Genesis of the Daleks
The Doctor, Sarah and Harry are waylaid by a secret arm of the Time Lords en route back to space station Nerva. A Time Lord has diverted them to Skaro, the Daleks’ homeworld, on the eve of their creation, and the Doctor is under orders to prevent the creation of the Daleks in order to avoid future in which they could conquer the entire universe. An atomic war between the Kaleds and the Thals has reduced both of Skaro’s superpowers from the nuclear age to the stone age, with the exception of the radiation-deformed Kaled genius Davros, who not only anticipates the mutation of his people that the war will cause, but embraces it as their future. Davros has devised armored life support systems to encase the shriveled mutants that the Kaleds will become after centuries of atomic bombardment – and he christens these devices Daleks. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah stumble into the Kaled city, and find that Davros has fanatical sympathizers as well as horrified opponents among his own people. And when the moment comes, despite the evil and hatred that Davros is preprogramming into his creations, the Doctor finds that there may be a just reason to allow the Daleks to run their destructive course through history.
written by Terry Nation
directed by David Maloney
music by Dudley SimpsonGuest Cast: Michael Wisher (Davros), John Scott Martin, Max Faulkner, Keith Ashley, Cy Town (Daleks), Roy Skelton (Dalek voices), Peter Miles (Nyder), Guy Siner (Ravon), Dennis Chinnery (Gharman), Richard Reeves (Kaled Leader), John Franklyn-Robbins (Time Lord), Stephen Yardley (Sevrin), James Garbutt (Ronson), Drew Wood (Tane), Jeremy Chandler (Gerrill), Pat Gorman, Hilary Minster, John Gleeson (Thal soldiers), Andrew Johns (Kravos), Peter Mantle (Kaled guard), Harriet Philpin (Bettan), Max Faulkner (Thal guard), Michael Lynch (Thal politician), Ivor Roberts (Mogren), Tom Georgeson (Kavell)
Broadcast from March 8 through April 12, 1975
LogBook entry & review by Earl Green
The Doctor stumbles upon a plot to revive Davros, thought to be long dead, but this time the Daleks aren’t behind it. This attempt to tap into Davros’ evil genius is a purely commercial concern, funded by a shady Earth corporation whose CEO wants Davros to work for him. Horrified by the implications of this, the Doctor counters with an offer to provide his own services in exchange for keeping Davros under lock and key. The company’s chief executive, realizing that he has two geniuses on his hands, instead strikes a bargain that both parties find even more terrifying – he will hire the Doctor and Davros, and they will share lab and office space. But what the corporation wants is someone who’s not afraid to set ethics aside for the sake of profit – and the Doctor soon becomes ripe for termination. Or, if Davros has his way, extermination.
A planet appears in the path of the TARDIS, moving so fast that a collision is unavoidable. Charley and C’rizz each awaken in a virtual reality of their past lives, but they each quickly figure out that the Kro’Ka is behind the illusions and are freed. When they awaken, they find not only the Kro’Ka, but Rassilon as well, who claims that he has nursed them back to health after the destruction of the TARDIS. But he shows them that the Doctor has survived as well, and he appears to have found company – a woman who has found him wandering through the jungle of the planet’s sole land mass. Charley and C’rizz both demand to be set free, but before he releases them Rassilon tries to put doubts in their minds about the Doctor – and each other. He’s at least partially successful, as the two TARDIS travelers go their own way in the jungle.
An attack on a space cruiser they’re visiting forces the Doctor and Melanie to evacuate by any means necessary. Mel manages to make her way to an escape pod, which takes her to a research colony on the planet Lethe. The Doctor and the TARDIS, however, are captured by the Daleks, who offer to send the Doctor to Lethe too…so long as he reports back on what their creator, Davros, is doing there. When the Doctor arrives, he finds that Davros has managed to conceal his appearance and is calling himself Professor Vaso – and worse yet, he has unearthed specimens of one of the Daleks’ worst enemies, the Mechonoids. Davros has quietly set up self-replication facilities for the Mechonoids, aware of their potential for battling the Daleks, claiming that he hopes to atone for his past by ridding the universe of his creations. But even with this claim of a noble mission, the Doctor sees Davros up to his old tricks, leaving a trail of death in his wake. But when the Doctor fulfills his end of the bargain and alerts the Daleks, who still want to capture Davros and try him for crimes against them, things only get worse, with an entire colony of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of a new Dalek-Mechonoid war.
Greeted by Davros and the Daleks after their escape from the Divergent universe, the Doctor, Charley and C’rizz are separated from each other. Davros is suffering from a split personality as he begins to lose himself in the identity of the Emperor Dalek. Charley and C’rizz flee the Daleks with members of a local resistance cell, but they too are separated from each other; Charley joins up with a woman who talks frequently about how her daughter was killed by the Daleks, while C’rizz ends up on the run from the Daleks with a young woman who could very well be that daughter. But the Doctor discovers that she could also be a former TARDIS traveler – even though he has no memory of her. And worse yet, Charley finds out that this planet, the new Dalek homeworld, is also known as Earth – and that its resistance movement is run by the Daleks themselves.
War rages on Skaro, as it has for centuries, between the Kaleds and the Thals. Born to a mother who is an ambitious senator and a father whole military career is coming to an ignoble halt due to illness, young Davros leads a life of privelege, but is fascinated by the patterns of life and nature around him, almost to the exclusion of all else. His mother hires a tutor, Magrantine, whose scientific experiments on the effects of radiation on living tissue fascinate Davros. When Magrantine turns out to be out for revenge against Davros’ father – the soldier whose actions resulted in the death of Magrantine’s son – Davros traps his tutor in his own radiation experiment chamber – a torturous experience that he survives, but it leaves him horribly mutated. But his mother, far from admonishing him, sees something of her own ruthless ambition in her son – and quietly gives her approval.
Nearing his 30th birthday, Davros is boiling with frustration that he’s a low-ranking tech officer testing weapons for the Kaled military, rather than a member of the elite Scientific Corps. But one meeting with the Kaled Supremo changes all that: if Davros will undertake a dangerous secret mission that takes him behind Thal lines to gather intelligence on a new weapons facility, his entry into the Scientific Corps is guaranteed. Davros eagerly agrees, but when he, a fellow tech officer, and a squad of Kaled commandos embark on their journey, he realizes it’s a suicide mission. Worse yet, the soldier leading the mission is weak-willed and proceeds to get most of his commando platoon killed before the Thal facility is even within sight. Davros insists on countermanding his orders and manages to breach the facility, discovering a vast automated weapons factory requiring no slave labor…but Thal soldiers are waiting there too, and they know Davros by name. The Kaleds manage to escape, and Davros once again assumes command, ordering the remaining Kaleds to make their escape via the wastelands between the Kaled and Thal borders. While this does prevent the Thals from giving chase, it also costs Davros the rest of his team – he’s the only survivor to make it back to the safety of Kaled territory, and is instantly declared a hero for completing his mission against terrible odds. But his first order of business is not to bask in the praise lavished upon him – he instead turns his attention to finding out who told the Thals he was coming, and the answer lies painfully close to home.
Older and a little wiser to the ways of the political world, Davros walks a knife’s edge as an increasingly senior member of the Kaled Scientific Corps: his government expects him to tend to research that will deliver devastating weapons for use in the war against the Thals, but Davros himself sees a higher goal: nothing less than ensuring the survival of the Kaled people in the radioactive aftermath of the war. As Davros sees it, leaving the Kaleds’ fate to evolution will produce too random a result, with little hope of surviving the merciless postwar ecosystem; he advocates research that will help direct the mutations that will carry the Kaled legacy forward. Davros’ mother, Calcula, sees far more immediate concerns, namely that Davros and his research are accumulating some political opponents, and she feels that he’s naive about politics in general. But when Davros’ mother is murdered, and the attack on her is found to be an inside job – the work of fellow Kaleds rather than enemy Thals – he proves just how well he learned the game of political maneuvering from her while she was alive, sweeping aside some of her enemies and putting others on notice as he consolidates his newly inherited power base. Mere weeks later, though, a Thal attack on the home base of the Kaleds’ Scientific Corps changes Davros – and his ambitions – forever.
As always, war rages on, ravaging the surface and the people of Skaro. The emphasis turns to espionage as a technological stalemate takes hold; so long as neither the Kaleds nor the Thals gain a decisive technological advantage, the war remains on a knife’s-edge detente that leaves the combatants with surgical strikes via conventional weapons. Davros is naturally working on new technology, but to the Kaled Supremo’s distaste, Davros is focusing solely on genetic engineering instead of devastating new weapons. Obsessed with the future of the Kaled race in the increasingly toxic and radioactive atmosphere, Davros – despite his debilitating injuries and being restricted to a mobile (but still very limited) life support base – is working toward providing a tank-like travel shell that will protect what he predicts the Kaleds will become, as well as allowing its occupant to defend itself. But the Thals are keenly aware that the best chance the Kaleds have of gaining an advantage in the war is Davros, and a commando unit raids the Kaled science dome to kidnap him. Separated from his life support chair, Davros is dying, but refuses to surrender any information, except the truth that he is not developing new weapons at this time. A Kaled strike team, led by the ambitious young Lt. Nyder, rescues Davros and brings him back to the Kaled capitol. Once recovered from his ordeal, Davros is finally ready to complete his rise to power…and all his people have to do is surrender their future to his great plans.
Notes: Davros first appeared in 1975’s