Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Destiny of the Daleks

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This page is for discussing the ways in which Destiny of the Daleks doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

Remember, this is a forum, so civil discussion is encouraged. However, please do not sign your posts. Also, keep all posts about the same continuity error under the same bullet point. You can add a new point by typing:

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• The room and connecting corridors where Davros is found look nothing like they did in Genesis of the Daleks. Further more Davros was left for dead in a bunker, not the Kaled city as stated in this story.

The bunker was attached to the Kaled city. Davros also would likely have been moved by the Daleks in the intervening time.

It is explicitly stated in War of the Daleks that's it's not the same bunker. The Daleks built a replica, and moved davros there.

Production error, as the original Genesis sets would have been destroyed.

Also, after however many centuries Davros had been buried there, the process of natural decay and erosion would have resulted in the place looking almost unrecognisable anyway.

• Why do both the Doctor and the Daleks look for Davros, assuming him to be alive?

The Daleks had ample time to realise that his life support system would have allowed him to be still live. The Doctor searches for him because he knows that must be what the Daleks are after.

• Why does Davros revive as soon as he is discovered?

He revives once a humanoid life form is nearby.

• Why does Davros immediately seek out the Daleks, given that his last memory of them is of being shot by them?

Davros is arrogant enough to believe the Daleks would willingly follow him, despite their past betrayal, which, in a way, is correct.

• Why does Davros not express astonishment at seeing the Doctor again?

In Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor explained that he could travel in time.

• The Daleks' attitude to Davros is one of unquestioning obedience. But they 'killed' him in the belief that they were superior to him and thus he was unnecessary to them. Why not simply command Davros to obey their will rather than submit to an inferior being?

If Davros dies they lose their advantage against the Movellans and it’s against Dalek programming to lose. So instead, they make him think he is in charge. They use a similar tactic in The Power of the Daleks, in which the three reactivated Daleks make the colonists think that they are in charge. This was a ploy by the Daleks to get the materials they needed to reactivate the Dalek factory and build new Daleks. Once the colonists' usefulness had ended, the Daleks began exterminating them.

• The Doctor detonates the explosives in order to kill Davros. Yet without knowing that the explosives did not kill him, he assumes he is still alive afterward.

The Doctor knows Davros is resilient and that the Daleks had time to potentially remove the device.

• The Daleks state that "Self sacrifice is illogical; therefore, impossible." Then why do they strap bombs to themselves ready to blow themselves up?

The Daleks will not blow themselves up; they are just carrying the explosives into optimal position. Davros planned to detonate the explosives himself. Since he is not bound to logic, the Dalek's argument does not apply to him.

It might also be possible that the Daleks' definition of self-sacrifice differs somewhat from ours, in that the one sacrificing themselves has to have made the decision to die of their own accord. A Dalek obeying its superiors' orders, knowing full well that it will die in doing so, might not constitute the Dalek sacrificing itself, but rather being sacrificed by said superiors.

The Daleks specifically and explicitly come to Davros seeking a new direction, because dependence on pure logic has them trapped in stalemate. The scene of Davros sending out the explosive-laden Dalek taskforce even has Davros explaining to them "The Sacrifice you make will ensure total Dalek victory in the space war!" before, after a brief pause, frustratedly snapping at them to carry out their orders - Daleks (at the point of this particular cul-de-sac in their evolution) do 'not' understand the concept of something like self-sacrifice to achieve a goal- this battle plan is, in addition to being stupid, also explicitly and in-story something which Davros himself brings to the table.

Another small but glaring inconsistency: if self-sacrifice is illogical, then how come the Movellan lieutenant offers himself to be the living detonator for the Nova Device? Of course, it is logical (as an AI, Lan has no fear, and blowing up Davros and the Dalek recovery squad will help the war effort no ends), but the line just serves to make a mockery of this story's assertion that Daleks are logical creatures.

Actually the dalek statement about self sacrifice being illogical is flawed. There is nothing in the idea itself that is illogical. If it serves a higher, desirable end it is evidently logical.

• Several references are made to the Daleks as 'robots', like the Movellans. The Doctor makes some of these. Davros does too. This is in apparent contradiction to other Dalek stories, such as Genesis of the Daleks and The Daleks, where they are described as mutant humanoids in mechanical casings.(In The Daleks they are mutated Dals; in Genesis, mutated Kaleds).

Their behavior in regards to the war with the Movellans is equivalent to that of robots, hence it is a fair approximation for them to make.

While the Daleks are mutants in casings, there maybe a subspecies of lesser Daleks, which are purely robotic to make up the numbers.

Further to the above, a purely mechanical "primitive" Dalek had been explicitly demonstrated in Genesis of the Daleks: the "Travel Machine Mk3" that Davros demonstrated to the Elite, which had no organic component, yet sufficient artificial intelligence (and prejudice) to detect and exterminate non-Kaled lifeforms. Terry Nation does appear to have genuinely envisaged at least one timeline in which the Daleks shed the last vestiges of their biological forms (although clearly the subsequent JNT-led production team decided not to stick with that option).

I kind of see where Nation was going with that idea. The Daleks are on an evolutionary path that goes further and further from their original humanoid origins, until they are entirely machines Yet it doesn't really make any sense. If the Daleks deliberately jettison the last remnant of their organic nature they are essentially destroying themselves. What's left is not a Dalek, but an artificial intelligence created by a Dalek. Perhaps Nation means that the AI of the dalek machine has evolved so far that it is independent of the creature and has destroyed it entirely. If so, that is interesting. But there is no explanation, nor even any hint in previous Dalek stories that they are headed in this direction. Nation seems to assume that the audience knows that for some reason, or otherwise he is wiping past Dalek history without letting the audience into the plan.When the Doctor picks up a blob from the sand and says 'a Kaled mutant!' as if he needs to be reminded that Daleks were once Kaleds (or Thals, depending on the story), the viewer is left asking 'uhh?' It's possible I suppose that the unedited script explain much more.

Terrance Dicks attempts to clarify the situation in the Target novelisation, having the Doctor describe the Daleks as "semi-robots" and "as good as robots" (Chapter 11) ... although this could just be interpreted as signifying that even at the time, Terry Nation was failing to sell the concept of purely robotic Daleks as a good narrative move. The amount of squishy green Dalek flesh on display in their next two TV appearances would certainly imply the BBC quickly grew keen to bury this plot strand.

Now that "The Power of the Daleks" is finally with us again (sort of) the "robotisation" of the Daleks looks even worse (and ironic) in retrospect. In the earlier story, it is precisely Lesterson's naïve assumption that the Daleks are mere robots that deludes him into thinking he can control them ... until the sociopathic, emotionally unstable mutant organic racists inside them give the game away.

The word 'robot' has only come to mean 'automated computer-brained mechanism'. Its original and more literary meaning comes via the play Rossum's Universal Robots and is closer in meaning to 'slave'- a slave to logic, in this case, although essentially in the original context a created (organic) being designed, like the proletariat in the analogy, to obey with all free-will absolutely circumscribed. Consider the plight of the Dalek - or, at least, of the lower ranking 'drone'; higher ranking ones may have more free will as indicated by both the novelisation of "Remembrance of the Daleks", the EDA "War of the Daleks", and the position and freedom of the Cult of Skaro as described in "Doomsday) as described in "Into the Dalek", where non-Dalek thoughts are purged from their minds by their onboard battle computers- or "The Witch's Familiar", where it's indicated that non-Dalek sentiments simply cannot be expressed. Then consider "Engines of War" or "Revelation of the Daleks" or "The Parting of the Ways" - the Daleks have considerable form for surgically, chemically, and nano-technologically butchering other races to create their (presumably lower-caste, given their ideology) lower ranking cannon fodder.

Your average Dalek is, in fact, very much a robot. Vat-grown ("Power of the Daleks"), forced into a body designed for fulfillment of a function, mind equally forced into function, free will shackled and butchered and made into a barely autonomous slave to the predetermined aims of its superiors.

It's more "Destiny's ..." unfortunate insistence that "organic = intuitive, illogical, good", while "AI = slavish, logical, bad" that makes this as weak a script as it is. As all those other stories demonstrate (and indeed the original Dalek story), the Daleks never had any trouble with being brainwashed, ruthless, one-track minded ideologues in spite of being organic beings. At best, their physical "robotisation" seems like a very unnecessary plot development just to make them more family-friendly (which JNT and co. clearly disapproved of, to judge from the disgusting squirmy Dalek corpse they showcase on their next screen appearance).

• Romana says that they 'were once humanoid themselves', though under Dalek interrogation by a lie detecting device she had said she knew 'nothing about Daleks'. According to the information text of the DVD release the scripted line was 'I don't know anything about Dalek operations'. The same text suggests that either the on-screen line was misread or Romana was capable of misleading the Dalek truth detector.

Romana was either capable of misleading the truth detector, or believed what she was saying to be truthful, even if it didn't come out sounding as she had intended.

The Daleks demanded her to answer with 'true' or 'false', and didn't check the truthfulness of anything else she said.

• As Commander Sharrel reads the information of Davros off his computer screen, he states that Davros' species is mutant humanoid when the screen reads humanoid mutant, He also says mutant before it appears on the screen. And 'mutant humanoid' is not a species; it is a descriptive term.

He is not reading the information off the screen, he is entering the information into their databanks. They further obviously have a different classification for mutant humanoids than "regular" humanoids. As for "humanoid mutant" vs. "mutant humanoid", they are very clearly synonymous terms.

On the other hand, "humanoid mutant" sounds very much like a mutant (of any origin) that now just happens to be humanoid-shaped, whereas "mutant humanoid" is more suggestive of an ex-humanoid that has subsequently mutated (in which case, Sharrel quite rightly corrects the computer's sloppy distinction).

• The Doctor sees a tomb stone marked Romana - how did the slaves find her name out? (she never told them).

She obviously told them 'off screen'.

• Romana's regeneration in the beginning is inconsistent with the depiction of regeneration as a traumatic event with strict limitations. She was seen trying out various new appearances as if trying on new clothes. The Doctor has never had this kind of control over his regenerations and a statement in Castrovalva indicates that with regeneration "You never know what you're going to get".

Some Time Lords have more control of their regeneration. The Doctor does indeed often have a difficult time with regenerations, but he also tends to regenerate in extremely traumatic and unplanned situations - notably, while about to die. Romana is not shown to be in a traumatic situation, and therefore should have an easier time controlling the process.

It may also be a case of regeneration being a different process for female Time Lords. Just as human women naturally have a higher pain threshold, Time Ladies may naturally be able to go through regeneration with less trauma.

• When the human slaves are being exterminated in order to make the Doctor surrender, the woman slave stands perfectly still and shows no reaction during her extermination; even after the negative-effect fades, she remains standing upright before throwing herself on the floor, in a very unconvincing manner.

She is shot, then slowly falls to the floor. This is consistent with how people usually die when standing up.

An unfortunate production artefact according to the DVD infotext - the actors and extras had to hold position after being shot so that the VFX artist could correctly apply the negative mask, hence why all the deaths are rather static and peaceful (compared to the screaming, writhing deaths of "Genesis ..."). In-universe, one could always speculate the negative effect is some kind of force field that holds its victims in place until they are satisfactorily exterminated.

Also, the producer had been told to 'Ease up' on the horror in the episodes. Therefore, goodbye writhing and screaming in agony a la 'Genesis'.

• During a countdown the Daleks count in seconds.

This is a standard occurrence in many Dalek stories, however the Daleks may have been counting using their own measurement of time, making this a simple translation of convenience.

• At the end of the story Tyssan says that Davros is being taken away to stand trial for his 'crimes against humanity'. But with the exception of Sarah-Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan (See Genesis of the Daleks'), Davros has never encountered a human before. All his crimes were committed against his own people centuries ago.

He knowingly created the Daleks with the specific intent that they should strive to become masters of the universe and conquer all other forms of life. Therefore, he can be held at least in part responsible for the terror and destruction they have caused for humanity since then. In any case, Tyssan's actual words are "crimes against the whole of sentient creation" (although Tyssan himself, as a human who has recently been enslaved and brutalised by the Daleks, has every reason to personally resent their unrepentant creator).

Yet this idea of being tried is still odd, given that Davros did not create the Daleks with the intention of destroying 'all sentient creation.' He created them to ensure the survival of his own people, albeit in a mutated form. It is true that after meeting the Doctor he learns of what they will do in the future, but he never gets to do anything about it. The tape made from the interrogation of the Doctor are destroyed. Evil as Davros is, it hardly seems just to try him for crimes he could not have foreseen himself when creating the Daleks, especially as he did not believe there were inhabited worlds beyond Skaro until he met the Doctor. Perhaps the 'trial' was merely a show trial, a bit of pantomime to justify his perpetual confinement.

In fairness to the human judicial system, we know that Davros was put on trial. We don't know the outcome, other than that he ended up frozen. Those very arguments may have been made in the court case 'in universe'- and are potentially the reason that in the next story, Davros sneered at humanity lacking the guts for "judicial murder", instead choosing to freeze him indefinitely. It's wholly possible that the point that he could not have been said to have knowingly set the Daleks on the human race, since he didn't know the human race existed, may have been the mitigation which saved his life.

• If the Daleks believe that self sacrifice is illogical ergo impossible, what is their rationale for the "Blakes Seven" inspired scene in which they shoot the hostages in order to force the Doctor to surrender?

As Davros indicated to them, the Doctor is not "logical" in that way. They realise he will surrender Davros if they threaten to kill more hostages.

Bearing in mind this is not the first time they have exploited the Doctor's compassion with a hostage gambit (as in "The Daleks Master Plan", albeit with prompting from Mavic Chen), the scene is in character for the Daleks. What is out of character, in fact, are their frequent lapses into Cyberman-esque devotion to logic. As Ian Chesterton pointed out in their first story, their core motivation - "a dislike for the unlike" - is illogical to the point of stupidity, nor is it absent from this story (as the humanoid slaves speculate their unnecessarily awful conditions are best explained by the Daleks enjoying watching them suffer and die). There is a distinct sense that the writer wanted it both ways ...

The scene still fails to hold up in-story. If the Daleks believe that the Doctor is too logical / selfish to blow himself up to deny them Davros, then they certainly have no reason to suppose he would be any less logical / more selfless to surrender unconditionally for the sake of the prisoners, with no guarantees whatsoever.

• In episode one, the Doctor stresses to Romana the need to continually take the anti-radiation pills. When Romana is captured by the Daleks, she is unable to take another dose. However, the missed doseage does not seem to affect her health.

Her collapse in the mine seemed to have been part of her act, to deceive the Daleks into thinking she was dead.

She collapses in part due to not taking the pills. After her "burial", she can resume taking them.

It is possible the Daleks provide their slave workers with some form of radiation protection, since otherwise they would likely die too quickly to be of use.

• Scissors, Paper, Stone is a very poor (in fact, a completely invalid) example of a strategy based game, and therefore not a reasonable analogy for a war. In fact, the Movellans' readiness to play the game makes it seem bizarre that they got into their impasse with the Daleks in the first place (if they are, seemingly, capable of making random choices with no strategically preferable option and hoping for the best outcome).

Yes, and there is no reason to suppose that the Movellans playing each other should achieve the same result every time. A robot would deduce that there is no way of predicting what the other would do, since all three options are potentially equally successful.

Another point that the Terrance Dicks Target novelisation tries to clarify: "But you two [Agella and Sharrel] are robots, and your minds follow logical paths — the same paths. So you get a draw every time." i.e. They may be randomising their results, but since their minds both use the same software / variables it still makes no difference - though they mimic sentience, they are incapable of truly random or individual action (Given the vagueness of the Movellans' depiction, it is debatable how well this holds up with the TV versions).

If one follows the game between the Doctor and Sharrel, it makes some sense, as Sharrel is predicting the Doctor's moves based on his preceding ones. This being the only "logical" evidence he has to go on, he slavishly sticks to this technique, and thus the Doctor outwits him. Of course, this says very little for Sharrel's intelligence, as even real-life AIs can adapt to player strategies. Perhaps K9 was really kept out of this story because of the danger he might have felt sorry to have seen his fellow AIs getting hammered at simple parlour games by the Doctor, and thus might have sought to cheer them up by showing them the TARDIS chess leaderboard...

The idea of the scene seems to be to imply that the Movellans all share the same AI / personality (or lack of) and are thus incapable of original thinking. A sound enough premise, miserably let down by the rest of the script: Agella, Sharrel, and Lan all seem to have quite distinct ideas about what strategies to adopt (Sharrel being blasé about flash-frying Romana, while Agella finds it wasteful; Lan suggesting an improvement to Sharrel's strategy by offering to guard the Nova Device). Their deadlock in Rock, Paper, Scissors thus comes across as nothing more than a dumb, and very unlikely coincidence.

As a curious sidenote to this, there are actually a few strategic elements to Rock, Paper, Scissors, or at least psychological: "A strong rock paper scissors player integrates a rich stream of information about their opponent's body language and recent plays to help approximate their opponent's mental state and therefore make an educated guess about the next play. These players will also use subtle movements and phrases to prime their opponent to think about a certain play." (Cal Newport, "Digital Minimalism", 2019, Penguin Books, p.129) Ironically, however, this would give the Movellans - with their perfect poker faces and robophobia-inducing lack of body language - all the advantage.

• Radiation, which figure so prominently in The Daleks (1963) seems to have referenced and then forgotten. We do not see the Doctor and Romana taking the anti-radiation pills. Tyssan, despite being a prisoner of the Daleks for some months, seems not to be affected (but tortured in other ways).

The radiation count was already falling off noticeably in [The Daleks], albeit "still enough to destroy". Most Dalek histories place the events of Destiny of the Daleks centuries later- hence the radiation, whilst still high enough to warrant medical countermeasures, has now declined enough that missing a dose of the anti-radiation treatment is still inadvisable, but considerably less likely to lead to lethal radiation sickness than it was at the time of the earlier story.

• After a great deal of build-up about the Movellans being emotionless, logic-driven androids, Commander Sharrel's mechanical stoicism badly lets him down when the battle turns against him. His final, disarmingly frantic dash (beg pardon) for the Nova Device would make any '80s Cyberleader proud.

Someone has to survive to relay the information back to his "people".

This is unlikely to be him, though, if he manually detonates a weapon of mass destruction. Perhaps Movellans (just like '80s Cybermen) default to "blind panic mode" when the situation is dire enough.

Their brief cameo in "The Pilot" (Season 10, Episode 1) has rendered this point moot, in retrospect. The Movellans may rely upon logic for determining their strategies, but in the heat of battle they are certainly capable of reacting with urgency.

• Given that a Movellan can be conveniently enslaved by a couple of pokes with a screwdriver into its external neural circuitry (a glaring design flaw if ever there was one), why do the Doctor and Tyssan leave the unnamed guard (played by Cassandra) lying on the sands rather than adding her to their "army"? Other than one suspects they were unwilling to pay the actress for more than one scene, that is...

• Two striking, and rather unfortunate prop discontinuities when the black, female Movellan guard is disabled and stripped by the Doctor (as if that wasn't disturbing in and of itself). For one, her chest panel has assumed male dimensions. For another, she has suddenly become white.

• Sharrel's "cunning plan" (in the Baldrick sense) to draw the Doctor into the open by strapping Romana to a ticking bomb makes no logical sense whatsoever. Keeping Romana as an enforced "guest" aboard the ship would be enough to ensure his return, and might also do slightly less to completely lose his trust. Also, what would Sharrel have done had the Doctor simply been too far away or wrongly placed to have seen the Nova Device? Other than be very grateful that Agella is less convinced on the point of blowing up their only hostage...

Its all about learning new strategies.

• The new CGI effects in the DVD release add a new plot hole in Episode 1: after the Movellan ship lands and the ground starts exploding around the Doctor and Romana, new shots are added of phaser blasts coming from the doorway of the ship, apparently causing the explosions. Imminently, though, this makes no sense, as the Doctor deduces that the explosions are actually caused by the Daleks' "high impact phason drills."

• On a small point of gun control, the supposedly "superior" and disciplined Movellans could really benefit from some remedial weapons drill. At the beginning of Episode 4, after the recap, Sharrel uses his pistol like a pointer, including gesturing towards his own troops with it while his hand is still in the trigger-guard. The T-800 would not be proud of his brethren ...

• Are we to believe that after two centuries or more of war (albeit of the static variety) the Daleks have never even seen a Movellan nor gained any intel on them? It is certainly strange that, having shot Lan, the Dalek patrol do not seem particularly concerned that there are Movellans stalking about their base (they do not bother to report the incident as more than a common intrusion), and they do not attempt to finish him off properly.

Worse still, they clearly have extensive enough intel on the Movellans to furnish Davros with a detailed report (in the lovely form of a rainbow disco ball), yet they still ignore Lan's not-a-corpse, leaving him to recover and make good his escape (and this, after they have made such a fuss about perp sweating poor Romana for every tiny scrap of intel she has). The Movellans do no better. With a full force, superior agility, and guns that can one-shot Daleks, they have no excuse for not launching an all-out attack on the subterranean base, where they would have all the advantage (rather than waiting for the evil little racist space tanks to engage them in open ground). For all the script tries to convince us the war is going nowhere because both sides are too logically advanced for their own good, what actually comes across is two forces evenly matched in stupidity and random exploitable weaknesses.

• Clumsy scripting raises so many more questions than it answers. Not only do the Daleks fluctuate between being the sadistic, sociopathic cyborgs one loves to hate, to being dimwitted robotic stooges, as script demands: the Movellans also suffer, failing attempts to establish them as cunningly-designed but soulless human facsimiles (such as the rock-paper-scissors game, the zombie-like behaviour of the extras, and their eerie coordination). Their hive-mindedness (or at least their programmed-mindedness) is undermined by a) the curious Movellan soldier at the Nova Device test, who wants to know how it works, b) Agella and Sharrel disagreeing over whether to fry Romana, for the sake of a cliffhanger, c) Lan crushing a rock for no apparent reason other than AI boredom, etc. All of which plays into the general sense that cast and crew lacked any consensus at exactly what sort of story they were supposed to be shooting.

Agreed. Consider also Sharrel asking if the Nova device has malfunctioned when it doesn't go off, and having to be told that it was only a ruse to trap the Doctor and didn't need to.

Indeed, their logic does not seem to factor in decent communication ... There are times the story feels as if it was written (or edited) to play up and parody the clichéd, plot-serving stupidity of villains in melodrama, with the Movellans coming off as particularly bad offenders (Having tried to preserve a guarded trust for two episodes, they suddenly start bullying and threatening their allies for no reason, then pointlessly reveal their own plans to conquer the galaxy ... ironically just at the point when their alleged devotion to logic becomes a major plot point). If so, though, one suspects that Terry Nation was not in on the joke.

• Bearing in mind that it doesn't have a single organic crewmember, it seems an astonishingly fortunate coincidence for all concerned that the Movellan ship is apparently equipped with suitable life-support facilities (assuming Tyssan and co. do not simply suffocate off-screen, of course).

The Movellans might not breathe, but they clearly interact with lifeforms that do, so presumably maintain some kind of atmosphere generation on their ships for the benefits of them, if only so that they don't have to leave their ship every time they want to interact in-person with a being that needs to breathe.

Alternatively, the Movellan spaceship was not originally built by the Movellans, but was commandeered by them from a lifeform which did (their creators, perhaps?).

• It be grand if Sarah J was involved. It rock if she faced Tyssan and fought back instead of bein wimpy as Romana, if she surrender to Daleks to save a younger slave, if she was tough in the torture only 'breaking;' when they blackmail they;'d kill the younger slave if she zero answers, if she faked her death, if she and the Doctor hugged, if she cause trouble for Davros including when she slaps him to shut him up from scaring the younger slave and hrting the Doctor, if she quickly saw through the Movellan's lies, if she was the one who destroyed the Dalek Commander, and if she did her own 'Bye, bye, Davros'. How'd you think the Doctor react if she did all this; especially to be brave? And how'd you think Davros react to her being this way including ehr slapping him over a creature zero her kind?

• Davros slapped the jelly babies away,. WHy?