Doctor Who fans care a great deal about continuity - or the lack thereof. This was especially an issue of the classic era of the programme.
The biggest continuity debate centred on the UNIT dating controversy - the result of some production teams setting stories in the near future, and others ignoring this, coupled with the realities of filming in contemporary England, with its pre- and post decimal currency, vehicle registration plates, and on-screen appearances by calendars.
The Doctor himself raised continuity issues. Was he simply a minor Time Lord who got bored and ran away with a malfunctioning TARDIS, or did he have some sort of connection with the earliest days of Gallifrey - the time of Rassilon and Omega?
Both the Daleks and the Cybermen had thrown up their particular continuity problems, thanks to their longevity and the input from diverse writers, producers and script editors.
How could Cybermen be running around London in the 1960s / '70's, if they were unknown before Mondas arrived in December 1986?
Unlike the Cybermen, the Daleks were written for by only a couple of authors - so continuity ought not to have been such a big issue with them - or so you might have thought...
Things start to go awry with only their second appearance.
The Dalek Invasion of Earth attempted to address the issue of the creatures having been apparently destroyed on Skaro in the far future - a race of beings dependent on static electricity, incapable of moving off the metal floors of their city. How could they be ruling Earth in the mid 22nd Century? The Doctor tells Ian that this is now the middle period of their history, and the events on Skaro were at the end of their existence, millions of years in the future. What the Doctor ignores is how these earlier - therefore more primitive - Daleks could have unlimited mobility when the future - therefore more advanced - ones were tied to their metal floors.
The creation of the Daleks was said to have come about as the result of an evolutionary process. Both they and the Thals had fought a terrible war involving a neutron bomb which ended the conflict in a single day. The Thals were a warrior people, whilst the Dals were teachers and philosophers.
Radiation mutated both races. The Thals eventually became beautiful blond humanoids, but the Dal(ek)s interfered with nature and confined themselves to self-contained mobile life support units - and got stuck this way. They referred to their own ancestors not as Dals but as Daleks ("... our Dalek forefathers...").
The Daleks featured not only on TV but in their own comic strip, and this began with an origins story. The strip had Terry Nation's name attached - the man responsible for the pair of already contradictory TV stories - but we all know that they were really the work of David Whitaker, who had script edited the Dalek tele-adventures and written a novelisation of the first of them.
The strip showed the Dals as small blue-skinned people who are at war with the never seen Thals. The neutron bomb element here is that a stockpile of the weapons held by the Dals is accidentally detonated by a storm. This wipes out all the Dals save for their warlike new leader (who assassinated the older one who wanted to sue for peace) and his chief scientist, Yarveling. They come across a Dalek which they recognise as a war machine they had built before the cataclysm. Somehow it has combined with a mutant Dal to create itself, off-stage as it were. It pretty much forces the last two Dals to create more of its kind before they die of radiation sickness, getting a fancy new casing to become the first Dalek Emperor (thus proving Nation did not write any of this, as he disliked the Emperor concept).
Come 1973, Terry Nation comes up with an alternative origins story for the Radio Times 10th Anniversary Special. In this, it transpires that future humans will eventually become Daleks.
At this time, Nation had returned to Doctor Who, following the use of the Daleks to launch the 1972 season. He had agreed to write one story per season himself. 1973 saw Planet of the Daleks (very much a rerun of old 1960's elements), and 1974 then saw Death to the Daleks - which featured another military-style expedition stranded on a hostile planet (just a quarry location one instead of a studio jungle one). In 1975, wishing to use the Daleks to help set up the new Doctor after five years of Jon Pertwee, Nation was invited to submit another story and unfortunately offered more of the same. Producer Barry Letts is said to have told Nation that it was a perfectly good Dalek story - it's just that he had already sold it to them twice before. Letts instead asked Nation to come up with an origins story - initially titled "Genesis of Terror".
This is where the continuity issues come in, as the events depicted here don't quite match what we had previously seen or been told.
The ancestors of the Daleks are the Kaleds, not the Dals. They are presented as ruthless humanoids, identical in appearance to the Thals other than having dark hair instead of blond. They are also identical in terms of behaviour and temperament. The notion of a race of warriors combatting a race of philosophers is entirely absent. We also have the war lasting for a thousand years, with the nuclear weapons (such as neutron bombs) having been used up way back at the start. The only similarity to the Thal legend related in The Daleks is that the war ended with the events of a single day - the Thals destroy the Kaled dome, and immediately afterwards Davros sends in his Daleks, so both cities perish within hours of each other.
It may well be that the story told to the TARDIS crew in The Daleks was simply a folk tale, handed down from generation to generation and so corrupted over time. This explanation only goes so far. What it cannot cover is the fact that the Dalek city is surrounded by a petrified forest in The Daleks - a result of the neutron bomb - which is entirely missing from the locations seen in Genesis of the Daleks, where Skaro is a blasted wasteland.
The Dalek city is destroyed by a missile in Genesis, and the Daleks come into being in a nearby underground bunker - so where does the city come from in The Daleks?
One issue which particularly annoys fans is the Dalek design. If these are the very first Daleks, how can they be mobile on any terrain, where supposedly future ones are limited in this area - and why do they have the vertical slats around the middle section, which only appear in later, more advanced Daleks?
One theory fans have come up with is to entirely ignore what the Doctor says about Dalek history in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. He's basically talking out of his backside. The events on Skaro were not in the far future at all, but in the ancient history of the Daleks.
After killing Davros they are sealed in by the Thal alliance of survivors. Cut off, without their creator, they simply stagnate over time and even go backwards scientifically - becoming reliant on static electricity since they never leave their city. They build their city, but prefer to remain underground due to their paranoia.
At some point, groups of Daleks do eventually leave the city and set off to explore, and these are the ones who evolve into the Daleks capable of forging empires. The ones left behind decline, and it is these which are seen to be destroyed in The Daleks.
(An alternative history features in Terrance Dicks' novelisation of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, where the Doctor simply tells Ian that there was probably more than one Dalek settlement on Skaro and they saw the end of just one of them).
(And another alternative history goes that the Doctor changes the future of the Daleks in Genesis of the Daleks, and all the events seen in the preceding stories are altered in some way - from minor deviations to never having happened at all. This is why all the stories afterwards feature Davros prominently, whereas he isn't even mentioned before this).
Going back to the cities as presented in this story - they appear to be only a few miles apart. How can these two races fight a war a thousand years long when they are almost on each other's doorsteps? And why did the conflict fail to end with the advanced weapons of the past?
Davros enters the Thal city via a secret tunnel. Why was this not used by him and the Kaleds in the past to invade the city, or to plant a bomb under it?
Once they learn of it, why do the Thals in turn not use it to attack the Kaled bunker, assuming that's where it starts?
The tunnel seems to emerge in the Thal city under a few floor tiles in a corridor. How exactly was this tunnel made, without anyone noticing this - and how did Nyder manage to get Davros through it?
Why did the Thal leadership not simply capture Davros, to prevent him developing weapons against them or to force him into helping them instead? Why trust him at all when he has just been seen to turn his back on his own race - happily condemning them to extinction for what are clearly his own selfish reasons.
The Doctor talks the Kaled government into suspending Davros' work. We don't see how he achieves this - and no wonder. It happens in double quick time. Why would they accept the word of a bizarrely dressed stranger who turns up out of nowhere with no official status?
They clearly don't like or trust Davros and his Elite but need him - so it makes no sense they would accept the Doctor's arguments against him. This involves him telling them about future events, when they don't even believe in life on other planets.
Sarah gains psychic powers - knowing that the Ark will become a beacon at some point while they're away (this was filmed after Revenge of the Cybermen, though broadcast after). She also knows all about the mission which the Time Lord gave to the Doctor, despite him never having any opportunity to tell her about it, and knows the Doctor is about to run around a corner long before he does so.
She also magically lands inside a rocket gantry after falling off the outside of it.
Why does she suddenly decide to change her clothes, in the middle of a crisis on enemy territory? And what are clearly non-Kaled Elite clothes doing in a Kaled Elite cupboard?
The Doctor knows that Nyder opens the safe in Davros' office because it is too high up the wall for the scientist to reach. Surely there are times Davros wants to access his safe without Nyder being around, so why not have one placed where he can reach it himself? What would have happened if Nyder had broken his arm, or been otherwise incapacitated? Davros would have had to give the combination to someone else, thus endangering security.
Davros shows the Elite members a big red button which he claims is a self-destruct for the Dalek nurseries. Later, it turns out that this is real. Why not just show them a fake one, with no risk involved of accidental or malicious pressing, to achieve his point?
And talking of buttons - why on Skaro would Davros have one that switched off his life support unit?
Why does the Doctor think he has set the Daleks back by a thousand years when he has only brought down a relatively short length of tunnel, and there are still a number of Daleks active within the bunker? Their creator might be dead (or is he...?) and their nursery might have been blown up, but he knows of their scientific and technical genius, which should allow them to overcome these obstacles in only a few decades at most...
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