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| A Dalek |
|
 The first alien race ever introduced in Doctor Who,
the Daleks have long been one of the most recognisable
details of the entire program, possibly surpassing even
the TARDIS as the most memorable detail about the program.
From the moment they first appeared on screen, they
had struck terror into the hearts and minds of all the
fans of the show, becoming an iconic image regardless
of the different tastes of the audiences watching them.
THE IDEA
When
asked to create the Daleks, Terry Nation set out to
create aliens that were different from anything that
had been seen before. Their dome-like appearances
were inspired by the Georgian State Dancers, whose
long skirts gave them the impression of gliding along
the stage, while their philosophy of eliminating everything
that didn’t fit their vision of perfection -
in other words, destroying anything that wasn’t
a Dalek - owes much to the Nazis.
THEIR DESIGN
Determined to create an alien that would never look like
someone wearing a suit, Nation set out to create something
that was different from anything that had ever been
seen before. Based on Nation’s description in
the script, BBS designer Raymond Cusick brought the
Daleks to life, basing his design around a man sitting
on a chair, subsequently adding the sucker arm and
gun at different levels (The ‘pepperpot’ analogy
that has become most common over the years was only
used later to demonstrate how the Daleks would move
about).
THEIR EVOLUTION
While the Cybermen have evolved drastically over the
years, the Daleks have retained essentially the same
appearance with only minor modifications, such as
the addition of ‘slats’ over the middle
section bands where the arms were located; they have
generally remained the same shape from their debut,
with one gun-arm, one sucker-arm, and one eye-stalk
on a dome-like body. In the new series, the Daleks
underwent their most significant change yet, their
traditional colour changing from grey to gold, with
their eyes becoming a blue light as opposed to the
simple ‘eye’ they’d possessed originally.
THEIR HISTORY
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| Barbara is Threatened |
|
Originally, the Daleks - then known as the Kaleds - were
one of two races inhabiting the distant planet of
Skaro, the other race being the Thals. The two races
had long been at war with each other, each one stationed
in a city protected by a huge dome, and their resources
so depleted that they now fought with a mixture of
modern and ancient weaponry and defences. Over the
course of the war, the use of chemical and biological
weapons caused some members of the population to mutate,
prompting scientists to begin research to determine
a means of dealing with the mutation. One of these
scientists, a crippled Kaled scientist known as Davros,
concluded that the mutation was inevitable and unstoppable,
and so diverted his attention to creating a machine
that could transport the Kaleds’ final mutated
form. Resolving that his ‘Daleks’ would
become the ‘supreme victor’ in the universal
wars that he believed would be inevitable, Davros
altered the Dalek creatures genetic make-up, increasing
aggression, removing their conscience and instilling
in them the notion that they were superior to all
other life. Despite the efforts of the Fourth Doctor
- sent by the Time Lords to avert the creation of
the Daleks - Davros was unable to be swayed from his
goal, but realised too late the flaw in his programming;
as they believed themselves superior to everything,
the Daleks saw no need to obey his orders. As The
Doctor trapped the Daleks in the Kaled bunker - he
refused to kill the entire Dalek race as it would
have made him no better than they were, and his actions
still delayed the Dalek development by around a thousand
years, - the Daleks seemingly exterminated Davros,
vowing that they would some day emerge to conquer
all.
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| Daleks Invade Earth |
|
Eventually, the Daleks spread out from the city, mounting
a reign of terror across Skaro and the surviving Thals,
who had become a pacifist race due to the damage caused
to Skaro by the war. With the Daleks determined to
wipe out the Thals but confined to their city due
to their current reliance on static electricity to
move, while the Thals were unwilling to fight and
running short of food, the stalemate was only broken
when the First
Doctor, Susan, Barbara
Wright and Ian
Chesterton arrived on the planet and were forced to mount an attack
on the city to recover a vital missing component of the TARDIS. As the
Daleks prepared to release a lethal burst of radiation to destroy the Thals,
Ian led a team of Thals into the main Dalek control room, damaging their
equipment and shutting down the city’s power supply, apparently killing
the Daleks in the process.
Under
as-yet-unknown circumstances, however, some Daleks
managed to survive; presumably they had long been
experimenting with a means to remove their reliance
on the city to provide them with power and the ‘test
subjects’ of these experiments escaped being
shut down with the rest of their brethren. Eventually
departing Skaro, now relying on the remote transmission
of power to keep their systems running, the Daleks
made their way to Earth, conquering the planet at
some time in the early few decades of the twenty-second
century, subsequently beginning mining operations
to replace Earth’s core with an engine that
would allow them to steer the planet from one solar
system to another. Aided by the First Doctor, a resistance
movement eventually managed to stop the bomb that
would have destroyed Earth’s core by creating
a barrier in the shaft that the Daleks were using
to transport it, the resulting explosion destroying
the Daleks and their mine. Although some Daleks survived
this explosion, they remained in stasis until reactivated
by the Roger Delgado Master some years later (Who
sought a matter transmuter, capable of transforming
elements into other elements, that had been hidden
in the Dalek base). With the factory activated, it
began to create new Daleks using its store of raw
materials and Dalek embryos, but the Eighth
Doctor - who had come to Earth to visit Susan, resulting
in an out-of-sequence encounter with the Master -
managed to set the factory to overload, destroying
all the Daleks within the factory as the Master escaped.
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| Dalek Invasion of Earth |
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At
one point during the Dalek invasion, in the year 2158,
the Daleks encountered a new threat from the distant
future, a crisis that also involved the Fifth Doctor
and his companion Nyssa (Resulting in a rather confusing
confrontation where the Dalek Emperor of the future
told the Daleks that The Doctor would thwart their
invasion in the future, but killing him now would
achieve nothing because he would still have already
done it). In the year 4220, a lethal race of insects
had attacked Earth, leaving the human race reduced
to a handful of colonies on Earth at best - rumours
of colonised planets were dismissed by many, - and,
even worse, these ‘insects’ were mutated
Daleks, robbed of all higher brain functions and reduced
to mindless destructive monsters. Unable to reach
into the past themselves, the Daleks, aided by the
Thals, contacted the Fifth Doctor via a time corridor
during a visit to the year 2158 - the year the Mutant
Phase was first detected in the Dalek genome, - and
drew him into the future, where he accepted their
mission after realising there was something strange
about the existence of the Mutant Phase. Accompanied
by the Dalek Emperor in the body of the Thal Ganatus,
The Doctor and Nyssa determined that the Mutant Phase
began when wasps were altered by genetically modified
food and subsequently stung a battle-damaged Dalek
with a cracked casing. Initially, the Emperor attempted
to ensure the Daleks’ triumph in all time frames
by providing them with a ‘cure’ for the
Mutant Phase in the form of a pesticide, but another
Thal had tampered with the pesticide in an attempt
to turn it against ordinary Daleks, and if the Emperor
had convinced the Daleks to use it, they would have
created the infection they were trying to stop. Smashing
the pesticide container, the Emperor created a temporal
ripple effect that wiped out all trace of the Mutant
Phase, erasing him from history as The Doctor and
Nyssa escaped the effects of the paradox in the TARDIS.
As The Doctor departed, however, he was left with
some degree of hope for the Dalek race; after all,
in the end, the plague was averted because the Emperor
Dalek listened to The Doctor’s warnings and
believed him, something that the Daleks would normally
have never done.
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| The Chase |
|
After the First Doctor defeated their invasion of Earth,
the Daleks began to consider him a serious threat,
devoting a great deal of their subsequent time and
resources to constructing their own time machine,
thus allowing them to pursue the TARDIS across various
points in history. Having visited such locations as
the Mary Celeste, the Empire State Building and a
haunted house at a fun-fair (As well as confronting
a robotic duplicate of The Doctor who was defeated
by the original in a duel), the Daleks confronted
the time travels on the jungle planet Mechanus, where
they faced the beings known as Mechanoids, who had
conquered that planet some years back. After the two
sides had destroyed each other, Ian and Barbara took
the Daleks’ time machine to return home - arriving
only two years after they’d originally left
- The Doctor and new companion Vicki departed, with
Steven
Taylor - a pilot who’d crashed on the
planet some years back - as their new companion.
The Doctor’s next confrontation with the Daleks was
his most trying one yet, not only because it featured
a rematch with The
Meddling Monk - The Doctor’s
first Time Lord enemy - but because it resulted in
the deaths of two of his companions. Arriving in the
year 4000, The Doctor, Steven and new companion Katarina
found themselves pitted against a Dalek army, the
Daleks now allied with the rogue ‘Guardian of
the Solar System’ Mavic Chen, who had betrayed
the human race in order to gain control of the solar
system. Requiring the rare element Taranium to control
their ultimate weapon, the Time Destructor, the Daleks
had treated Chen as an ally to gain access to the
Taranium, which could only be found on Uranus after
fifty years of mining. Learning of the Dalek plot
upon their arrival on the planet Kembel, The Doctor,
Steven and Katarina tried to escape to warn the rest
of the galaxy, but when they were boarded by a prisoner
who threatened Katarina in an airlock unless he was
taken to the nearest planet - Kembel, - Katarina ejected
the two of them into space to give The Doctor and
Steven the chance to spread the warning. Allying themselves
with security agent Sara
Kingdom after the Daleks
tricked her into killing her brother Bret Vyon, The
Doctor and Steven managed to recover the TARDIS and
trick the Daleks into accepting a fake taranium core,
subsequently going on the run throughout various locations
in time. However, after the intervention of the Meddling
Monk - who had managed to get his TARDIS working after
his last encounter with The Doctor, - the Daleks reacquired
the taranium, leaving The Doctor with no option but
to activate the time destructor ahead of schedule,
aging the entire Dalek invasion fleet - and Sara -
to dust. The Doctor only survived because Steven managed
to get him back to the TARDIS and set the destructor
into reverse after the Daleks had disintegrated but
before The Doctor could do the same; the process couldn’t
bring back the dead, but it served to restore The
Doctor to approximately his original age.
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| The Chase |
|
Shortly
after his first regeneration, the Second
Doctor, accompanied by Polly and Ben Jackson,
found himself on the colony planet Vulcan, discovering
the body of an Earth Examiner sent to investigate
reports of rebels, using the dead man’s pass
badge to give himself unrestricted access to the colony.
Discovering that a scientist had found a crashed space
capsule containing inert Daleks, The Doctor was shocked
when the Daleks claimed to be the colony’s servants.
As the rebels grew in strength, lead by the chief
of security of the colony, the Daleks took advantage
of the colonists' naive trust to establish a reproduction
plant on a conveyor belt system that allowed them
to increase their numbers. Fortunately, The Doctor
was able to destroy the Daleks by turning the colony's
power source against them, allowing the colony’s
deputy governor to re -establish control from the
rebels, subsequently departing, with Ben and Polly
once again convinced that he was the true Doctor (The
source of this Dalek factory ship was later revealed
in “War
of the Daleks”).
Shortly after this, The Doctor, now accompanied solely
by Jamie McCrimmon, was investigating the theft of
the TARDIS by antiques dealer Edward Waterfield, whose
daughter Victoria was being threatened by the Daleks
in order to force to operate his time machine (His
time of origin being the Victorian era only serves
to highlight the scale of his intellect). The Daleks
forced The Doctor to monitor Jamie's rescue of Victoria
as part of a test to supposedly identify the human
factor: the special quality possessed by humans that
enabled them to always defeat the Daleks. Having succeeded,
The Doctor implanted the human factor into three test
Daleks, making them friendly and playful, only to
realise that the Daleks’ true intention was
to isolate the Dalek factor - the impulse to destroy
- and implant it into humans, using the TARDIS to
spread the ‘Dalek Factor’ across time.
However, The Doctor was able to infuse multiple Daleks
with the human factor by pretending that he had been
infected with the Dalek factor and reprogramming the
computer, thus triggering a Dalek civil war between
the original Daleks and the human factor Daleks as
he, Jamie and Victoria departed.
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| The Power of the Daleks |
|
Shortly after his new companion Zoe had joined the crew
(“Fear of the Daleks”), The Doctor visited
the peace conference between the Xantha Empire and
an alien race called the Tibari, only to learn that
Atrika, a Tibari scientist, was using Dalek telepathic
technology in an attempt to take control of the two
cultures for himself and thus create a vast empire.
Connecting Zoe to the machine in an attempt to force
her to assassinate the Tibari president, Atrika then
planned for the Daleks to aid him in seizing control
and forging a new empire, realising too late that
the Daleks had no intention of fulfilling their side
of the bargain. With this realisation, Atrika confessed
to his crimes over the telepathic system before being
exterminated, subsequently using the system to force
the Daleks to self-destruct.
Following
his regeneration and subsequent exile to Earth, the
Third Doctor had a rather confusing encounter with
them during his exile on Earth, when UNIT was called
upon to provide security for an important peace conference
in “Day of the Daleks”. Discovering the
presence of a group of renegade freedom fighters from
the future in the mansion where the conference was
to be held, The Doctor and his companion Jo Grant were drawn over two hundred years into the future
into a world where the conference had apparently been
sabotaged by Styles - the diplomat in charge of the
conference - in a bid to grab power for himself, resulting
in a series of wars that decimated seven-eighths of
the world’s population and left Earth easy pickings
for the Daleks. However, after travelling into the
future himself, The Doctor realised that the guerrillas
had been caught in a temporal paradox. Styles hadn’t
triggered the explosion; it had been set off by one
of the guerrilla force himself, trapped in the past
when he was separated from the group and so determined
to finish his mission by destroying the mansion that
he failed to realise that the conference was taking
place. Aided by the guerrillas, The Doctor and Jo
travelled back to the past and prevented the explosion,
restoring history to its proper course.
When
they finally returned, the Daleks, in an unusual break
from tradition, had actually allied themselves with
The Master, intending to trigger a war between Earth
and the Draconian Empire in the far future. Having
exposed the truth of the scheme to the two respective
Empires and forced the Master to flee, The Doctor
and Jo tracked the Dalek army to the planet Spiridon,
where they allied themselves with a Thal strike force
sent to eliminate the Daleks. Despite the Daleks’ attempts
to master the native Spiridons’ ability to turn
invisible, the power requirements were too great for
the Daleks to make regular use of the power, allowing
The Doctor to plant a bomb that destroyed the Dalek
army frozen in suspended animation in a cavern beneath
their base. With the war averted, The Doctor and the
Thals departed, The Doctor taking care to remind the
Thals that they should never make war sound like a
game, and tell their comrades back home of the people
who wouldn’t be coming back rather than allowing
them to focus on those who had survived.
The Third Doctor’s last encounter with the Daleks is
particularly memorable because it marked the first
time that the Daleks ever collaborated with The Doctor,
albeit because they were trapped on a planet with
a vast high-tech city that emitted a field shutting
down all advanced technology such as their weapons.
Trapped on the planet Exxilon by a power failure,
The Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and a human expedition
seeking a cure for a violent plague were forced to
work with the Daleks to find a solution for the power
drain in order to leave Earth. Aided by Bellal, one
of the native Exxilons, The Doctor learned about the
city and managed to enter it, subsequently disabling
the field after passing various ‘tests’ laid
out inside the city. Although the Daleks attempted
to escape with the cure for the plague - intending,
naturally, to blackmail their enemies into surrendering
to them in exchange for the cure, - their ship was
destroyed by a bomb planted by a member of the expedition,
Sarah and another of the expedition having already
smuggled the cure onto the Earth ship.
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| Destiny of the Daleks |
|
Returning to Skaro literally centuries after his last
visit, the Fourth Doctor and the newly-regenerated
Romana were shocked to discover that the Daleks had
returned, seeking to revive Davros; as it turned out,
the Dalek attack after their activation had not killed
him, but merely trapped him in a state of suspended
animation thanks to his chair’s defences. Confronting
a robot race called the Movelleans, The Doctor learned
that the Daleks and Movelleans were currently at war
with each other, but their reliance on logic rather
than impulsive emotion meant that their battle computers
were locked in a deadlock calculating the best possible
plan of attack; every time one of their ships moved
to begin a new battle strategy, one of the enemy’s
ships automatically moved to compensate for the shift,
leaving them permanently locked in a stalemate with
not one single shot having yet been fired. The two
sides hoped that Davros would be able to program them
with the initiative necessary to overcome this defect,
but Davros instead attempted to destroy the Movellean
ship by reprogramming a group of Daleks to act as
a ‘suicide squad’ by loading them with
bombs and sending them to the ship, intending to subsequently
re-establish himself as leader of the Daleks. Having
tricked Davros into activating the bombs early, The
Doctor deactivated the Movelleans and cryogenically
froze Davros until the Daleks’ now-freed human
slaves could take him back to Earth to stand trial.
On a later
trip, while Nyssa was taking a visit to the Crusades,
the Fifth Doctor arrived in the Savoy Hotel and was
shocked to learn that he was in 2158, a year after
the Dalek Invasion, but with the Daleks conspicuously
absent. Although Earth was at peace in the new history,
The Doctor was nevertheless forced to solve the mystery
of the Dalek’s non-invasion, beginning with
the investigation of the society Global Warning, who
possessed surprisingly advanced technology that had
somehow repelled the Daleks while allowing some essence
of ‘Dalek-ness’ to penetrate as the Daleks
tried again and again to attack Earth, resulting in
the creation of toy Daleks despite the lack of logic
in such a creation. Investigating other such anomalies
across history, focused around conflicts such as the
American Civil War, The Doctor tracked the Daleks
to a temporal nexus point, where the Daleks had developed
nano-Daleks that would thus spread and turn humans
into Dalek slaves, which they intended to force The
Doctor to release with the aid of the TARDIS; the
new timeline had been created as a result of the Daleks’ attempts
to ‘re-do’ their original invasion of
Earth to avoid The Doctor’s original intervention.
Although the nano-Daleks spread over the TARDIS, The
Doctor was able to trigger the HADS - Hostile Action
Displacement System - by encouraging Global Warning
to fire on the TARDIS, granting him thirty seconds
to regain control of the TARDIS and release the nano-Daleks
into the Time Vortex, where they were instantly destroyed,
thus undoing the non-invasion and restoring history.
During the 20th
anniversary special “The Five Doctors”,
where all five Doctors were taken from their proper
places in time and placed within the Death Zone -
an area where past Time Lords pitted various species
against each other for sport - the First Doctor and
Susan encountered a single Dalek in a maze of mirrors,
the Dalek subsequently chasing them as it yelled that
The Doctor must be exterminated. Fortunately, The
Doctor and Susan were able to trick the Dalek into
entering a mirrored alcove; as the Dalek fired blindly
at them, the blast reflected off the mirrors and hit
the Dalek itself, the explosion simultaneously creating
a hole in the wall of the building that allowed The
Doctor and Susan to find the other Doctors.
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| Resurrection of the Daleks |
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Although The
Doctor had hoped that their last encounter would see
the end of Davros, the Daleks were unfortunately able
to rescue their creator from the space station that
he was trapped in after his trial, seeking his aid
in creating a cure for an anti-Dalek virus that had
been created by the Movelleans. As well as this, the
Daleks created a time corridor into Earth’s
past, replacing key figures with android duplicates,
with their main goal being to capture The Doctor and
his companions - one of these traps featuring a time
corridor, - replace them with androids, and send the
androids to assassinate the High Council of Time Lords.
Fortunately, although they managed to capture the
Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough in the corridor,
one of their previously created duplicates rebelled
and destroyed the space station, thus leaving the
duplicates without anything to control them and The
Doctor confident that their conditioning would wear
off and allow them to live normal lives among society.
At the same time, The Doctor released samples of the
Dalek virus onto the Dalek ship, killing the Daleks
and forcing Davros to flee in an escape pod as the
virus began to affect him due to his Dalek components.
After an encounter
with Davros on his own, the Sixth Doctor again encountered
the Daleks’ creator allied with his creations
during a visit to the planet Necros, where the wealthy
could have their newly-deceased bodies cryogenically
frozen until such time as medical science could cure
whatever killed them. Investigating the death of a
friend, The Doctor discovered that the ‘Great
Healer’ of the facility was in fact Davros,
who was using the organic material in the cryogenic
storage units both as the raw material for the synthetic
food that was Necros's biggest export and also to
create a whole new army of Daleks with which to take
control of the universe. Thankfully, the arrival of
Daleks loyal to the Supreme Dalek averted Davros’s
plans, with the Daleks arresting their creator and
ignoring The Doctor (His regeneration prevented them
from recognising him, the only occasion where the
Daleks were unable to instantly identify The Doctor).
During
a visit to a conference of twenty of the greater powers
in time and space on the planet Archetryx, the Sixth
Doctor found himself locked in a new confrontation
with the Daleks as they sought to acquire control
of strange new elements from the Archetryx system
that seemed to defy all known laws of physics. Learning
that his former companion Romana had been captured
twenty years ago when the Daleks literally stole a
planet containing the elements in question, The Doctor
quickly helped to coordinate a defence as the Daleks
attempted to force the stolen planet to crash into
Archetryx, subsequently being reunited with Romana
when she managed to transmat off the planet - where
she had been kept prisoner - with a Dalek focusing
crystal, thus disrupting their plans. Using one of
the ships from the conference, the Daleks were subsequently
able to launch an invasion of Gallifrey, forcing the
Time Lords to program all retina-scan-controlled machines
to respond only to the retina pattern of The Doctor’s
companion Evelyn
Smythe, as the Daleks would otherwise
use the eyes of the Time Lords they killed to gain
access. Learning that the Daleks intended to use the
new elements - which had somehow been programmed with
all the hatred and loathing of the Dalek race - as
a weapon of destruction, but they required Gallifreyian
time technology to control the reaction or the universe
itself would be destroyed in the destruction that
resulted. As the Daleks triggered the element in the
Seriphian galaxy, The Doctor, Evelyn and Romana were
only just able to contain the Effect by combing the
Eye of Harmony with the Dalek focusing crystal, drawing
on the power of all the Daleks to halt the destruction
and leave the Seriphian galaxy a completely new galaxy
(Albeit one that, as a contingency plan, the Daleks
intended to use as the base of their new empire).
A later visit
to London resulted in a deeply personal confrontation
with the Daleks for The Doctor and Evelyn, as they
found themselves in an alternate timeline where they
had helped the British Empire to defeat a Dalek invasion
in 1903 and, as a result, Britain had taken Dalek
technology and used it to create a worldwide empire
based on power and domination, keeping a crippled
Doctor and a disarmed Dalek - the Dalek unable to
even self-destruct - locked up in the Tower of London
to use as symbols for their empire. While The Doctor
was shown the new world that his future actions had
created, Evelyn found herself locked up with the Dalek,
who actually formed a certain bond with her due to
its inability to kill her and her being the first
human it had met in years who didn’t ‘insist’ that
it act the way she felt Daleks were meant to act.
As the Jubilee celebrations began, the situation became
worse when The Doctor’s subconscious attempts
to hold back the pressure of the timeline collapsed
(Time having been fractured after The Doctor and Evelyn
drastically changed history by fighting the Daleks
in 1903), resulting in the Dalek invasion force of
1903 being drawn to the present. As The Doctor, Evelyn
and the Dalek prisoner were taken to the Dalek Supreme,
The Doctor managed to convince the prisoner that the
Daleks’ program of conquest would inevitably
result in them destroying themselves when all other
races were dead, resulting in the prisoner connecting
itself to the Dalek command net and broadcasting to
the other Daleks that, to survive, the Daleks must
die. With that command issued, the Daleks all self-destructed
(Evelyn destroying the prisoner on its request), thus
eliminating the fleet before the 1903 invasion and
setting history back on track.
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| Remembrance of the Daleks |
|
The Seventh
Doctor’s initial encounter with the Daleks pushed
the further than ever before, mainly since it was
such a personal confrontation; not only were two factions
of Daleks at war around Coal Hill School - the school
which Susan had attended and where the First Doctor
had originally met Ian and Barbara and begun his travels,
- but they sought the Hand of Omega, a Time Lord relic
that would allow the Daleks to harness the power of
time travel, hidden on Earth by The Doctor himself.
Despite the aid of a group of soldiers, the Hand was
eventually claimed by the Imperial Daleks, led by
Davros - who had discarded the last of his human form
and now called himself the Dalek Emperor, - but The
Doctor revealed that it was all part of an elaborate
trap, with the Hand sending Skaro’s sun supernova
and subsequently returning to Earth to destroy the
Dalek fleet. With the Dalek ships destroyed and Davros
apparently dead, The Doctor confronted the Dalek Supreme
- the sole surviving Dalek - with its status as the
apparent last of its kind, causing it to self-destruct.
Some time after
this encounter, The Doctor and Ace encountered the
Daleks as they sought control of the fabled library
of Kar-Charrat, due to the librarian, Elgin, having
created the ‘wetworks facility’ - a device
that contained all knowledge in the universe. Unable
to access the library due to its defences, the Daleks
instead used time scoop technology to deploy Daleks
to every planet in the sector until they were able
to gain entry thanks to Ace, who had left the library
in a fit of boredom but been given a DNA tag to allow
her to return later. Although the Daleks subsequently
created a duplicate of Ace that deactivated the library’s
temporal shields and granted the Daleks access, the
subsequent download of the information into a Dalek
test subject granted the Dalek an independent mind,
causing it to turn against the Dalek Supreme and force
the Daleks to abandon the planet after Ace destroyed
the Wetworks (A resolution that The Doctor was quite
satisfied with, given that the Wetworks had only been
created due to Elgin harnessing the neural power of
the native Kar-Charratians, not even bothering to
learn if they were sentient before carrying out his
work).
Following his
regeneration, the Eighth Doctor encountered the Daleks
while investigating a temporal fissure that had apparently
erased William Shakespeare from history, tracking
it to the end of the 21st century, where dictator
General Mariah Learman had been conducting time experiments
that had apparently erased Shakespeare. While attempting
to create a time machine using orthopositronium-coated
mirrors, thus allowing her to witness Shakespeare’s
plays, Learman accidentally drew in a group of Daleks
who had escaped a temporal extinction device by travelling
through the temporal fissure. Discovering that Learman
was collaborating with the Daleks to kill Shakespeare
in an attempt to prevent the rebellion against her
rule using him as a figurehead, The Doctor and Charley
Pollard were able to divert the Dalek assassination force
by manipulating the time machine to send them to various
dangerous points in history. Having rescued the young
Shakespeare - who had been drawn into the future by
one of the rebels in an attempt to protect him, -
The Doctor and Charley tricked the Daleks into activating
their temporal extinction device ahead of schedule,
trapping them in a time loop where they would forever
repeat the same actions over and over without ever
escaping.
Some time after
this, following his return to his home reality after
a period of exile in the anti-time universe, The Doctor,
Charley and new companion C’rizz were shocked
to find themselves on an Earth that had been conquered
by Davros and the Daleks (“Terror
Firma”),
with only small pockets of human resistance remaining
in parts of the world and disguising their intentions
by pretending to be focused on nothing but having
parties. While C’rizz and Charley escaped capture,
The Doctor talked with Davros, learning that not only
was Davros suffering from multiple personality disorder
- one personality being Davros while the other identified
itself as the Dalek Emperor, - but, recalling the
Fourth Doctor’s query about whether Davros would
release a virus if he knew it would destroy all life,
he had actually created such a virus using technology
from an alien ship he had discovered when he was sent
into the Time Vortex after his last defeat, as well
as another virus that he had released on Earth earlier
to mutate millions of humans into Daleks. Despite
Davros’s pleas for The Doctor to kill him, The
Doctor refused, allowing the Daleks to destroy a clone
that Davros had created with the intention of transferring
his mind into a new body, causing the Dalek Emperor
to take control of Davros completely and take the
Daleks off into space, The Doctor leaving Davros’s
virus with the British resistance to use against the
Daleks if they should ever return.
Some time after
Charley and C’rizz’s departure, The Doctor
found himself facing off against the Daleks once again,
this time accompanied by Samantha
Jones (Although the evidence
would suggest that this encounter took place before the “Terror Firma” encounter as far as
Davros was concerned). Having arrived on a Thal spaceship,
The Doctor was horrified to discover that the Thals
had recovered Davros’s escape pod and were intending
to force Davros to engineer the Thals to become better
warriors, only for the Daleks to discover Davros and
take him back to Skaro to answer for his crimes against
the Dalek people. During the subsequent trial, the
Dalek Supreme informed Davros that Skaro had not been
destroyed; having learned about Skaro’s destruction
from records during their invasion of Earth, the Daleks
- having found themselves unable to change history
during their attempt to invade in “Day of the
Daleks” - had instead transferred Davros, still
in stasis, to another planet that had been terraformed
to resemble Skaro, subsequently creating the Movelleans
to provide them with a reason to awaken him and thus
allow history to unfold as it should while leaving
Skaro intact. As Davros was about to be sentenced,
however, Daleks loyal to him moved to rescue him,
resulting in a civil war that gave The Doctor and
Sam the chance to escape with the Thals, The Doctor
subsequently ejecting a Dalek factory ship that had
been planted on the Thals’ vessel into the Time
Vortex (The ship in question being the one that the
Second Doctor fought in “The Power of the Daleks”)
and departing in the hope that the Thals would ben
encouraged to return to their old ways after what
he had told them. Back on Skaro, Davros was sentenced
to matter dispersal, but he was apparently able to
reprogram the Dalek at the controls, thus allowing
him to escape and (presumably) begin the steps that
would lead to his mental instability in “Terror
Firma”.
 |
| Dalek |
|
When the new
series of Doctor Who aired, the Daleks had taken on
a new importance in the series; thanks to their actions,
The Doctor was the last Time Lord in existence, the
others having all perished in the last great Time
War between Daleks and Time Lords. The details of
this war are still unclear, but what is known is that
the Master was resurrected to fight in the war - only
to flee in fear after the Daleks took control of something
called the ‘Cruciform’, - that The Doctor
fought on the front line at the fall of the planet
Arcadia, and, in the final battle, The Doctor triggered
the destruction of all ten million Dalek ships, with
the Time Lords being destroyed themselves, thus leaving
The Doctor as the Time War’s sole apparent survivor.
However, as the Ninth Doctor would soon learn, there
had been other survivors; during a visit to the underground
Utah bunker of alien fan Henry van Statten in 2012,
he confronted a Dalek soldier that had crashed on
Earth in the 1950s, having fallen through time. However,
the Dalek, having absorbed the temporally-charged
DNA of The Doctor’s companion Rose Tyler to restore
itself, eventually committed suicide, Rose’s
DNA causing it to mutate and develop emotions, the
Dalek being unable to cope with its new existence.
Another survivor was the Dalek Emperor, who, having
rebuilt the Dalek race using genetically altered humans
it abducted from Earth in the year 200 100, came to
see itself as the God of all Daleks, confronting the
Ninth Doctor as he fought to develop a delta wave
emitter that would destroy the Daleks by frying their
brains… and, since he was unable to refine the
emitter to focus exclusively on Daleks, every human
being on Earth. At the last minute, The Doctor was
unable to go through with it, refusing to become a
mass murderer just to stop the Daleks, but Rose, having
absorbed the energy of the Time Vortex to become a
god-like being, eliminated the entire Dalek fleet
with a wave of her hand, turning the Emperor to dust
and seemingly ending the war.
 |
| Army of Ghosts/Doomsday |
|
However, this
was revealed to not be the case in the finale of the
second series, when the Tenth Doctor and Rose discovered
that the Torchwood Institute of Earth had acquired
a ‘Void Ship’, a ship that existed outside
Time itself, dwelling in the rift between universes.
Although an army of five million Cybermen from a parallel
world managed to use the Void ship to cross into this
universe, the true threat was the inhabitants of the
Void ship; the near-mythical Cult of Skaro, an elite
group of four Daleks who dared to have names - Dalek
Sec, Dalek Thay, Dalek Jast and Dalek Caan - and emotions
while coming up with new ways to defeat the enemy
by using the imagination that had been forsaken by
their people long ago. As a result, a moment that
Doctor Who fans had longed for ever since the two
species became the nightmares they are today came
to pass at long last; a war between the Daleks and
the Cybermen. Initially, the Cybermen had the advantage
of numbers - it was five million Cybermen to only
four Daleks, after all - but the Daleks' advanced
weapons gave them the edge regardless, and after the
Daleks managed to open a Time Lord prison capsule,
the Cybermen lost even the advantage of numbers, with
millions of Daleks filling the skies of London. However,
as both species had passed through the void, The Doctor
was able to defeat both of them by opening the rift
into the Void, thus drawing both species into the ‘null
space’ between universes due to them having
absorbed 'background radiation' when they passed through
the void. With the rift open, both species were pulled
into the void, essentially being trapped in a dimension
that has become known as ‘Hell’ by some
people.
As The Doctor
later learned, however, the Cult of Skaro had survived
once again, initiating an ‘emergency temporal
shift’ to escape being pulled into the Void
by retreating to another period of history - in this
case, New York in the late 1920s. Realising that the
Daleks’ devotion to the purity of the race had
led them to the brink of extinction, Dalek Sec oversaw
the creation of Dalek/Human hybrids, combining his
own DNA with that of a human to become the first Human
Dalek in existence. Using Dalekanium - the material
that the Dalek casings were made of - atop the Empire
State Building, the Cult of Skaro intended to use
a lightning strike to energise the bodies of selected
humans with Dalek DNA, creating a new breed of soldiers
for the Cult to send out against humanity. Although
Sec’s transformation caused him to have a change
of heart, resulting in him feeling genuine emotion
and prompting him to try and make the Dalek/Humans
even more human than they would have been, the other
members of the Cult rejected his ideas, preferring
for the Dalek/Humans to remain predominately Dalek.
Although Sec tried to talk them out of their course
of action - even actually sacrificing himself to save
The Doctor - the other members of the Cult were unmoved
by his sacrifice, ordering the Human-Daleks to kill
The Doctor. Fortunately, The Doctor had grabbed the
top of the Empire State Building just as the lightning
struck, causing his DNA to be mixed up with the process.
As a result, the would-be Human Daleks acquired freedom
to turn against the Cult, destroying Daleks Thay and
Jast before Dalek Caan exterminated them by remote
as a failed experiment. Unwilling to witness another
genocide that day, The Doctor offered to help Dalek
Caan, but Caan instead initiated an emergency temporal
shift with the last of his power, escaping to an as-yet-unknown
location.
 |
| The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End |
|
It was later revealed that the subsequent temporal shift
had caused Dalek Caan to break through the temporal lock
that had been established on the Time War, allowing him
to rescue Davros, who had been presumed dead during the
first year of the war after being apparently devoured
by the Nightmare Child at the Gates of Elysium. Although
this rescue drove Dalek Caan mad as he perceived the entirety
of time, Davros instead perceived Caan’s ability
to breach the temporal lock as true proof of the Daleks’ greatness
that the last of them had succeeded where all others had
failed. However, even though he allowed Caan to live thanks
to the prophecies he now made as a result of his glimpse
into the future when he saw Time, Davros disdained Caan’s
emotions and created a new Dalek race grown from his own
cells. The Dalek army now rebuilt, the Daleks, stationing
themselves on the Crucible space station at the heart
of the Medusa Cascade - the location of a rift in the
universe - used a magnetron to steal twenty-seven planets
- including Earth - from across time and space, arranging
them in a specific pattern within the Medusa Cascade.
With the twenty-seven planets now arranged in a pattern,
the Daleks would use the planets to generate neutrino
energy in a single stream, which, when compressed on a
specific location, would cause the electrical fields holding
matter together to collapse, the destruction thus travelling
through the rift to the entire multiverse. Although various
companions attempted to force the Daleks to stop by threatening
to destroy Earth - thus breaking the network - or destroying
the Crucible, Davros simply had the companions teleported
to the vault where he had imprisoned The Doctor and the
returned Rose. However, thanks to the creation of a part-human ‘clone’ of
The Doctor - based on the excess regenerative energy in
his spare hand and the DNA of companion Donna Noble, -
Donna had acquired some of The Doctor’s knowledge,
allowing her to disrupt the Reality Bomb and set the magnetron
in reverse to send the planets back to their points of
origin, while the second Doctor programmed the Daleks
to self-destruct. As the Crucible collapsed, Dalek Caan
revealed to Davros that the destruction of the Daleks
had always been his final goal; having perceived the entirety
of the Daleks’ reign during his temporal shift,
he had come to realise that their attempts at conquest
and control were wrong, and had thus decided to help The
Doctor defeat them. |
|
|
