living by my own Pro-Fun Troll Philosophy*

I complain about the Daleks (and dalek stories) a lot, I suppose, so here, I will three things I like about them.

1. I find it intriguing that Terry Nation got the idea for their design from watching ballerinas in floor-length gowns moving across the stage -- that something intended to be an image of beauty and grace could be reimagined into something so sinister and evil. Just goes to show how thin and fragile that dividing line is.



2. That they are so completely non-humanoid. Neil deGrasse Tyson would be pleased, if he knew about them.



3. That they have, almost from the very beginning, been shown to have a complete culture of their own, with its own internal hierarchies and factions and tensions. So often, the Baddies in genre fiction are just shown as a single, faceless, monolithic force. It's interesting that the one baddie who doesn't even have a face, per se, is the one that's shown to have the most personality.

What prompted this post are the after-thoughts that have been swimming around my head since I watched the three DVDs in the Peter Cushing Dr. Who boxset that gordon_r_d sent me, the other day.

( Other thoughts are: )

*For those of you who've met me Post-Radw era, that philosophy is: "Praise what you enjoy before criticizing what you don't, entice lurkers into the sunlight, and host the occasional Hoedown."