Talk:Dalek Prime

Image

The image credits it as a screenshot (not a telesnap?) of "Destruction of Time". I've not seen telesnaps or reconstructions of The Daleks' Master Plan, but does anyone think that looks like a CGI fan recreation? I didn't even know sphere-headed Daleks existed in the television series before the Emperor in Remembrance. -- Tybort (talk page) 17:05, October 1, 2012 (UTC)

It's already been deleted, but I've left a message on the uploader's page asking that question. --Tangerineduel / talk 17:07, October 1, 2012 (UTC)

Splitting

I think this page should be split.

There should be a page about "Dalek Prime" or "Prime Dalek" as a title that can be held in the Dalek hierarchy; and there should be another about "the Dalek Prime", the single and highly notable individual whose history is interwined with Dalek history as the whole, the one conceived of by John Peel as the very first created Dalek and the first and greatest Emperor of his race.

The page as it stands is trying to be about both at once, and it chafes a bit; you have links in sentences clearly treating "the Dalek Prime" as a specific characters pointing to a page whose lead describes "Dalek Prime" as a title akin to "Dalek Supreme" or "Dalek Emperor". --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:11, July 12, 2019 (UTC)

Update: this issue (and more) are under discussion in the Panopticon in Thread:257167. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 14:35, September 20, 2019 (UTC)

Primacy of John Peel lore

Unfortunately the thread which brought about the merger of the Dalek Emperors into a single page is not accessible, but reading this page after being reminded of it by Forum:Subpage proposals: TV only & "Wikipedia style" subpages, I do find a few things about it a bit inconsistent.

One would assume that a page called "Dalek Prime" would be about the concept of the "Dalek Prime" as created by John Peel, as is mostly the case, but I notice that this page describes a history for the character in which The Evil of the Daleks occurs before War of the Daleks, which is simply not the case for the Dalek Prime. Peel was pretty resolute about Evil being the death of the Daleks and their Emperor, and used War of the Daleks to essentially re-instate Evil as the end of the Daleks after the ambiguity caused by Remembrance. In-universe, we have a pretty solid sense of the Dalek Prime's life and death, and sources which contradict that don't use the Dalek Prime name.

I don't know what was discussed in the thread, but I also note that The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe consistently names the Dalek Emperor as "Dalek Emperor", but when it describes the events of War of the Daleks during its description of the Movellan war, it mentions "a future Dalek leader known as the Dalek Prime", pretty conclusively saying that in-universe it does not equate the two. Given that much of the structure of this page comes from that source, this is perhaps something worth considering. TheChampionOfTime ☎ 02:45, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Thread:257167 is at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon IV. Najawin ☎ 02:49, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! TheChampionOfTime ☎ 03:16, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Hmm. We should certainly introduce a repeat of the Evil section post-Civil War, as a "according to one account" deal — although I don't think War itself is explicit about this; but History of the Daleks probably is. Such a thing was implemented at Dalek#History some time back, if I'm not mistaken.

As to giving Peel's timeline primacy though, I don't think this is suitable. In essence "Dalek Prime" is being used here as the later-given proper name for "the Classic-era Dalek Emperor considered as a singular individual", a character who certainly predated Peel but does not otherwise have a good undabbed name that stretches across casings. This is in the same way that First Doctor should still strive to depict all views on how Hartnell's timeline works, without privileging the POV of whoever coined the appellation of "the First Doctor". (Imagine that the first source to coin "the Second Doctor" for Troughton also had a really obtuse opinion on the timeline placement of Two Doctors — I don't know, that it takes place in-between scenes during The Ice Warriors or something — surely we'd still want to use the name for the overall page, and merely use accounts languages for the Two Doctors placement.)

Trickier of course are the accounts which seek to retroactively separate some chunks of the Classic Emperor's life into different identities. (Though Astounding History separating the War Dalek Prime is something I don't remember noticing on my readthrough, and sounds quite bizarre — War could not be screaming any louder that its golden boy is the TV21 guy, and the Evil of the Daleks novelisation also makes it quite clear that he's the Emperor in that story.)

I think we should follow the precedent of the First Doctor and Eighth Doctor, which is to say, to keep the primary, undabbed page as a centralised, "maximal" compilation of all biographical elements attributed to the character — and at most to cover any "splits" à la Zagreus on side-pages. But I'm not sure quite how we'd implement such a thing, especially for the various Dalek Primes. There's no obvious name for a "Peel-core Dalek Prime" page, nor obvious boundaries for what sources would or would not be covered on it… --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 15:07, 10 May 2024 (UTC)