B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  A Brief History of the Daleks

  The history of the Daleks would be convoluted even if they weren’t time travellers. What follows is an attempt to boil Dalek history down to the basics. Speculation is in italics, and most of the working in the footnotes is to be found in the main timeline - see especially the articles Are There Two Dalek Histories?, The Neutronic War, The Dalek Emperors, The Middle Period of Dalek History, The Alliance, Last Contact, The Dalek Wars, Was Skaro Destroyed?, The Davros Era, The Great Catastrophe, Who Started the Last Great Time War? and The Last Great Time War.

  The Thousand Years War between the Thals and Kaleds on Skaro devastated the planet. The Daleks were created by the Kaled scientist Davros, but the fourth Doctor believed he had set their development back a thousand years. [1]

  A thousand years passed. There were again two races on Skaro - the Thals and the Daleks (or Dals), squat blue-skinned warriors who had evolved from the Kaled survivors. We don’t see the Thals at this time, but their rivals the Dals occupied futuristic cities and had an advanced civilisation. [2]

  A neutron bomb exploded, instantly devastating Skaro. Forests were petrified, and animal life mutated into exotic monsters. The Dals and Thals also mutated. [3]

  A mutated Dal, a creature like that created by Davros’ experiments (perhaps even a survivor from those experiments), crawled into a war machine designed by Yarvelling, almost identical to Davros’ ancient design (and so clearly influenced by it), and became the first Dalek. He became the Emperor Dalek and casings were soon constructed for other Dalek mutants. Within months, the Daleks had built the Dalek City, and soon after that they developed space travel. A social hierarchy emerged, with the feared Black Dalek in charge of military production on Skaro and the Red Dalek in charge of space projects. The Emperor Dalek led the fleet of Dalek saucers in the first conquests. They encountered the Mechanoids. It was the late eighteenth century on Earth.

  No more than five centuries passed. During this time, the Daleks didn’t encounter the human race or learn of the Earth, and they never met the Doctor. They paid little attention to Skaro itself and didn’t encounter the Thals. [4]

  Quite what they do during these centuries is unclear. They might have a war with the Mechanoids, but it’s never mentioned. We have no account of them meeting any other Doctor Who monsters, but that is also possible - the Sontaran-Rutan war is underway across the galaxy, for example. At this time the Daleks are building up a powerbase, and developing advanced weapons, but are far from being the all-conquering race we’ll see later.

  The only thing we know from this period is that a Dalek ship crashed on Vulcan in the early nineteenth century. [5]

  Dalek survivors from the Last Great Time War attacked the Earth a number of times in the early twenty-first century, most notably in 2007, when they fought the Battle of Canary Wharf against the Cybermen, and in 2009, when they conquered the planet in a blitzkrieg, then moved the entire planet across the universe. [6]

  In 2012, a Dalek from the future was unable to detect any Dalek transmissions. [7] In the mid-twenty-second century, the Daleks learned of Earth and humanity. [8]

  Around 2157, the Daleks attacked the human race - their powerful space fleet cut Earth off from the space lanes, and then a relatively small force invaded the Solar System. They attacked humanity on Earth and the Mars colony. Earth was occupied for ten years. [9]

  Thirty years later, the Daleks invaded Earth again, only to suffer another defeat. [10]

  The Daleks were defeated, but retained their ambition to conquer Earth. [11] Around this time, the Daleks internalised their power sources, removing their greatest vulnerability - now they ran on psychokinetic power, not static electricity. [12]

  For the Daleks, their defeat had great significance for another reason - this was the very first time, from their point of view, that they encountered the Doctor. Soon after the Dalek Invasion, the Daleks developed time travel and sent an assassination group in their time craft to exterminate him. [13]

  The Daleks also used their time travel to achieve their other great ambition - they went back in time and conquered the Earth. These Daleks already knew the Doctor’s name - they hooked the Doctor up to a Mind Analysis Machine, and learned that the third Doctor was the same individual as his previous two incarnations. Whether this knowledge survived the collapse of the alternative timeline is unclear [14]. But from now on, even if they don’t always recognise the Doctor on sight, they understand that he can change his appearance. [15]

  The Dalek Invasion was also long-remembered by humanity (some historians called it The First Dalek War), and it resulted in an Alliance of a number of planets, and races being set up to defend against such an attack. The Daleks themselves don’t seem to threaten Earth for centuries (Vicki, from 2493, only knows the Daleks from history books about the Invasion). [16]

  What the Daleks do in this period, though, is a mystery. We know that the first Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks - when we see them in severely reduced circumstances - happens in Ian and Barbara’s “future”, “generations” before the year 2540, which would seem to fall around here on the timeline.

  The Daleks were confined to Dalek City on Skaro. The Doctor and his companions helped the Thals to destroy them. There’s no indication at this time that these Daleks have space travel, time travel, or even are aware that life exists on other planets. [17]

  However you rationalise this away, even if you don’t try to incorporate the TV Century 21 comic strip, the result is clumsy. The most straightforward explanation is perhaps that the vast majority of Daleks abandon Skaro because their conquests have taken them elsewhere, leaving behind a small group... but this doesn’t explain why the Daleks there can’t move or see beyond their city. Perhaps they have refused to upgrade their power supplies and literally been left grounded as a result.

  Perhaps these are all the surviving Daleks - crippled by their defeat on Earth and the loss of their time craft, and perhaps leaderless (the Daleks need strong leadership, and are prone to turn on each other the moment they don’t have it). We know that the Moroks were on Skaro - perhaps they stole more than just the one Dalek seen in their space museum. If they took, say, the Dalek Brain Machine that’s seen to guide the Daleks and stripped the Daleks’ archives, then it would have been a crippling setback.

  The next time we see the Daleks, they’re attacking human colony planets in the mid-twenty-fifth century. The Daleks did not, at this time, seem to have the strength to launch an attack against Earth itself.

  However, they are clearly far more powerful than they were when confined to one city on Skaro. They’ve had a few centuries to rebuild and regroup, but we don’t know anything about the catalyst for this process. Perhaps various defeated remnants of the Daleks - the space travellers, the time travellers and the inhabitants of Dalek City - converge on Skaro. There’s a Supreme Council in place by the twenty-sixth century - perhaps this is the body that provides the unified leadership that allows the Daleks to gain strength.

  A century later, the Daleks are far more powerful than ever before.

  Presumably this is just a natural consequence of building up a powerbase for centuries. Interestingly, the Daleks seem to have time travel, but not to use it - they might just be wary after their two high profile defeats. They don’t seem aware of the Time Lords, yet, but they must have spotted that the Doctor has thwarted them on the three occasions they’ve used time travel technology. [18]

  In the twenty-sixth century, there was “the third wave of Dalek expansion”, and the Doctor described the Daleks as “one of the greatest powers in the universe” at this time. This was the time of the Second and Third Dalek Wars, which sparked off when the Daleks attempted to divide and conquer the space empires of Earth and Draconia. [19]

  The Daleks plot this with the Master. It’s never made clear exactly what the Master tells them about himself, but this might be the point where the Daleks realise that the Doctor is just one of a race of time t
ravellers with TARDISes.

  This was Benny Summerfield’s native time - her father, Abslom Daak and (later) Ace all fought in these Dalek Wars. Abslom Daak apparently killed the Dalek Emperor at this time. This might have been a turning point in the war. [20] It was a war that lasted a generation, ending in the early 2570s. The Daleks lost.

  Following this, the weakened Daleks tried tactics other than full scale assaults. [21]

  There are no accounts of the Daleks for centuries - and the human race goes from strength to strength as the Earth Empire spreads across the galaxy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Daleks became interested in “the Human Factor”. The next time we see them, the Daleks are in their city on Skaro. The introduction of the Human Factor into the Daleks leads to civil war, to the Emperor’s death and to the Doctor declaring this to be “the final end”. [22]

  So, the Daleks disappeared around the year 3000. It was the year 4000 before humanity came into contact with them again, but they’d begun their expansion around 3500.

  The Daleks’ Master Plan saw the Daleks’ most ambitious scheme yet - a conquest of the entire Solar System, but merely as part of a strategy to dominate eleven whole galaxies. These Daleks also used time machines, and hoped to construct a Time Destructor. The Daleks were based back on Skaro at this point. [23]

  Despite being defeated, the Daleks were now a powerful intergalactic force. Within twenty years of their Master Plan failing, the Daleks had succeeded in splitting the Federation. Within a couple of centuries of that, the Daleks were capable of threatening the Time Lords themselves. [24]

  By now, then, the Daleks have learned of the Time Lords and Gallifrey. To a race dedicated to becoming the supreme beings of the universe, the Time Lords were now obviously the ones to beat - and from now on, the Daleks express no interest in conquering the Earth. [25]

  The Davros Era took place - the Daleks lost their war with the Movellans, but Davros clawed his way to become the new Dalek Emperor. He re-engineered the Daleks, upgraded their technology and put them in a position where they were a genuine threat to the Time Lords... which may have been what the Dalek leadership had planned all along.

  Whether the events of War of the Daleks can be taken at face value or not, the Daleks get what they want - they go from military defeat and fragmented forces to having a strong leader and the knowledge and ability to fight a war across an entire galaxy and take on the Time Lords.

  The Dalek Empire period saw the Daleks based in the Seriphia galaxy launch a massive assault on the Milky Way, forcing the Earth Alliance to surrender. Resistance leaders Mendes and Kalendorf were able to forment a slave uprising and enlisted the help of Daleks from a parallel universe, but despite countless sacrifices, still the Daleks could not be defeated. Eventually, a signal was sent that destroyed all Daleks and Dalek technology in both the Milky Way and Seriphia - triggering a Great Catastrophe that took those territories millennia to recover from. The Daleks were not utterly destroyed, and thousands of years after the Great Catastrophe, they unleashed a new plague on the galaxy. Humanity mobilised against them once more. [26]

  The Daleks may, or may not, have lost Skaro. Either way, by now the Daleks were operating at a universal level, not just an intergalactic one. We have patchy information for the next ten thousand years or so, but Captain Jack sums it up: they were the greatest threat in the universe.

  The Daleks now merely superficially resembled Davros’ original creation. The Dalek Emperor (at least the third or fourth bearer of the title, and definitely not Davros) now oversaw an entirely revamped Dalek force - a huge army of highly-mobile, heavily-defended Daleks, with a re-engineered Dalek mutant inside. At least some of these Daleks had built-in “temporal shift” units. Dalek Saucers were now capable of firing missiles that could shoot down a TARDIS in flight.

  To put the Daleks’ might in perspective: now that the Daleks were upgraded, a single one of them was capable of subduing the entire human population of twenty-first century Earth. Four of them could fend off droves of Cybermen with no evident damage or difficulty.

  Before this upgrade, in 2540, the largest army of Daleks ever assembled consisted of ten thousand Daleks - it was capable of conquering an entire galaxy. In the year 4000, five thousand Daleks would have been enough to subdue Earth’s solar system.

  Now, the Dalek space fleet consisted of ten million ships, each with two thousand Daleks onboard. Twenty billion Daleks.

  The Daleks were ready to fight the Last Great Time War ...

  The War devastated both sides, leaving few survivors. A few Daleks survived, as did remnants of their technology. From this, they were able to rebuild their strength, but only by losing their genetic purity. Eventually, the Daleks were able to create a new Dalek paradigm - genetically pure, with advanced travel machines. [27]

  [1] Genesis of the Daleks

  [2] The TV Century 21 strip, which builds on information from The Daleks.

  [3] The Daleks

  [4] The TV Century 21 strip.

  [5] Two hundred years before The Power of the Daleks - even there, the dating of the story is open to question, and War of the Daleks states that the crashed ship came from the far future. In any event, these Daleks are not in contact with Skaro, which remains unaware of the events of this story.

  [6] Doomsday, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End

  [7] Dalek

  [8] This is depicted in the TV Century 21 strip, but obviously happens at some point before The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

  [9] The Dalek Invasion of Earth (and references in other stories to it - see the main timeline for details).

  [10] As depicted in the Big Finish audios An Earthly Child, Relative Dimensions, Lucie Miller and To the Death.

  [11] Oddly, the Daleks say the Doctor merely “delayed” their conquest of Earth in The Chase.

  [12] They run on “psychokinetic power” according to Death to the Daleks, but static electricity in The Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Power of the Daleks. Maxtible and Waterfield’s experiments with static electricity attract the Daleks (The Evil of the Daleks).

  [13] The Chase. The Daleks have done some research - they know what the TARDIS looks like, even though they never saw it in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (or Genesis of the Daleks, The Power of the Daleks or The Daleks, for that matter). They know the Doctor’s a time traveller, somehow (perhaps this was an accidental discovery when their were conducting their own time travel experiments). However, there are some big gaps in their knowledge: they don’t even consider the possibility that the TARDIS crew might have changed, and they refer to the Doctor as “human” - we might infer they have yet to encounter another incarnation of the Doctor, and they don’t know about the Time Lords.

  [14] Day of the Daleks

  [15] From The Chase onwards, the Daleks know about the Doctor. They have “files” on him by The Daleks’ Master Plan; Chen thinks, possibly because the Daleks told him, that the Doctor is from “another galaxy”. The Daleks recognise the second Doctor on sight in The Power of the Daleks, and lay a trap for him in The Evil of the Daleks (they have a photograph of him). They need to use the Mind Analysis Machine to identify the third Doctor in Day of the Daleks, but understand he can change his appearance. They know the third Doctor on sight in Frontier in Space, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks and the fourth Doctor in Destiny of the Daleks. They again lay a trap for the fifth Doctor in Resurrection of the Daleks (and have built duplicates of the fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough, so know of them). In Revelation of the Daleks, Davros has a tombstone prepared that’s specifically the sixth Doctor’s; the Daleks don’t seem to recognise the seventh Doctor in Remembrance of the Daleks - and Davros remarks on his changed appearance - but they know his name (and, indeed, both factions’ plans rely on detailed knowledge of the Doctor’s past).

  Since the Time War, the Doctor has gone from being “an enemy of the Daleks” who they know is a threat to someone they are viscerally scared of - in Dalek, the Dalek knows the
Doctor’s name and reputation, but apparently doesn’t recognise the ninth Doctor on sight. In Doomsday, the Daleks don’t recognise the tenth Doctor, but are able to identify him, on sight, as a threat.

  [16] The Rescue

  [17] The Daleks

  [18] The Chase, Day of the Daleks and “Dogs of Doom”.

  [19] Frontier in Space

  [20] “Nemesis of the Daleks”

  [21] “Metamorphosis”, Death to the Daleks.

  [22] The seventh Doctor met the Emperor earlier in history in the comic strip “Nemesis of the Daleks”. As the Emperor in The Evil of the Daleks says it’s their first meeting, he’s either lying or a different individual from the one in the earlier story.

  [23] The Daleks’ Master Plan

  [24] The Apocalypse Element

  [25] The Doctor explicitly states that the Daleks don’t want to conquer the Earth in Remembrance of the Daleks.

  [26] The four Big Finish Dalek Empire mini-series.

  [27] The televised Dalek stories from 2005 onwards have told a continuing story of the post-War Daleks rebuilding. These are Dalek, Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, Journey’s End/The Stolen Earth and Victory of the Daleks.