The Dalek Handbook (reference book)

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The Dalek Handbook was a 2011 reference book about the Dalek race.

Publisher's summary

The Dalek Handbook is your complete guide to the Doctor's greatest and most feared enemies.

It explores the Daleks' origins on the planet Skaro, how a Time Lord intervention altered the course of Dalek history, and how they emerged to wage war on Thals, Mechanoids, Draconians and humans.

It also reveals the secrets of Dalek design, the development of their iconic look and sound, and their enduring appeal on and off the screen.

With artwork and photographs from six decades of Doctor Who, "The Dalek Handbook" is the ultimate celebration of all things Dalek.

Contents

  • Introduction - Page 5
  • Skaro - Page 7
  • Part One: If They Call Us Mutations, What Must They Be Like? - Page 15
  • Part Two: We Have Changed the Pattern of History! - Page 39
  • Part Three: We Foresee a Time... - Page 63
  • Part Four: They Went off to Fight a Bigger War - Page 89
  • Part Five: Surviving the Time War - Page 117
  • Part Six: The New Dalek Paradigm - Page143
  • They Always Survive... - Page 160

Timeline summary

The book attempts to create a coherent and mostly linear (from the Daleks' point of view) timeline of events based on the Dalek stories from the TV series, with expanded universe material for the most part omitted, save for some minor references. It is fairly consistent with the TV series but there are numerous suggestions based on conjecture and, as a work of non-fiction, it cannot be considered valid by the wiki. Nevertheless, the summary is as follows:

First timeline

The main species on Skaro were once the warrior Thals, the scientific Kaleds and the philosophers the Dals. The Thals fought a war with the Dals leading the latter to either merge with the Kaleds or to become extinct while later Thal records merged Dal history with the Daleks. Around 450 (in Earth time), the Thals and Kaleds began the Thousand Year War which lasted until 1450 when Davros betrayed his people and allowed the Thals to destroy the Kaled Dome. Davros and his Scientific Elite created the Daleks which exterminated them all and later build the Dalek City around the ruins of the Dome called Kalaann [sic]. From there, the Daleks set off a neutron bomb which mutated the Thals and ended the war.

Because Davros believed Skaro was the only planet capable of supporting life, the Daleks' ran on static electricity from their city as they had no need of venturing outside. The Daleks believed themselves the only survivors on Skaro for over 500 years. The Thals, however, had survived and had mutated back into their humanoid forms and had become pacifist and farmers. The arrival of the First Doctor, Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright on Skaro in 1963 allowed the Daleks to discover that not only was their other life on Skaro but also on other planets. An attack on the Kalaann disabled the Daleks' power and they were believed extinct but all they needed was the power back to revive.

The Daleks were later revived by unknown means. It may have been a careless Thal, forces from the Morok Empire (which explains where the Dalek shells in their museum came from), or forces from the Earth Empire who visited Skaro. Regardless, the Daleks were soon revived and created spacecrafts which they used to invade Earth in 2157 to remove the Earth's core and use the planet as a spaceship. The Doctor and his companions helped defeat the invasion in 2167. The Supreme Dalek on Skaro eventually identified the Doctor and around 2265 they sent a Dalek squad in a time machine after his TARDIS but they were destroyed in a battle with the Mechonoids in their city on Mechanus.

The 26th century saw a period known as the Dalek Wars, which included the Human-Draconian War and the Second Dalek War. The wars ended with a failed invasion of Earth in 3000, after which the Daleks disappeared from human space, although these were supposedly future Daleks (see below). The Dalek began a series of conquests outside of the Milky Way between 3500 and 4000, taking over more than 100 planets before finally being sited again by the Space Security Service. The Daleks allied themselves with Mavic Chen and the Outer Galaxies on Kembel and planned to use the Time Destructor to take over the galaxy. The First Doctor stole the Taranium core and turned the Time Destructor against the Daleks, destroying them.

In the 41st century a Dalek Timeship fled Skaro, possibly from the Dalek Civil War. It ended up crashing on Vulcan in the later half of the 21st century as the Daleks recognised the Second Doctor but the human colonists did not recognise the Daleks, meaning they had not yet invaded Earth. The Doctor defeated the Daleks on Vulcan but he encountered the Daleks again soon after. Following the Time Destructor disaster, the Dalek Empire began to experiment with time corridor technology. They established a link between 41st century Kalaann on Skaro, 1866 Earth and 1966 Earth with the intention of spreading the Dalek Factor throughout human history. The Doctor turned the tables and infected the Daleks with the Human Factor, causing a civil war between the rebelling humanised Daleks and the Dalek Emperor's guards, devastating Kalaann and apparently ending the Dalek race.

However, the Emperor's guards defeated the uprising and the Emperor revamped the Dalek command structure, replacing Black Daleks with Gold Daleks and establishing a Supreme Council led by a black and gold Supreme Dalek. The Emperor also decreed that the Daleks should abandon Skaro and their plans should focus more on time travel to undo their past defeats. With the help of Ogrons since their numbers had been drastically reduced in the Civil War, the Daleks invaded 22nd century Earth again but this time it was built on a paradox when a time-travelling guerilla blew up the Second World Peace Conference in 1972 with the intention of preventing the invasion. The Third Doctor's intervention prevented the paradox.

In the 26th century, the time-travelling Daleks began the Dalek Wars by preying on the Earth and Draconian Empires which had just entered an uneasy peace. With the help of the Master and the Ogrons, the Daleks tried to spark another war between the two empires so they could invade in the aftermath with an army buried under the molten ice on Spiridon. The Third Doctor exposed the plan and the humans and Draconians united in a war against the Daleks. The Doctor appealed to the Time Lords to send him to Spiridon to prevent the revivial of the Dalek army. After they were beaten, the Daleks began attacking Earth's out colonies with bacteria bombs during the 27th century. The race was now on to find the cure, the mineral parrinium, which the Daleks and humans both found on the planet Exxilon. The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith helped the humans find the parrinium first while the Daleks only made off with bags of sand. Their saucer was destroyed by Dan Galloway.

It is unknown how badly the Daleks affected their own timeline with their time travel. It is possible two different types of Daleks co-existed in the same time or the future Daleks may have destroyed the past Daleks to prevent a paradox. However, with the Daleks' increased use of time travel, the Master's involvement in their plans and the Doctor's plea to be sent to Spiridon, the Time Lords began to take a closer look at the Daleks and foresaw a future in which the Daleks were at last the supreme begins. A future they could not allow to happen.

Second timeline

The Time Lords sent the Fourth Doctor back to Skaro during the closing days of the Thousand Year War to avert their creation. The Doctor's presence changed the timeline as Davros discovered there was indeed life on other planets. As a result, the Daleks were no longer made initially dependent on static electricity and could move freely from the very beginning. The Doctor failed to stop the Daleks' creation and estimated he only delayed their advance for 1000 years but this was most likely wishful thinking. It is not known how much of the Dalek timeline was changed as a result of the Doctor's intervention – there may have been huge differences (such as the invasion of Earth taking place in 3157) or it may have played out largely the same with only a few minor differences.

In the 42nd century, the Daleks entered a war against the Movellans which resulted in a logical impasse until the 46th century. While the origin of the Movellans is left a mystery, it is suggested that they were created by the Time Lords to destroy the Daleks or by the Daleks themselves as part of their duplicate program or were more advanced Robomen. Around 4500, the Daleks went in search of Davros to end the stalemate but he was captured by the Doctor and frozen in suspended animation for 90 years to be put on trial. The Daleks attempted to rescue him after they were defeated in the war by the Movellan virus while also attempting to Duplicate the Fifth Doctor and his companions so they could be sent back to Gallifrey to assassinate the members of the High Council in retaliation for their attempt to avert the Daleks' creation. The plan failed when the Duplicate Stien resisted his conditioning and destroyed the space station the Duplicates were stationed on.

Davros also escaped to Tranquil Repose and began creating his own loyal Imperial Daleks. However, the Daleks loyal to the Supreme Dalek found him and took him back to Skaro to put him on trial and to recondition his Daleks. The Imperial Daleks managed to overpower their captors, now referred to as Renegade Daleks, and they took control of Skaro with Davros becoming the Emperor. This was the Imperial-Renegade Dalek Civil War which culminated in the Shoreditch Incident when both Dalek factions travelled to Earth in 1963 to recover the Hand of Omega. The Imperial Daleks secured the Hand and planned to harness the power of Skaro's sun to wipe out the Time Lords but the Seventh Doctor programmed the Hand to destroy Skaro and Davros's mothership. The two Dalek factions destroyed each other and when the Supreme Dalek self-destructed, that saw the end of the final Kaled-decended Daleks.

At some point, Skaro was restored. The Doctor was sent to retrieve the Master's remains after he was executed by the Daleks at his trial. Following this, the Dalek Emperor led the Daleks to war against the cosmos but following the Tenth Dalek Occupation, the Daleks disappeared from many areas of space to battle the Time Lords in the Last Great Time War. Details of the war are largely unknown but it is known that Davros was consumed by the Nightmare Child in the first year and that the war ended when the Doctor used the Moment to destroy both Gallifrey and Skaro after the war turned into hell. Only pockets of Daleks survived, including one found in the 1960s and placed in Henry van Statten's museum and the Dalek Emperor in its ship which fell though time. The survivors were defeated by the Ninth Doctor and the Bad Wolf.

The Daleks survived in the Cult of Skaro, four Daleks created by the Emperor during the Time War and escaped into the Void in a Void Ship with the Time Lords' Genesis Ark which contained millions of Dalek prisoners.. The Cult emerged in London 2007 where they engaged in a battle with the Cybermen. The Tenth Doctor sent the Daleks and Cybermen back into the Void, save for the Cult who escaped via Emergency Temporal Shift to 1930s Manhattan. Where their leader Dalek Sec planned to evolve the Daleks. Sec became to human for the rest of the Cult's liking and so they turned on him, eventually exterminating him. Daleks Thay and Jast were later destroyed, leaving Caan the last Dalek in existence. Caan escaped via Temporal Shift again and broke the time lock containing the Time War and rescued Davros at the cost of his sanity.

Davros established the New Dalek Empire, creating Daleks from his body's own cells. Caan and Davros were still seen as impure and the Empire was led by a red Supreme Dalek and they invaded Earth in 2009 as they planned to destroy reality with their Reality bomb. However, the Tenth Doctor and the Children of Time destroyed the Dalek Crucible and the fleet. One ship survived and fell back in time to 1941 Earth during the Second World War and located a Progenitor device containing pure Dalek DNA. Posing as robots called Ironsides, the Daleks helped Winston Churchill fight the Nazis while waiting for the Doctor to arrive and confirm to the Progenitor that they were Daleks. Their plan succeeded and they created a New Dalek Paradigm that escaped via Time Corridor technology to rebuild their race.

This new race of Daleks eventually came to realise that the source of cracks devouring the universe was the Doctor's TARDIS. To save the universe, and by extension themselves, the Daleks formed an Alliance consisting of the Doctor's greatest enemies and they imprisoned the Eleventh Doctor in the Pandorica. However, the Doctor was not responsible for the cracks and total event collapse was not prevented by his imprisonment. All members of the Alliance, including the Daleks, were erased from history. The Doctor managed to escape the Pandorica and initiated the Big Bang Two, rebooting the universe and restoring everything to its proper place. As a result, the Supreme Dalek continued to oversee the construction of the greatest Dalek army ever seen. Someday they would succeed in proving themselves to be the supreme beings in all creation...

Notable features

  • The book features extracts of interviews on Daleks in the expanded universe and Dalekmania, and behind the scenes of the Daleks on Doctor Who.

Notes

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Dalek history: Part One. BBC - Doctor Who Classic Episode Guide. Retrieved on 26 July 2013.
  2. ↑ Dalek history: Part Two. BBC - Doctor Who Classic Episode Guide. Retrieved on 26 July 2013.
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