Doctor Who and the Daleks (short story)
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Doctor Who and the Daleksfor other, similarly-named pages.
Doctor Who and the Daleks is the collective name for two 1964 short stories told on a series of 50 cards included with Dr Who and the Daleks sweet cigarettes, manufactured by Cadet Sweets.
Summary
Story one (cards 1-25)
The Doctor goes to the planet Marinus. Here, the Daleks are at war with the Voord. He watches the battle collapse after the two sides agree to go to Earth to locate a mysterious power source. The new allies capture the Doctor and force him to divulge the secret of Ultkron travel or how to travel through time.
En route to the Solar system, the Doctor unsuccessfully attempts to sabotage the Voord ship. The Voord eject him into the vacuum of space, but the Daleks use their hoverbouts to rescue him. They secret him to their part of the Voord ship.
The Doctor then tries to send a warning to Earth. He successfully transmits to Earth Space Station, but he is re-imprisoned by the Daleks before he can fully explain. Earth officials dismiss the Dalek attack as unlikely, and do not prepare an adequate defence.
As the ship approaches Earth, the Doctor overhears that the Daleks intend to destroy the Voord. The Doctor shares this information with the Chief Voord, who is more than surprised to see the Doctor back on his ship. All Daleks onboard, save one in seclusion, are rounded up. A battle ensues which rips apart the ship. The Doctor uses an escape capsule to fly to the freedom of Earth. Unbeknownst to him, the Chief Voord is also aboard the escape capsule. As the craft enters Earth's atmosphere, they notice that several Daleks have survived the explosion of the Voord ship, and are now, like them, bound for South America and the Great Power.
Story two (cards 26-50)
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Characters
References
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Notes
- The story was included in electronic form in the The Keys of Marinus DVD release.
- Each card has a snippet of the story on one side and a full-colour painting on the other. The stories are told very economically, owing to the tiny space available on each card. Sentences are often devoid of articles, and are rendered, unusually, in the present tense to eliminate the need for helping verbs.
- The cards' art is by Richard Jennings.[1] Although the writer is unknown, the stories are a clear effort to market characters created and owned by Terry Nation. It is one of the few pieces of merchandising to include the Voord and the planet Marinus, which had also been introduced in 1964.
- They are the first original prose stories to use the character of the Doctor, in this case the First Doctor, in the history of the Doctor Who franchise. They may also be the first works of original prose set in the Whoniverse, though it is unknown when exactly in 1964 this product was released. It could, then, have been beaten to the market by June 1964's The Dalek Book. The Dalek World book is actually referenced on card #33, but it's unclear whether that's a call back to something already on the shelves, or an advertisement for something which was soon to be published. Whichever the case, Doctor Who and the Daleks is unlikely to have been released prior to mid-April 1964, since that's when the Voord debuted on television.
- For Dalek fans, the second story is notable as the first piece of fiction in any medium to feature the Dalek Emperor and the first to depict him with a golden dome casing. This would later be developed in TV Century 21 Dalek comics, in which the Emperor was often styled the "Golden Emperor".
- The story's name is rendered, oddly, Doctor — Who and the Daleks on each card. However, the dash is not really a part of the story's name. It is instead a typographic "trick" used at the time to make the primitive full-justification "balance" on the page. Were the card printed today, there would be no need for the dash.
- There was an album that was available for one shilling. The cards could be pasted into the album. The album was likely a generic one rather than one that had been produced specifically for this promotion.[1]
- This story specifically equates hoverbout with transolar disc. This is somewhat unusual, since most later Dalek fiction calls a hovabout a transolar disc, but a hoverbout a kind of intra-planetary shuttlecraft that is crewed by multiple Daleks and has scientific equipment aboard.
- The Dalek's reluctance to speak until the Doctor arrives bears similarities to Dalek.
- This story is unusual in that it is one of the few Doctor Who stories in which the Daleks are allies of the Doctor.
- At the end of the second story, it is suggested that the Doctor is a human from Earth. 1960s comics and editions of the Doctor Who Annual, which often had poor continuity with the TV series, occasionally stated or implied this.
- The Doctor's TARDIS never appears, nor is it even mentioned, in this story.
Continuity
- The Voord would be at war with the Daleks again when they allied with the Time Lords during the Last Great Time War. (COMIC: Four Doctors)
Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Howe, David J. Blumberg, Arnold J, 2001, Howe's Transcendental Toybox, Telos Publishing, Great Britain
External links
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