(Snip)
...Wow. I had honestly never viewed them as thinly-veiled Axis analogies before, but that makes their personalities and motivations so much more contextual. Assuming this was the basis for their personalities originally, or if it's just utter coincidence that they line up so seamlessly, it's a perfect fit.
Close enough, I'll grant you.
Bear in mind that Doctor Who started in 1963, with Daleks appearing in the
second storyline and Cybermen about three years later, IIRC. The key writers involved would have grown up through WW2, giving loads of scope for taking inspiration from "the Nazi menace" of the time, so I think "Nazi Daleks" could be a given.
OTOH, it's a bit harder to work out whether writing sympathies (creatives at the BBC often being assumed to have left-leaning ideologies, at least by the more vocal right-wing detractors!) might have let them present the "old ally" of Russia, which had now been best part of two decades in a Cold War stalemate with the 'West', as something not at all desirable.... Crushing of personality, suppressing of free-thought, indoctrinating and converting the Warsaw Pact populations towards communistic lines. Of course, they could have been socialist without being Stalinist, and I do think it's not a
total coincidence that these manipulative processes can apply both to "Good Communists, true to the State" and the cyberconverted.
(Um, I'm deliberately leaving any spoilering in the following as vague and non-specific. Should any of the following apply to Doctor Who fiction that you are yet to experience, there
may be some small bits of information that will at that future time pop into your head, although I doubt it'll be coherently so, so you
might want to consider not reading further if you're sensitive about such things
and have some form of eidetic memory... (Plus there's an "it's what starts the movie!" plot-point about Star Trek VI, in a footnote!))
New Who has a few points against this being a
continued analogy (but, then again by now Russians are generally 'the good guys', or at least not so utterly isolated behind nigh-on-impregnible walls of ideology[1], and perhaps someone else is being "bad old Russian" in a similar way) including the fact that "Pete's World" cybermen were created by probably the biggest and baddest raging
capitalist of that particular parish. And can the latest incarnations of the Dalek be equivalenced to any current contemporary threat? There's perhaps something to be said that Dalek Sec and his fellow Cult Of Skaro crew are acting the part of a terrorist cell (but then who does the massed Dalek menace of later timelock-loophole-induced conflicts represent?), but I'm more inclined to put the Weeping Angles into this role ("most dangerous when you can't see them")... Which is not to say that there can't be a whole load of
different terrorists (and there are other candidates, or individuals, with their own atrocities in mind).
Oh, and what sort of creature in our non-Whoniverse world is The Master an equivalent? And can we
even reconcile the Time Lords of old (perhaps being a "Western Power" of some kind, but one largely reluctant to interfere with more primitively developed/'ideologied' peoples) with the "We're the power, and we're the one's who will decide if the Universe has a future!" of the Timothy Dalton interference? And can the Ood be said to be a "nation", or perhaps more a form of mentality that exists across national boundaries?
[1] And just check Star Trek, as per my previous off-hand comment. With TOS being made during the height of the Cold War and with a fully 'Nortamericano' perspective being taken on this 'Wagon Train in Space' program, Klingon/Soviet encounters were Cold-War-like (even unto the 'submarine/submarine-hunting games' they played), the Japanese/Vulcans the source of interesting technologies and logical thinking, the Chinese/Romulans being yet another secretive and 'un-American' group of people
looked similar to the J/Vs, even, but kept themselves isolated. But through the later films and certainly by the time of TNG a Klingon version of Glastnost had occurred (hmmm... also Chernobyl might have also inspired ST6's explosion of the moon Praxis that came to the screen no more than a handful of years later) whereupon friendships between the nations were wrought anew (even while the Romulans remained aloof, although even
they've caved in a
bit, recently, in the relative Trek time-line). But I'll leave it up to others to work out how TNG/DS9/Voyager counterpart enemies such as The Borg (Cybermen themselves in many ways), the various monomaniac influences from the Q Continuuum, Ferengi, Cardassians, Odo's people and Species 8472, amongst others, fit into the respectively contemporary Earth politics. (Although, if you ask
certain people you might get an argument that the Bajorans are Jewish, recently reclaimed their Israel from the Arabic Cardassians... But it could as easily be a reversed metaphor of the Palestinians having
got to the stage of getting their homeland back, contemporaneous with one of our
possible futures! But that's a quicksand-infested discussion area, beware!)
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Topic: !!DALEKS!! and Introducing: Cybermen! (Read 77693 times)