A Brief History of the Daleks (short story)
A Brief History of the Daleks was an online article published on the official Doctor Who website as a catch up for the televised history of the Dalek species before Revolution of the Daleks. By covering the chronological story of the Daleks, the article has a loose narrative that enables it to be covered on this wiki.
Publisher's summary
There's one deadly menace that has haunted the Doctor throughout all the Time Lord's lives. Every time the Doctor defeats the Daleks, they just turn up again, deadlier than ever.
But do you know what went on every single time the Doctor and the Daleks have clashed? Here's a handy catch-up…
Plot
The Daleks are the most recurring of the Doctor's many enemies. Their encounters date back to when the First Doctor and his companions, Ian, Barbara, and Susan, ventured into their city hundreds of years after a devastating war fought on Skaro. Enraged that they are stuck within travel machines, while their Thal neighbors have returned to a humanoid form, the Daleks move to exterminate their fellow Skarosians in an act of revenge. However, as the Daleks relied on static electricity, the Doctor's intervention appears to spell the end of the Daleks once he switches off their power supply.
In truth, however, the Daleks survived. After the Daleks invaded the Earth in the 22nd century, the Doctor arrives and is forced to combat their scheme to turn Earth into a mobile base. An even more ambitious plot, however, comes when the Daleks devise their own time machine to pursue the Doctor. Luckily for the Doctor, the Daleks chasing him are caught up in a battle with the robotic Mechanoids. Their battle ends with both sides destroying each other.
Sadly for the Doctor, his next battle with the exterminators exacts a heavy toll. Two friends are lost during the Daleks' plot to conquer the universe with the Time Destructor superweapon. The Daleks involved in the plot met their end as well, being reduced to embryos by the very superweapon they intended to use. The Second Doctor encounters the Daleks immediately after his regeneration: a trio of powerless Daleks are found on the colony world of Vulcan, where the colonists hope to use the Daleks as slave labor despite the Doctor's warnings. Soon enough, the three Daleks boost their numbers by establishing a production line.
However, the Daleks' repeated defeats force the exterminators to re-examine their tactics to better ensure they can emerge victorious in their wars against the rest of the universe. Turning their focus on the very essence of humanity, the Daleks pin their hopes on the human factor, which they force the Doctor to research. With that, the Daleks also hope to distill and spread their own factor to humanity. However, the Daleks granted the human factor are regarded as impure by the rest of the Daleks, kicking off a Dalek Civil War between the humanised Dalek and "pure" Daleks. The "Dalek Factor fiaso" thus forces the Daleks to "lay low for a while".
The Daleks return to force in a complicated temporal plot that human fighters and the Third Doctor both become involved within. During this scheme, the Daleks also employ Ogrons, who served as strong yet stupid muscle. The Ogrons are seen again "soon after" when the Master and the Daleks attempt to manipulate the Earth Empire and Draconian Empire into war. At the same time, the Daleks have a force of 12,000 in frozen hibernation on Spiridon. The Doctor, however, further freezes this army to delay any hope of releasing them for battle. The Third Doctor later encounters stranded humans and Daleks alike on Exxilon. There, losing power forces the Daleks to rely on "old-school bullet-based guns".
When the Fourth Doctor is sent back in time to the Daleks' genesis during the Thousand Year War, he watches as Davros unveils the Mark III Travel Machine and rebrands them as the Daleks. However, the Daleks soon turn on their creator. Luckily for Davros, he was actually left in suspended animation and was "resurrected" by the Daleks during their stalemate of a war with the robotic Movellans. With the Daleks hoping Davros could use his imagination to free them from the stalemate, the Movellans hope to make the Doctor do the same for them. Ultimately, however, it is an anti-Dalek tissue virus created by the Movellans that ends the war.
Eager for a cure, the Daleks again free Davros from suspended animation. Davros instead works to create a new force of Daleks who will obey him because the originals had once betrayed him. A "massive dust-up" ensues instead, with Davros appearing to die thanks to the Movellan virus. In reality, Davros survives and eventually makes his way to Necros, where he works as "the Great Healer" to create a new breed of Dalek out of the deceased. The Sixth Doctor journeys to Necros and is surprised to find Davros.
In 1960s London, so-called Imperial Daleks and Renegade Daleks clash over purity. The Dalek Emperor of the Imperials reveals himself to the Seventh Doctor: it is an even more insane Davros, who tries to use the Time Lords' Hand of Omega for his own ends. However, the weapon instead backfires, destroying Davros, all of his Imperials, his mothership, and even Skaro. One can only hope the Thals were not present on the world. Afterward, not much is heard from the Doctor because he is "dragged off" to join the Last Great Time War. With the Daleks and Time Lords fighting and all of creation at stake, the Doctor resolves to destroy both the exterminators and his own people, seemingly destroying all the Daleks once and for all.
The Ninth Doctor learns the Daleks have survived the War when he encounters a surviving Dalek contained within billionare Henry van Statten's alien collection. Extracting artron energy from the Doctor's companion Rose to revive itself, the Dalek finds itself grabbling with human emotions. The Dalek destroys itself rather than deal with this. Soon, the Doctor also learns that the Dalek Emperor of the War has also survived and built a fleet of two hundred Dalek flying saucers, granting it a fighting force of nearly half a million Daleks. The Tenth Doctor also encounters a Void Ship in the possession of Torchwood, paving the way for the return of the Cult of Skaro, who escape with temporal shifts.
The Cult and the Doctor cross paths in 1930s New York City, where Dalek Sec tries to lead the cult to abandon their "pure" forms and become Human-Dalek hybrids. The rest of the Cult, however, kill their commander after declaring him unfit to command. Dalek Jast and Dalek Thay are then destroyed by the other Dalek-human hybrids they created, forcing the last of the Cult, Dalek Caan, to escape in a temporal shift. The next the Doctor knows of the Daleks comes when he unexpectedly reunites with Davros, who has been rescued from the Time War and re-created the Daleks using cells of his own body. Aboard the Crucible, Davros is now working to destroy all non-Dalek life with a reality bomb. The ungrateful Daleks have left him locked with "a vault" with the insane Caan. The destruction of the Crucible appears to mark the ends of both Caan and Davros.
The Eleventh Doctor first encounters the Daleks when "a few clapped-out old units" have entered British service under Winston Churchill, claiming to be "Metaltrons" invented by a human scientist. The Daleks are actually manipulating the Doctor to unlock a progenitor, creating a New Dalek Paradigm of pure Daleks. Two of these pure units, however, are soon reduced to stone in the total event collapse, only for the Doctor's restoration of the universe to resurrect the Paradigm Daleks with it. The Doctor is later forced by the Daleks to enter the Dalek Asylum, where insane Daleks have a chance to escape. He also unites with two of his previous selves, the Tenth Doctor and the War Doctor, to rewrite history on the last day of the Time War, saving Gallifrey from destruction by moving it to a pocket universe. The attacking Daleks, meanwhile, are destroyed in their own crossfire.
When the Time Lords try to escape the pocket universe through a crack in time on Trenzalore, the Daleks and numerous other threats converge above the planet, resulting in the Doctor and his gathered enemies waiting out the Siege of Trenzalore. Aware that the Doctor is on his last life, the Daleks hope to simply outlive their great enemy, only for the Time Lords to grant the Doctor a new cycle of regenerations. The Doctor uses his excess regneration energy to destroy the Dalek Fleet. The ensuing Twelfth Doctor has his first encounter with the exterminators when he meets a very rare sight: a "good" Dalek nicknamed Rusty. When he seals up a radiation leak within Rusty, the good Dalek returns to its evil ways.
Davros, meanwhile, has also survived and returned to a rebuilt Skaro. Dying of old age, he requests to see the Doctor one last time and exploits his enemy's compassion, stealing regeneration energy from the Doctor to heal himself and power up the Daleks on Skaro. The Thirteenth Doctor later has her first encounter with the Daleks upon meeting a reconnaissance scout stranded on Earth since the 9th century. Without its casing, the Dalek mutant puppeteers the body of an archaeologist, Lin, and uses her to build itself a new casing.
Aside from these encounters, other incidents include Bill Potts' "baptism of fire" when she encountered Daleks and Movellans, the First Doctor and Susan's run in with an upset Dalek in the Death Zone, the Dalek who became trapped in the Matrix Cloisters, the Eleventh Doctor's breach of a Dalek Supreme, and when Adelaide Brooke survived a Dalek during their 2008 invasion.
Characters
- The Doctor
- Daleks
- Ian Chesterton
- Barbara Wright
- Susan Foreman
- Katarina
- Sara Kingdom
- Davros
- Henry van Statten
- Rose Tyler
- Winston Churchill
- Edwin Bracewell
- Amy Pond
- Rory Williams
- Lin
- Bill Potts
- Adelaide Brooke
References
- Davros gave the Mark III Travel Machine the much "snappier" Dalek name with an "eye on marketing potential".
Notes
- With the exception of Genesis of the Daleks understandably being placed at the start of the Daleks' timeline, this story is notable for placing Dalek stories in their televised order as their timeline order, whereas other sources attempt to mix what order the events occur in.
- The story says the Ironside Daleks referred to themselves as "Metaltrons".
- This story claims the Planetary Relocation Incident occurred in 2008.
Continuity
To be added
