Red Dalek Leader
When the First Doctor stole the Time Destructor's Taranium core in the year 4000 and replaced it with a fake, a Red Dalek was sent by the Dalek Prime to from Skaro to Kembel in a Dalek time machine.
The Red Dalek was placed in command of a squad of Daleks tasked with pursuing the Doctor's TARDIS and retrieving the core. Mavic Chen answered to the Red Dalek when they landed on Earth in ancient Egypt, c.2500 BC. Although the squad successfully retrieved the Taranium core, the Red Dalek was destroyed by the Egyptians who bombarded it with rocks, taking out its gunstick and eyestalk and damaging the casing beyond its ability to move. The Egyptians buried it beneath a mound of stone.
The Egyptians were reluctant to leave the pile of rocks on the site of the Great Pyramid lest it displease the spirit of the Pharaoh Khufu, but neither did they want to release the Dalek. To placate the Pharaoh, Khepren decided his masons would carve the rocks into a Guardian of the Pyramid, inspired by the legend of the Sphinx. (PROSE: The Mutation of Time)
Behind the scenes
- The Red Dalek corresponds to the Dalek which interacts most with Mavic Chen in the surviving tenth episode of The Daleks' Master Plan, "Escape Switch" (it also appears in the missing "Volcano" and "Golden Death"). There is no apparent difference between this Dalek and the others under its command in the televised serial, where it appears as a normal Silver Dalek, but the fact that the serial is in black and white allowed John Peel the freedom to turn it into a Red Dalek for the novelisation.
- It is the first Red Dalek to appear outside of the comics featured in The Dalek Chronicles and The Dalek Outer Space Book, from which Peel's novelisations took clear inspiration. Peel would include another prominent Red Dalek, as well as other minor ones, in his novelisation of The Evil of the Daleks.
- This Dalek's death did not occur on-screen in "Escape Switch", although one Dalek was rendered immobile as Egyptians stacked rocks around its base. The idea that its death resulted in the construction of the Great Sphinx provides one of numerous suggested origins of the Sphinx in the Doctor Who universe. Others were suggested by GodEngine, The Sands of Time and The Eye of the Scorpion.
- The Red Dalek's colour scheme as depicted on the cover for The Mutation of Time is almost identical to that later used for the Red Dalek in Brotherhood of the Daleks, the only difference being the latter has a red midsection.
