Star Trek rules the world of racial allegories with an iron tricorder. There's the amazing "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield," as pictured above - the Cherons are half black, half white, but they discriminate based on which half is which. They're such awful bigots, flames appear in front of their faces whenever they start running. It must make running a marathon kind of a challenge:



Also, in the book New Boundaries In Political Science Fiction, Wanda Raiford makes a strong argument that when Data is put on trial in the episode "Measure Of A Man," it's presented as a version of the Supreme Court's famous Dred Scott case, only this time the court rejects slavery. Also, Spock's "half-breed interference" is frequently brought up, holograms like Voyager's Doctor are discriminated against based on their photons, and alien prejudice is rife. As Tom Lehrer would say, "the Romulans hate the Vulcans, the Bajorans hate the Cardassians, and everyone hates the Ferengi."

Battlestar Galactica - the new version - also gets into racism with the use of the epithet "toaster" for the Cylons. As New Boundaries notes, Baltar's "Head Six" actually refers to "toaster" as a "racial epithet" and pleads with Baltar to stop Cally from saying it in one scene. Baltar ignores her.

Doctor Who's Daleks are basically space Nazis, as writer Terry Nation made clear on a number of occasions. In their origin story, "Genesis Of The Daleks," we see how the dark-haired Kaleds despise the blond-haired (or wigged) Thals, as their genetic inferiors. It's a "dislike for the unlike," as Ian puts it in the first Dalek story. So of course, the sneaky Russell T. Davies finds several ways to make the Daleks into genetic hybrids with other species, mostly humans, in the new series. Plus there are the Silurians, who refer to the humans as apes or ape-descended primitives.

The X-Men used to be an allegory about racism and the "other" in our midst, but these days it's more likely to be about homophobia.

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham also has a strong eugenics theme - the survivors of some kind of holocaust are living in Labrador, and they're fanatically obsessed with purging all genetic abnormalities out of the human race. Like a girl with six toes, or the cool telepathic kids.

Blade Runner's Replicants are created for slavery on the outer worlds, and then hunted down and slaughtered by Deckard and his ilk. Like the Cylons, the Replicants are referred to as "skin-jobs," which Deckard says is a racial epithet. Since the Replicants can pass as human and anyone could be a Replicant, it becomes another fear of the "other among us," like Battlestar.

Top Ten by Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, Gene Ha et al. This classic comics series uses human-robot relations as a clear parallel for those between white and black people, complete with terms like "clicker," "spambo" (instead of "oreo"), and "wetware" (instead of "cracker"). Also, the Godzilla-esque monster characters have aspersions cast on their intelligence on a regular basis. The series is mostly presented from the perspective of non-robots and non-monsters, and we don't really get to know any robots beyond the stereotypes until we meet Ferro-American cop Joe Pi.

Legion of Superheroes. Over the past decade, this comic set in the thirtieth century has dealt a lot with anti-alien sentiment, which has posed a challenge for the mostly alien kids sworn to defend Earth. In the recent Action Comics storyline, the imaginatively named human supremacist Earth Man took charge of the Legion and banished all aliens off the planet, going so far as to suggest Superman was really always from Earth. This remains an ongoing concern in the Legion of Three Worlds.

Titan AE. After the world blows up, aliens have nothing but disgust for the homeless, destitute survivors of humanity.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As commenter DocWha points out, this show has been pushing the idea of "metal" as a slur against the machines pretty hard lately, including the variant "metal-lover."

The Time Machine. As commenter alphanumeric1971 points out, the whole Morlocks/Eloi thing gets pretty metaphorically charged. Mostly because those Morlocks are always playing their music and stuff.

Babylon 5 Similar to some other shows, B5 showed a lot of racial animosity going on between different species, although the series also deconstructed this whole notion in "The Geometry of Shadows", where the ethnic battle lines are totally arbitrary and change every five years.

Smallville: Kara Zor-El used the apparent racial slur "Red eye" to refer to Martian Manhunter in the seventh season episode "The Cure." Supergirl, how could you?

Heroes this season has pushed the "persecuted mutants" theme pretty hard, and Danko (aka "The Hunter") is a mouthpiece for all sorts of anti-mutant mutterings. They're taking our jobs!

The Teen Titans addresses anti-Tamaranian bias in the episode "Troq," all about the prejudice which Starfire faces. "Do you know what it feels like to be judged simply because of how you look?" Starfire asks, in one of the episode's more sledge-hammery speeches. Luckily, Cyborg does understand... because he's part robot.

Futurama. Everyone has his/her little prejudices - Bender dreams about killing all the humans, for example - but the only group that really faces institutional racism is the mutant population, which isn't allowed to go on the surface unless with special passes (which even then aren't always honored). Although they themselves hate in turn the sub-mutants who live in the sub-sewers. Oh, and Zapp Brannigan really hates the neutral people (but then…what does it take to make a man turn neutral?). Oh, and the Native Martians are a clear allegory for Native Americans, complete with being tricked into giving up their entire planet for just a bead (which turns out to be the biggest diamond in the universe, making it not such a bad deal after all).

The Animatrix – The whole Matrix origin story "The Second Renaissance" uses a lot of really obvious racism parallels to explain how humans and AI came to hate each other.

Planet Of The Apes. I can't believe we left out the 1970s' greatest racism analogy, until commenter UshaBibaculus pointed it out. Damn it all to hell!

Isaac Asimov. Some of his stuff about robots takes on racism overtones, but the condescension of space-going humans towards those still on Earth is way more blatant. Pebble in the Sky has some of the most blatant anti-Earth sentiment, as even the hero, archaeologist Bel Arvadan, considers himself quite progressive and would allow an Earthling to join one of his digs – as long as nobody else objected too strongly. Asimov's short story "The Martian Way" also shows how Earth sentiment against the colonists on Mars forces them to find fuel around the rings of Saturn. Considering the Earth politician who whips up public outcry against the colonists is actually called Hilder, I think it's fairly clear this goes beyond simple dislike. Meanwhile, in the real world, Asimov deleted aliens from his Foundation books entirely because he didn't want to deal with his editor John Campbell's belief that humans would always be superior to aliens, which grew out of his belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority.

Alien Nation. After a bunch of aliens come to live among us in this TV series, they experience prejudice and mistreatment at the hands of the anti-alien Purists. The humans try to kill all of the Binnaums, the rare third gender which the aliens need to mate. Even the most sympathetic human character, Matt, turns out to have anti-alien biases.

The Green-Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. These books spend a lot of time delving into the mutual distrust and antipathy between the "fair-skinned, treedwelling Kindar and the darker-skinned, underground race of Erdlings" who live on the eponymous Green-Sky planet.

Wild Cards, created by George R.R. Martin – In a world where aliens test out bioweapons on humanity, creating fully superpowered "Aces" and horribly mutated "Jokers", both groups face bigotry at the hands of humans - although the Jokers generally have a much harder time of it, being horribly mutated and all.

Darkover by Marion Zimmer Bradley. In this series of books about humans colonizing the world Cottman IV after their ship crashes, the native trailmen and catmen face a lot of nasty prejudice from the humans.

Someone Like Me by Tom Holt. This book explores a post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of humanity spend all their time fighting evil, mindless monsters. The only problem with that is that these monsters aren't evil or mindless at all, but in fact just as intelligent and human (with all the attendant strengths and flaws) as the humans, which the human protagonist discovers at the end of the book.

Warchild by Karin Lowachee. Humans assume their alien opponents are mindless cannibals and hate them accordingly. Then the author explores the alien society, and the truth becomes far more complicated.

The Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler. The Oankali find humans fascinating and horrifying, and they want to combine with us to create a new species - unfortunately, humans are also revolted by the Oankali, and have a lot of disgust for the half-breed Akin, the first person to result from the intermixing.

Astro Boy. As TVTropes points out, this anime includes robots comparing their planned robot homeland to Israel, and also compares the human treatment of robots to Apartheid. One Japanese robot flees to the United States after almost being lynched. (TVTropes also points to Bubblegum Crisis, Fullmetal Alchemist, Zettai Karen Children, Warhammer 40K and Mass Effect. I wish I'd found that page before we'd already finished researching this post!)

Mr. Show. This list would be hopelessly incomplete without the comedy sketch, "Racist in the Year 3000." We miss Mr. Show.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

So Davros first appeared in the story "Genesis Of The Daleks," back in 1975. By this point, the Daleks were really really tired — they'd pretty much exhausted their potential in the 1960s. They'd been brought back in 1972 purely as a ratings grab, replacing some generic aliens in "Day Of The Daleks" at the last moment. (I'm guessing that story originally had a different title.) And then Terry Nation kept writing the same Dalek script over and over again, so finally the Who production team asked him to do something different: create an origin story for the Daleks. The result, "Genesis Of The Daleks," remains the best Dalek story of all time, because it uses the Daleks sparingly and takes their Nazi subtext and makes it blatant. (Nyder, Davros' right-hand man, actually wears a Nazi cross in a couple of episodes, before the BBC freaks out and removes it.)

Davros is a compelling character in "Genesis Of The Daleks." He honestly believes his race is doomed, due to thousands of years of war with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The Kaleds will inevitably mutate into unrecognizeable blobs, so their only hope is to embrace their transformation by building mini-tanks to roll around in. It's all about survival. And Davros' thinking has been shaped by a genocidal race war with the Thals, so it's not surprising he wants to engineer the Daleks genetically to be ruthless and obsessed with racial purity.

Davros' speeches are memorable and quotable in a way that Terry Nation's writing generally isn't. They have the cadences of some of Robert Holmes' great villain rants (Holmes was editing the scripts during this era) — you can hear other Holmes villains, like Morbius or Sharaz Jek in Davros — but they also have a weird lilt of their own. I heard a rumor, years ago, that actors Tom Baker and Michael Wisher sat during lunch breaks and rewrote Davros' dialog into iambic pentameter. (Probably not true, but it's a nice story.) It's certainly true that you can rewrite some of Davros' speeches into Shakesperean blank verse:

To hold in my hand a capsule that contained such power,
To know that life and death on such a scale was
My choice. To know a tiny pressure on
My thumb, enough to break the glass, would end
Everything. Yes! I would do it! That power
Would set me up among the gods! And through
The Daleks, I shall have that power!

(No, it's not perfect. But Shakespeare's iambic pentameter often has the occasional troche tossed in as well.)

Davros is cunning and manipulative, using the Thals to destroy his enemies among his own people, and then wiping out the Thals afterwards. He becomes more and more maniacal, until that great scene, quoted above, where he admits all he really wants is to achieve immortality by wiping out everyone else.

Actually, "Genesis Of The Daleks" introduces two great elements. Davros is one, and the other is the idea that the there's a possible future where the Daleks have succeeded in wiping out all other life in the universe. The Time Lords are actually scared of the Daleks, so much so that they're willing to drag the Doctor into rewriting history on an almost unimaginable scale. Davros pretty much exhausted his potential in his one outing, but the idea of trying to avert a dystopian Dalek future has almost limitless potential — so guess which one Doctor Who returns to in the next outing, "Destiny Of The Daleks"?

There's so much wrong with "Destiny Of The Daleks" that we could be here all day enumerating its faults. It's so blah, even the incidental music gets bored and quits halfway through. The Daleks wobble and have to resort to becoming suicide bombers. And Davros is a shell of his former self. It's partly the actor — David Gooderson just can't match Michael Wisher's purring mania — but also the writing. He's degenerated into generic mad-baddie #52.

Plus, none of it makes any sense. "Genesis Of The Daleks" presumably takes place in the distant past, centuries if not millennia before the Daleks invade Earth in 2165. And "Destiny Of The Daleks" takes place in the future, when humans are scattered across the universe. So Davros not only survived getting exterminated in "Genesis," he managed to activate a life-support system that operated for, what, 10,000 years? (I know, I know. This is the same program that had clones appearing fully clothed.) The point is, Davros had a perfectly great death scene in "Genesis."

And the reason for bringing back Davros is horrendous: disco robots have managed to battle the Daleks to a standstill. Instead of exploring the idea that a future timeline involves the Daleks dominating the universe, suddenly they're so weak they can't defeat an army of android Bo Dereks. It's all because the Daleks are too logical, and so they can't outthink the disco-droids' computers. (The thing I always liked about the Daleks before this was that they weren't logical. They were full of rage and hatred, and enjoyed killing inferior life forms for its own sake.) So the Daleks need Davros to help them think outside of the pepper-pot. It's insulting to the Daleks, and a waste of Davros.

A side note: I can see why people felt the need to keep bringing Davros back: it's hard to write for the Daleks as villains. In the early Dalek stories, there are long scenes of the Daleks talking amongst themselves, and it gets a bit tiresome. Like in "The Daleks," where they say things like, "We-will-lure-the-pri-so-ners-into-a-false-sense-of-security." The Daleks are better when they have someone to bounce off, or a leader. It's the same reason Star Trek's Borg got first Locutus, then Lore, then (yawn) the Borg Queen. But it's a lazy way of dealing with the Daleks. The new series managed to make them compelling on their own, in stories like Rob Shearman's "Dalek" and Russell T. Davies' "Doomsday." It's not impossible.

And then all of the Dalek stories of the 1980s have Davros, just as a matter of course. At some point, he's literally 20,000 years old, and still rattling around making repetitive speeches. It turns out the Disco-bots have created a virus that kills Daleks, and they need Davros to deal with it. (Even though we never see the Disco-mats again, and the virus goes away on its own eventually.) Davros' only good bits, apart from "Genesis," are in "Revelation of the Daleks," which is really just a generic story about a mad scientist who turns corpses and cryo-suspended humans into a food source. Davros and the Daleks are shoehorned in, presumably because a story about Daleks is more exciting than a story about mad scientists and cannibalism. (That is, there's no reason for the Great Healer to be Davros, in the context of the story.)

And then "Remembrance of the Daleks" actually does fine without Davros. The Daleks are given other human mouthpieces, including the creepy little girl — who we're supposed to think is Davros at first, when she's wearing her headpiece. And the Nazi sympathizer guy. And Marcus Scarman. "Remembrance" is proof that you can still do a great Dalek story without Davros — until he turns up and starts chewing scenery in the last 10 minutes. I feel like shouting "Who invited you?" at the screen, like in that Vernon Reid album. Sylvester McCoy and Terry Molloy have a scenery-chewing contest and call it a draw, then everything blows up. The little blonde girl is a million times more chilling and menacing than Davros and his increasingly floppy rubber mask at this point.

Really, at this point, Davros represents the failure of the Daleks. Whenever you see Davros on screen in any episode other than "Genesis," you can just know that he's there because the producers don't think the Daleks can carry a story on their own. He exhausted all his story possibilities the first time around, and now he's just the Daleks' ball and chain.

Good thing the new Doctor Who show proved so conclusively that we don't need Davros to make the Daleks interesting, eh?

Famous names: Gene Roddenberry, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Deforest Kelley, James Doohan, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon.

Crunchy goodness: 3

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Eleven films, plus Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise.

Sights you'll never unsee: The half-black, half-white space racists running through fake yule log flames. A big blob ordering Abraham Lincoln to wrestle Vulcans. Captain Kirk flying a starship into a space dildo. Spock flamenco-dancing. It goes on and on.

Life lesson: "You'll have to get your entertainment somewhere else." — Captain Kirk.

Most painfully dated moment: The planet where the Vietnam war never ended.

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