Doctor Who Monsters, Aliens and Villains

The Daleks



A Dalek
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, BBC 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

Barbara is Threatened
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.

Daleks Invade Earth
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.

Dalek Invasion of Earth
Dalek Invasion of Earth
 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.

The Chase
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 The 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.

The Chase
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.

The Power of the Daleks
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.

Destiny of the Daleks
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.

Resurrection of the Daleks
Resurrection of the Daleks
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 Jovanka 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 ("Jubilee") 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.

The Sixth Doctor’s next encounter with the Daleks ("Brotherhood of the Daleks") was a particularly complex meeting, due in no small part to the presence of his current companion Charley Pollard, a woman who he rescued from the year 500 002 who was actually the companion of his eighth incarnation (Charley thus forced to constantly lie to The Doctor to stop him from learning about his future). Arriving on a tropical planet that the sensors indicated was an ice cavern, The Doctor and Charley encountered a group of Thals training for combat, using a virtual fantasy generated by mental engrams (Located inside the ice cavern the TARDIS had initially identified). As part of a Dalek experiment that had been hi-jacked by the Thals after a future Doctor had stopped the Daleks’ original plan, Thal scientists had developed a means of transmitting the thoughts and personalities of comatose Thals into the Daleks, intending for the Thal-Daleks to infiltrate the Dalek armies, but The Doctor knew that this couldn’t work as the Dalek minds and instincts were too strong to overcome. Although The Doctor and Charley were nearly captured when the true Daleks arrived - the experiment’s central goal being to create Daleks who thought like Thals to capture the spirit of comrades in arms - Charley was able to buy time by claiming to be a Dalek replicant sent to capture The Doctor, her story being plausible enough for the Daleks to delay in executing her and The Doctor, giving them enough time to escape and leave the experiment to destroy itself when the Daleks triggered a self-destruct mechanism that had been planted in the facility.

During The Doctor’s next encounter with the Daleks, the audience - although not The Doctor himself - learned of a long-abandoned Dalek experiment in viral warfare, using the mysterious Mila as ‘Patient Zero’ for a unique virus that transformed those it infected into duplicates of its original host. Having failed to perfect the virus as a means of turning other life-forms into Daleks - and with Mila having escaped them after the Daleks’ attempts to kill her shifted her into another dimension due to the combination of the radiation she was exposed to and the viruses she was infected with ("Patient Zero") -, the Dalek tracked the various viruses they had discovered back to Amethyst Station, a space station in the distant past where multiple viruses were being stored as part of an armistice treaty, waiting to be destroyed by the enigmatic Viyrans, a powerful and mysterious race who had been ‘summoned’ by an unspecified higher authority to track and eliminate the viruses. Although the Daleks were initially reluctant to do serious damage to the station due to the risk in jeopardising the Web of Time, The Doctor - having visited the station to try and find help for Charley, who had become infected with Mila’s virus as part of Mila’s efforts to take her place - unintentionally forced their hands when he set the Dalek ship to self-destruct, leaving the Daleks in a desperate effort to keep time on the station frozen with the Dalek time generators they had planted around the station when attempting to steal it. Although The Doctor’s plan had been to allow the Viyrans to use the time available to destroy the viruses, a casual comment he made to the Dalek commander unintentionally caused the Daleks to realise that they themselves would trigger the station’s destruction in order to spread the viruses across time and space for them to find, leaving the Viyrans to begin their long quest to find and destroy the viruses.

Remembrance of the Daleks
Remembrance of the Daleks
During his next encounter with the Daleks ("The Juggernauts"), The Doctor was shocked to learn that Davros never made it to Skaro to stand trial after his capture; the ship he was on was attacked and crashed on the doomed mining colony Lethe, and he was the only survivor. Taking advantage of his initial injuries in the crash concealing his identity, Davros used an engineered virus to make the colonists perceive him as simply an old man in a wheelchair and assumed the alias of Professor Vaso, subsequently creating the ultimate anti-Dalek weapons by adding human nervous tissue to the Mechanoids, large robots that the First Doctor had encountered on the planet Mechanus that were created to protect the colonists but were abandoned when the colony never received any inhabitants. Renaming the redesigned Mechanoids the ‘Juggernauts’, Davros turned them into the ultimate anti-Dalek weapon, aided in their programming by none other than The Doctor’s companion Mel, who had become separated from The Doctor after the medical spaceship they were on was attacked and Mel was forced to leave in an escape pod, The Doctor forced to ally himself with the Daleks in order to find Davros and rescue Mel. Although he told The Doctor that the Juggernauts would revert to their default programming as terraforming robots after the Daleks had been eliminated, his use of living human subjects to provide the necessary nervous tissue proved to The Doctor that Davros hadn’t changed, forcing him to call in the Daleks - who had recruited him to help them capture Davros - to battle the Juggernauts. As both sides fell fighting each other, Davros’s self-destruct system was activated as a result of the damage that his chair had sustained, forcing The Doctor and Mel to flee to the TARDIS before the subsequent explosion wiped out the colony (How Davros survived this is unknown; the most likely explanation is that he was able to retreat to an escape pod which contained a back-up life support system, thus abandoning his chair while allowing himself to continue).

The Seventh Doctor’s initial encounter with the Daleks pushed the further than ever before, mainly since it was such a personal confrontation ("Remembrance of the Daleks"); 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 ("The Genocide Machine"), 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).

Some time after this, The Doctor and Ace - now accompanied by new companion Hex - arrived on the planet Bliss during the Dalek wars, where, according to The Doctor, one of the worst atrocities of the conflict with the Daleks would be committed… with The Doctor visiting Bliss to ensure the atrocity happened ("Enemy of the Daleks"). Accompanied by a ‘Valkyrie’ unit - an all-female fighting force created to combat the Daleks - The Doctor, Ace and Hex learned that Bliss was the location where notorious scientist Professor Toshio Shimura had created a laboratory facility, The Doctor subsequently learning that Shimura had created a new life form in his lab. By collecting and altering the eggs of the ‘Pirhanalocusts’ - a lethal race of giant insects native to Bliss - Shimura had not only enlarged the Pirhanalocuts far beyond their original size, but had also granted them the ability to evolve beyond their original form by spinning cocoons for themselves, emerging from these cocoons as the ‘Kiseibyaa’, a race of lethal insect-like monsters that ate metal. Shimura intended for the Kiseibyaa to be unleashed against the Daleks - the Kiseibyaa devouring the metal Dalek casing and subsequently laying their eggs in the Dalek mutant - using them against a Dalek attack force that he had drawn to his lab by broadcasting a signal, but even without the moral issues involved in the experiment, The Doctor knew that, in the end, the Kiseibyaa would be almost a greater threat than the Daleks, as they would inevitably turn on humans after the Daleks were gone. With no other way to stop them - and reminded of his fourth incarnation’s failure to stop the Daleks at their beginning - The Doctor programmed the Black Dalek’s damaged casing to self-destruct - with the Dalek’s permission - the force of the explosion destroying the laboratory and all of the Kiseibyaa… the very atrocity that history would record had taken place.

The Doctor faced another personal confrontation with the Daleks during a return to the planet Spiridon - now renamed Zaleria - where the Daleks had resumed their attempts to harness the Spiridons’ secret of invisibility and salvage the Dalek army that had been left there after The Doctor’s last encounter with them ("Return of the Daleks"). Realising that the Spiridons had found a means to make themselves visible once more, the Daleks sought to learn how to reverse the process, The Doctor agreed to help the Daleks harness the secret of invisibility if they released their prisoners. Although it took years of work, The Doctor was able to develop a cure that, when released, restored the Spiridons to their natural state of invisibility while infecting all others on the planet with ‘light-wave sickness’ - a disease caused by the massive amounts of energy required to become invisible - killing all the Daleks on the planet; The Doctor was only just able to survive by returning to the dimensional stability of the TARDIS, and even then he was left ill for some time as his body fought between its current state of cellular paralysis and its natural ‘desire’ to regenerate before his cells finally stabilised.

Following his regeneration, the Eighth Doctor encountered the Daleks while investigating a temporal fissure that had apparently erased William Shakespeare from history ("The Time of the Daleks"), 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.

Several years after this encounter, following his return to his home reality after a period of exile in the anti-time universe, the Eighth Doctor, Charley Pollard 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. On a more personal level, Davros revealed that he had actually forced The Doctor to help him achieve this; after The Doctor had materialised on board the ship where Davros had been trapped since the destruction of Skaro, Davros had captured The Doctor’s then-companions Samson and Gemma Griffin and used them to force The Doctor to take him to Earth, subsequently manipulating the TARDIS to erase The Doctor’s memory of the Griffin siblings before he departed, leaving Davros to spread a Dalek-creating virus across Earth for the sole purpose of destroying The Doctor’s home like The Doctor had destroyed his while The Doctor travelled with Charley and C’rizz in complete ignorance of Davros’s schemes. Despite Davros’s pleas for The Doctor to kill him - his mind now torn between a desire to end his twisted life and a desire to continue it - The Doctor refused to allow Davros to drag him down to his enemy’s level, allowing the Daleks to destroy a clone that Davros had created with the intention of transferring his mind into a new body. As a result of the trauma caused by the clone’s destruction, the Dalek Emperor persona took total control of Davros and subsequently left for space with the Daleks, 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 Lucie Miller, a young woman sent to him by the Time Lords as part of a ‘witness protection program’ who had just arrived in the TARDIS ("Blood of the Daleks"). Arriving on the human colony world Red Rocket Rising following a meteor strike, the Doctor was shocked to learn that the Daleks were offering their assistance to the colony, an offer that had been accepted by the colony president out of his belief that the Daleks were benevolent. However, it was subsequently revealed that the Daleks had actually been summoned by the renegade Professor Martez, who had combined living and dead humans with Dalek technology salvaged from a crashed ship, creating a new race of Daleks that she believed would help the people to survive. Initially forced to work with the Daleks to destroy Martez’s creations - the asteroid strike revealed to be the doing of the Daleks to try and destroy Martez’s Daleks, seen as a threat to their ‘purity’ - The Doctor was eventually able to arrange for both Daleks to destroy each other, the true Daleks weakened by a recent conflict and Martez’s Daleks no longer producing new models after The Doctor convinced Martez to shut down the birthing machine.

The Doctor had a particularly personal confrontation with the Daleks when they attempted to invade Earth in the late 22nd century once again, this time aided by The Doctor’s old friend the Monk. Using a Dalek virus he had acquired in the future, the Monk helped the Daleks eliminate opposition by infecting the human race with the plague, subsequently sending his current companion - and the Eighth Doctor’s former companion - Tamsin Drew around the planet to acquire artefacts from museums for his collection. However, the human resistance movement against the Daleks - lead by Susan and including her son Alex and Lucie Miller, another old companion of the Eighth Doctor - were able to contact The Doctor for help ("Lucie Miller"), allowing them to plant a bomb in the Dalek stronghold that destroyed their invasion force, although Tamsin, Lucie and Alex were all killed in the attempt (The Doctor and Susan only escaping due to the Monk betraying his ‘allies’ after they destroyed his collection) ("To the Death").

During the Fifth Doctor’s visit to the Vault of Stellar Curios to investigate recent temporal leakage, he found himself involved in a particularly interesting Dalek plot, made even more significant by the fact that his next three incarnations were involved in the events as well. Allied with Colonel Ulrik of the Jaridens - a race who had fought off the Daleks by reverse-engineering their technology -, the Daleks attempted to invade the Vault, unaware that not only was the Fifth Doctor present, but he was being aided by his eighth incarnation, while the Seventh Doctor - currently on Earth - narrowly escaped a Dalek attack with the aid of another version of Ulrik, the Sixth Doctor planting a transmitter in a cell to provide another version of Ulrik with information on how to escape. Learning that the Daleks were after a Jariden/Special Weapons Dalek hybrid that had been created to fight the Daleks - to the extent that even Daleks from the future were travelling back in time to acquire it -, The Doctors were able to trigger time loop that destroyed all the present versions of Colonel Ulrik and the various Dalek forces involved, the Fifth Doctor using his TARDIS to contain the resulting temporal instability and briefly meeting his future selves before they parted company ("The Four Doctors").

Now travelling alone once more, the Eighth Doctor returned to the Greenpeace rally where he had left his current incarnation’s original companion Samantha Jones, later going on to have another encounter with the Daleks and Davros (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 ("War of the Daleks"), 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
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
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
However, this was revealed to not be the case in the finale of the second series - barring a brief encounter with a Dalek discovered in an archaeological dig that had been sent to try and infect humanity with the ‘Dalek factor’ once again, The Doctor subsequently tricking the Dalek into taking a Time Ring that he had set to self-destruct after apparently making a deal to send it to another planet in exchange for leaving Earth alone ("I Am A Dalek") - 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 ("Army of Ghosts/Doomsday"). 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
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.

The Tenth Doctor, now alone, found himself facing the Daleks once again when the TARDIS somehow jumped time tracks, causing him to arrive in the universe prior to the Time War in the middle of the first Earth Empire’s war with the Daleks ("Prisoner of the Daleks"). Having encountered a group of Dalek bounty hunters on the distant planet Hurala after they had taken a Dalek prisoner, The Doctor learned that the Daleks were planning to use the Arkheon temporal rift - most likely the reason for The Doctor arriving in a universe where the Time War had yet to be waged - as a means of gaining true time travel by penetrating the Time Vortex. Although The Doctor and the bounty hunters attempted to find out what the Daleks were planning, they were captured by the Daleks and The Doctor subsequently interrogated by Dalek X - the Dalek Inquisitor General, whose ‘name’ had been given to him by Earth command, regarded as the Devil in Dalek form - who swiftly deduced that The Doctor was from the future and forced him to take them to the TARDIS. Once back on Hurala, however, The Doctor and the bounty hunters were able to trick the Daleks into entering Hurala’s dormant refuelling facility by claiming that The Doctor had lost the TARDIS key during his previous visit, allowing The Doctor to trigger the facility to self-destruct, the resulting energy release destroying Dalek X’s Command Saucer and his support ships, creating a significant dent on Dalek operations in this part of the galaxy. Having sealed the Arkheon rift with the TARDIS, The Doctor returned to Hurala to confront the crippled and immobilised Dalek X - who had been trapped at the bottom of the facility before the explosion, his systems too damaged to work while retaining enough power to keep him alive - before returning to his proper time, coldly informing Dalek X that, in the end, the Daleks would never win because they could never accept that every other race was better them, pointing out that there wasn’t a single being in the universe who would willingly become a Dalek.

Victory of the Daleks
Victory of the Daleks
The Doctor’s next encounter with the Daleks was one of his most dramatic, as it marked one of the few occasions where the Daleks even technically defeated him. Responding to a call for advice from his old friend Winston Churchill ("Victory of the Daleks") - whom he had previously met in his second and sixth incarnations ("Players", "The Shadow in the Glass") -, the Eleventh Doctor and his companion Amy Pond learned that Professor Edwin Bracewell had recently developed the ‘Ironside’ project, Ironside being a secret weapon that Churchill believed could help win the war... only for The Doctor to be horrified when he learned that the ‘Ironsides’ were Daleks. When The Doctor confirmed the identity of both himself and the Daleks, the Daleks transmitted his ‘testimony’ to a Dalek ship hiding behind the moon, the Daleks subsequently revealing that Bracewell was merely an android the Daleks had created to conceal their origins; their presence on Earth in this time had been conceived for the sole purpose of making contact with The Doctor so that he could activate the ‘Progenitor’. As the Dalek ship approached Earth, The Doctor confronted the Daleks on their ship, deducing that the badly-damaged Dalek ship had fallen back through time after his last encounter with them. The Progenitor device - the last of thousands - contained thousands of Dalek DNA samples, capable of recreating the Dalek race, but they had needed The Doctor to activate it as the Daleks no longer registered as being ‘pure’ due to their new origins from Davros’s cells, The Doctor’s testimony being required to prompt the Progenitor to recognise them as Daleks. Although the Progenitor created the first of a new wave of Daleks - the new Daleks’ first action being to destroy the old Daleks as ‘inferior’ before turning their attention to The Doctor -, Amy and Churchill were able to convince Bracewell to move past his issues with his identity to help them create weapons to fight the Dalek ship, The Doctor keeping the Daleks distracted long enough for the British to launch planes capable of flying in space. Unfortunately, the Daleks escaped when they revealed that Bracewell was powered by an Oblivion Continuum - a miniature wormhole linked to another dimension of near-unlimited power -, forcing The Doctor to allow the ship to escape while he returned to Earth to stop Bracewell from detonating, rendering it inevitable that he would face them again, although Amy and Churchill assured him that he had still won by saving Earth.

City of the Daleks
City of the Daleks
 Shortly after this confrontation with the Daleks, The Doctor and Amy were forced to face them once again when a visit to London in 1963 to see the Beatles in concert resulted in them arriving on an Earth that had been decimated by a Dalek invasion, the only apparent human survivor being a young woman called Sylvia ("City of the Daleks"). Learning from Sylvia that the Daleks had attacked Earth through a rift in the sky - although she was exterminated shortly afterwards -, The Doctor and Amy tracked the rift back to the Dalek city of Kaalann on Skaro, confronting the Dalek Emperor after The Doctor had constructed a chronon blocker to maintain Amy’s existence after she began to fade due to humanity’s history being erased. Learning that the Daleks had acquired control of the ‘Eye of Time’- a natural phenomenon said to be the core of the Big Bang and the literal ‘heart’ of time and space, once controlled by the Time Lords before the Daleks found it after the destruction of Gallifrey ("The Ancestor Cell") - and used it to change history, The Doctor used the Eye to travel back in time to before the Daleks had completed preparations for their invasion, constructing a device that would blind all the Daleks in the city using the Dalek Visualiser from Kaalann’s main monitoring room. Having tricked the Daleks into attacking each other after activating the visualiser - ironically aided by Amy’s current invisibility as she flickered in and out of existence due to her paradoxical existence -, The Doctor and Amy fled through the Eye after releasing it back into the universe, finding themselves back in the future facility with the TARDIS, the Dalek army now eliminated.

  The Doctor and Amy found themselves facing the Daleks once again when they landed on Station 7, a research station where scientists attempted to analyse Dalek technology ("The Only Good Dalek"). Establishing himself as a government investigator using both the psychic paper and his old friendship with Sara Kingdom ("The Daleks' Master Plan"), The Doctor learned that the scientists at the station had developed what they believed was a means of taking direct control of the Dalek casing by installing a positronic brain between the creature and the control links to the travel machine, essentially allowing the humans to ‘bypass’ the Dalek creature and control their machines. This research station’s worth was apparently proven when the Daleks attempted to board the station to recover the scientists’ data, but it was quickly established that the ‘converted’ Daleks were anything but; the Daleks had psychokinetically bypassed the positronic brain as soon as it was installed. With Amy and The Doctor forced to escape the station in separate pods, Amy and Jay - one of the soldiers on the station - were only just able to evade capture with the aid of an apparently reprogrammed Dalek, while The Doctor and station Commander Tranter discovered Professor Weston, the former chief scientist on the station, who had left Station 7 some months back. Working on the planet, Weston had not only converted the native animal population with cybernetic implants to serve as a security force, but had also managed to genetically re-engineer a Dalek to give it a full understanding of compassion and mercy, successfully creating the only truly ‘good’ Dalek. Although their attempts to use this Dalek to escape were nearly jeopardised when Tranter was revealed to be a brainwashed Dalek agent - controlled by an apparently cybernetic left eye that had been planted on him after his recent escape from a Dalek prison -, The Doctor’s discovery of his programming allowed Tranter to resist its influence. Realising that he was the reason the Daleks had discovered Station 7, Tranter sacrificed himself to destroy the Dalek ship - with some slight assistance from Weston’s altered Dalek -, Weston also giving his life so that The Doctor, Amy and Jay could get away with his research. Although The Doctor doubted that anything would come of Weston’s research, he reflected that its mere existence represented humanity’s capacity for hope and ingenuity, traits that the Daleks would never be able to understand and overcome.


The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang (2010)
 The Eleventh Doctor faced the Daleks again when they joined forces with his other enemies in a vast Alliance to trap him in the Pandorica - a legendary prison that had been spoken of in myth, created specifically to hold The Doctor - after they became convinced that he would be responsible for a temporal explosion that triggered the creation of cracks in the universe after the TARDIS exploded, unaware that the explosion had already taken place when his future companion River Song was piloting the ship. With the collapse of history, the various races in the Alliance were all erased from existence, leaving only statues of themselves gathered around the Pandorica as ‘after-images’, Earth the last fragment of time left in the universe thanks to the exploding TARDIS putting itself in a time loop at the moment of its destruction to act as a substitute sun for Earth. Although a ‘stone’ Dalek survived to the present, awakening once again as a result of the Pandorica being opened by the young Amelia Pond that existed in this reality - the residual atoms of the true universe preserved inside the Pandorica being enough to revive the Dalek -, it was fought off by the Auton duplicate of Rory Williams and The Doctor’s future companion River Song - River managing to kill it by shooting at its eyestalk while its shield density was weakened by its power shortage -, but not before it managed to nearly kill The Doctor with a lucky shot. With The Doctor having taken the Pandorica into the TARDIS explosion, using the TARDIS itself as a power source to transmit the remaining atoms of the true universe stored within the Pandorica across all of time and space in a second explosion that restored the history of the universe, the Alliance was erased and history restored.

 While preparing for his death at the hands of River Song while she was controlled by the Silence, The Doctor discovered a crashed Dalek ship, accessing the datacore of the damaged Dalek inside it for all information that it possessed about the Silence so that he could find a way around his death. Using this information, The Doctor was able to find a source that could tell him why the Silence wanted him dead, and subsequently devised a means of faking his death so that he could throw them off.




THEIR TELEVISION APPEARANCES

Story Doctor Writer Originally Transmitted Episodes BBC Archive Status Released on Video/Audio Average Ratings (Millions)

The Daleks

1st

Terry Nation

21st December 1963 - 1st February 1964

7

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

9.0

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

1st

Terry Nation

21st November - 26th December 1964

6

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

11.9

The Chase

1st

Terry Nation

22nd May  - 26th June 1965

6

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

9.4

Mission to the Unknown (Dalek Cutaway)

 

Terry Nation

9th October 1965

1

None held.

Audio
CD

8.3

The Daleks' Master Plan

1st

Terry Nation & John Lucarotti

13th November 1965 – 29th January 1966

12

Only episodes 2, 5 & 10 held. Clips of episodes 1 - 4 are also held

Audio
CD

9.4

The Power of the Daleks

2nd

David Whitaker

5th November – 10th December 1966

6

None held. Clips of episodes 1, 2, 4, 5 & 6 are held

Audio
CD

7.8

The Evil of the Daleks

2nd

David Whitaker

20th May – 1st July 1967

7

Only episode 2 held. Clips of episode 7 are also held

Audio
CD

6.4

Day of the Daleks

3rd

Louis Marks

1st – 22nd January 1972

4

All held

Video
VHS

9.6

Frontier in Space

3rd

Malcolm Hulke

24th February – 31st March 1973

6

All held.

Video
VHS & DVD

8.0

Planet of the Daleks

3rd

Terry Nation

7th April – 12th May 1973

6

All held..

Video
VHS & DVD

9.7

Death to the Daleks

3rd

Terry Nation

23rd February – 16th March 1974

4

All held

Video
VHS

9.4

Genesis of the Daleks

4th

Terry Nation

8th March - 12th April 1975

6

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

9.6

Destiny of the Daleks

4th

Terry Nation

1st – 22nd September 1979

4

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

13.5

The Five Doctors

5th

Terrance Dicks

25th November 1983

1

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

7.7

Resurrection of the Daleks

5th

Eric Saward

8th – 15th February 1984

2

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

7.7

Revelation of the Daleks

6th

Eric Saward

23rd – 30th March 1985

2

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

7.6

Remembrance of the Daleks

7th

Ben Aaronovitch

5th – 26th October 1988

4

All held

Video
VHS & DVD

5.4

Dalek

9th

Robert Shearman

30th April 2005

1

All held

Video
DVD

7.8

Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways

9th

Russell T Davies

11th & 18th June 2005

2

All held

Video
DVD

6.8

Army of Ghosts/Doomsday

10th

Russell T Davies

1st & 8th July 2006

2

All held

Video
DVD

8.2

Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks

10th

Helen Raynor

21st & 28th July 2007

2

All held

Video
DVD

6.9

The Stolen Earth/Journey's End

10th

Russell T Davies

28th June & 5th July 2008

2

All held

Video
DVD

9.7

Victory of the Daleks

11th

Mark Gatiss

17th April 2010

1

All held

Video
DVD

7.8

The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang 11th Steven Moffat 19th - 26th June 2010 2 All held
Video
DVD
7.2
 
THEIR MOVIE APPEARANCES

 Unlike any other Doctor Who enemy, The Daleks have also appeared in two movies: "Dr. Who and the Daleks" and "Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD”. Both were based on the television serials "The Daleks" and "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", respectively. However, the movies were not straight remakes. When released viewers were able to see the Daleks in colour for the first time. Brand new Dalek props were used, based closely on the original design, with a wide range of colours. Originally, the movie Daleks were supposed to shoot jets of flame, but this was thought to be too graphic for children, so their weapons emitted jets of deadly vapour instead.




THEIR STRENGTHS

 Possessing formidable firepower and armour, the Daleks are practically indestructible, particularly in recent times, due to them having developed individual force fields that stop bullets from hitting them, as well as anti-gravity motors that enable them to fly through open space. Their utter ruthlessness means that the fate of an individual matters little to them so long as the species survives, giving them an almost fanatical devotion to destroying their adversaries. According to The Doctor, Daleks are geniuses, capable of calculating a hundred billion combinations in a second, and their emotionless natures allow them to coldly calculate the best decision to take in any combat situation regardless of the threat to the individual Dalek so long as the species survives.


THEIR WEAKNESSES

Death by Dalek
Death by Dalek
 In many ways, the Daleks are the adversaries who have evolved the most during their confrontations with The Doctor, with old weaknesses being constantly ‘screened’ out of them after a past defeat. In their initial appearance, they were dependent on static electricity being generated by the metal floors of their city in order to move about, thus confining them to their city. However, this weakness was totally removed in their subsequent appearances, with them using enlarged ‘fenders’ that allowed them to pick up power remotely.

 Their limitation to flat surfaces was also overcome, with them eventually acquiring anti-gravity motors that allowed them to hover up the stairs, although their bulk made tight corners difficult for them. Although they could initially be defeated with enough gunfire or other large weapons such as rocket launchers, during the Time War they developed personalised force fields that dissolved bullets before they could even make contact. The Doctor has said that if bullets were continuously fired on one part of the shield, such as around the eye, the shots would eventually hurt the Dalek by blinding it. However, so far the only weapons known to penetrate the force field have been energy weapons, so it remains unclear whether the soldiers firing at the Daleks just didn’t aim at the right place or The Doctor was only hoping that concentrated gunfire would do the job and in reality it accomplished nothing.

Their only continuous weakness is their lack of emotion and imagination as a species; although some Daleks have acknowledged the value of emotion in war, resulting in the creation of the Cult of Skaro - a secret order created to think like the enemy and find new ways of killing people, - in general the Daleks are emotionless beings, lacking any form of initiative or imagination, thus causing them to strictly follow their orders and thus rendering them relatively easy to defeat when dealing with an imaginative enemy like The Doctor.


THEIR WEAPONS

Special Weapons Dalek
Special Weapons Dalek
 Traditionally, the Dalek weapons have been limited to the single thin gun arm on their left-hand sides, capable of serving both as a laser and as a cutting tool. However, there have been some rare examples of Daleks with different capabilities, the most prominent of these being the Special Weapons Dalek, possessing only an enlarged gun and far heavier firepower than the conventional Dalek. In an attempt to overcome their lack of imagination, some Daleks have been known to use a Dalek battle computer, which is plugged into the brain of another species - the computer shown used a human child, although it is possible that other species might be compatible - to channel their imagination and come up with further strategies. According to The Doctor, a Dalek mother ship could crack open Earth like an egg, but the strength of firepower possessed by their conventional ships is currently unclear.

 Although they possess time travel technology, such as time corridors - linking one point in time and space to another, - it is generally portrayed as being rather crude when compared to the TARDIS, which is most likely one of the reasons for the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks, the Daleks driven to acquire time-travel technology to ensure their supremacy. The Cult of Skaro have displayed the ability to initiate an ‘emergency temporal shift’ when in danger, allowing them to travel to another location in time and space, but this process is apparently very draining to them and the destination is seemingly random.


THE THALS

The Thals
The Thals
 The other species to evolve on Skaro, the Kaleds and the Thals initially waged a long and bloody nuclear war, which only ended when Davros gave the Thals the ability to destroy the main Kaled base in the hope of forcing the Kaleds to accept the creation of the Daleks. With the aid of the Fourth Doctor, the Thals were able to trap the Daleks in a bunker, thus delaying their development by around a thousand years. By the time the Daleks re-emerged, the Thals had become a beautiful, peaceful people, refusing to even fight the Daleks when their lives were at stake, regarding the fate of Skaro as proof of what happened when war was waged. However, encouraged by the First Doctor and his companions to fight back in order to defend themselves and their loved ones, the Thals later mounted a revolution against the Daleks, destroying their city and apparently leaving them powerless. Following this, the Thals remained absent until the Third Doctor encountered them during the Daleks’ attempt to acquire the Spiridons’ secret of invisibility, during which a Thal task force aided The Doctor in destroying a Dalek army, The Doctor subsequently encouraging the Thals to tell the story of what had happened without glorifying it to ensure that they retained their reputation as a peaceful people. Tragically, however, this wish was apparently unfulfilled; in "War of the Daleks", the Thals were revealed to have become almost as bad as the Daleks, destroying an entire planet simply to eliminate a Dalek force despite the planet being inhabited (Although the novel ended with some hope that the Thals, having encountered The Doctor once again, would turn away from their new path).

 Exactly when the Thals relocated away from Skaro (As implied in "War of the Daleks"), or where they went to afterwards is unclear.


THE STATISTICS

 The Daleks have appeared in a total of 22 stories (93 episodes in all) plus cameo appearances in many others. They have to-date appeared in countless books, comic strips and audio adventures and dalek related merchandise has outstripped any other Doctor Who merchandise. During the first 4 years of the show they appeared a total of 7 times and in the revised series that started in 2005, they have appeared at least once a year.

The Cybermen may have appeared more times than the Daleks during the First and Second Doctor’s eras but the Daleks have remained one of the most consistent enemy The Doctor has ever faced. Despite the shows early remit that their would be no ‘bugged-eyed monsters’ The popularity of the Daleks, along with the Cybermen, made the show so popular. It is also widely acknowledged that if it was not for the Daleks Doctor Who would not have had such an initial long run and therefore would not now be back on our screens.

 The Daleks rein supreme consistently beating all other monsters in any polls that are conducted. So much was their popularity a campaign was run when, in 2004, it was first announced that the show was returning – but without the Daleks!




THEIR WRITTEN AND AUDIO APPEARANCES

 As well as the Target novels of the television stories the Daleks have appeared in countless number of books, comic strips and audio adventures.

 

THEIR BOOK APPEARANCES

Format Title Released Writer Remarks
Book
Script

The Daleks

December 1989

John McElroy

Titan Script Book

Book
Script

The Power of the Daleks

March 1993

John McElroy

Titan Script Book

Book
Novel

War of the Daleks

October 1997

John Peel

BBC's The Eighth Doctors Stories

Book
Novel

Legacy of the Daleks

April 1998

John Peel

BBC's The Eighth Doctors Stories

Book
Novel

The Dalek Factor

March 2004

Simon Clark

Telos Doctor Who Novellas

Book
Novel

I Am A Dalek
(Quick Read Series)

May 2006

Gareth Roberts

BBC's The Tenth Doctors Stories

Book
Novel

Prisoner of the Daleks
(Quick Read Series)

April 2009

Trevor Baxendale

BBC's The Tenth Doctors Stories





THEIR AUDIO APPEARANCES
Audio - Dalek Empire: The Genocide Machine
The Genocide Machine


 The Daleks have also returned numerous times in the Big Finish Productions Doctor Who line of audio plays. This includes there own mini-series "Dalek Empire" (of which 18 CDs, have so far been produced) and in the opening story "Blood of the Daleks" of a series of Eighth Doctor audio adventures that was broadcast on BBC 7 in December 2006.

 They have also appeared in the Bernice Summerfield spin-off audio series in a story called "Death and the Daleks".

THE AUDIO STORIES

Format
Title Released Writer Remarks

The Genocide Machine

April 2000

Mike Tucker

The Big Finish Audio Stories

The Apocalypse Element

August 2000

Stephen Cole

The Big Finish Audio Stories

The Mutant Phase

December 2000

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

The Dalek Empire
Chapter 1 - Invasion of the Daleks

June 2001

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

The Dalek Empire
Chapter 2 - The Human Factor

July 2001

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

The Dalek Empire
Chapter 3 - Death to the Daleks!

November 2001

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

The Dalek Empire
Chapter 4 - Project Infinity

January 2002

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

The Time of the Daleks

May 2002

Justin Richards

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Jubilee

January 2003

Robert Shearman

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire II - Dalek War - Chapter 1

January 2003

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire II - Dalek War - Chapter 2

February 2003

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire II - Dalek War - Chapter 3

March 2003

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire II - Dalek War - Chapter 4

April 2003

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire III
Chapter 1 - The Exterminators

May 2004

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire III
Chapter 2 - The Healers

June 2004

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire III
Chapter 3 - The Survivors

July 2004

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire III
Chapter 4 - The Demons

September 2004

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire III
Chapter 5 - The Warriors

October 2004

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire III
Chapter 6 - The Future

November 2004

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

The Juggernauts

January 2005

Scott Alan Woodard

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Terror Firma

August 2005

Joseph Lidster

 

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Return of the Daleks

December 2006

Nicholas Briggs

 

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Audio
Audio

Blood of the Daleks (Part 1)

January 2007

Steve Lyons

The Big Finish Audio Stories
(Originally broadcast 31st December 2006 on BBC 7)

Audio
Audio

Blood of the Daleks (Part 2)

February 2007

Steve Lyons

The Big Finish Audio Stories
(Originally broadcast 7th January 2007 on BBC 7)

Audio
Audio

Fear of the Daleks

February 2007

Patrick Chapman

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Renaissance of the Daleks

March 2007

Stephen Hawking (from a story by Christopher H Bidmead)

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire 4: The Fearless - Part 1

October 2007

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire 4: The Fearless - Part 2

November 2007

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire 4: The Fearless - Part 3

December 2007

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Dalek Empire 4: The Fearless - Part 4

January 2008

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Brotherhood of the Daleks

October 2008

Alan Barnes

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Enemy of the Daleks

May 2009

David Bishop

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Patient Zero

August 2009

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Plague of the Daleks

December 2009

Mark Morris

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Audio
Audio

The Four Doctors

December 2010

Peter Anghelides

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Audio
Audio

The Destroyers

December 2010

Terry Nation

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Audio
Audio

Lucie Miller

February 2011

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Audio
Audio

To the Death

March 2011

Nicholas Briggs

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Audio
Audio

The Five Companions

December 2011

Eddie Robson

The Big Finish Audio Stories

Audio
Audio

The Curse of Davros

January 2012

Eddie Robson

The Big Finish Audio Stories






THEIR COMIC STRIP APPEARANCES

Classic Comics - Issue 6
Classic Comics
- Issue 6

 In 1965 Terry Nation authorised the publication of the comic strip "The Daleks" in the comic TV Century 21. This one-page strip (written by David Whitaker but credited to Nation) featured the Daleks as protagonists and "heroes", and continued for two years. Although much of the material in these strips directly contradicted what appeared in later television stories, some concepts like the Daleks using humanoid duplicates and the design of the Dalek Emperor did show up later on in the programme. In 1994 Marvel Comics reprinted all the TV Century 21 "The Dalek Chronicles" strips in a collected edition titled "Classic Comics".

 The Daleks also made appearances in the Third Doctor-era Doctor Who comic strip that featured in the combined Countdown/TV Action comic during the early 1970s

 Beginning in 1979, Marvel UK started to publish the Doctor Who Magazine (originally titled Doctor Who Weekly and Doctor Who Monthly). The Doctor occasionally fought the Daleks in the main comic strip, and this included the introduction of a recurring back-up strip: "Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer". Daak was a convicted criminal in the 25th century who was given the choice between execution and being sent on a suicide mission against the Daleks. He chose the latter and, when the woman he loved was killed by the Daleks, made it his life's purpose to kill every one of the creatures he came across.


OTHER APPEARANCES:


 As well as on television and in books, comics and on audio there have also appeared, or played a significant part, in the following stage plays:

"The Curse of the Daleks": Wyndham's Theatre, London (premiere 21 December 1965)
"Doctor Who and the Daleks in the Seven Keys to Doomsday": Adelphi Theatre, London (premiere 16 December 1974)
"Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure": Wimbledon Theatre, London (premiere 23 March 1989)
"The Evil of the Daleks": Theatre Royal, Portsmouth (premiere 25 October 2006)
"The Dalek Masterplan": Theatre Royal, Portsmouth (premiere 24 October 2007)

 The Daleks have appeared in countless number of television shows mostly in a comedy role. They have been used in advertising and have even found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. The amount and diversity of Dalek related merchandise is endless making them the most popular icon that has been used to promote a television show ever.

 Their continued popularity seems to be endless and it must be true to say that Doctor Who and the Daleks go hand-in-hand and neither would exist today without the other.
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Parts of this article were compiled with the assistance of David Spence who can be contacted by e-mail at djfs@blueyonder.co.uk
 
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