In the Ninth Doctor story “Aliens of London” (2005), the alien crime family the Slitheen fake a spaceship crash-landing in the River Thames. They lure experts of extraterrestrial life, including the “ultimate expert” in the Doctor, into a trap inside 10 Downing Street.
“My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.”
—Richard Dawkins, The Guardian (2013)
Charles Darwin invented the modern alien. That great discovery of the nineteenth century, in which Darwin played a major part, was not just a theory that life evolved. That had been argued before. No, the true innovation of Darwin’s age was to discover the evolutionary mechanism by which new species came about. Little wonder Darwin named his 1859 book, The Origin of Species. “Evolution” was not a word Darwin liked to use. “One may say,” Darwin wrote, “there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying to force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.”
Here was a natural mechanism that was not only global, but also cosmic. Extraterrestrial as well as terrestrial. It was a mechanism that canvassed continually to snuff out most traits. It kept only those traits carried by individuals who had won the struggle to survive and breed. Here was “natural selection.” The individual differences between members of a species, along with environmental factors, shape the chances that an individual will pass its traits on to posterity.
What have the writers of Doctor Who done with this evolutionary mechanism over the last five decades or so? Well, here’s the best point about all those aliens in Doctor Who. Even though science has made tremendous gains in the understanding of space during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scientists still have relatively little to say about the psychology and physiology of the alien. That’s mostly still the job of science fiction. Sci-fi has been conducting a kind of continuous thought-experiment on the matter of aliens for a few centuries. And Doctor Who has been doing so for over half a century.
So let’s take a look at the last five decades of Doctor Who aliens. A word of warning: you won’t find the Silurians. Even though the Third Doctor referred to the Silurians as aliens, he soon learned they had ruled on planet Earth millions of years before.
Late in their evolution, of course, the Daleks would hide deep down in their robot shells. And yet, inside those shells are living creatures, evolved and mutated from aliens known as the Kaleds, one of the humanoid races that originally inhabited the planet Skaro. The “mad doctor” Davros engineered the creatures to believe every other race inferior and to become hell-bent on conquering the Whoniverse. Dalek-creator Terry Nation based his invention on the Nazis. And when you watch the Daleks armed with this knowledge, their behavior makes a lot more sense! As Peter Grehan points out in his excellent 2016 book Connecting Who: Artificial Beings, in the very first two stories, the Daleks even make the Nazi salute. In “Genesis of the Daleks,” the uniform of the Kaleds is very SS-like, and Nyder’s badge had to be removed because it was too similar to the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) badge. Davros, incidentally, is the leader of a scientific elite. They have gradually usurped the power of the legitimate Kaled government, with the support of a quasi-military organization that wear black uniforms bearing insignia reminiscent of lightning bolts, and who salute each other by raising a hand, palm outward, and clicking the heels together—ring any bells? And a final clue, should there be any doubt: Nyder, the bespectacled commander of this organization, wears an Iron Cross (although this was removed for subsequent episodes). In short, Nyder is a parallel to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, and Davros, a brilliant madman who, having maneuvered himself into a position of power, is obsessed with the creation of a “master race,” is Hitler, while the Daleks themselves are composite creatures of various Nazi characteristics.
The Weeping Angels are a fascinating example of sci-fi writers going mad with the evolutionary mechanism idea. In this case that mechanism is a defense tactic known as quantum-locking. The Weeping Angels are meant to be an ancient race that dates back to the beginning of the Whoniverse. How did they last that long? This is where quantum-locking comes in. They move silently and quickly to kill their prey. When observed by any living creature (including other Weeping Angels), they turn to stone, making them resistant to harm. When they’re not being observed, they can come to life; quickly! That’s why it’s not a good idea to even blink anywhere near one of these guys. (Another quota of evolutionary quirk is the idea that the Angels dump their victims by zapping them across time, so they can feed off the time energy. Whatever that is.) Actually, thinking once again about the quantum-locking mechanism: Does this mean Weeping Angels have to breed blindfolded?
To be truly extraterrestrial you merely need to be from a planet other than Earth, even if that planet is Mars or Earth’s fictional twin planet Mondas. Mondas was the original home of the Cybermen. Like us, they’re human in form, but they’ve been stripped of all emotion, and enhanced by cybernetic body parts. And yet, they have a weakness. The element gold is the Cybermen’s Kryptonite. It plays havoc with their breathing, or something. For example, one of the Cybermen had his tongue pierced and paid the price by choking to death. (Actually, I just made up that last fact, but it’s true about gold being their Kryptonite.)
Another impossibilist evolutionary mechanism idea comes in the form of the Silence. Sure, they’re creepy. And sure they’re so obviously modeled on Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream, famous for its agonized face, which has become one of the most iconic images of art, seen as symbolizing the anxiety of modern man. But the creepiest thing about the Silence is the fact they’ve been living alongside humans for thousands of years. And yet no one has ever remembered seeing them. In a kind of reverse-engineer of the quantum-locking mechanism of the Weeping Angels, as soon as you turn your back or look away from the Silence, you forget about them. Evolutionarily speaking, we must assume this mechanism doesn’t work on the Silence themselves, otherwise they’d have had a troubled history in social gatherings.
Possibly a more believable alien race are the Vashta Nerada. They’re microscopic critters that live in shady swarms, casting creepy shadows when they emerge into the light. They live on almost every planet that has meat, so that includes you and yours. (One assumes they get from planet to planet inside space-faring human meat, which is also a rather creepy idea.) The story goes that they first emerged as tiny spores in trees, larking about in forests, but soon got bored and decided instead to strip your body down to bare bone. And just in case you think the Vashta Nerada are a fictional exaggeration, consider the parasitic wasp. Also known as the jewel wasp, the parasitic wasp goes up to an insect and, by imparting a sting into the brain, turns it into a kind of zombie. The wasp then pulls the insect into the wasp’s nest, and wasp eggs are planted in the sealed nest. When the baby wasps are born, they eat the insect alive from the inside, in a special order, to keep it alive for as long as possible, so that the insect meat doesn’t fall off too quickly.
The curious-looking Ood are another humanoid alien. They have no voice, but they can communicate instead by the power of thought. One can only wonder in amazement as to how this little ability evolved. The Ood also have two brains. One brain is in the head (normal). The second brain they hold in their hands; it’s connected by a kind of cord to their faces. Let’s just say: highly improbable and laughably impractical. What’s the evolutionary advantage of the opposable thumb if you have to carry your brain wherever you may roam? (More trivial and juvenile questions include: Do they munch Ood food? Is their family unit known as an Ood brood? And, when they get grumpy, are they in an Ood mood?)
The Slitheen are the most famous family of farting aliens in the Whoniverse. These Raxacoricofallapatorians are rotund of habit, eight feet tall, and have powerful claws. (The powerful claws are great for hunting, fighting, and generally scaring weaker species, but not so good for constructing intricate high-tech devices, changing a tire, or making sandwiches.) They are able to hide in the skins of humans, and other victims, by using a gas collar, worn around their necks, which allows them to fart out any excess gas (it’s usually a tight squeeze, slipping into a human skin). One assumes that, before they had the necessary tech to invent the gas collar, the Slitheen simply bound about on Raxacoricofallapatorius, without the need for farting tech. (Incidentally, the Slitheen’s gas collar looks remarkably similar to the patch on the tummy of the Teletubbies, though everyone seems to be mysteriously quiet about that . . . )
These three-fingered, toad-faced humanoid aliens are a militaristic species dedicated to a warring life. Being clones, they were batch-created in millions, and on a planet with more gravity than Earth’s. Thus the Sontarans are short but strong. (They’re also not very funny and totally devoid of humor. Unlike many species they also wear helmets that are exactly the same shape as their heads, somewhat like a jelly mold.) Like the Cybermen, the Sontarans also have a curious Kryptonite. Their weak spot is this: they can easily be stunned by a blow to a vent at the back of their necks. This makes it very advisable that they should always stay face-on to enemies in battle.