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| Davros |
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 Name: Davros
Format:
Television, Book, Audio
Time of Origin: Skaro, originally from
centuries in the past but has survived to the far future thanks to
such means as suspended animation and time travel.
Appearances: "Genesis
of the Daleks", "Destiny
of the Daleks", "Resurrection of the Daleks", "Davros", "Revelation
of the Daleks", "The
Juggernauts", "Remembrance
of the Daleks", "Terror
Firma", "War
of the Daleks", "The Stolen Earth/Journey's End".
Doctors: Fourth Doctor, Fifth Doctor,
Sixth Doctor, Seventh Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Tenth Doctor.
Companions: Sarah
Jane Smith, Harry
Sullivan,
K9, 2nd Romana, Tegan, Turlough, Peri
Brown, Melanie Bush, Ace,
Samantha
Jones, Charley
Pollard, C’rizz, Rose Tyler, Mickey
Smith, Captain Jack Harkness, Martha Jones, Donna Noble.
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| Davros DVD Box Set |
|
History: In many ways, Davros may very well be
the only being The Doctor has ever encountered who was more evil
than the Daleks; while the Daleks’ belief in their superiority
over other forms of life could be excused by the fact that they were
programmed to believe such was the case from the moment they were
created, Davros knew both good and evil throughout his life, and
nevertheless chose to program the Daleks - his great legacy to the
universe - to know nothing but evil and destruction.
Originally,
Davros was one of the greatest scientists of the Kaled race, one
of two races that existed on the planet Skaro, engaged in a prolonged
civil war with Skaro’s other dominant race, 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. As a child Davros claimed only his mother believed
in him, while others feared him and his determination. His father
wanted him to become a soldier like his elder generations, but Davros
was determined to become a scientist. Disagreeing with his sister
Yarvel’s belief that a compromise with the Thals was possible,
Davros was forced into the military, where he was put in charge of
developing new weapons. After his mother killed his father, sister
and aunt, Davros no longer had anyone that he could impress, with
his mother dedicating herself to helping her son’s career to
the point where Davros came to be regarded as an infallible scientific
genius.
Even in death, Davros’s mother helped
his theories; when she sacrificed herself to stop a soldier who had been
sent to kill Davros, she used one of her son’s machines to expose
herself and the soldier to a lethal radiation dose, thus accelerating
the mutation that she - and the Kaled race as a whole - were already
undergoing and giving Davros a better look at what they would become.
Shortly after this, Davros was horrifically crippled in a bombing raid,
but, unable to bring themselves to end the life of their greatest scientist,
the Kaleds instead gave Davros a poison injector so he could do it himself.
Perceiving their sympathy as weakness, Davros vowed to live so that a
new, stronger race would be born, turning his attention to the long-term
effects of the war.
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.
Having already found inspiration in the work of Shan - described
by Davros as the most beautiful, intelligent Kaled ever - when she
wrote a paper about the “Dalek Solution” as a means of
allowing the species to survive in the aftermath of the Kaled/Thal
conflict despite the damage done by the weapons over the course of
the war, Davros began his work in earnest. Although intrigued by
her work, Davros later betrayed Shan when he learned that she was
involved with Councillor Valron. Planting information to suggest
that Valron was a Thal spy, Davros had all of Valron’s associates
arrested, including Shan, due to his own inability to admit to himself
that he was in love with her.
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| Genesis
of the Daleks |
|
Concluding from a combination of Shan’s paper and
his own research that the mutation was inevitable and unstoppable,
Davros, rather than seeking a cure, 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,
Davors 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 or delay 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.
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 had come
to Skaro to recover Davros in the hope that he 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, seeking to 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 for his crimes.
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| 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 linking the space station where Davros had been restored
to a warehouse on Earth in the 1980s -, 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.
Somehow managing to cure himself of the Movellan virus,
Davros was later discovered in the vault of a freighter owned by
the galactic bank by Arnold Baynes and his wife Lorraine, the CEOs
of the TAI corporation, taking Davros’s apparently dead body
back to their homeworld just as The Doctor arrived. Reviving Davros
to offer him a position as head of R&D at the company, the Baynes
were able to attract Davros’s interest by their campaign idea
of offering mankind services before they knew they needed them, with
The Doctor getting himself hired as joint R&D head to keep an
eye on Davros now that he had acquired a position of power. Although
Davros claimed to have reformed after sending decades in suspended
animation, unable to do anything but reflect on how petty his actions
were, The Doctor vowed to keep an eye on him. Disturbed by Lorraine’s
desire to write his autobiography - Lorraine regarded him as the
greatest scientific mind in history -, Davros nevertheless set to
work solving the problem of an intergalactic famine, calculating
a formula that allowed him to predict the rate of any exchange of
stock. Having discovered the formula, however, Davros then intended
to make it public, thus triggering an economic collapse that would
allow him to implement a new economic plan based on Skaro’s
wartime economy, with criminals doing hard labour, ordinary citizens
making weapons, and only those with special aptitudes becoming the ‘galactic
elite’. Reflecting on his past with Lorraine, Davros concluded
that he couldn’t change, and thus triggered a nuclear explosion
that would vaporise all the workers on the planet after tricking
Lorraine into transferring her executive power to him just after
he’d apparently killed Baynes. Having escape the blast, The
Doctor subsequently destroyed the communications console to prevent
Davros broadcasting his formula, but Davros managed to gain control
of an escape ship, using a young woman called Kim The Doctor had
befriended as a hostage with the poison injector that he had been
given long ago and kept to that day. Knowing that The Doctor could
control the ship as long as it remained within the atmosphere, but
also knowing that he dared do nothing while her life was at risk,
Kim injected herself with the poison, thus leaving The Doctor free
to activate the ship’s hyperdrive and crash it into the planet.
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| Revelation of the Daleks |
|
Following this confrontation, The Doctor again faced
Davros - who had escaped the crash by using an escape pod - 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 - hence contributing
to his attempts to destabilise the galactic market and release his
formula - 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 - shooting off his hand in the process
- and destroying his makeshift Daleks, simultaneously ignoring The
Doctor as they didn’t recognise him due to his regeneration
(The only occasion where the Daleks were unable to instantly identify
The Doctor).
As The Doctor would later learn, however, Davros never
made it to Skaro; 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. 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).
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| Remembrance
of the Daleks |
|
The Seventh Doctor’s initial encounter with Davros
pushed him 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 (Possible further
evidence of him having escaped the colony’s destruction by
abandoning his old life support system in favour of a new one) 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 - although he retreated to his escape pod, it was unknown whether
he had managed to get far enough away in time -, 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.
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Terror Firma
(Joseph Lidster) |
|
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. 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. As a result of the trauma, 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.
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War of the Daleks
(John Peel) |
|
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 - finding themselves unable to change history
by such actions as 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 be 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
as the Dalek teleported rather than disintegrating him, (presumably)
beginning the steps that would lead to his mental instability in “Terror
Firma”.
When the new television series began, although the Daleks
were swiftly revealed to have been rendered all but extinct as a
result of the last great Time War between the Time Lords and the
Daleks - the war culminating in The Doctor triggering the destruction
of ten million Dalek ships, apparently at the cost of Gallifrey -,
Davros took some time to appear, Russell T Davies seeking to re-establish
the Daleks’ independence from their creator rather than the
over-reliance that had been demonstrated in their last televised
appearances. Even without actually appearing, Davros was clearly
not forgotten; both the Ninth and Tenth Doctors referred to Davros
when reflecting on the Daleks’ history, the Ninth describing
Davros as a man who was “king of his own little world” and
the Tenth noting Davros’s belief that lack of emotions made
the Dalek race stronger, although neither Doctor identified Davros
by name. In a more indirect reference, the evil John Lumic, a wheelchair-bound
genius from an alternate Earth who created the Cybermen of his reality,
clearly owes at least some elements of his appearance to Davros;
both of them were crippled, wheelchair-bound geniuses who claimed
to be acting in the interests of their species by turning them into
a different form of life (Although there were significant differences;
Davros made the Daleks in the image of what he had become due to
outside influence while Lumic made the Cybermen in the image of what
he wanted to become by choice, and Davros was mostly lying when he
referred to the Daleks as the only hope of survival for his people
whereas Lumic seemed to genuinely believe what he was saying).
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| The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End |
|
When he finally returned to the series - now with a mechanical
hand to replace the one that he had lost years ago -, it was revealed
that Davros was presumed dead in the first year of the Time War at
the Gates of Elysium, when his command ship flew into the jaws of
the Nightmare Child despite The Doctor’s efforts. However,
when Dalek Caan fled New York after the destruction of the rest of
the Cult of Skaro, his emergency temporal shift somehow allowed him
to jump past the temporal lock placed on the war to travel back in
time and rescue Davros, although the process drove him mad as he
perceived the entirety of time. After Davros created a new race of
Daleks from the very cells of his body - although the Daleks still
treated him as inferior due to his non-Dalek status, keeping him
in a prison at the base of their ship -, the Daleks went on steal
twenty-seven planets from across all of time and space, bringing
them together in the Medusa Cascade and hiding them from The Doctor
by keeping the entire Cascade a second out of sync with the rest
of the universe. Tracking the planets to the Cascade, The Doctor
learned that Davros had arranged the twenty-seven planets into a pattern
that they would use 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 - the weapon,
naturally, being known as the ‘Reality Bomb’. Although
The Doctor’s companions tried to stop the Reality Bomb - Martha
by threatening to use a weapon called the Oosterhaagen Key that would
trigger strategically-placed nuclear bombs to destroy Earth while
Sarah
Jane Smith, Captain Jack Harkness, Mickey Smith and Jackie
Tyler threatened to detonate the Crucible with a gem containing a
pocket explosion that Sarah possessed -, Davros simply taunted The
Doctor for his refusal to fire weapons even as he turned those he
met into soldiers, transmatting the companions to his location to
witness his victory and avert their attempts. However, thanks to
the actions of a part-human ‘clone’ of The Doctor - due
to The Doctor averting his latest regeneration by channelling the
regenerative energy that would have changed his appearance into his
spare hand, the hand subsequently creating a new Doctor based partly
on Donna’s DNA while also granting Donna access to Time Lord
knowledge -, Donna was able to reprogram the Reality Bomb to backfire,
subsequently sending the planets back to their proper places in time
while the second Doctor triggered the Daleks’ self-destruct;
Dalek Caan’s ‘prophecies’ had all been made with
the intention of ending the Daleks once and for all, having perceived
the pointlessness of their actions on the universe as a whole. Although
The Doctor tried to save Davros, Davros denounced him as the Destroyer
of Worlds and refused his offer, the TARDIS thus departing the Crucible
just as it detonated. Whether Davros escaped this as he has so many
other attacks in the past remains unknown. |
