Dalek - Fictional History

Fictional History

Dalek in-universe history has seen many retroactive changes, which have caused continuity problems. When the Daleks first appeared in The Daleks, they were presented as the descendants of the Dals, mutated after a brief nuclear war between the Dal and Thal races 500 years ago. This race of Daleks is destroyed when their power supply is wrecked. In 1975, Terry Nation revised the Daleks' origins in Genesis of the Daleks, where the Dals were now called Kaleds (of which "Daleks" is an anagram), and the Dalek design was attributed to one man, the crippled Kaled chief scientist and evil genius, Davros. Instead of a short nuclear exchange, the Kaled-Thal war was portrayed as a thousand-year-long war of attrition, fought with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons causing widespread mutations among the Kaled race. Davros experimented on living Kaled cells to find the ultimate mutated form of the Kaled species and placed the subjects in tank-like "travel machines" whose design was based on his own life-support chair.

Genesis of the Daleks marked a new era for the depiction of the species, with most of their previous history either forgotten or barely referred to again. Future stories in the original Doctor Who series, which followed a rough story arc, would also focus more on Davros, much to the dissatisfaction of some fans who felt that the Daleks should take centre stage rather than merely becoming minions of their creator. Davros made his last televised appearance for 20 years in Remembrance of the Daleks, which depicted a civil war between two factions of Daleks. One, the "Imperial Daleks", were loyal to Davros, who had become their Emperor, whilst the other, the "Renegade Daleks", followed a black Supreme Dalek. By the end of the story both factions have been wiped out, though Davros escapes.

A single Dalek appeared in "Dalek", written by Robert Shearman, which was broadcast on BBC One on 30 April 2005. This Dalek appeared to be the sole Dalek survivor of the Time War which had destroyed both the Daleks and the Time Lords. A Dalek Emperor returned at the end of the 2005 series, having rebuilt the Dalek race with genetic material harvested with human subjects. It saw itself as a god, and the new Daleks were shown worshipping it. These Daleks and their fleet were destroyed in "The Parting of the Ways". The 2006 season finale "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday" featured a squad of four Dalek survivors from the old Empire, known as the Cult of Skaro, led by a black Dalek named "Sec", that had survived the Time War by escaping into the Void between dimensions. They emerged, along with a Time Lord prison vessel containing millions of Daleks, at Canary Wharf due to the actions of the Torchwood Institute and Cybermen from a parallel world. This resulted in a Cyberman-Dalek clash in London, which was resolved when the Tenth Doctor caused both factions to be sucked back into the Void. The Cult survived by utilising an "emergency temporal shift" to escape. They would later appear in the two-part story "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks", in which whilst stranded in 1930s New York, they set up a base in the partially built Empire State Building and attempt to rebuild the Dalek race. To this end Dalek Sec merges with a human being to become a Human/Dalek hybrid. The Cult then set about creating "Human Daleks" by "formatting" the brains of a few thousand captured humans, with the intention of producing hybrids which remain fully human in appearance but with Dalek and human minds. Dalek Sec started to become so human, that he changed the DNA to make the hybrids more human. This angered the rest of the Cult, so they betrayed Sec and put him in chains. The Doctor, however, was able to escape. With the humans fully Dalek, as Caan, the new leader, wanted, the three daleks started the war with their army of Dalek humans. They find the doctor. The two daleks that find him say they will exterminate him, but Dalek Sec gets in the way and, in turn, is exterminated. The doctor suggests to the Daleks that the they make the hybrids kill him, and the hybrids are able to get free and destroy Daleks Thay and Jast. This leaves Dalek Caan as the last Dalek in existence. The Doctor faces off with Caan and, when the Doctor makes Caan realise he is the last of his kind, Caan uses emergency temporal shift and escapes back into the Time War.

The Daleks returned in the 2008 seasons' two-part finale, "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End", accompanied once again by their creator Davros. The story reveals that Caan's temporal shift sent him into the Time War despite it being time-locked where he rescued Davros, in the process gaining the ability to see the future at the cost of his own sanity. Davros has created a new race using his cells. The episode depicts a Dalek invasion of Earth which with other planets is taken to the Medusa Cascade, led by a red Supreme Dalek, who has kept Caan and Davros imprisoned in "The Vault", a section of the Dalek flagship, the Crucible. Davros and the Daleks plan to destroy reality itself with a "reality bomb" for which they need the stolen planets. The plan fails due to the interference of the Donna Noble, a companion of the Doctor, and Caan himself, who has been manipulating events to destroy the Daleks after realising the severity of the atrocities they have committed. The Daleks returned in the 2010 episode "Victory of the Daleks", the third episode of the series; Daleks who escaped the destruction of Davros' empire fell back in time and, by chance, managed to retrieve the "Progenitor". This is a tiny apparatus which contains 'original' Dalek DNA. The activation of the Progenator results in the creation of a "new paradigm" of Daleks. The New Paradigm Daleks deem their creators inferior and exterminate them; their creators make no resistance to this, deeming themselves inferior as well. They are organised into different roles (drone, scientist, strategists, supreme and eternal), which are identifiable with colour-coded armour instead of the identification plates under the eyestalk used by their predecessors. They escape the Doctor at the end of the episode via time travel with the intent to rebuild their Empire. The Daleks only cameo in subsequent finales "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang" (2010) and "The Wedding of River Song" (2011) as Steven Moffat decided to "give them a rest" and stated "There's a problem with the Daleks. They are the most famous of the Doctor's adversaries and the most frequent, which means they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe." They next appear in "Asylum of the Daleks" (2012), where the Daleks are shown to have greatly increased numbers and have a Parliament. All record of the Doctor is removed from their collective consciousness at the end of the episode.