- Dalek Empire
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The Dalek Empire refers to the sphere of influence of the Daleks, a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Dalek Empire is also a series of audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions, featuring the Daleks. The series begins in Invasion of the Daleks. In 2006, a short-story collection, Short Trips: Dalek Empire was published by the same company.
Contents
Organisation
The concept of a Dalek Empire is alluded to many times during the course of the programme's history. Charting the precise development of the Dalek Empire is a problematic exercise because the exact timeline of the Daleks is highly debatable. The time travelling nature of Doctor Who means that the Doctor's encounters with the Daleks, as first screened, can take place out of chronological sequence. At times the Dalek Empire is under the command of the Emperor Dalek, and at other times, the Dalek Supreme (also known as the Supreme Dalek).
The extent of the Empire has never been made clear in the television series. In one of the few firm dates the programme provides, in the year 4000, the Empire is said to consist of 70 planetary systems (The Daleks' Master Plan). In Resurrection of the Daleks the Daleks, having lost a war with the extragalactic Movellans, the extent of Dalek control has been reduced to a few colony worlds.
Whilst Skaro, the home planet of the Daleks, is often assumed to be the centre of the Empire, this has not always been in case. In Destiny of the Daleks the Daleks returned to Skaro to find their creator Davros, implying that they had abandoned their ancestral seat at that point. Planets like Kembel are often portrayed as being primary bases. By Remembrance of the Daleks, the Daleks have reoccupied Skaro and made it once again the centre of the Empire, until its destruction by the Hand of Omega, a Time Lord weapon of mass destruction, at the end of the serial.
In the Big Finish Productions audio plays the Daleks abandon the Milky Way galaxy altogether. Using a superweapon known as the Apocalypse Element, they wipe out all sentient life in the Seriphia galaxy, which is four times larger than the Milky Way, consisting of 600 billion stars. In the Dalek Empire audio plays they then occupy the Seriphia galaxy and use it as their base of operations, eventually launching an invasion of the whole Milky Way. In other works, Skaro is said to be located in the "Seventh Galaxy."
Life in the Empire
In whatever guise, the purpose of the Empire is not for glory, trade or to act as an extension of Dalek patriotism, but merely to seek planetary systems that can provide exploitable resources for the Daleks' main purpose — to conquer the universe and cleanse it of all life besides themselves.
The Daleks usually subjugate the indigenous populations of the planets they conquer, using them as slave labour to exploit the planet's material resources to the point of exhaustion. Once the inhabitants' usefulness has expired, they are then exterminated by whatever means is most efficient. Biological warfare is a favoured tactic for both conquest and subsequent extermination (The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Planet of the Daleks). In The Dalek Invasion of Earth the population of Dalek-occupied 22nd century Earth is enslaved and put to manual labour, kept in check not just by Daleks but also by 'Robomen', humans converted into mindless drones obedient to the Daleks' will.
In the alternate timeline of Day of the Daleks these supervisors were in the form of collaborators who co-operated with the Daleks for fear of being exterminated. In addition, the Daleks used Ogron mercenaries as a police force to keep the slave population in line. These Dalek agents were themselves supervised by Daleks in control centres that monitored operations from behind the scenes.
In the revived Doctor Who series an elite group of Daleks known as the Cult of Skaro is introduced, tasked with finding new ways of exterminating their enemies, and of ensuring the survival of the Dalek species should the Empire be destroyed.
Civil Wars
The Dalek Empire is not always a unified one. In The Evil of the Daleks the Dalek race is all but wiped out when civil war erupts between Daleks impregnated with 'the human factor' by the Doctor and those that remain unconverted. Later in the series when Davros is revived, he decides to take over the leadership of the Daleks himself, resulting in a schism within the Empire with one faction remaining loyal to the Dalek Supreme and another faction serving Davros. Davros' Daleks were distinguished from the others by their gold and white livery, and variously created from Kaled mutants (as other Daleks), or gentically engineered from the bodies of other species.
By the time of Remembrance of the Daleks, Davros had installed himself as a Dalek Emperor, calling his new breed of Daleks "Imperial Daleks", with the deposed faction becoming "Renegade Daleks". Both sides considered the other as genetic abominations by Dalek standards. At the end of Remembrance, the Renegade Dalek task-force on Earth, including a Supreme Dalek, is wiped out. At the same time, Skaro, the seat of the Imperial Daleks, is destroyed when its sun goes supernova. Presumably this meant an end — or at least severe disruption — to Dalek ambitions of conquest for a time.
The BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel War of the Daleks by John Peel picked up where Remembrance left off, and saw another civil war between Daleks loyal to the Dalek Prime and those loyal to Davros. By the end of the book Davros' forces are wiped out and Davros himself seemingly executed. This however seems to be a contradiction to the Big Finish adventure Terror Firma which also is apparently a continuation of Remembrance. However, both of these spin off media have disputable relation to the television series. Terror Firma also has the concept of Daleks disagreeing, with one faction physically turning Davros into an Emperor causing the evil creator to become, to some large degree, schizophrenic.
The Big Finish Productions Dalek Empire series of audio stories also sees Daleks battling Daleks, as the Daleks from this universe came into conflict with an ostensibly peaceful and benevolent species of Daleks from a parallel universe.
Recent history
In the 2005 series, the Doctor states that his own homeworld Gallifrey, the entire Dalek race and its entire fleet of ten million warships have been wiped out in the last great Time War between the Daleks and the Time Lords. However, it is soon revealed that, just as the Doctor and the Master have survived, so too have remnants of the Daleks who have constantly attempted to rebuild their Empire with varying approaches and results.
As revealed in the episodes "Bad Wolf" and "The Parting of the Ways", the Emperor Dalek's ship survives and over the course of centuries the Emperor rebuilds the Dalek race using genetic material secretly culled from the human race, establishing itself as the god of the Daleks. The Emperor uses agents such as the Jagrafess to manipulate human society, keeping the population ignorant of the growing Dalek army. By the year 200,000 the Daleks are nearly ready to invade Earth. These new Daleks, half a million strong, are destroyed along with their Emperor in "The Parting of the Ways".
In the 2006 series episode "Army of Ghosts", a void ship (a craft built to travel through the nothingness between universes) being examined at Torchwood Tower on 21st century Earth opens up. Emerging from it are a squad of Daleks, members of the elite Cult of Skaro who had escaped the Time War by hiding in the Void, together with a Time Lord prison ship containing millions of Daleks which they call the Genesis Ark. Eventually the new Dalek army is pulled back into the Void due to the actions of the Tenth Doctor in "Doomsday". However, the black Dalek leading the army — named Dalek Sec — initiates an emergency temporal shift and escapes along with the rest of the Cult of Skaro.
The Cult of Skaro resurfaces in 1930 New York in the 2007 two-parter "Daleks in Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks". There, the Cult kidnaps humans in an experiment to create a new species of human-Dalek hybrids in order to evolve the Dalek race and survive. Dalek Sec himself merges with a human, but finds himself influenced by more pacifistic thoughts, even negotiating with the Doctor to find a new world for the hybrids to repopulate. However, the remaining Cult members cling to the Dalek notions of racial purity and turn on Sec. Eventually, thanks to the Doctor inserting some of his DNA into their makeup, the hybrids revolt against the Cult in a battle that leaves Dalek Caan as the only survivor. Dalek Caan, too, escapes by means of an emergency temporal shift.
A new Dalek Empire appeared in the 2008 two-part finale "The Stolen Earth/Journey's End". It is revealed that Dalek Caan was able to teleport back to the Time War (apparently a feat thought impossible due to the events being 'time-locked') and was able to save Davros from his apparent destruction during the first year of the conflict. In breaking through that barrier Caan was exposed to the Time Vortex and witnessed the entirety of time, causing him to know everything that had and would ever happen. However the stress of this shattered his mind, leaving him insane. His prophecies guide Davros as he constructs a new Dalek empire using his own Kaled cells. Unlike the previous attempts to recreate their Empire which had relied on scavenged and inferior equipment, this Empire had the full power of their technology at their disposal. The Empire was based around a space station hidden in the Medusa Cascade, named the Crucible. 27 planets were stolen from throughout time and space and used to form the Reality Bomb, a weapon that channeled Z-neutrino energy into a form that would annihilate any matter it came into contact with. Their intent was to use the rift in the Medusa Cascade to transmit the energy into every reality, destroying everything except for their Empire. This Dalek Empire was destroyed when Dalek Caan, while apparently helping the Empire's cause, was actually orchestrating its downfall. During his brief contact with the time vortex, Caan had seen the effect of the Daleks upon all of time and space and concluded that their race needed to be destroyed. He manipulated the timelines so that the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble would meet and destroy both Davros and his new Daleks. The Daleks were indeed destroyed when the Crucible exploded, which also apparently resulted in the deaths of both Caan and Davros though their fates were intentionally left ambiguous.
The Daleks made a return in Victory of the Daleks. A trio of surviving Daleks in WWII Britain during the blitz successfully created a new race of Daleks from a progenitor device that contained the purest sample of Dalek DNA. The new race exterminated their impure predecessors and successfully escaped through time.
References
See also
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