Background
Freelance writers for the BBC were allowed to retain intellectual property rights over concepts and characters they introduced into individual serials. As a result, Terry Nation found himself co-owning the Dalek phenomenon of the mid-1960s. Nation was eager to find some way of divorcing them from the Doctor Who universe so that he could build a franchise which would not require BBC cooperation, and two such attempts were made in 1965.
One was the Doctor- and companion-less episode Mission to the Unknown. Though commonly known as an introduction to the Doctor Who serial, The Daleks' Master Plan, it was also preparatory to a proposed Dalek-only pilot called, The Destroyers. Had it been completed, The Destroyers would have been centred around the same "Space Security Service" seen in Mission to the Unknown and Master Plan.
The second was through this play, which introduced the idea of accidental human discovery of the planet Skaro (similar to what happened to the TARDIS crew in The Daleks), and the humans' subsequent reaction against the Daleks.
While this was the only of the two approaches that actually got produced on the strength of Terry Nation's ownership alone, it received no further independent development. Elements from this play were later reworked by David Whitaker for the Second Doctor television story The Power of the Daleks.
In 2008, Big Finish Productions reproduced the play in an audio format starring Nicholas Briggs as the voice of the Daleks, along with The Ultimate Adventure and The Seven Keys to Doomsday.
Read more about this topic: The Curse Of The Daleks
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