Davros
- For the audio drama see Davros (audio story).
Davros was originally the head of the Kaled Scientific Elite on the planet Skaro, but is best known for presiding over the genesis of the Daleks. During the Imperial-Renegade Dalek Civil War, he served as Emperor of the Imperial faction and later of the Dalek race itself.
Biography
Early Life
Davros was born during the Thousand Year War between Thals and Kaleds on the planet Skaro, the issue of an adulterous relationship between Calcula and Quested. It was a time when mercy and nobility were all but non-existent, and life was harsh and grim. The use of atomic weapons and other agents of mutation produced mutos. As a child, Davros claimed only his mother believed in him. Others feared him and his determination, and were right to do so. His mother's husband, Nasgard, wanted him to become a soldier like his elders, but Davros was determined to become a scientist. (BFD: Innocence)
Scientific Career
Davros disagreed with his sister Yarvell's ideas of a compromise with the Thals. He was forced into the military, put in charge of developing new weapons and gadgets to help Kaled soldiers. After his mother killed his father, sister and aunt, Davros no longer had anyone to impress. In honour of Yarvell's death, his mother and he commissioned a statue to house her ashes. (BFD: Purity)
Davros began experimenting with organisms and teaching them to speak. In particular, he taught them to say his name. For his first experiment he used a Thal brain instead of a Kaled one. (BFD: Guilt)
Davros was grievously wounded by an attack. Afterwards he needed a mobile life support system. (BFD: Corruption) Thirty seconds without his life support would have killed him. The life support system was controlled by a switch on the panel of buttons on his system. (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)
Creation of the Daleks
With his equally ruthless aide, Nyder, Davros ascended to a high rank in the Kaled Scientific Elite and presided over the creation of the Daleks. (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)
- For more see main article.
Intervention by the Time Lords began a chain of events. The Fourth Doctor was sent to Skaro at this time when Davros first demonstrated the Daleks to the Kaled Scientific Elite. Davros imprisoned the Doctor. He used a lie detector to force the Doctor to reveal the details of the Daleks' future defeats, so that he could learn from them and so his creation, the Daleks, could avoid them. (The Doctor later had this record destroyed.) (DW: Genesis of the Daleks) It is possible that the Time Lords' intervention changed history, and that these events originally occurred without the Doctor's involvement.
"Death" and Revival
The Daleks turned on and exterminated Nyder. They exterminated Davros himself, doing so because of the programming he himself had given them: to exterminate all those who were not pure Dalek. At least they thought so. (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)
Unbeknownst to the Daleks, they had actually only damaged his primary life support system. The secondary and backup circuits switched on immediately, placing him in suspended animation while his life support worked to regenerate him. After an unknown, but lengthy time had passed, the Daleks, now a major galactic power, sought to revive Davros so that he might offer them a way out of the impasse in their war with the Movellans.
Davros' suspended body was found in the underground remains of the crumbled bunker. He was revived. Davros opted to help the Daleks in their war against the Movellans. He devised a plan to destroy a Movellan ship. After this failed, he was captured by the Doctor and escaped Dalek slaves, and imprisoned in a cryogenic freezer as "a block of ice". (DW: Destiny of the Daleks)
- EDA: War of the Daleks claims that Davros was moved, unbeknownst to him, from Skaro to a decoy planet called Antalin, as part of a plan by the Daleks to stop Skaro's destruction. Most of this is explained by the Dalek Prime, who might have been lying.
Liberation
The humans decreed an indefinite sentence of suspended animation while Davros retained full consciousness. After ninety years, the Daleks, led by the Dalek Supreme, liberated Davros from his prison ship in space, and revived him again. They believed he might help them to find a cure for the virus with which the Movellans defeated them, a virus that attacked only Dalek tissue. Pretending to research the cure, Davros experimented on Daleks to bring them under his control. The Doctor, now in a new incarnation, attempted to kill Davros at this time, though he lacked the resolve to do so directly. His treachery discovered by the Dalek Supreme, Davros released the Movellan virus onto the prison ship, killing all the Daleks on board.
The virus began affecting Davros, who promptly fled in an escape pod before Stien caused the station (and the prison ship) to explode. (DW: Resurrection of the Daleks)
A New Enterprise
- It is unclear what order Davros (audio story) and Revelation of the Daleks take place in. The Complete Davros Collections timeline places Davros between Resurrection and Revelation.
Davros was somehow picked up by a different space station and imprisoned in a vault. Arnold Baynes and his wife, Lorraine, extracted him and helped in his restoration. At this very same moment, the Sixth Doctor arrived after being called in by some friends. He demanded Davros be immediately placed in suspended animation, but as Davros was fully conscious he goaded the Doctor into doing the job himself. The Doctor couldn't. Feeling Davros deserved a chance for redemption, Baynes offered him a job at his company, TAI. The Doctor also offered a working relationship with Davros.
Davros gained a foothold. He held great interest in the stock market and planned on closing it down, the results completely disrupting the Galaxy. However Davros began to be haunted by his past, particularly the time before his accident when he had betrayed a female Kaled scientist named Shan whom he perhaps had loved. The Doctor halted his plan but Davros escaped in a ship. The Doctor took control of the ship from the TAI control room and made it crash while Davros screamed Shan's name. (BFA: Davros)
Emperor of the Imperial Dalek Faction
Davros survived and set himself up as "The Great Healer" on the planet Necros and lured the Sixth Doctor there. Using the bodies of the dead at Tranquil Repose, Davros created a new race of Daleks with white and gold livery. These would become "Imperial Daleks". The new faction was totally loyal to him. The Supreme Dalek's forces arrived on Necros and captured him to put him on trial. (DW: Revelation of the Daleks)
- For more background on and an account of the war that followed between Dalek factions, see Imperial-Renegade Dalek Civil War.
By the time of his attempt to recover the Hand of Omega from 1963 Earth, Davros called himself the Dalek Emperor. Apparently, he had lost most of his organic body, and was completely encased within an Imperial Dalek-like shell, though his head and upper body still appeared to be at least partially Kaled. (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks) He was apparently killed by the Hand of Omega but survived once again in an escape pod.
- For more details on this see the Shoreditch Incident.
After the Hand of Omega
- There are two conflicting accounts of what happened to Davros next. This is the first.
The escape pod was taken on board by a garbage ship called the Quetzel. The Eighth Doctor and Sam Jones landed on the Quetzel. A Thal force later took control of the ship. They wanted Davros to alter their race so they could better fight the Daleks. A force of Daleks arrived and took Davros, the Doctor, Sam, the Thals, and the Quetzel engineer Chayn to Skaro, which Davros had believed destroyed by the Hand of Omega. The planet destroyed had in fact been a decoy world named Antalin. The Dalek Prime wanted to remove any supporters of Davros from the Dalek race and a trial was held. Those Daleks loyal to Davros turned on the Dalek Prime and a civil war broke out. In the end, the Doctor and his allies escaped from Skaro, Davros' forces were defeated, and Davros was apparently executed by matter dispersal. However, there is a possibility that the Dalek operating the unit was loyal to Davros, and may have transported him to safety. (EDA: War of the Daleks)
- This is the second.
Alone in space, Davros created a virus capable of killing all living things, which the Doctor had hypothetically compared the Daleks to during their first conflict on Skaro. He was found by a Nekkistani ship. They helped him, and he rewarded them by killing them. The ship with Davros on board was found drifting in the Time Vortex by the Eighth Doctor, Gemma Griffin and Samson Griffin. Davros took control of Gemma and Samson and operated on the TARDIS after Samson had rendered the Doctor unconscious. Davros established a link to the TARDIS. He sent Gemma and Samson home and left the TARDIS to be damaged by the self-destruct of the Nekkistani ship. Davros conquered Earth by causing mutations and creating new Daleks. By the time he met the Doctor again, Davros teetered on the edge of sanity, his mind split between two warring personalities - Davros and "the Emperor". The Doctor struck a deal with the Daleks, who considered Davros an unreliable leader. They would leave Earth with their true Emperor if the Doctor did not release the virus. The Daleks accepted and left Earth with Davros, his Emperor personality dominant. (BFA: Terror Firma)
During the Last Great Time War
Davros was a commander of the Daleks in the Last Great Time War, only to supposedly die during the first year of the conflict at the Gates of Elysium, when his command ship flew into the jaws of the Nightmare Child. However, Dalek Caan broke the War's time lock and saved him from death. Davros rebuilt the Dalek race by using his own cells, leaving his internal organs and skeleton exposed. Davros called these Daleks his "children". (DW: The Stolen Earth)
Following the Last Great Time War
After Davros was rescued by Dalek Caan and had finished creating his new army of Daleks, he used a planet-sized ship known as the Crucible to travel the universe and "steal" planets. Earth was the final planet taken by Davros and his New Daleks. They took the planets to the Medusa Cascade where they awaited the Doctor in a pocket of time one second out of sync with the rest of the universe. Davros hacked into the Subwave Network to speak to the Doctor. (DW: The Stolen Earth)
Davros had once again become a slave of the Daleks, who had placed him under guard within the Vault on the Crucible as part of a deal he made with the Supreme One. This arrangement required Davros to build a Reality bomb powered by the Crucible and the twenty-seven planets in the Medusa Cascade to destroy all of existence, leaving the Daleks the sole inhabitants of the universe. However, the Doctor and Donna intervened, destroying the new Daleks and leaving Davros on a burning Crucible. Before leaving in the TARDIS, the Doctor offered to save Davros, but the creator of the Daleks refused. It is unknown if Davros survived or not. (DW: Journey's End)
Creations
Most notable of Davros' creations is the Mark III travel machine, which became known as a Dalek. Davros also experimented with other Dalek forms, such as a Dalek able to walk over rough terrain known as a Spider Dalek. (EDA: War of the Daleks)
Davros also created an Imperial faction of Daleks to counter what he saw as a Renegade faction of Daleks, as well as the cybernetic Juggernauts by combining human components and DNA with the robotic Mechanoids. (BFA: The Juggernauts)
Personality
Davros had a sound mind early in his life, but the incident that crippled him and his overall experiences in the Thal-Kaled war left him a depraved and insane megalomanic. Brilliant and driven, he relentlessly experimented to find the final form of the Kaled people.
Davros was cool and sadistic; it was his ability to command and delegate that was most forceful and cold. While his conversation with the Doctor following his awakening (DW: Destiny of the Daleks) suggests that he may have survived the extermination attempt through forethought, it seems to have made Davros even more bitter. This led him to making what would later be the Imperial Daleks.
After his supposed death and rescue from the Last Great Time War, Davros arguably seemed less power-crazed and somewhat defeatist, perhaps due to having lost control over the Daleks yet again and being aware that once he was of no further use to them, they would exterminate him. He also seemed to have developed a dislike of pride and vanity, traits which he had always exhibited himself. He admonished the Dalek Supreme for displaying pride and distastefully noted "arrogance" in the Doctor's voice. He himself displayed pride, refusing to escape the exploding Crucible with the Doctor, choosing death. Davros was also a hypocrite. He was also a complete maniac, arguably even more than before and was consumed by an insane desire to completely destroy the entire multiverse. (DW: The Stolen Earth / Journey's End)
Physical Characteristics
Davros was originally seen by the Fourth Doctor sitting upright in a movement and life support chair resembling the base of a Dalek. His skin was discoloured and his body has been crippled by some accident in his past. His Kaled body was humanoid though a blue eye in his forehead replaced his lost vision, allowing him a semblance of sight. This made him look like a Dalek from a distance. A metal brace was attached to his head, and wires were plugged into his skull. Davros also had a throat microphone implant to enhance his damaged voice. He had only his right hand, which he used to operate controls on his chair. These could perform functions for controlling doors, the Mark III travel machines, or his own life support system. (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)
Following his cryogenic imprisonment, Davros's face gained a yellowish, sagging appearance, probably caused by the effects of the time he spent in sub-zero conditions.(DW: Resurrection of the Daleks)
On Necros, Bostock fired a gun which destroyed most of his right hand and with it his ability to operate independently. (DW: Revelation of the Daleks) For a short time after, his hand was replaced with a claw (DWM: Emperor of the Daleks) and finally with a prosthetic substitute of futuristic design (BFA: The Juggernauts, DW: The Stolen Earth). He was capable of projecting electric shocks from both his organic and mechanical hands and his eye, allowing him to ward off attackers and stun or even kill them. It was able to (accidentally) activate the Doctor's mind in Donna causing her to become the DoctorDonna and save the universe from Davros. (DW: Revelation of the Daleks, Journey's End)
At some point during or after the Time War, Davros would dispense with his skull wires and throat microphone, though retaining his head brace. (possibly due to having gained access to more advanced medical equipment) (DW: The Stolen Earth/Journey's End).
Behind the scenes
Actors
Michael Wisher (who had previously played the voice of the Daleks in several Third Doctor stories) portrayed Davros (as well as provided the Daleks' voices) in his debut story Genesis of the Daleks. The creator of the Daleks and of Davros, Terry Nation, intended to imply that Davros had not actually died during that story by showing Davros' life support button still working, a detail not shown in the filmed story. When Davros returned in Destiny of the Daleks, Wisher could not play the part, so David Gooderson was cast in the role.
Subsequently, Terry Molloy, who first appeared in Davros' third story, Resurrection of the Daleks, has played the role on television and audio more times than any other actor. Rory Jennings played Davros as a child in a flashback sequence in the Big Finish Productions audio mini-series I, Davros, which examined Davros' life before creating the Daleks. Molloy has stated that Julian Bleach's performance has stayed true to the type of person that Davros seems to be.
Michael Wisher rehearsed with a paper bag on his head because of the limited vision he would have with the Davros mask/makeup.
Purpose
Terry Nation saw Davros as a voice for the Daleks. In DWM #250, he commented:
The Daleks, when they have to make any kind of long speech, are immensely boring creatures. You can't have a Dalek doing four or five sentences in a row, so I wanted someone to speak for them. The thing that was half-man and half-Dalek was a perfect example of this, and I made sure he was not killed...he actually became a very good plot piece.
Stage appearance
Davros appeared on stage, once more played by Julian Bleach, during the initial Doctor Who at the Proms. He dramatically appeared on-stage to welcome attendees to his Dalek Empire and claimed the Royal Albert Hall as his new palace and the audience would become his slaves. The appearance is not generally believed to be canonical.
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