Doctor Who and the Daleks (short story)
- You may wish to consult
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 Cadet Sweets' Dr Who and the Daleks sweet cigarettes.
It is unknown exactly when the short story was released, but its inclusion in the merchandise supplement for the film of the same name suggests somewhere around August 1964.
Summary
Story one (cards 1-25)
"Dr. Who" 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.
En route to the Solar system on the massive Voord ship, travelling close to the speed of light, Dr. Who unsuccessfully attempts to sabotage the Voord ship by pulling the vital lever. 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.
Dr. Who then tries to send a warning to Earth. He find the transpace radio room and successfully messages the Earth Space Station, telling them to warn all planets of invasion, 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 passes Saturn, Dr. Who 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. The Voords round up all the Daleks onboard, but one escapes, and it fires on the Voord guards, beginning a fierce battle. The ship disintegrates when its power centre is hit by a Dalek ray-gun; Dr. Who uses an escape capsule to fly to the freedom of Earth. He sees that the explosion destroyed the Voord, but some Daleks escaped on their hoverbouts. Unbeknownst to him, the Chief Voord is also aboard the escape capsule.
As the craft enters Earth's atmosphere, the Daleks follow it towards the South American jungle. Earth Space HQ orders space fighters to intercept the Daleks; after a brief space battle, the Earth fighters retreat and the remaining Daleks land near the capsule in the jungle.
Dr Who and the Chief Voord escape the capsule, and after Dr. Who rescues the Chief Voord from an alligator, the Voord agrees to help him locate and fight the Daleks. They find the Daleks and overhear them discussing the nature of the Great Power, and Dr. Who realises that the Great Power would allow the Daleks to outwit any enemy. As the Daleks start blasting down the jungle to find the Power, Dr. Who sends the Chief Voord to lead the Daleks to the mountain of the poisonous mushrooms.
The Daleks absorb the mushroom juices and, with their enhanced brain power, they destroy half a fleet of Earth space fighters, and Dr. Who begins to think he was double-crossed by the Chief Voord. However, before the Daleks can finish the rest of the fleet, they all drop dead, succumbed to the poison of the mushrooms. The Chief Voord is killed by the crashing hoverbouts, and one of the Earth crafts takes Dr. Who back to England.
Story two (cards 26-50)
In the "little-known depths of hyperspace", an Earth-bound starship finds a Dalek floating through space. It's apparently unconscious, and they bring it back to Earth, where the president and council of Space HQ question the Dalek but get no response. However, when Dr. Who arrives, the Dalek shows interest.
Dr. Who and the Dalek have a private conversation where the Dalek explains it allowed itself to be brought to Earth to deliver a message from the Dalek Emperor to Dr. Who. The Dalek won't explain why, but the Daleks need Dr. Who on Skaro, where a terrible force will be unleashed unless he can stop it. Realising the urgency of the situation, Dr. Who smuggles the Dalek onto a spacefighter and they zoom away from Earth on full emergency thrust.
As they approach Skaro, they meet a Dalek squadron that is just returning from a distant journey on their transolar discs; the squadron sees the Earth ship as an enemy and shoots it down. The ship crashes in the area of the monsters, where Dr. Who and the Dalek fight two-headed creatures before the Emperor sends a squadron of Daleks to pick them up and bring them to the capital.
In the great council chamber, the Emperor explains to Dr. Who that the Daleks built a superintelligent machine, but after they ordered it to produce Neutronium, it destroyed their scientists. Dr. Who visits the desert where the machine is located, pulsing with enough Neutronium to destroy the planet. The Emperor orders that a Dalek approach the machine, as a test, and sure enough the machine destroys the Dalek with a death ray.
Dr. Who knows that, if Skaro explodes, its radioactive dust clouds might endanger Earth. The Emperor has calculated that the great Neutronium explosion will occur in an hour and seventeen minutes, so Dr. Who wastes no time in ordering a Dalek suicide squadron to bomb the machine. They do so bravely, but it has no effect: the machine is built of metal that can only be penetrated by atomic bombs, but a nuclear explosion would detonate the Neutronium.
With only nine minutes left, Dr. Who approaches the machine himself. Despite being engulfed in its death rays, he finds the main switch and pulls the lever at the last second. The dreadful machine-brain is dead, and Skaro is saved. The Daleks put up a great shout of wonder: how did Dr. Who do it? He explains that the death rays were specifically built to kill Daleks, not Earthmen, so they have no effect on humans, "apart from being hot!" The Daleks hold a banquet in honour of Dr. Who that evening.
Characters
References
to be added
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 were introduced on television in April 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. However, they are not the first works of original prose set in the Whoniverse: although it is not known exactly when they were released in 1964, card 33 makes reference to The Dalek Book, which was released in September.
- 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. Several 1960s comics and editions of the Doctor Who Annual occasionally stated or implied this.
- The Doctor's TARDIS neither appears nor is 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
to be added
| ||||||||||||||||||||
