Overthinking the Destination: Skaro "controversy"
My thoughts and opinions on abled-bodied Davros in the 2023 Children in Need Doctor Who short
Davros disability discourse?
Oh yeah, Davros disability discourse.
(love the alliteration there. Didn’t think this would be the first post to go live on the site but oh well, procrastination will do that to ya, and this one is time-sensitive.)
Since 17 November, Whovians have been reacting to the decision to represent Davros, the creator of the Daleks, without his traditional Dalek-esque life support system and wheelchair. This has caused quite a stir from a wide range of people, many of whom I think are well-meaning fans who simply don’t know about the “Evil Cripple” trope, or who genuinely believe that the lore of the show precludes Davros from inclusion in the trope.
I’m gonna attempt to, in the spirit of the Doctor, show up with my two cents and hopefully, leave things in a better place.
So in case you didn’t know, Doctor Who had a short “minisode” as part of the BBC’s annual Children in Need telethon this year, to help hype up the 60th anniversary specials featuring David Tennant as the 14th Doctor. It was the first true collaboration between the programmes since 2012’s The Great Detective.
Despite a history between the two that stretches back to 1983, Doctor Who’s presence on the show had been rather lacklustre the last several years, with only clips or previews for upcoming episodes shown, if that. This was especially disappointing to longtime fans in the UK, the older ones remembering the 20th Anniversary Special “The Five Doctors,” a 90-minute special episode uniting the first five doctors, save for Tom Baker’s fourth incarnation, whose involvement was reduced to repurposed clips from an incomplete serial from his era, Shada.
So, now that I’ve padded this article with context and history in order to sound scholarly, authorial, and intelligent, let’s talk about 2023’s “Destination: Skaro”.
This, along with Russell T. Davies (RTD) and David Tennant’s return, meant hype for this short was huge, perhaps overly so, with RTD himself promising a “canon” story that was “not a sketch” on his Instagram. The special itself is fine – a short, 5ish-minute prequel of sorts to the classic story Genesis of the Daleks (1975), with lots of in-jokes and light-hearted ribbing of Who’s infamous fascist pepper shakers. It features Dalek creator Davros and fellow member of the Kaled species Castavillian in a lab with the as-yet-unnamed Dalek, merely a “Mark III travel machine.”
I’m not going to spoil anything more, but if you want to see it for yourself, the episode is available on YouTube:
But then, during the accompanying behind-the-scenes segment, Russell T. Davies said this:
“We had long conversations about bringing Davros back because he's a fantastic character, [but]…there's a problem with Davros of old, in that he's a wheelchair user, who is evil…I had problems with that, and a lot of people on the production team had problems with that; associating disability with evil – and trust me, there's a very long tradition of this. I’m not blaming people in the past, at all. But the world changes, and when the world changes, Doctor Who has to change as well….So we made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring and without…his support unit…I say this is how we see Davros, now. This is what he looks like. This is 2023, this is our lens, this is our eye, things used to be in black and white, they’re not in black and white anymore, and Davros used to look like that and he looks like this, now. And that, we are absolutely standing by.”
And the fandom exploded.
One fan reaction video features an enraged fan brandishing a Davros action figure opening with the line:
“THIS is MY Davros”
The title of another reads:
“DOCTOR WHO CANCELS DAVROS, Russell has lost his MIND!!”
Here’s what the comment section looks like on an upload of the clip featuring RTD’s quote:
For me, while I didn’t ever watch episodes featuring Davros and think “omg so ableist, cancel him NOW”, my initial reaction to RTD’s comment was something along the lines of “Yeah, okay I can see how he falls into the Evil Cripple trope, but I don’t think you need to ruin continuity over it”. I didn’t like his comments that implied we would exclusively see this version of Davros, but I agreed with his stated value of not wanting to reinforce outdated character tropes.
And this is why I think this controversy has been just that, a controversy: there are at least 3 distinct discussions going on, but everyone is treating it all like one topic.
There’s the discussion about Davros himself, focused entirely on the show, that excludes or discounts any real-world considerations in favour of continuity, lore, and canon. I’ll explain why this is misguided in a moment.
Then, there’s the discussion about whether or not “Evil Cripple” exists as a trope, which often relies on people listing off 1-3 examples, from Doctor Who or otherwise, as evidence that it doesn’t exist. This is just factually wrong, as can be proven by simply going to tvtropes.org, finding the accompanying page for “Evil Cripple,” and reading the list of examples.
Last, there’s a discussion about whether or not anyone in the fandom was upset about Davros being an ableist character before RTD made this change and his comments. I saw a lot of comments from self-identified disabled people defending wheelchair Davros, saying he never bothered them or that they even felt an extra level of connection to him, making him all the more a compelling villain.
I get the reaction to explain how Davros doesn’t fall into this trope – the urge to explain how his disfigurement is thematic and important to the character in other ways than to communicate to the audience “he’s evil because he’s disabled”. We like Doctor Who, and Davros is a cool design that evokes a “half human, half Dalek” aesthetic that is unique in the show, so when someone comes along and changes it and implies that it’s gonna get retconned for out-of-universe reasons, it makes sense to want to defend it. After all, most people don’t want to openly label themselves as bigots and will resent the implication (perceived or otherwise) that they like a character with bigoted themes.
Citing lore, past episodes, or other in-universe sources as a means to assert that Davros doesn’t fit into the Evil Cripple trope is misguided because what makes him an Evil Cripple is simply the fact that he is 1) an evil character and 2) disfigured and disabled. The definition is broad, and the mere application of the label shouldn’t be viewed as “cancelling” anything.
It’s okay to like problematic things – RTD himself said in the same quote that he isn’t blaming anyone. That said, I also think it’s prudent to make sure that the presentation of problematic tropes is done so as not to reinforce bigoted attitudes about real people. This appears to be what RTD is trying to do in his second era, being more conscious of what messages, intentional or unintentional, the show sends under his watch.
All this being said, if your problem with the change was that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with equating disability with moral alignment, fuck off.
What’s not okay is to deny what RTD is saying about this trope having a long history. This is inaccurate and ahistorical. For example, despite accounts suggesting that King Richard III only had a slightly higher shoulder than the other, Shakespeare portrayed the King as hunch-backed and decrepit, despite accounts of people who had actually seen or met the man not being able to even remember which shoulder was higher.
I do think that, with Davros specifically, there is a value in him being the halfway point between the Daleks and their predecessors, the humanoid Kaleds. The appearance of his support unit evokes the Mark III transport unit of the Dalek, itself the Mark II. Plus, by removing his disability, we are losing a disabled character (that said, it appears we are gaining one more, with Ruth Madely playing the far more likeable wheelchair using UNIT Scientific Advisor Shirley Anne Bingham in the 2023 specials). The idea of him being “half man, half Dalek” is compelling, at least to me.
Ironically, I think that as far as fixing Davros in regards to avoiding the Evil Cripple trope, the Children in Need special does that on its own, without any behind-the-scenes context from RTD. Making him evil before he was in the wheelchair removes any subtext about his disability being a factor in his morality, replacing it along the lines of “in his quest for purity, he has become something that he’d exterminate,” an irony which thematically works both with the morality tale about fascism that the Daleks represent and with his (spoiler for a 40-year-old episode of television incoming) apparent demise at the end of “Genesis of the Daleks.”
I think that Vera Wylde, discussing the controversy on her YouTube channel Council of Geeks, put it best: The solution to bad representation is MORE REPRESENTATION!