I.
In the Doctor Who serial Genesis of the Daleks we uncover the backstory behind the Doctor’s perennial opponent, the Dalek race. As with most villains in post-war popular culture, the Daleks are “the Nazis”—their manipulative robotic arms are even locked in a permanent Roman salute, and their catchphrase is “Exterminate! Exterminate!”. All higher life in the universe will either be bent to their will or exterminated—the Daleks have been bred to be utterly without pity, then placed in their robotic cases (technically, “the Dalek travel machine” but synonymous with the genetically augmented creature that resides within).
In Genesis, the Doctor is sent to the Dalek homeworld, Skaro, just as the creatures are created. He is tasked by his own race, the ever-vigilant Timelords, with a mission to stop the Daleks before they start—effectively, to abort them. The scenario on Skaro is as follows: the planet’s two primary races, the Thals and Kaleds, have waged a generations-long total “forever war” between each other (have a go at an anagram for “Kaleds”, crypto freaks); and the war has been so prolonged that they have degenerated from advanced laser weapons to WWI-style battle gear. The remains from both races, having poisoned the planet with nuclear and biological warfare, have retreated to two vast domes that cover underground bunker complexes. From these domes, they launch futile attacks across no-man’s land—the implication is that the stalemate has persisted for decades, if not centuries.
Deep beneath the Kaled dome, as the Doctor soon discovers, lies the mad mutant scientist Davros. He leads an “elite scientific corps” that is black-clad, clip their heels together, and wear the lightning flash (i.e. it’s the SS). Davros is a bona fide genius; his “unique formula” protects the Kaled dome from penetration by Thal missiles and he even whipped up an artificial heart to save an associate. Davros has worked out that the Kaled race has been irredeemably corrupted at the genetic level by exposure to chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare; hence he has decided to accelerate and control the mutation to its final form (albeit with a few tweaks along the way)—not an anthropoid but rather a green spongey blob with a tentacle or two. The Davros scheme to save his race is to accelerate the inevitable, tweak the mutation to increase its “survival value”, and then place it in the “Dalek travel machine” (life is pretty limited as a small green spongey creature, otherwise).
This is “the genesis of the Daleks”; note, it’s a “genesis”—it’s biblical. It’s notable because other Doctor Who serials have quite pedestrian descriptive names like The Solatran Invasion or Rendezvous on Altari. Yet here it’s an evocative title: genesis—the beginning; from the show’s perspective “the origin of all evil”, just like the snake in Eden. Since the show is progressive liberal in orientation, “evil” means masculine hierarchical warlike organisation.
The Doctor, as a character, actually is a woman; he looks at the proud soldiers on both sides and just sees “silly boys playing with their pop guns”—and that’s how women look on boys “silly men with their silly little games of soldiers”. He’s finally glad to speak to the staff when he arrives at the Davros lab because “they’re scientists”—he can reason with them, unlike soldiers (narrative: science is our religion, all scientists are well-intentioned). The implication is progressive: if people weren’t “educated for war” on the playground, they would be naturally peaceful. The Doctor is like a mother who intervenes between two brothers in a fist-fight or between “boys playing rough”, she prises them apart and tells them to stop “this nonsense”.
The alternative view is that life is war and, as with the Spartans, you play war games to prepare you for what is an existential struggle in the adult world where there is no mother to prise “boys playing rough” apart and to tisk tisk them. In the previous article, I mentioned the nationalist streamer Millennial Woes, an aficionado for Doctor Who as a child; yet Woes himself mentions that he no longer sees Davros as “evil”, because he grew up—and that is true, Doctor Who is for children and it teaches the values of mummy’s nursery (war is a funny silly thing men do—itself a flirtatious counter-signal by a woman aroused by knee-high riding boots, clipped heels, and the goose step).
So in a way the serial subverts Christian morality: genesis—the genesis of evil—doesn’t start with temptation from a woman, it starts because “boys are being boys”; and they need “mum”, the Doctor, to come in and tell them to “stop being silly” and stop “playing Alexander the Great” (as the Doctor says to one arrogant officer); and perhaps, perhaps, to weep for all the people who have died. Anyway, the serial is mythical stuff—for a popular culture children’s show—and what it wants to do is restructure mythology in a pro-feminine way.
II.
Now Davros is a curious creature himself; he is a sexless mutant, being crippled—and there’s an irony in that because the Kaleds (perhaps the Thals too) hurl out “mutos” to die (or survive at a primitive level) in the wastelands. As an aside, there’s some amusement here because the mutants descend on the Doctor’s female assistant at one point and say, “She is a ‘norm’—all norms must die,” and this recalls the alt-right’s disdain a few years ago for “normies” and also cock-tease thots (there was even a book about the alt-right called Kill All Normies). The vision anachronistically conjured up is that the mutos are spergy NEETs descending on a normie woman to pull her apart (very red-pilled).
And yet, the Kaleds haven’t thrown Davros out—even though he is withered and has no eyes. The point with the way Davros remains “inside the dome” is to make the Kaleds look like hypocrites; they have this quasi-Greek policy where deformed children are cast into the wastelands to die, yet the man they depend on to survive (he built their protective roof-shield) is himself a mutant. Irony.
The idea this sets up is that deformed people are not in fact a burden, malicious, or evil but are actually highly capable—perhaps the most able in society—and that even so-called “eugenic” societies actually depend on them (if only they weren’t so prejudiced, think how great they could be). It’s a semiotic anchor that discredits the Kaled worldview from the moment you see Davros.
It also sets up the idea that Davros, in his search for “race perfection”, is himself driven by psychological compensation. The trope is familiar: “Hitler only had one ball”, “Goebbels had a limp”, “Himmler was ugly”—and yet these men, these cretins, had the audacity to demand a “master race”. To channel Stefan Molyneux, “Not an argument”. I mean, perhaps you are an ugly creature but perhaps you also aspire to improve and transcend ugliness in the next generation. The liberal response would be, perhaps, “Just accept people as they are, accept yourself—accept everybody.” The Nietzschean shudders, “I’m stepping over myself, I’m after transcendence.”
Davros is, of course, Moriarty to the Doctor’s Holmes—the Doctor is also sexless and is somewhat deviant, since he actually stole his time machine, the TARDIS, and is, in fact, a “freelance” Timelord (occasionally reigned in by his race for special assignments—the implication is again liberal, the good person is the guy who bucks the rules; he stole something but he stole it to save weak people so it was actually “good stealing”). Davros is a “male mother”; he gives birth to “children”, the Daleks; and the Doctor has a similar relationship with his companions, humans he adopts to share his adventures—though he is a purely “sterile mother” (there is a parallel, as discussed elsewhere, between the child molester’s fantasy and the Doctor—the mysterious stranger who whisks you to a “secret” world in his magic box, hence child molesters are often Doctor Who fans. But I digress).
III.
In Genesis, the Dalek race gestates in an underground bunker—the bunker is a womb. It’s why the serial is so cozy, a cozy catastrophe (a British specialty); although it’s all about bleak post-apocalyptic devastation, it’s mostly set in bunkers—and the bunker is the womb; it’s Mother Earth that keeps you safe from nerve gas and radiation. I swear I know what the bunkers smell like too—just like those old stainless steel radiator ducts at school clogged with dust and fluff that get very hot in the winter, so that the dust almost burns.
There’s a paradox in Genesis because “the womb”, the safe bunker, actually contains monsters—the Daleks. One way to read the situation is that regression to the womb births monsters: failure to separate from the maternal causes men to birth monsters—the Daleks are an ultra-masculine compensation; hence the proverbial NEET who lives at home with his “chicken tendies” becomes an unironic neo-Nazi to compensate for his feminised state.
I don’t think that’s true; people don’t “turn Davros”—turn to the far-right—to escape “smother love”. If you look at men like the nationalist speaker Jonathan Bowden and Millennial Woes, it’s actually the opposite. Bowden’s mother died when he was young and Woes lived with his father (his parents are divorced) until the media uncovered his career as a “vile vlogger” (i.e. a nationalist YouTuber). In both cases, it’s not a retreat to the womb that caused a turn to the far-right—perhaps that aetiology is a better explanation for the far-left—rather, it was “mother absence”, pure paternal presence, that caused a turn to the radical right.
That’s because the pure paternal view offers absolute justice and no mercy—it’s very harsh; and if you’re mainly with your father, with little or no maternal influence, you will absorb unmediated masculinity (and, though the masculine is severely disprivileged today, that’s also a disorder; although it’s rare now, mostly it’s a divorce with the mother who has custody today).
To pick on another contemporary figure seen as “on the right” (mistakenly), Andrew Tate is not very masculine—in fact Bowden and MW are more masculine than Tate (despite poor physiques). The reason is that for all his manly bluster—his fast cars and tarts and muscles—Tate is a narcissist; he was raised by a single mother, everything he does is for show—just like a woman. Bowden and Woes, by contrast, though less masculine in the superficial “kick-boxer with fast cars” sense are more masculine in the substantial sense (i.e. they’re more “rough-housing lads”, less precious, and actually are substantial people not preening narcissists—the flip-side being that it’s easy to imagine them living in the proverbial man-cave, in semi-filth, with crusty cum socks and half-empty Coke cans, whereas the prissy Tate undoubtedly lives in some mid-2000s antiseptic modernist apartment).
To return to Genesis, the whole womb idea is further extended because, at the end, the Doctor is such a good liberal he cannot “exterminate” even a race that is absolute evil—even the Daleks, like the habitual murderer-rapist, deserve “a chance”. In the end, the Daleks are entombed in the their bunker thanks to a cave-in induced by high explosives detonated by a resistance group organised by the Doctor—the womb becomes the tomb.
It is this womb-tomb dynamic that explains why the “Dalek compensation” model doesn’t quite work. The tomb is a womb, the empty tomb. As noted previously, Davros has an electronic “third eye” and that is because he actually stands for spiritual awakening and the masculine objectivity that comes with it—particularly the Indo-Aryan kind, his “third eye” is even the right colour for that chakra (it’s almost like there’s an esoteric war, natch). To spiritually awaken, you have to undergo a “second birth”—to be Aryan literally means to be “twice born”; it’s a rebirth that doesn’t require women—it’s a self-sufficient rebirth, hence the awakened man becomes “a law unto himself”. Symbolically, Davros has retreated to the “second womb”, his bunker, and there he has become a “male mother”—he has given birth to the Daleks, he has been reborn. In the end, the Daleks will escape their tomb-womb and rove the universe.
Once this dimension to “the bunker” has been understood, the point becomes more clear. The Doctor is feminine; he is the nagging mother who says, “What are you doing in your room? You better not be creating a genetically-augmented master race in there!”. The Doctor doesn’t want there to be rebirth, he doesn’t want the tomb to be empty—indeed, the whole serial is a play on “would you kill Hitler as a child?”, with actual dialogue that alludes to “would you kill an innocent child” if he grew to be “pure evil” (so it’s also about abortion, race abortion—of the Daleks; and the Doctor can’t do it, because abortion can’t be “eugenic”; it has to be a “personal choice”—if it’s a broad policy, it becomes “evil” for liberals; it might be aimed at the creation of something higher through the removal of the inferior, whereas if it’s just an individual emotional choice, “my choice”, it can’t be so).
The Doctor represents the feminine narcissism that cannot stand the idea that a man might subsist without “a woman”—without being “inclusive” as regards other dependent organisms (of which a woman is one). This is presented as merciful and good, the Timelords being obviously angel-like creatures who aristocratically “guard time”—except the Doctor is actually a renegade angel (played, in this serial, by Tom Baker—himself a renegade monk who abandoned the monastery for satyriasis and a stage career). Rhetorical question: what do we call “renegade angels”? What the Doctor wants to prevent—and the Timelords, who may not be “angels” themselves exactly—is spiritual rebirth, a self-sufficient masculine activity connected to war, austerity, and discipline.
IV.
Whether the “regression to the womb” constitutes a deviation depends on whether or not you are a woman or take the feminine perspective, whether or not you fear that your womb will be “replaced”—either with literal artificial wombs as some technical people daydream about, or with some spiritual enlightenment that leads to a rebirth that transcends matter (feminine). The journey “into the bunker” is analogous to Dante’s entry into Hell—he has to go into Hell, climb down the Devil’s fur, to reach Heaven (beneath the Devil there is a mountain that goes upwards, Mount Meru—the magical world is topsy-turvy). In the bunker’s case, we go down into the roots—into feminine nature—to protect ourselves as we gestate into a higher entity (represented in a material techno-scientific form as the Daleks in Doctor Who, because that is the only “rebirth” comprehensible to moderns).
Feminised men will warn other men against “the descent into Hell” and that is because they are the “uncommitted” or lukewarm who moan outside the gates of Hell—the greatest punishment, so weak sauce you’re not even eligible to be condemned to Hell (let alone be rewarded). Notably, Jordan Peterson is adamant that people should not “go to Hell” or be “in Hell”; and that is because he doesn’t want people to enter “the womb” and be reborn—to be reborn you have to go into the matrix (mother, mater, earth—the natural world, Hell) to be reborn on the other side.
If you fail to do so, you end up dominated by it because you have not confronted it; and that’s where Doctor Who wants you to remain, just a child scolded by “mother” outside the gates of Hell—dominated by Hell because you refuse to “abandon hope” and begin the journey through Hell to salvation. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter in,” says the sign above Hell’s entrance—the first step to Heaven is to give up hope and get real. The people who never start the journey stand outside and say, “Well, I like everybody and everybody is valuable to me, mutants and norms alike,” and that is a lie.
“I’ve given up hope, I’m going in.” You notice that Davros, who has abandoned hope, does actually create things—he creates a whole race, protects his race with a special dome, and even saves one fellow scientist’s life with an artificial heart as a young man. What does “the Doctor” actually create? Doesn’t he in fact travel through space and time (in a stolen time machine) meddling where he is not wanted and convincing gullible young people to join his adventures (at what cost to their lives?)—isn’t the Doctor really a “live, love, laugh” liberal on a jaunt to Thailand to get some new photos for Facebook or Instagram? Sure, he’s superficially charming—but he’s not serious, he has no stake (and is, in fact, in exile from his homeworld); he doesn’t create anything and that’s because real creation involves “evil”, the interplay between good and evil.
The Doctor is just childish, just a woman, just “good”; and that’s why he can’t create—that’s why he’s a hero for children (for good girls and boys). Davros, on the other hand, much maligned (because envied), actually creates—arguably, he just saved his entire race (itself locked in a life or death struggle with another race) and does that make him bad? What grounds do we have to think that the Thals, who try to nuke the Kaleds in the story, are any better? Actually, they are portrayed as better because the storyline needs a “democratic” counterpart to the “fascistic” Kaleds—even though the Thals eventually wipe out the Kaled dome with a nuclear strike; in truth, for liberals it is acceptable to “genocide”…fascists; and that’s because liberals are hypocrites. What does “the Doctor”, a tourist, really care about what happens to the Kaleds and Thals anyway?
V.
It would be conceivable to change the semiotics around Davros. Imagine if he were instead a tall, blond, and handsome man who, quite reasonably, explained to you why he has to genetically engineer his people to save them from the mutations that are inevitable anyway—and why he euthanises mutated children because their lives, if allowed to live, would be too terrible to endure (cast into the wasteland). Imagine if he were more like the character Ozymandius, depicted below—a gay god-genius who loves cats (gay men often like their cats); he is the same archetype as Davros (he also has an “evil” scheme to save the world in Watchmen)—yet, in fact, Alan Moore, a leftist, demonises him too (though not as much as Davros, Moore is more mature than that).
Davros is only depicted as monstrously ugly due to projection: to the spiritually dead, people who are spiritually awakened and procreative seem “twisted and ugly”—and that’s down to envy and an unwillingness to engage with the “evil” (the bunker, the matrix, the mater, the mother) that makes any real creation possible. The proletariat are literally “the child-bearers”, even their men are feminised—the aristocracy gives birth to non-human children (whether marble statues or Daleks).
Still, it would be more just to depict Davros as like Ozymandias. It’s only because Doctor Who is designed to program children to think that they are “innocents” and that, frankly, “the father” is evil—and that self-sufficient creation is evil (i.e. to master nature, to master Hell, to master the woman is “evil”—from the woman’s perspective, from the Devil’s perspective). This serial is a microcosm for almost all popular entertainment (popular education), children’s programs, video games, and so on—and it’s purposefully done to keep people enslaved to Satan, to destroy integrity with the illusion that you’re a “good” person and, therefore, innocent. In actuality, you have to descend to the bunker to become a “procreative man”; not in the false sense, as when you’re outfitted with an artificial womb and pretend to be a woman, but in the real sense—when the third eye opens.