D is for... Daleks (Part 3)

At some point during the Doctor's eighth incarnation, a series of conflicts broke out between the Daleks and the Time Lords. The Doctor tried to maintain a distance from the Time War, but was soon sucked into it - regenerating with the help of the Sisterhood of Karn into an incarnation who no longer saw himself as a "Doctor". The Daleks soon gained the upper hand in the conflict, laying siege to Gallifrey. They surrounded the planet with a fleet of saucer-like ships, and overran the second city, Arcadia. They made use of flying gun platforms in their attack. These Daleks had a new armoured appearance, with casings cast from bronze. The middle section could spin round so that they could fire in any direction without turning, and all had the ability to fly or hover. They were ruled by an Emperor, whose personal guards had black domes. The War Doctor stole a powerful Gallifreyan weapon known as The Moment, and used it to destroy both sides in the conflict - Dalek and Time Lord - as the only way to bring the conflict to an end. Or so he always thought...

When the Doctor and Rose Tyler responded to an emergency call from the US state of Utah in 2012, the TARDIS landed in an underground museum devoted to alien technology. The owner, Henry van Statten, had one living exhibit - and the Doctor was horrified to discover that it was a Dalek. The War had been time-locked, so that nothing could enter or leave, but this lone Dalek had somehow managed to break free - arriving in the Ascension Islands. Anyone who touched it had been burned alive. The creature - which was dubbed a Metaltron - was passed from collector to collector until it came into van Statten's grasp. It was kept chained up, tortured by one of his men in order to make it talk but it refused to do so. It only spoke when it recognised the Doctor. The Dalek was restored after Rose touched it, passing on some Artron energy.

It used its sucker arm to kill its tormentor, crushing his skull, then broke out of its cage. It absorbed the entire internet as well as sufficient electrical energy to reconstitute itself - draining the entire power supply of the eastern seaboard of America. The Dalek then began to slaughter the personnel in the museum as it made its way towards the surface. It found that it could not kill Rose after it captured her, as it had absorbed some of her DNA along with the Artron energy. Its obsession with racial purity meant that it could not live with itself as it was changed by the contact with Rose. It opened up its casing to reveal the mutant within. Believing itself to be the last Dalek in existence, and sickened by what it was becoming, it decided to kill itself - but required Rose to order it to do so. The spheres in the skirt section detached themselves and created a ball of energy which disintegrated the Dalek. The Doctor thought that he had finally seen the last of the Daleks.

However, the Emperor had also survived with its command ship. It waited on the edge of space, slowly building a new army of Daleks from human genetic material. It grew insane during this period, believing itself to be the god of the Daleks. It infiltrated Satellite 5, which broadcast news across Earth's empire, and placed an agent in charge - the Jagrafess. This creature began to manipulate the news to cause Earth to become inward looking, altering the timeline as the Doctor recognised it.
The Doctor destroyed the Jagrafess, but on his departure society on the planet collapsed. 100 years later, the Doctor and his companions Rose and Captain Jack Harkness were abducted from the TARDIS and placed back on the satellite, which was now known as the Game Station. This hosted hundreds of apparently deadly TV game shows. Victims were secretly being transported to the Dalek fleet to be turned into new Daleks. The Doctor discovered what was going on after the Daleks kidnapped Rose, and he and Jack flew the TARDIS to the command ship to rescue her.

Rose was freed, but the Daleks then launched an attack on Earth, destroying whole continents. They arrived on the Game Station to capture the Doctor. He devised a means to destroy them, but it would kill everyone on the station and half of those on the planet below. He tricked Rose into entering the TARDIS and it took her back home to present day London. Jack was exterminated, and the Doctor found he could not bring himself to use his weapon. Rose was determined to get back to the station and so opened the TARDIS console - absorbing the temporal vortex into herself. She arrived back on the station where she resurrected Jack - inadvertently making him immortal - then disintegrated the Emperor and the entire Dalek fleet. In removing the vortex from Rose, the Doctor sacrificed his own life and regenerated.

Other Daleks had also escaped the Time War, but this time deliberately so, prior to the conflict's conclusion. This was the Cult of Skaro - four Daleks led by Sec, who had a black casing. The Cult had been established by the Emperor to think like their enemies and so devise strategies for beating the Time Lords and their allies. They permitted themselves names, and were answerable to no-one - not even the Emperor. They manged to capture a Time Lord prison capsule, which they dubbed the Genesis Ark. It was dimensionally transcendental, and had thousands of Daleks troops imprisoned within it. They took the Ark with them into a Void Ship and fled from the war. A breach into the Void opened up in the skies above London, and the Torchwood organisation built a tower to reach this point. The Void Ship broke through and was captured by Torchwood, who failed to analyse it. It was only when the Doctor saw it that it was identified. The breach was further opened when an army of Cybermen from an alternative Earth forced their way through, with the unwitting assistance of Torchwood. The Cult emerged from their ship and attempted to take control, rejecting an alliance with the Cybermen. The Ark was activated after Mickey Smith accidentally touched it - transferring Artron energy, as he had also travelled in the TARDIS. The Dalek army poured out and began exterminating the population of London, and fighting with the Cybermen. The Doctor fully opened the breach and the Daleks were sucked back into the Void, but the four Cult members fled using an emergency temporal shift.

The Cult found themselves in New York in 1930. They kidnapped a number of homeless humans and transformed them into their slaves by combining their DNA with that from pigs. Attempts at creating new Dalek mutants failed so Sec devised a scheme to create an army of human-Dalek hybrids - fusing the DNA through a massive gamma radiation surge which was expected from the sun. They took control of the Empire State Building's construction in order that an aerial atop it would harness this radiation. They were helped by a human named Diagoras. Sec decided to perform another experiment on itself - genetically joining with Diagoras to become the first of a new Dalek-Human species. The other Cult members objected to this, as they could see that Sec had taken on some human characteristics and was no longer pure enough to lead them. They turned on him and chained him up. The Doctor got in the way of the radiation surge and so the army had Time Lord DNA in their mix - causing them to question the Daleks. Sec died trying to save the Doctor. The army turned on the Cult members and destroyed two of them before Dalek Caan self-destructed them remotely. The Doctor confronted Caan - now believed to be the final Dalek - and offered to take it away from Earth, but it once again used an emergency temporal shift to flee.

The shift took Caan back into the Time War, where it rescued Davros. He then set about creating a new Dalek army using cells from his own body. Caan had been left damaged and insane by the shift into the war, and could now foresee the future. The new red / gold Dalek Supreme took command of their new space station - the Crucible. Davros was tasked with devising the ultimate weapon that would leave the Daleks as the only creatures left alive in the entire universe. He created the Reality Bomb, which dissolved the electromagnetic force binding atoms together. To power it he needed to harness the kinetic energy of a number of planets, and these were removed from time and space and brought to the Medusa Cascade. One of these worlds was the Earth. The Daleks moved the planet to the Cascade then invaded. The Doctor tracked them down and, accompanied by a number of his recent companions, arrived on the Crucible.

Caan had kept secret one of his prophesies - that the Daleks deserved extinction. They tried to destroy the TARDIS with Donna Noble still on board, along with the Doctor's severed hand. The Doctor had earlier been shot by a Dalek and avoided regeneration by pouring the excess energy into the hand after healing himself. The hand grew into a half-human version of the Doctor, combining with Donna's DNA. She in turn became part Time Lord. The new Doctor and Donna brought the TARDIS onto the Crucible just as the Daleks were about to activate their bomb. Davros shot Donna, triggering the Time Lord part of her. She and the half-human Doctor then set about sabotaging the Dalek systems. The Reality Bomb was shut down and the Daleks were sent out of control. All of the planets bar Earth were returned to their rightful places and times, but the half-Doctor went further. He decided to destroy the Daleks in an act of genocide. They and the Crucible were blown up.

The Doctor later met someone who had been a child when the Daleks had stolen the Earth. She was Adelaide Brooke, commander of the first base on Mars. She told the Doctor of how she had seen a Dalek outside her bedroom window. It had seen her, yet did not attempt to capture or kill her. The Doctor surmised that it might have identified in her something of her future destiny.

One Dalek saucer survived, and this travelled back through time to the 1940's and the middle of the Second World War, hiding itself on the dark side of the Moon. The Daleks had hidden devices known as Progenitors around the galaxy as a safeguard for their future survival. These contained pure Dalek DNA from which to create a new army. The Daleks found one of these devices but discovered that it would not respond to them - no longer recognising them as pure Dalek. They needed the Doctor to confirm their identity to the device and so set an elaborate trap. They placed an android in Winston Churchill's team - knowing that he was known to the Doctor. They had programmed the android, posing as Professor Bracewell, to believe that he had created a new weapon for the Prime Minister - armoured robots called Ironsides. These were really Daleks, in khaki camouflage colours. They pretended to be friendly, committed to helping defeat the Germans. Churchill called upon the Doctor for advice about employing them, and they were already helping to shoot down German aircraft when he arrived. One of the Daleks remained on their saucer, monitoring what was said. When the Doctor told them he knew they were Daleks, this activated the Progenitor.

The device created a new breed of Dalek, with bigger casings in a variety of colours, denoting their function. They exterminated the Daleks which had helped create them as they were inferior to them. These new Daleks attempted to destroy London by illuminating the city during an air-raid, but Bracewell had devised a means for British fighter planes to travel into space. A squadron of Spitfires attacked the saucer and disabled the device which was powering the lights of London. The Dalek Supreme activated a bomb in Bracewell's chest, and the Doctor was forced to return to Earth to deactivate it, allowing the Daleks to escape into the future.

The new Daleks later headed an alliance of many of the Doctor's foes in an attempt to stop him from destroying the entire universe. An exploding TARDIS would wipe everything out, and to prevent this the alliance created a prison for the Doctor called the Pandorica, hidden beneath Stonehenge. The Daleks assumed that only the Doctor could pilot the TARDIS, whereas it was River Song who was flying it when it began to break up.

The universe began to unravel, until only a warped version remained on Earth. Present were a couple of stone Daleks, which were held in a museum exhibition close to the Pandorica. The prison was designed to keep its occupant alive forever, and light from it brought one of the stone Daleks to life. It nearly killed the Doctor, but was destroyed by River.

When trying to discover information about the organisation known as the Silence, the Doctor destroyed a Dalek spaceship in order to remove the data-core from one of its occupants.

Daleks could not bring themselves to destroy those of their number who had become insane. Instead they banished them to an icy planet which acted as an asylum. An energy barrier was set up around the planet, and anyone who got through this would be turned into a Dalek drone as the atmosphere was full of nanogenes - even corpses. A signal started to be heard coming from the planet - from a human. If someone could get in, then something could get out, and the Daleks feared to go to the asylum themselves. They lured the Doctor to the ruins of their city on Skaro in order to capture him, abducting his companions Amy and Rory to assist him. All were brought to a vast saucer containing the Parliament of the Daleks, which was in orbit around the planet. The Dalek Prime Minister wanted the Doctor and his friends to go to the asylum and deactivate its defences, so that they could then bombard and destroy it.

The asylum contained Daleks from all periods of their history. They were mostly inactive but were reanimated by the presence of the intruders. In the intensive care unit were Daleks who had previously encountered the Doctor, from the worlds of Kembel, Vulcan, Spiridon and Exxilon. The signal was coming from a young woman named Oswin Oswald, who claimed to be the survivor of a spaceship crash. When the Doctor finally found her, he discovered that she had already been transformed into a Dalek, but her strong will had meant that she had continued to deny this new existence. The Oswin Dalek agreed to deactivate the defences, but first it completely erased all knowledge of the Doctor from the Dalek data-base. The Doctor and his companions transmatted up to the Dalek saucer and the safety of the TARDIS as the asylum planet was destroyed. The Daleks had no idea who he was.

The Doctor later travelled to an obscure planet from which a strange signal was emanating across the entire universe. This attracted many other powerful alien races - including the Daleks. The Church of the Papal Mainframe put a cordon around the world to stop anyone going down to it, but the Doctor and Clara went there and discovered that it was Trenzalore - the location where the Doctor's grave was said to lie. The signal was translated as originating from the Time Lords. The War Doctor had encountered two of his later incarnations, who had helped him save Gallifrey by placing it in a pocket universe at the end of Time. He had therefore not had to use the Moment after all. The Dalek fleet had been wiped out in its own crossfire when the planet disappeared, and so the Daleks and everyone else believed that Gallifrey had been destroyed. Now that it was known to have survived, there was a risk that the Time War would resume. The Doctor remained on the planet to defend it for several centuries, taking him towards the end of his final incarnation. The Daleks battled all the other races in orbit around the planet, eventually taking over the Papal Mainframe. Clara Oswald talked the Time Lords into remaining where they were, and they broke contact. But first they granted the Doctor a whole new regeneration cycle, and he used his regeneration energy to destroy the Daleks.

In the first incarnation of his new regeneration cycle, the Doctor rescued a pilot from the middle of a war between humans and Daleks. Taking her back to her main ship, he discovered that there was a lone Dalek held captive there. This Dalek was heavily damaged, leading the Doctor to nickname it "Rusty". The Dalek was also claiming to be an enemy of its own people, intent on wiping them out. The Doctor hoped that if he could discover why this Dalek thought the way that it did then there might be a hope that other Daleks might be changed. He agreed to be miniaturised and injected into the Dalek along with Clara and a squad of soldiers. Within the Dalek they discovered deadly automated anti-bodies. Those killed by them were turned into a foodstuff for the Dalek.

They discovered that it was radiation poisoning from a damaged component that was making Rusty question its existence. It had seen a star being formed and thought it beautiful, and so turned against endless war and extermination. It had been inspired to fight against the rest of its kind by the Doctor himself. The spaceship was attacked by a Dalek saucer. After the Doctor and his friends had been taken out of Rusty, it broke free and killed a number of soldiers, before turning on the attacking Dalek forces. It sent a signal to the other Daleks that the ship had been destroyed, so that they could escape, then left the ship - determined to carry on its crusade against its kin.

The TARDIS later took the Doctor back to Skaro, this time to a point earlier in the Kaled-Thal war. He met Davros as a boy, trapped in the middle of a minefield. He decided to walk away and leave him to die... Centuries later, Davros sent his henchman Colony Sarff to hunt down the Doctor. Ashamed of what he had done, the Doctor allowed himself to be taken captive and he was brought to Skaro, where the Daleks had built a new city. Clara and Missy insisted on accompanying him. Present were Daleks from all periods of their history, as there had been in their asylum. In command was a new red / gold Supreme. Davros was here, and he was dying. The Daleks destroyed the TARDIS and appeared to exterminate Clara and Missy, but the latter had managed to teleport them both to safety outside the city.

They decided to break back in via the sewer system. Missy informed Clara that Daleks were immortal, and only lost their effectiveness when their bodies deteriorated into slime, when they were flushed down into the sewers. A Dalek guard sent to investigate the intruders was destroyed by some of the still living residue which dwelt there, and Missy forced Clara to get into the empty casing to help them get into the city. The Doctor made his peace with Davros, and then decided to give him some of his regeneration energy to restore him to health. This was all a trap by Davros, who was biologically linked to all of his creations. They all fed on the regeneration energy. The Doctor had guessed the trap, however, and knew that the discarded Daleks in the sewers would also benefit. They hated those who had abandoned them, and rose up to destroy the city. The Doctor later went back and saved the young Davros, so that he would later give his creations the capacity for mercy.

The Doctor settled down to live and work at St Luke's University in Bristol, England, as he had to watch over a vault which contained Missy. He took an interest in one of the kitchen staff - Bill Potts - and decided to mentor her. She befriended a girl named Heather, who joined with a crashed alien spaceship to become its new pilot. Wanting a co-pilot, Heather began to pursue Bill through time and space, as the Doctor sought to shake her off. At one point they landed in the middle of the Dalek-Movellan war, where Heather took on the form of a Dalek to try to ensnare Bill.

Approaching the end of his life, the Doctor decided he would no longer regenerate. He encountered his first incarnation in the snowy wastes of Antarctica, in December 1986. He was also refusing to regenerate. The two then met a soldier who had been taken from a First World War battlefield by an alien entity known as Testimony. Wanting to know what Testimony was, the Doctors travelled to the planet of Villengard to seek out the greatest repository of knowledge in the universe. This proved to be a data-base created by the Dalek known as Rusty, who was still fighting against the other Daleks. The planet was swarming with Dalek mutants who had come out of their casings. Rusty allowed the Doctor to access the data-base and learn that Testimony was not a threat, but a programme to save the memories of everyone who had ever lived.

Appearances (Part 3): Dalek (2005), Bad Wolf / Parting of the Ways (2005), Army of Ghosts / Doomsday (2006), Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks (2007), The Stolen Earth / Journey's End (2008), Victory of the Daleks (2010), The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (2010), Asylum of the Daleks (2012), The Day of the Doctor (2013), The Time of the Doctor (2013), Inside the Dalek (2014), The Magician's Apprentice / The Witch's Familiar (2015).
Cameos: The Waters of Mars (2009), The Wedding of River Song (2011), The Pilot (2017), Twice Upon A Time (2017).