So, The Outer Limits is not the only monster-heavy Science Fiction series to be celebrating a sixtieth anniversary this year—in fact, only a month or two separates the debut of that series and the debut of the BBC’s own Doctor Who, which I have written about before as a Creature Classic. That means another series of posts about classic television for the next few months, with each entry analyzing a monster-focused storyline from multiple eras of the show. Considering that its original run lasted for twenty-six years, from 1963 to 1989, and its current one has been airing for eighteen, there are a lot of different eras to choose from.
Even so, I think it’s best to go back to the beginning (or close to the beginning, at least), not only to the original cast, but to the very first, and ultimately most famous, monsters to appear on the show. As I laid out in the “Ark in Space” Creature Classic, the original direction for Doctor Who was for it to avoid Science Fiction cliches in its tales of alien time travellers, which included the deployment of “bug-eyed monsters”—but writer Terry Nation had already penned a storyline, submitted under the title “The Mutants” (although back then, each episode had its own title), involving a battle against an alien foe on a distant planet, and a lack of other suitable scripts meant that his serial was not only given the greenlight, but ended up the second aired story in the series’ history. That in turn meant that, almost as soon as Doctor Who started, it was already moving away from its own internal edicts, and would only move further away when audiences got a glimpse of the first alien menace to appear on the show.
That serial introduced the Daleks, which Nation had specified in the script would be “legless”—it was up to series production designer Raymond Cusick to come up with a final design, a job that was originally assigned to another BBC employee who became unavailable…Ridley Scott (seriously.) It was Cusick who gave the Daleks their distinct pepper pot shape, an inhuman, mechanical appearance that immediately set them apart from the men-in-suits aliens of so much of the 1950s creature features—combined with their staccato, electronically-modified voices, they became mass culture figures almost instantly, recognizable to the large swathe of public in the UK. They became so popular that not only were they figures of reference and parody, and not only was their debut story the basis for the Amicus-produced film version starring Peter Cushing, but Terry Nation, who maintained a controlling stake in them, even attempted to create separate Dalek media projects outside the BBC, sometimes leading to periods where they did not appear on Doctor Who itself. As I said in the older post, the reason why Doctor Who has continued to make imaginative monsters such a core part of its identity is almost certainly because of the perfect notes that Cusick and Nation manage to hit at the beginning of the series.
A follow-up to the original story—now generally referred as “The Daleks”—was essentially guaranteed, and so in the second season, Nation was back again to apply a novel twist to the Daleks: bringing them to our planet. This is the central conceit of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, which aired in six parts from November 21st to December 26th 1964, once again the second storyline in the line-up. As the original Daleks story inadvertently set the tone of the series by introducing iconic monsters, this story evolved the series’ approach to monsters by introducing the conceit of monsters appearing in familiar English locations, contrasting the everyday with the extraordinary, which would prove to be one of the series’ frequently recurring motifs.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 