on beyond the end of the war.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Shades of a thousand-year Reich.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the Dalek's backstory is essentially a military R&D enterprise.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same here on Earth.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Endless war remains a major trigger for tech,
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: with wartime resources conjured up in ways they simply aren't
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: for peacetime projects.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, we can read the Dalek tale as a story based on a Manhattan project to build
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: an atomic weapon before Hitler.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: But what about the biology of the Daleks?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Once they say goodbye to their humanoid form, It's a brave new world indeed.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Mysterious creatures locked in the dark prison of that robotic shell.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: We learn that the Daleks become a space-faring and then even a time-faring species.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: We also learn that they conquer planets across the breadth of the universe.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in the face of this incredible, if somewhat fascistic journey,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: how did they ensure creature comforts within those dark shells?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: In short...
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: How did the Daleks defecate?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is, of course, mildly juvenile to suggest that one of the mitigating factors
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: in the infamously bad temperament of the Daleks is their inability
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: to achieve biological release.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, to answer the scientific question as to how Daleks defecate,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: we first have to think about the very nature of the Dalek and then think
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: about how its biology might work.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So what actually constitutes a Dalek?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Consider the creature inside that robotic shell.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Beneath the armour sits a mutant.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: You see the anatomy plainly.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: What most people think of as a Dalek is actually the machine
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: that carries these creatures around.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the actual Dalek is the being that lives inside the shell.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: 100% engineered mutants of pure hatred for all other forms of life.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: The machine shell is little more than a battle tank.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: It hides a war computer and a support system to keep alive the murderous creature.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: The Daleks, by the way, have no gender.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're neither male nor female.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Deep down, though, hidden in their biology,
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: they may still have some way of giving birth to live young.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: After all, Daleks were originally created from humanoids.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: In the labs where the Daleks are made,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: they use cells to clone other creature Daleks,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: so one Dalek can produce thousands of copies of itself during its lifetime.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: As a single Dalek may live for a million years, if only one Dalek survives,
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: it's capable of booting up an entirely new Dalek army all by itself.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: That Dalek shell can be tweaked to make a support system.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: The design is based on Davros' own life mobility scooter.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Since the Dalek is a cyborg,
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: this system has to join up the org bits of the Dalek with the cyber bits
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: of the robotic shell.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Daleks are able to have lunch Because the support system would include some kind
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: of nutrient stream that is fed directly into their organic parts.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: In the same way, their waste products would be removed like a dialysis machine works for humans.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: To make sure a Dalek doesn't defecate on duty,
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: they could have control over the emptying of their waste tanks.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, like trains parked at railway stations,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Daleks are not allowed to defecate while stationary.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps they defecate only when in motion, if you pardon the pun.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Your mission now, should you choose to accept it,
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: is to look back over the Doctor Who episodes that feature the Daleks.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: You might like to see if you can spot a Dalek voiding its tank while on the go.