Section Eight used the dark arts to end the Cuban Missile Crisis. [1858] A small party of Muslims passed into Avalon. [1859] The starship of the alien scientist Raldonn crashed in Britain, killing the co-pilot. He was set to work on Operation Proteus, and began using it as a cover for other experiments on humans. [1860]
@ It was the eighth Doctor’s idea that the Beatles should wear suits. [1861] The Doctor travelled the world in the sixties and seventies. [1862] He visited India. [1863]
The Doctor spent some time at a Buddhist temple in Thailand, searching for a dragon. His search took twenty-five years and he travelled across China, Vietnam and Siam. He found the dragon, but it’s not known what subsequently happened. [1864]
During the 1960s, the Doctor spent some time learning ventriloquism from Edgar Bergen of The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show. [1865]
One Dalek fell through time at the end of the Last Great Time War, crashing to Earth in the Ascension Islands. Damaged and unresponsive, it spent the next fifty years being passed from one private collection to another, ending up being bought by Van Statten. [1866]
Melanie Bush’s sister Annabelle was born 4th October, 1962. [1867] Percival Noggins was born around 1962. [1868]
(=) 1962 - “Klein’s Story” [1869]
Elizabeth Klein was researching physics at Cambridge when Major Eunice Faber recruited her to examine alien technology stored in Berlin. The two of them became romantically involved, and he told her of the capture of the Doctor’s time machine in 1955. Soon after, the eighth Doctor, posing as “Johann Schmidt”, made contact with Klein and offered to help her determine the Ship’s secrets. They worked together for the next three years.
Minnie Hooper, a friend of Wilfred Mott, got trapped in a police box on August bank holiday in 1962. [1870]
History Section Sidebars
Are There Two Dalek Histories?
There are a number of discrepancies between the accounts of the Daleks’ origins in The Daleks and Genesis of the Daleks. In the first story, the original Daleks (or Dals) were humanoid, and it is implied they only mutated after the Neutronic War. This version was also depicted in the TV Century 21 comic strip, where the Dalek casings are built by a scientist called Yarvelling and a mutated Dalek crawls into a casing to survive. Whereas in Genesis of the Daleks, we see Davros deliberately accelerate the mutations that have begun to affect the Kaled race (a process the Doctor calls “genetic engineering” in Dalek).
Fans have attempted to reconcile these accounts in a number of ways. Perhaps the most common nowadays is to completely dismiss the version in The Daleks, and declare the Thal version of events to be a garbled version of the true history seen in Genesis of the Daleks. This would mean that the Doctor’s comment that the Thal records are accurate is wrong - which isn’t too difficult to justify. The idea that Skaro’s civilisation lost knowledge following a nuclear war and that the two races would have subjective, propaganda-driven history is tempting... but it doesn’t explain why both the Thals and the Daleks in The Daleks believe in exactly the same version of events, especially as they’ve had no contact with each other for some time. It’s also suggesting that Skaro’s historians are so incompetent that they can’t tell the difference between a war that lasted a thousand years with one that lasted a day.
Another possible explanation is that the Doctor changes history in Genesis of the Daleks - before then, history was the version in The Daleks, afterwards it’s the Genesis version. This is tempting, because altering history was the Doctor’s mission, after all, and he says at the end that he’s set the Daleks back “a thousand years”. The Discontinuity Guide suggested that in their appearances after Genesis of the Daleks, the Daleks are nowhere near as unified a force as they had been before. Morever, Davros - who previously wasn’t even mentioned - plays a major part in Dalek politics. The Discontinuity Guide credits all of this to the Doctor changing history - looking closely at the evidence, though, the Doctor hasn’t actually made much of a difference. The Daleks are an extremely feared, powerful and unified force in the first of the post-Genesis stories (Destiny of the Daleks), and it’s their defeat to the Movellans after that story which weakens them. In other words, no alteration of the timeline need be invoked to explain the change in the status quo. Perhaps the clincher is that The Dalek Invasion of Earth still happens in the post-Genesis stories - Susan remembers it in The Five Doctors (indeed, she’s been snatched from its aftermath), and Remembrance of the Daleks contains references both to the Daleks invading Earth in “the twenty-second century” and to events on Spiridon (Planet of the Daleks). That’s before factoring in the dozens of references to pre-Genesis of the Daleks stories in the novels, audios and comic strips featuring later Doctors.
All told, it looks like the Doctor setting the Daleks back a thousand years in Genesis of the Daleks is part of the timeline we know, not a divergence from it - again, they still invade Earth in 2157, not 3157. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that the 60s strip has the Daleks developing space travel very soon after they take to their mechanical casings, but that this happens a thousand years after the end of the Thousand Years War (which we would later see ending in Genesis of the Daleks). If the Doctor hadn’t been there, the Daleks would have developed space travel very soon after Genesis of the Daleks, and so the Doctor - as part of the original timeline - has set them back a thousand years.
There’s a second problem: We have to reconcile the fact that The Daleks shows a group of Daleks confined to their city on Skaro and wiped out at the end, while all the other stories have them as galactic conquerors. Nothing in any Doctor Who story, in any medium, accounts for this.
The FASA roleplaying game and About Time both explain the discrepancy by theorising that soon after Genesis of the Daleks, there’s a schism between Daleks who want to stay on Skaro to exterminate the Thals and those who want to conquer other planets. The FASA game names them the “exterminator” and “expansionist” factions, and states that the exterminator Daleks never leave Skaro, eventually wither on the vine and end up confined to their city - finally dying out in The Daleks. (In this scenario, spacefaring Daleks later recolonise their home planet.)
In About Time’s version, the “exterminator” Daleks do venture beyond Skaro, but only on limited sorties - like the invasion of Earth - and they’re not galactic conquerors. There’s nothing on screen to suggest an early divergence in Dalek history, and only a line in Alien Bodies (p138) supports it. If this was the case, it seems the spacefaring “expansionist” Daleks completely broke contact with the Daleks on Skaro. Adding speculation to speculation, we might infer this schism was because the Daleks on Skaro continued to mutate - indeed, perhaps they become the humanoid Dals mentioned in The Daleks, a different race altogether. Given what we know of Dalek history, it seems unlikely that this was an amicable arrangement, so there could have been a Dalek civil war of some kind.
While we’re speculating, we might wonder if the Thals joined the Dals in their efforts to rid the planet of Daleks. Following this, the Dals and Thals lived together in (relative) peace on Skaro for a long time - until the Neutronic War, placed in this guidebook in 1763. The spacefaring Daleks eventually return to Skaro somewhere between The Daleks (?2263) and Planet of the Daleks (2540).
It might be straightforward, then: the “expansionist” Daleks are the ones with slats in their mid-section, the “exterminators” are the ones with bands (as seen in the first two TV stories, The Space Museum and the TV Century 21 strip). However, the Daleks in The Chase are based on Skaro and are out to avenge the defeat in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, so that would also seem to be the “exterminator” faction (unless the first order of business when the “expansionists” return to Skaro is to go after the man who twice inflicted crushing defeats - and so wiped out - the “exterminators”).
Alternatively, it could be that the Doctor changes history in The Daleks - his first encounter with them might affect Dalek development. We know from The Evil of
the Daleks and Dalek that the Daleks can be altered by contact with aliens, particularly time-travelling ones. Their first contact with the Doctor in The Daleks might have been the catalyst that set any Daleks that survived on course to conquer the universe and challenge the Time Lords’ supremacy. Again, though, there’s no evidence from the series that this is the case - and every Dalek on Skaro appears dead at the end of The Daleks.
Ironically, the one thing fans seem to agree on is that the Doctor is simply wrong in The Dalek Invasion of Earth when he said The Daleks was set “a million years” in the future. At the time, it was the television series’ own attempt (and in only the second Dalek story!) to explain the discrepancies in Dalek history, but virtually nobody credits the Doctor’s statement now.
So... reconciling the account given in The Daleks and TV Century 21 with Genesis of the Daleks may not be as difficult as it appears, but merely needs a little speculation to smooth things over. The Thousand Years War ends in Genesis of the Daleks with the Kaleds wiped out and the first Daleks buried underground. These Daleks either leave Skaro to become galactic conquerors or they simply die out. For the purposes of this chronology, it’s been assumed the Doctor set the Daleks back a thousand years, so no Daleks leave Skaro at this time. Six hundred years later (according to The Dalek Outer Space Book), the Daleks evolved... meaning the blue-skinned humanoid Daleks (or “Dals”). We could speculate that the Dals are mutated Kaled survivors, or perhaps Dalek mutants who’ve escaped from the buried bunker.
A thousand years after Genesis of the Daleks, Yarvelling builds a “metal casing” that looks like Davros’ Mark III travel machine - even though it’s not exactly the same design (the mid section and colour scheme is different, matching the ones from The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth), it’s too similar to be a coincidence. Perhaps Yarvelling has based it on a design from history that he knows will scare the Thals, although it seems more likely he’s got access to ancient records of Davros’ work, or maybe he’s even managed to excavate an old Dalek casing from the Kaled bunker. The Dals also develop the Neutron bomb, which goes off (deliberately according to The Daleks, accidentally according to the TV Century 21 strip) and all but wipes out life on Skaro. A mutated Dal - the creature predicted by Davros’ experiments, perhaps even a thousand-year-old survivor of those experiments - crawls into one of the casings, and becomes the sort of Dalek we’re familiar with.
Very quickly, these Daleks develop a thirst for galactic conquest, the early days of which are recounted in the TV Century 21 strip. At some point, apparently soon after The Dalek Invasion of Earth, there’s a split - one group of Daleks completely abandons Skaro to become fearsome conquerors elsewhere in the universe, another group becomes confined to their city and dies off in The Daleks. Eventually spacefaring Daleks return to Skaro and reoccupy their planet, sharing it with the Thals, at least for a while (as seems to be the case in Planet of the Daleks - although, ominously, there are no Thals seen on Skaro in later TV stories).
Cybermen... Fashion Victims?
Does the variation in design between the Cybermen actually symbolise anything, and how helpful is it to the dating process? It’s a similar question to that of the Klingons in Star Trek - there’s a real-life reason (generally related to budgets and audience expectations) as to why they look different in the sixties and the eighties, but is there a reason within the fiction?
On television, it’s not even clear that the characters “see” any difference between different models of Cybermen. Ben instantly recognises the Cybermen in The Moonbase, even though they bear little resemblance to the ones he saw in The Tenth Planet. Notably, he doesn’t so much as comment that they’ve been redesigned - something that might be relevant to say, if one is evaluating the capabilities of the alien invaders that are besieging one’s moonbase. Ben is hardly alone in this, as many other characters fail to make the same observation (just to name a few, the Doctor, Polly, Jamie, Zoe, Brigadier and Sarah Jane all encounter different versions of the Cybermen). On screen at least, we never see an old model once a new one has been introduced (except for the flashback in Earthshock and the head in a museum in Dalek).
We never see two versions of the Cybermen together. Yet the development doesn’t appear to be linear in terms of fictional history - it’s strictly linear in terms of the order the Doctor meets them. Without wanting to get unduly philosophical, the television episodes we see are a representation of reality, not a window on it - unless there’s an unrevealled canonical reason as to why (for instance) the Silurians have zips down their backs in Warriors of the Deep. We’re seeing things as convincingly as the BBC can render them, so it’s entirely possible that - to the characters - the Cybermen from The Tenth Planet look identical to the ones in The Moonbase and Earthshock.
In the books, audios and comic strips, the distinction is made rather more often - for example, the Doctor notes that the Cybermen in “The Good Soldier” are the same design as the ones from The Tenth Planet.
If we take it as read that the characters do see different models of Cybermen, the significance could be functional. Perhaps the Cybermen from The Tenth Planet are adapted for Arctic conditions, the ones in The Moonbase and The Wheel in Space for low gravity operation and so forth. This seems unlikely, though - the Cybermen we see are almost always intent on roughly the same thing: marching into a human military installation and taking it by force.
It may well be that what we think of as one race is, in fact, many. Elsewhere in the Doctor Who universe, it seems to be a common stage of evolution for an organic race to remove “weaknesses” using cybernetic implants. Not every race does so - the Gallifreyans don’t, for example, and humans apparently only ever do so in a limited fashion (as seen in, say, Warriors of the Deep or The Long Game). But a fair number of the Doctor’s adversaries are cyborgs - the Daleks, the Sontarans and the Ice Warriors all are to at least some extent. Perhaps “Cyberman” is just the name of the end result when one of the human-like races that seem to exist on countless planets independently (or semi-independently) discards their organic form for a cybernetic one. Following the dictates of pure logic, technology and elegance, they all come up with roughly the same design for their cybernetic bodies. (And therefore there must be some overwhelming logical imperative for those handles on their helmets.) In the parallel universe of Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel, Lumic seems to create Cybermen practically identical to the ones from our universe (name, handles and all) - and the Doctor, Rose and the Daleks all identify them.
There’s no reason why these various Cyber Races couldn’t cooperate, or even see themselves as part of the same “ethnic” or “political” group - it seems logical enough, and the Cybermen of a parallel universe offer an alliance with the Daleks in Doomsday. It might explain the discrepancies in the accounts of their origins, sphere of influence and levels of technology - as well as their appearance - across the series.
So perhaps the design indicates a lineage - the Cybermen of The Invasion and Revenge of the Cybermen are of one lineage, the ones of Earthshock and Silver Nemesis another. Surprisingly, while not entirely unproblematic, this does work.
Here is a list of different models, as well as the years and planets they are from. In the case of books and audios, cover art was considered as evidence if the text didn’t specify. Note that, as elsewhere in the book, it’s been assumed that the Cybermen we see aren’t time travellers unless explicitly stated. The Cybermen of the far future clearly acquire time travel - it’s usually stated that they’ve stolen the technology, but it seems equally clear that the Cybermen of The Moonbase or The Invasion, say, aren’t time travellers.
Type I: Spare Parts (when created, Mondas), The Silver Turk (1873, Mondas), “Junkyard Demon” (“pioneers”, Mondas), “The Good Solider” (1954, Mondas), The Tenth Planet (1986, Mondas).
Note: It seems pretty clear that these are the early Cybermen, exclusively from Mondas.
Type II: The Harvest (2021), The Moonbase (21st c
entury, ?), The Wheel in Space (21st century, ?), The Tomb of the Cybermen (21st century, Telos), Iceberg (21st century), Benny: The Crystal of Cantus (2606, the planet Cantus), Illegal Alien (time travellers from the 30th century).
Notes: Again, it’s easy to group these together as the model of Cybermen who survive Mondas’ destruction and attempt to attack twenty-first century Earth, then retire to their Tombs on Telos. The Cybermen in The Wheel in Space are from roughly the same time period, and a slight variation on this model.
Until the Cybermen relocate to Telos, it’s unclear where they are based after Mondas’ obliteration. David Banks speculates in his Cybermen book that they are based on a planet on the edge of the solar system, and links this to the Planet 14 mentioned in The Invasion.
The Cybermen from Illegal Alien come from the thirtieth century. The book only refers to the mask as having “teardrops” - a feature of the type of Cyberman seen in The Invasion and Revenge of the Cybermen, which would fit with the dating. The cover of Illegal Alien, however, reuses a photograph from The Wheel in Space, another design with “teardrops”.
While The Harvest is an audio and we don’t see Cybermen involved (they’re not shown on the cover), the reference to The Wheel in Space suggests the Cybermen are the same type in both stories.
Type III: The Invasion (UNIT Era), Human Resources (2006), Killing Ground (22nd century, nomads), Legend of the Cybermen (early 22nd century), Sword of Orion (2503, Telos), Kingdom of Silver (circa 2505), Cyberman 1 and 2 (2515-2516), Benny: Silver Lining (2604), Revenge of the Cybermen (29th century, nomadic survivors of Cyber Wars), The Girl Who Never Was (time travellers grounded on Earth, 500,002).
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