Sherlock Holmes, the Daleks and Continuity

The New Jersey PBS station NJN made three Doctor Who mini-documentaries in the 1980s and despite not having seen them for decades until finding them again recently on Youtube, I still remembered quite a bit of them. One of my clearest memories is from Doctor Who: Then and Now (1986). In it Terry Nation — creator of the Daleks — responds to a fan’s accusation that he had “messed up the continuity” between the two differing origin stories (The Daleks [1963] and Genesis of the Daleks [1975]).

That’s a phrase that fandom has somewhat gone away from. Nowadays some would call it “breaking canon” (a phrase that annoys me more than it probably should). But it is not new for fans to notice inconsistencies in fictional universes and complain about them.

Pointing out and arguing about major and minor inconsistencies in large collections of works goes back at least as far as early Biblical studies. But the more modern view of fandom can be seen in the Sherlock Holmes stories where fans wondered why the war injury that Watson suffered was described inconsistently across stories, moving between his shoulder and his leg.

There are in-universe ways and out-of-universe ways that fans have of explaining or reconciling these kinds of issues and the terms are taken from Sherlock Holmes fandom: Doylist (named after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the real-life author) or Watsonian (named after Dr. Watson who is the fictional first-person chronicler of the Sherlock Holmes adventures). In a Doylist explanation, you simply say, “Well, Doyle didn’t keep track of the details too well and he screwed up”. In a Watsonian view you can come up with a creative excuse such as, “Dr. Watson was changing details in order to keep his real life identity secret.”

This brings us back to Terry Nation’s explanation for how the Dalek origin story changed. In the first Dalek story, the Doctor are his companions are told the history of how Thals and the Dals fought each other in a neutronic war which caused both species to mutate, the Thals ending up as Aryan-looking humanoids while the Dals became reliant on radiation and needed to live inside the Dalek casings to survive.

In Genesis of the Daleks, we see the Thals and the Kaleds (no mention of the Dals) engaged in a centuries-long war of attrition where the Kaled scientist Davros enhances an existing mutation in order to develop the creatures then called the Daleks.

Here’s the full exchange between the fan and Terry Nation (edited to remove an extra question):

Fan: “[W]hen you wrote Genesis of the Daleks you messed up the continuity which was formed by the earlier Dalek stories. Are you ever going to, say, write a story which tries to join the two continuities together?

Terry Nation: “Now I don’t agree with you. I didn’t mess up on anything. I didn’t mess up the continuity; I simply saw history from another perspective. This was [sic] facts that had come into my possession and I wanted to put things straight. So Genesis of the Daleks was the new look with the new information. Interesting question and thank you for it.”

What’s amusing to watch is that while Terry Nation is polite and firm about this, his whole body language does change from the earlier questioners. He goes from a relaxed posture in the previous question to having his arms folded in front of him and looking slightly annoyed.

But what’s interesting is that what he describes (presumably off the top of his head) is a very meta combination of both a Doylist and Watsonian explanation in one, while bringing himself into the fictional universe.

A purely Watsonian view would be to posit something like “The Thal records in The Daleks were obviously incomplete and wrong, and many of them were probably corrupted during the millenia after Genesis of the Daleks.”

A Doylist view would be to say, “Well, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks thought the script I submitted was too similar to the two previous Dalek stories I’d done so they asked me to explore the Daleks’ origin, and I came up with more interesting creation story than what I originally did for The Daleks”.

But here Terry Nation is treating the televised Doctor Who stories more like a collection of docu-dramas or dramatizations of a living history. When you learn something new about the Doctor Who universe, you write a new story that brings the new information to a broader audience. Of course, that has the side effect of having us — the audience — also exist in the fictional Doctor Who universe and places Terry Nation (and the other writers) in the role of being a sort of archaeologist / historian. It’s a very fun twist on the black and white Doylist vs Watsonian discussion.

The other great thing in this video is the fan in 1986 who is clearly dressed as the Delgado Master but seems to have cosplayed as the Jonathan Pryce Master from Curse of the Fatal Death 13 years too early.