B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (330 page)

The Daleks also used their time travel to achieve their other great ambition - they went back in time and conquered the Earth. These Daleks already knew the Doctor’s name - they hooked the Doctor up to a Mind Analysis Machine, and learned that the third Doctor was the same individual as his previous two incarnations. Whether this knowledge survived the collapse of the alternative timeline is unclear
 [14]
. But from now on, even if they don’t always recognise the Doctor on sight, they understand that he can change his appearance.
 [15]

The Dalek Invasion was also long-remembered by humanity (some historians called it The First Dalek War), and it resulted in an Alliance of a number of planets, and races being set up to defend against such an attack. The Daleks themselves don’t seem to threaten Earth for centuries (Vicki, from 2493, only knows the Daleks from history books about the Invasion).
 [16]

What the Daleks do in this period, though, is a mystery. We know that the first Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks - when we see them in severely reduced circumstances - happens in Ian and Barbara’s “future”, “generations” before the year 2540, which would seem to fall around here on the timeline.

The Daleks were confined to Dalek City on Skaro. The Doctor and his companions helped the Thals to destroy them. There’s no indication at this time that these Daleks have space travel, time travel, or even are aware that life exists on other planets.
 [17]

However you rationalise this away, even if you don’t try to incorporate the
TV Century 21
comic strip, the result is clumsy. The most straightforward explanation is perhaps that the vast majority of Daleks abandon Skaro because their conquests have taken them elsewhere, leaving behind a small group... but this doesn’t explain why the Daleks there can’t move or see beyond their city. Perhaps they have refused to upgrade their power supplies and literally been left grounded as a result.

Perhaps these are
all
the surviving Daleks - crippled by their defeat on Earth and the loss of their time craft, and perhaps leaderless (the Daleks need strong leadership, and are prone to turn on each other the moment they don’t have it). We know that the Moroks were on Skaro - perhaps they stole more than just the one Dalek seen in their space museum. If they took, say, the Dalek Brain Machine that’s seen to guide the Daleks and stripped the Daleks’ archives, then it would have been a crippling setback.

The next time we see the Daleks, they’re attacking human colony planets in the mid-twenty-fifth century. The Daleks did not, at this time, seem to have the strength to launch an attack against Earth itself.

However, they are clearly far more powerful than they were when confined to one city on Skaro. They’ve had a few centuries to rebuild and regroup, but we don’t know anything about the catalyst for this process. Perhaps various defeated remnants of the Daleks - the space travellers, the time travellers and the inhabitants of Dalek City - converge on Skaro. There’s a Supreme Council in place by the twenty-sixth century - perhaps this is the body that provides the unified leadership that allows the Daleks to gain strength.

A century later, the Daleks are far more powerful than ever before.

Presumably this is just a natural consequence of building up a powerbase for centuries. Interestingly, the Daleks seem to have time travel, but not to use it - they might just be wary after their two high profile defeats. They don’t seem aware of the Time Lords, yet, but they must have spotted that the Doctor has thwarted them on the three occasions they’ve used time travel technology.
 [18]

In the twenty-sixth century, there was “the third wave of Dalek expansion”, and the Doctor described the Daleks as “one of the greatest powers in the universe” at this time. This was the time of the Second and Third Dalek Wars, which sparked off when the Daleks attempted to divide and conquer the space empires of Earth and Draconia.
 [19]

The Daleks plot this with the Master. It’s never made clear exactly what the Master tells them about himself, but this might be the point where the Daleks realise that the Doctor is just one of a race of time travellers with TARDISes.

This was Benny Summerfield’s native time - her father, Abslom Daak and (later) Ace all fought in these Dalek Wars. Abslom Daak apparently killed the Dalek Emperor at this time.
This might have been a turning point in the war.
 [20]
It was a war that lasted a generation, ending in the early 2570s. The Daleks lost.

Following this, the weakened Daleks tried tactics other than full scale assaults.
 [21]

There are no accounts of the Daleks for centuries - and the human race goes from strength to strength as the Earth Empire spreads across the galaxy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Daleks became interested in “the Human Factor”. The next time we see them, the Daleks are in their city on Skaro. The introduction of the Human Factor into the Daleks leads to civil war, to the Emperor’s death and to the Doctor declaring this to be “the final end”.
 [22]

So, the Daleks disappeared around the year 3000. It was the year 4000 before humanity came into contact with them again, but they’d begun their expansion around 3500.

The Daleks’ Master Plan saw the Daleks’ most ambitious scheme yet - a conquest of the entire Solar System, but merely as part of a strategy to dominate eleven whole galaxies. These Daleks also used time machines, and hoped to construct a Time Destructor. The Daleks were based back on Skaro at this point.
 [23]

Despite being defeated, the Daleks were now a powerful intergalactic force. Within twenty years of their Master Plan failing, the Daleks had succeeded in splitting the Federation. Within a couple of centuries of that, the Daleks were capable of threatening the Time Lords themselves.
 [24]

By now, then, the Daleks have learned of the Time Lords and Gallifrey. To a race dedicated to becoming the supreme beings of the universe, the Time Lords were now obviously the ones to beat - and from now on, the Daleks express no interest in conquering the Earth.
 [25]

The Davros Era took place - the Daleks lost their war with the Movellans, but Davros clawed his way to become the new Dalek Emperor. He re-engineered the Daleks, upgraded their technology and put them in a position where they were a genuine threat to the Time Lords... which may have been what the Dalek leadership had planned all along.

Whether the events of
War of the Daleks
can be taken at face value or not, the Daleks get what they want - they go from military defeat and fragmented forces to having a strong leader and the knowledge and ability to fight a war across an entire galaxy and take on the Time Lords.

The Dalek Empire period saw the Daleks based in the Seriphia galaxy launch a massive assault on the Milky Way, forcing the Earth Alliance to surrender. Resistance leaders Mendes and Kalendorf were able to forment a slave uprising and enlisted the help of Daleks from a parallel universe, but despite countless sacrifices, still the Daleks could not be defeated. Eventually, a signal was sent that destroyed all Daleks and Dalek technology in both the Milky Way and Seriphia - triggering a Great Catastrophe that took those territories millennia to recover from. The Daleks were not utterly destroyed, and thousands of years after the Great Catastrophe, they unleashed a new plague on the galaxy. Humanity mobilised against them once more.
 [26]

The Daleks may, or may not, have lost Skaro. Either way, by now the Daleks were operating at a universal level, not just an intergalactic one. We have patchy information for the next ten thousand years or so, but Captain Jack sums it up: they were the greatest threat in the universe.

The Daleks now merely superficially resembled Davros’ original creation. The Dalek Emperor (at least the third or fourth bearer of the title, and definitely not Davros) now oversaw an entirely revamped Dalek force - a huge army of highly-mobile, heavily-defended Daleks, with a re-engineered Dalek mutant inside. At least some of these Daleks had built-in “temporal shift” units. Dalek Saucers were now capable of firing missiles that could shoot down a TARDIS in flight.

To put the Daleks’ might in perspective: now that the Daleks were upgraded, a single one of them was capable of subduing the entire human population of twenty-first century Earth. Four of them could fend off droves of Cybermen with no evident damage or difficulty.

Before this upgrade, in 2540, the largest army of Daleks ever assembled consisted of ten thousand Daleks - it was capable of conquering an entire galaxy. In the year 4000, five thousand Daleks would have been enough to subdue Earth’s solar system.

Now, the Dalek space fleet consisted of ten million ships, each with two thousand Daleks onboard. Twenty
billion
Daleks.

The Daleks were ready to fight the Last Great Time War ...

The War devastated both sides, leaving few survivors. A few Daleks survived, as did remnants of their technology. From this, they were able to rebuild their strength, but only by losing their genetic purity. Eventually, the Daleks were able to create a new Dalek paradigm - genetically pure, with advanced travel machines.
 [27]

[
1
]
Genesis of the Daleks

[
2
] The
TV Century 21
strip, which builds on information from
The Daleks
.

[
3
]
The Daleks

[
4
] The
TV Century 21
strip.

[
5
] Two hundred years before
The Power of the Daleks
- even there, the dating of the story is open to question, and
War of the Daleks
states that the crashed ship came from the far future. In any event, these Daleks are not in contact with Skaro, which remains unaware of the events of this story.

[
6
]
Doomsday
,
The Stolen Earth
/
Journey’s End

[
7
]
Dalek

[
8
] This is depicted in the
TV Century 21
strip, but obviously happens at some point before
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
.

[
9
]
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
(and references in other stories to it - see the main timeline for details).

[
10
] As depicted in the Big Finish audios
An Earthly Child
,
Relative Dimensions
,
Lucie Miller
and
To the Death.

[
11
] Oddly, the Daleks say the Doctor merely “delayed” their conquest of Earth in
The Chase
.

[
12
] They run on “psychokinetic power” according to
Death to the Daleks
, but static electricity in
The Daleks
,
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
and
The Power of the Daleks
. Maxtible and Waterfield’s experiments with static electricity attract the Daleks (
The Evil of the Daleks
).

[
13
]
The Chase
. The Daleks have done some research - they know what the TARDIS looks like, even though they never saw it in
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
(or
Genesis of the Daleks
,
The Power of the Daleks
or
The Daleks
, for that matter). They know the Doctor’s a time traveller, somehow (perhaps this was an accidental discovery when their were conducting their own time travel experiments). However, there are some big gaps in their knowledge: they don’t even consider the possibility that the TARDIS crew might have changed, and they refer to the Doctor as “human” - we might infer they have yet to encounter another incarnation of the Doctor, and they don’t know about the Time Lords.