The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out around now, ish,
and amongst many other wondrous things it contains a little article by me about
the Daleks’ greatest masterplans. It was a fun piece to write and research, and
looking at all the stories in sequence gave me a new appreciation for just how
good some of them are (Power Of The Daleks and Genesis Of The Daleks really
stood out) and how consistent and logical the Daleks’ development throughout
the series was. Of course, a few things leapt out at me – it’s bizarre that in
The Daleks’ Masterplan they don’t recognise the Doctor, for instance, and the time-travel
logic of Day Of The Daleks doesn’t bear close scrutiny – but on the whole I’d say that Daleks have always brought out
the best in Doctor Who and have participated in the best stories.
The other interesting thing for me - without wishing to get
all ‘The Writer Speaks’ – was to look at each of the Daleks’ stories from the
villains’ perspective and see how much sense they made that way around. Because
I think in the best stories the antagonists’ storyline is as strong and logical
as that of the protagonist. The antagonist should have a clear goal, and should
be taking the shortest possible route to reach it, and should the protagonist
get in the way, they will do the simplest and most effective thing to overcome
the protagonist. In short, everything that applies for the protagonist applies
for the antagonist, because, as far as the antagonist is concerned, they are
the protagonist and the protagonist is the antagonist. If you follow my
meaning. Everyone is the hero of their own story. Even the villain. Particularly the villain.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a route to better stories but
certainly, if a story isn’t working, one possible way of ‘debugging’ it might
be to look at it from the bad guy’s point of view. Because weak stories tend to
result from villains’ having overcomplicated, illogical, arbitrary plans;
villains taking a route from a to b via the rest of the alphabet or behaving
conveniently stupidly. The most memorable example I can think of is in The Man
With The Golden Gun, where Scaramanga has James Bond at his mercy, but instead
of shooting him in the head and dumping the body over a cliff, he enrols him in
kung-fu college. It makes no sense and undermines both the villain and the
hero; the villain is undermined because he’s an idiot, the hero is undermined
because he hasn’t managed to defeat an idiot.
It also tends to happen when a story isn’t being generated
by the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist’s goals, but where it
has been constructed out of set-pieces or other considerations, or where a
story has been started before the antagonist’s plan has been decided, and so
their plan ends up being an afterthought, cobbled-together out of unresolved
plot threads, where every loose end and coincidence is explained away as being
part of their implausible scheme. But the best evil schemes are those that are
best-laid, calculated, rational and efficient. And villains should be defeated
by the hero’s virtues, not through their own shortcomings and carelessnesses
(because otherwise, you’re left wondering if it was necessary for the hero to
be present for the villain’s plan to fail).
Anyway, DWM 447, out now, buy it, it has lots of Daleks on
the front.