In 1987, though, Riddell worked for Texas Instruments, employee number 800069, at Trinity Mills (now Carrollton). This is back when TI was designing the AGM-88 HARM (High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile), which would seek and destroy enemy radar-based air defenses. The weapon was used to enforce no-fly zones during the first U.S.–Iraq War. For obvious reasons, this made the workings of the HARM very important to keep secret.
Riddell had a boss, a nice guy from a Mormon family who Riddell says, “had clearly heard of this ‘humor’ thing people did and was desperately trying to learn it.” His boss’s attempts led Riddell to joke back with him, though Riddell’s wide-ranging pop culture experience sometimes left the man perplexed.
One day, the manager came up to Riddell and clapped him on the back. “Sell any secrets to the Russians this weekend?” he asked. Riddell replied, “No, but I sold a few to the Daleks.”
Cue the vrorp vrorp noise, and let’s go back in time a bit. These days, Doctor Who is a mega-sensation in the U.S., to the point every chain bookstore carries merchandise from it. This was not the case in 1987. Though the adventures of the time-traveling hero called The Doctor had been a hit in its native Britain since its debut in 1963, it was little known in America. Starting in the 1980s, PBS began running the program thanks to its being both foreign and nominally educational.
“Most places would show it on Sunday afternoons,” says Riddell. “Not KERA. They showed it at midnight. It made the whole thing much more gonzo.”
Uber-nerd that he was, Riddell never missed an episode. In fact, he blames himself partially for the closing of Club Sparx after he got more people interested.
“They all started leaving the club early to catch Doctor Who,” he says. “None of us could afford a VCR at the time, so it was either leave or have someone explain what happened.”
Outside of this little group, few people were familiar with Doctor Who. There had been a couple of film remakes of television stories starring Peter Cushing in the 1960s, but they failed to draw a crowd in the United States.
The Daleks were the principal enemies of both films and also arguably The Doctor’s chief antagonists in the series. They are a race of hyper-fascist mutants who encase themselves in personal battle tanks and work to rid the world of non-Dalek life. The Daleks are well known for having toilet plungers for arms and for their scream of “Exterminate!”
Riddell’s boss knew none of this and wasn’t great at humor, either. Working at a top-secret-security-clearance facility, he thought it best to report Riddell as a possible enemy agent. The matter kept climbing up the chain of command, with each person questioning Riddell.
“I got to the point I was running around with a plumber’s helper yelling ‘Exterminate!’ to try and get them to understand what I was talking about,” says Riddell. “They’d nod, then move the investigation up another layer.”
Frankly, the whole thing sort of sounds like the plot of an episode involving the Daleks. In nearly every one of them, some human sells out to the alien race for personal gain, only to get lasered in the third act. It’s actually a little weird that the Daleks never got involved in Cold War America outside of a pretty terrible mobile game.
We reached out to Dalek expert John Peel. No, not that one. Peel is an author who has written dozens of Doctor Who books, including novelizations of stories such as “Power of the Daleks,” which was wiped by the BBC and now lives on only in adapted forms.
Dr. What?
In 1997, Peel wrote the novel War of the Daleks, an expansion of an unproduced story that was shelved after the show’s cancellation in 1989. Peel had the unenviable task of trying to sew together the various continuity errors in the Dalek canon, so he knows his stuff.Luckily, we caught him recuperating from an appearance at the Long Island Doctor Who Convention and asked what he thought of the story.
“The FBI has a long history of surveilling people without real cause,” he said. “I'm sure the Daleks — if they actually existed — would sympathize with this!”
As if to drive that point home, the first people in the chain of investigation that Riddell met who actually knew about the Daleks were the two FBI agents who grilled him. Riddell says they were kind, even bemused, but that they were bound by protocol to take every lead seriously.
In the end, Riddell convinced them he had not given aliens from the planet Skaro our missile details.
“I told them I would never sell us out to the Daleks, anyway,” says Riddell. “The Cybermen or the Sontarans, sure! They pay more.”
Nonetheless, there is a file folder somewhere in the FBI archives detailing the investigation of him for treason to the Daleks. Good thing it’s completely fictional.
“I would imagine that we wouldn't still be here now to discuss it,” Peel says about what would have happened if Riddell had been a real double agent.
Riddell first told this story at the 2000 AggieCon. He was onstage with the late and legendary science fiction author and professional misanthrope Harlan Ellison. A fan in the audience asked Ellison about how he got fired from Disney.
For the uninformed, Harlan Ellison was a prolific author and a well-known television writer who wrote the acclaimed Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Tomorrow.” This led to Disney headhunting him. Ellison lasted exactly four hours in the job after Roy Disney overheard Ellison say the company should make an official animated porno.
Normally, that story would be the best you were going to hear at something like AggieCon. Riddell, though, quietly said he could top it.
“Harlan looked at me and crossed his arms, clearly daring me to do so,” says Riddell. “By the time it was done, he was laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall off the stage.”
