Invasion of the Daleks (comic story)
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Invasion of the Daleks was the first original long-form story in the history of Doctor Who merchandising tie-ins. As the lead story in The Dalek Book, it was the first time the public saw any characters from Doctor Who outside the television series. It established the basic premise of the entire book — often considered to be the first Dalek annual — and introduced readers to the three main protagonists of the volume: Jeff, Andy and Mary Stone. It also featured the first appearance of the Dalek Emperor in the flesh, after a mention of him by his Dalek underlings in the introductory two-pager of The Dalek Book.
It proposed the notion of the very well-inhabited Solar System falling prey to a massive Dalek invasion in 2400. It also curiously showed Skaro as a wandering "mystery planet", which had recently become itself located in the Solar System, near the planets Jupiter and Saturn.
Summary
Fearing that, having landed on Mars and Venus, humanity might soon try to conquer Skaro, the Daleks' plan to invade the Solar System before the humans can do so, starting with Earth and the enslavement of humanity. The Daleks take off into space on their transolar discs. The Daleks wipe out the primitive races of the moons of Jupiter and the Saturnian monsters on Saturn's moons. They then kill all inhabitants of the "little colony" on Mars in just three hours.
Through a series of circumstances, the peoples of the Solar System fail to understand the warning signs from their outposts. On an observation satellite circling Earth, Paddy sees flying saucers on his screen, but they disappear before anyone else can see them, and his observations are dismissed. The Daleks spread an electron shield to mask their journey to Venus from Earth's space scanners; the inhabitants of the Lunar-1 base notice that their scanners were dead, but they don't connect it to the weeks-long silence from Mars and the strange lights coming from Jupiter and Saturn.
Arriving on Venus, the Daleks conquer the idyllic city of New Paris without difficulty, enslaving the inhabitants. However, the Daleks didn't yet visit the Churchill Mountains, where the Stone siblings are on a "working vacation". Andy Stone remarks that he's starving like a "Pluto jackal" and sends Mary and Jeff to their cabin to cook barbecued Venus fruits while he finishes loading their equipment into the Hoverskeet II. Mary and Jeff leave in the Hoverskeet I.
Just then, two Daleks – Dalek Scout 159 of the Logric Squadron and its "Number Two" – come over the mountain peaks. They destroy the cabin and capture Jeff and Mary as slaves. Hearing the commotion, Andy headed their way in the Hoverskeet with "full booster revs", but he was too late to save them.
While Dalek "Number Two" takes Jeff and Mary back to New Paris, Dalek Scout 159 remains behind in Area XX to perform some minor repairs, and Andy blows it up with Jeff's rock blasters. More Daleks hear the blast and start swarming to his location, but, listening to the Dalek's intercom, Andy hears Jeff, deliberately talking loud enough to be heard over the intercom, reassuring Mary by saying "He may still remember the mountains." Thinking of the Churchill Mountains, Andy remembers how Churchill was a great fighter for freedom who was at his best when the odds seemed impossible, and he swears to never rest until he finds his siblings and drives the Daleks from their skies.
Characters
References
- The Daleks' chart of the solar system places a planet Vulcan as the first planet out from the Sun in advance of Mercury.
- Skaro is orbiting the Sun, in an elliptic orbit that crosses that of Uranus. It is, when the story begins, located near Saturn and Jupiter.
- The planet Omega is beyond Pluto.
- A Venubus is seen in New Paris.
Notes
- No individual credits are given in the book's table of contents but Richard Jennings signs the top panel on page 14.
- The star chart of the Golden Emperor features a planet Vulcan as part of the Solar System. Two years later, the television serial The Power of the Daleks (also cowritten by David Whitaker) would center around a human colony world called Vulcan, though as that Vulcan is not stated to be part of Earth's solar system, it is unclear if the two Vulcans were intended by Whitaker to be one and the same.
- This is the second-oldest Dalek story in existence, next to The Daleks. Yet it quickly establishes that the Daleks can levitate and fly through space through the use of transolar discs. Those discs have a design perfectly in harmony with the propulsor units seen on the underside of Daleks since their BBC Wales introduction in Dalek.
- The date given in Break-through! is 2400, though the humans are unaware of the Daleks and have only just begun colonising Mars. The Dalek Book, of course, was written before all future-set television stories, except The Sensorites.
- The story uniquely seems to presume that Skaro is a moving planet, which, during the events of the story, has become located in the Solar System. Other sources place it in a different solar system, culminating in Remembrance of the Daleks showing the detonation of Skaro via the destruction of its sun. Although within the story it is not at all clear that the Daleks intentionally displaced Skaro, the idea of Daleks being able to move whole planets was seen later in the television stories The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Stolen Earth/Journey's End.
Continuity
- The Golden Emperor shows a group of Daleks an accurate chart of the solar system, as he had previously promised to when releasing a first, distorted map which instead gave the planets sizes and positions that represented their importance to the Daleks. (COMIC: Dalek Planetarium)
- The Skarosian museum contained several artifacts from the Solar System: it had on display an artefact from humanity's early exploration of the Moon, the caption to which directly stated that they took humans from the surface of the moon in 1971. At some point, the Daleks had also gone to Mercury, based on exhibits in the museum. (COMIC: City of the Daleks)
