Dalek


 * For the 2005 episode of Doctor Who, see Dalek (Doctor Who episode). For the computer game, see Daleks (video game).

The Daleks (pronounced "DAH-lecks"; IPA: ) are a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The mutated descendants of the Kaled people of the planet Skaro, they travel around in tank-like mechanical casings, a ruthless race bent on universal conquest and domination, utterly without pity, compassion or remorse. They are also, collectively, the greatest alien adversaries of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Their most infamous catchphrase is "EX-TER-MIN-ATE!", with each syllable individually screeched in a frantic electronic voice ([[Media:Dalek_Exterminate_all_humans.ogg|download sample]]). Other common utterances include "I (or WE) OBEY!" to any command given by a superior.

The Daleks were created by writer Terry Nation and BBC designer Raymond Cusick and were first introduced in December 1963 in the second Doctor Who serial. They became an immediate hit with the viewing audience, featuring in many subsequent serials. They have become synonymous with Doctor Who and their behaviour and catchphrases are part of British popular culture.

The word "Dalek" has entered the Oxford English Dictionary and other major dictionaries (the Collins Dictionary defines it rather broadly as "any of a set of fictional robot-like creations that are aggressive, mobile, and produce rasping staccato speech"). It is also a trademark, having first been registered by the BBC in 1964 to protect its lucrative range of Dalek merchandise.

The term is sometimes used in a metaphorical sense to describe people, usually figures in authority, who act like robots unable to break their programming. John Birt, the much maligned ex-Director General of the BBC, was called a "croak-voiced Dalek" by playwright Dennis Potter in August 1993. The Daleks even appeared on a postage stamp celebrating British popular culture in 1999, photographed by Lord Snowdon.

Physical characteristics
Externally, Daleks resemble man-sized pepper shakers, with a single mechanical eyestalk in a rotating dome, a gunstalk containing a directed energy weapon (or "death ray"), and a telescoping robot arm. Usually, the arm is fitted with a device for manipulation that, to the amusement of generations of viewers, resembles a plunger, but various episodes have shown Daleks whose arms end in a tray, a mechanical claw, or other specialised equipment like flamethrowers. In Dalek, the plunger was used to kill by crushing a human skull. The casings are made of a material that has been called dalekanium.

In the alternate future of Day of the Daleks, dalekanium is an unstable explosive that can penetrate Dalek casings. The two may be the same, or the term may simply be a neologism to describe a product of the Daleks. The lower shell is covered with many hemispherical protrusions or "Dalek bumps". These have been described as being a sensor array but in the episode Dalek they are part of a self-destruct system.

The creatures inside their "travel machines" are depicted as soft and repulsive in appearance, but still vicious even without their mechanical armour. In Resurrection of the Daleks a Dalek creature, separated from its casing, attacks and kills a human soldier. The Doctor has described the Daleks as "little green blobs in bonded polycarbide armour." However, as the creature inside is rarely seen on screen, the misconception that Daleks are wholly mechanical robots exists, a mistake the series itself has made on occasion. The interdependence of biological and mechanical components makes the Daleks a type of cyborg.

The voice of a Dalek is electronic, the Dalek creature having no vocal apparatus as such. Daleks also have a radio communicator built into their shells, and emit an alarm to summon other nearby Daleks if the casing is opened from outside. The Dalek's eyepiece is its most vulnerable spot, and impairing its vision often leads to a blind firing of its weapon.

Due to their gliding motion Daleks were notoriously unable to tackle stairs, which made them easy to overcome under the right circumstances. An oft-copied cartoon from Punch pictured a group of Daleks at the foot of a flight of stairs with the caption, "This certainly buggers our plan to conquer the Universe". In a scene from the serial Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor and companions escape from Dalek pursuers by climbing into a ceiling duct. The Doctor (Tom Baker) calls down, "If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us? Bye bye!" The Daleks generally make up for their lack of mobility with overwhelming firepower. A joke around science fiction conventions went, "Real Daleks don't climb stairs; they level the building."

In The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) a Dalek emerges from the waters of the River Thames, indicating that they are amphibious to a degree. Remembrance of the Daleks (1988) showed that they can hover using a sort of limited antigravity &mdash; first implied in earlier serials such as The Chase (1965) and Revelation of the Daleks (1985) &mdash; but their awkward forms still limit their mobility in tight quarters. Despite this, the Daleks' supposed inability to climb stairs is still frequently referred to for humorous effect by journalists covering the series. The 2005 series episode Dalek also featured a hovering Dalek. In this episode, before hovering, the Dalek said "Elevate" as it would say "Exterminate" before exterminating.

Costume details
The Daleks were actually operated from inside by short operators who had to manipulate their eyestalks, domes and arms, as well as flashing the lights on their heads in sync with the actors supplying their voices. The Dalek cases were built in two pieces; once an operator stepped into the lower section the top would be lowered onto him. The operators looked out between the circular louvres just beneath the dome that were lined with mesh to conceal their faces.

Unfortunately, as well as being hot and cramped the Dalek casings also muffled external sounds, making it difficult for the operators to hear the director's commands or studio dialogue. The top sections were also too heavy to lift from the inside, which meant that the operators could be trapped in them if the stagehands forgot to let them out.

Early versions of the Daleks were either rolled around on castors or propelled by wheels connected to hand cranks by bicycle chains. Later versions had more efficient wheels and were simply propelled by the operators' feet. Even so, they were so heavy that when going up ramps they often had to be pushed by stagehands out of camera shot. In addition, the difficulty of operating all the prop's parts at once also contributed to the occasionally jerky movements of the Dalek. The latest model of the costume still has a human operator within, but the movement of the dome and eyestalk is now remotely controlled so that the operator can concentrate on the smooth movement of the Dalek and its arms.

The Dalek voice, a staccato delivery, was initially developed by voice actors Peter Hawkins (who had also provided the voice for the popular children's animated series Captain Pugwash) and David Graham, who would vary the pitch and speed of the lines according to the emotion needed. Their voices were further processed electronically by Brian Hodgson at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Although the exact sound-processing devices used have varied over the years, the original 1963 effect used EQ to boost the mid-range of the actors voice, then subjected it to ring modulation with a 30Hz sine wave, and the distinctive harsh grating vocal timbre this produced has remained the pattern for all Dalek voices since then. Notable voice actors for the Daleks include Roy Skelton. In the 2005 series, the Dalek voice is provided by Nicholas Briggs, speaking into a microphone connected to a voice modulator. Briggs has also done Dalek and other alien voices for audio plays.

The non-humanoid shape of the Dalek, unlike anything that had been seen on television before, did much to enhance the creatures' sense of menace. With no familiar points of reference, it was a far cry from the traditional "bug-eyed monster" of science fiction that Doctor Who series creator Sydney Newman wanted the show to avoid. The unsettling form of the Daleks, coupled with their alien voices, also made many believe for a while that the props were wholly mechanical and operated by remote control.

Manufacturing the props was also expensive. In scenes where many Daleks had to appear, some of them would be represented by wooden replicas or even (in early black and white episodes) by life-size photographic enlargements. In scenes involving armies of Daleks, the BBC effects team even turned to using commercially-available toy Daleks, manufactured by Louis Marx & Co. Judicious editing techniques also made it look like there were more Dalek props than were actually available.

Conceptual history
Terry Nation claimed that he was inspired by watching ballet dancers in long dresses glide as if on wheels. Indeed, for many of the shows, the Daleks were "played" by retired ballet dancers wearing black socks while sitting inside the Dalek. Raymond Cusick claims that after Nation wrote the script, he was given only an hour to come up with the design for the Daleks, and was inspired by a pepper shaker on the table in front of him to do the initial sketches (other sources state that he based it on a man seated in a chair, and only used the pepper shaker to demonstrate how it might move).

Nation also claimed that the name came from a volume of a dictionary or encyclopedia, the spine of which read "Dal - Lek". He later admitted that he had made this up as a reply to a question by a journalist and that anyone who checked out his story would have found him out. The name had in reality simply rolled off his typewriter. Later, Nation was pleasantly surprised to discover that in Serbo-Croatian the word "Dalek" means "far and distant thing".

Nation grew up during World War II, and remembered the fear caused by German bombings. He consciously based the Daleks on the Nazis, conceiving the species as faceless, authoritarian figures dedicated to conquest, domination, and complete conformity. The analogy is most obvious in the Dalek stories penned by Nation, in particular The Dalek Invasion of Earth and Genesis of the Daleks.

Prior to writing the first Dalek serial, Nation was chief scriptwriter for comedian Tony Hancock. The two fell out and Nation was fired. According to various sources, including Cliff Goodwin's biography of Hancock, the comedian claimed that during one of their last meetings he had speculated on how nuclear warfare might reduce humans to such a helpless state that they would have to be plugged into robot-like casings to stay alive. Allegedly, when Hancock saw the Daleks he shouted at the screen, "That bloody Nation &mdash; he's stolen my robots!"

The first Dalek serial is called, variously, The Survivors (the pre-production title), The Mutants (its official title at the time of production and broadcast, later taken by a second, unrelated Doctor Who story), Beyond the Sun, The Dead Planet, or simply The Daleks. The reason for the multiple titles is that in the show's early years each individual episode had a different name and overall story titles were used only by the production office. Subsequently, several different overall story titles were circulated by fandom without access to the correct records. See: Doctor Who story title controversy.

The instant appeal of the Daleks took the BBC off guard, and transformed Doctor Who from a Saturday tea-time children's educational programme to a must-watch national phenomenon. Children were alternately frightened and fascinated by the completely alien look of the monsters, and the Doctor Who production office was inundated by letters and calls asking about the creatures. Newspaper articles focused more attention on the series and the Daleks, enhancing their popularity further.

Despite the Daleks' popularity, however, they were forever associated with Doctor Who. Nation, who jointly owned the intellectual property rights to the Daleks with the BBC, therefore had the problem of owning a money-making concept that proved nearly impossible to sell to anyone else and was dependent on the BBC wanting to produce stories featuring the creatures. Indeed, several attempts to market the Daleks outside of Doctor Who were unsuccessful. The sums of money required to pay Nation for the use of the Daleks also explained why their appearances in the programme were rare in later years. Since Nation's death in 1997, his share of the rights now belong to his estate and are administered by his former agent, Tim Hancock.

History within the show
Main article: History of the Daleks

As is common in long-running series whose backstories are not mapped out and which are also the product of many different writers over the course of years, Dalek history has seen many retroactive changes and these have caused some continuity problems.

When the Daleks first appeared in The Daleks (1963), they were the product of a brief nuclear war between the Dal and Thal races. However, in 1975, Terry Nation revised the Daleks' origins in the serial Genesis of the Daleks, where the Dals were now called Kaleds (an anagram of Dalek), and the Dalek design was attributed to one man, the crippled Kaled chief scientist and evil genius Davros.

Also, instead of a short nuclear exchange, the Kaled-Thal war was portrayed as a generations-long war of attrition, fought with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The resulting mutations from the fallout were accelerated by Davros and placed in tank-like "travel machines" whose design was based on his own life-support chair.

Genesis of the Daleks marked a new era for the species, with most of their previous history either forgotten or barely referred to again. Future stories, which followed a rough story arc, would also focus more on Davros, much to the dissatisfaction of some fans who felt that the Daleks should take centre stage, rather than becoming mere minions of their creator.

Davros made his last televised appearance in the serial Remembrance of the Daleks (1988). Remembrance of the Daleks also marked the last on-screen appearance of the Daleks in the context of the programme until 2005, save for charity specials like Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death and the use of Dalek voices in the Doctor Who television movie in 1996.

The Daleks returned in the 2005 series. Dalek, written by Rob Shearman, the sixth episode of the new series, was broadcast on BBC One on 30 April, 2005. The new Dalek exhibited abilities not seen before, including a swivelling mid-section that allowed it a 360-degree field of fire and a force field that dissolved bullets before they struck it. In addition to the ability to fly, it was also able to regenerate itself by means of absorbing electrical power and the DNA of a time traveller. The "plunger" manipulator arm was also able to crush a man's skull in addition to the technology interfacing abilities shown by earlier models. A more sophisticated model of the Dalek mutant was also shown. This Dalek was apparently the sole survivor of a Time War that had destroyed both the Daleks and the Time Lords.

The two-part 2005 series finale, comprising Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways saw the return of the Dalek Emperor, who had also survived the Time War and had rebuilt the Dalek race. This Emperor came to see itself as a god, and built its new society around the Daleks' worship of itself. At the end of the story, the Daleks and their fleet were reduced to atoms.

The production team has stated that the Daleks will face the Tenth Doctor at some point, but not in the 2006 series.

Culture
Daleks have little to no individual personalities and a strict command structure, conditioned to obey superior orders without question. Ultimately, the most fundamental feature of Dalek culture and psychology is an unquestioned belief in the superiority of the Daleks. Other species are either to be exterminated immediately, or enslaved and then exterminated later once they are no longer necessary. The default directive of a Dalek is to destroy all non-Dalek lifeforms.

This belief is thought to be the reason why Daleks have never significantly modified their mechanical shell's designs to overcome its obvious physical limitations; any such modification would deviate from the Dalek ideal, and therefore must be inferior and deserving of extermination. The schism between the Renegade and Imperial Daleks is a prime example of this, with each faction considering the other to be a perversion despite the relatively minor differences between them. It also means, however, that Daleks are intolerant of such "contamination" even within themselves, as shown in Dalek and in the Big Finish Productions audio play The Mutant Phase.

Another offshoot of this superiority complex is their complete ruthlessness and lack of compassion. It is because of this that it is nearly impossible to negotiate or reason with a Dalek and it is this single-mindedness that makes them so dangerous and not to be underestimated. However, their reliance on logic and machinery is also a weakness that they recognize. As a result, they also make use of non-Dalek species to compensate for these shortcomings (see Dalek agents).

As noted above, in The Parting of the Ways, the Daleks that were resurrected through the manipulation and mutation of human genetic material by the Dalek Emperor were religious fanatics that worshiped the Emperor as their god.

Although the Daleks are well known for their disregard of due process, there have been two occasions on which they have taken enemies back to Skaro for a "trial" rather than killing them on the spot; the first was their creator Davros in Revelation of the Daleks, and the second was the renegade Time Lord known as the Master in the Doctor Who television movie. Neither trial occurred on-screen, so it is not clear what was actually involved. The Master's trial presumably took place before the destruction of Skaro. The reasons for the Master's trial, and why the Doctor would be asked to retrieve the Master's remains, have never been explained on screen.

The spin-off novels contain several (tongue-in-cheek) mentions of Dalek poetry (and an anecdote about an opera based thereupon, which was lost to posterity when the entire cast was exterminated on opening night) but no actual samples, although some of the more elborate Dalek battlecries do have an almost poetic quality about them (for example, "Seek and Locate! Locate and Destroy! Destroy and Rejoice!" from the televised story The Chase.) In an alternate reality portrayed in Big Finish Productions audio adventure The Time of the Daleks, the Daleks show a fondness for the works of Shakespeare.

Due to their frequent defeats by the Doctor, he has become a sort of bogeyman in Dalek culture. They have standing orders to capture or exterminate the Doctor on sight, and are occasionally able to identify him despite his regenerations. This is probably not an innate ability, but rather because of good record keeping. In the comic strips and novels the Daleks know the Doctor as the Ka Faraq Gatri, ("The Bringer of Darkness" or "Destroyer of Worlds") (this was first established in the novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks by Ben Aaronovitch). In The Parting of the Ways, the Doctor claims that the Daleks call him "The Oncoming Storm" &mdash; this name was used by the Draconians to refer to the Doctor in the Virgin New Adventures novel Love and War by Paul Cornell.

The Doctor, in turn, has grown to be almost monomaniacal in his belief that the Daleks are completely evil and unworthy of trust or compassion. This contrasts with some of the Doctor's earlier dealings with the Daleks, for example the Second Doctor's attempt to instil a "human factor" in Daleks in The Evil of the Daleks and the Fourth Doctor's hesitation when presented with the opportunity to destroy the Daleks at the point of their creation in Genesis of the Daleks. It was his conviction of the irredeemability of the Daleks that motivated a venomous outburst by the Doctor in Dalek, leading the lone mutant in that episode to observe that the Doctor "would make a good Dalek."

Other appearances
Two Doctor Who movies starring Peter Cushing featured the Daleks as the main villains: Dr. Who and the Daleks, and Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD, based on the television serials The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth, respectively. However, the movies were not straight remakes. Cushing's Doctor is not an alien, but a human inventor, and is literally named "Doctor Who." The movies used brand new Dalek props, based closely on the original design but with a wider range of colours. Originally, the movie Daleks were supposed to shoot jets of flame, but this was thought to be too graphic for children, so their weapons emitted jets of deadly vapour instead.

Nation also authorised the publication of the comic strip The Daleks in the comic TV Century 21. The one-page strip (written by David Whitaker but credited to Nation) featured the Daleks as protagonists and "heroes", and continued for two years, from their creation of the mechanised Daleks by the humanoid Dalek scientist Yarvelling to their eventual discovery in the ruins of a crashed space-liner of the co-ordinates for Earth, which they proposed to invade. Although much of the material in these strips directly contradicted what was shown on television later, some concepts like the Daleks using humanoid duplicates and the design of the Dalek Emperor did show up later on in the programme. In 1994, the UK arm of Marvel Comics reprinted all the TV 21 strips in a collected edition titled The Dalek Chronicles.

Marvel UK was publishing Doctor Who Magazine at the time, which included comic strip stories in its pages. Aside from meeting up with the Doctor in them, the DWM strips also introduced a new nemesis for the Daleks, the Dalek Killer named Abslom Daak. Daak was a convicted criminal in the 25th century who was given the choice between execution and being sent on a suicide mission against the Daleks. He chose the latter and, when the woman he loved was killed by the Daleks, made it his life's purpose to kill every Dalek he came across.

The Daleks' popularity extended to books, stage shows and television programmes. Daleks have been the subject of many parodies, including Spike Milligan's "Pakistani Dalek" sketch, and Victor Lewis-Smith's gay Daleks. To an extent Doctor Who itself has also parodied the Daleks from time to time. In 2002, BBC Worldwide published The Dalek Survival Guide, a parody of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks.

The Daleks have also appeared in the Dalek Empire series of audio plays by Big Finish Productions, of which three mini-series of 4 CDs each have so far been produced and saw the return of the original Dalek Emperor. They have also returned to bedevil the Doctor in Big Finish's Doctor Who line of audio plays.

In the 2003 film Looney Tunes: Back In Action, two Cushing movie-style Daleks made a cameo appearance in the "Area 52" segment amidst many famous "old-time" movie monsters. A Dalek also appears (along with Robby the Robot and the Lost in Space robot) in a 2005 television advertisement for the Australian ANZ Bank.

In the Red Dwarf A-Z (a collection of popular Red Dwarf gags, with commentaries by famous fans and the cast and crew), two Daleks are shown (in the Exterminate section, of course), arguing that all Earth television is human propaganda, and the works more commonly attributed to William Shakespeare and Ludwig van Beethoven were actually written by Daleks. After this one of them begins talking about past episodes of Red Dwarf, and is promptly exterminated for the crime of "not behaving like a true Dalek."

Merchandising
The BBC approached Roger Tuckwell, an Australian entrepeneur who was handling product merchandising for other BBC shows, and asked him to do the same for the Daleks and Doctor Who. Tuckwell created a glossy sales brochure that sparked off a Dalek craze, dubbed "Dalekmania" by the press, which peaked around the time The Chase aired in 1965.

The first Dalek toys from Louis Marx & Co. appeared that year, along with toys of the Mechanoids (robotic foes of the Daleks introduced in the same serials). The Mechanoids were created with the expectation that they would become as popular as Daleks, but they were not as successful. Other unsuccessful BBC attempts to create a "replacement" for the Daleks, or at least duplicate their popularity included the Voord (The Keys of Marinus), the Krotons (The Krotons) and the Quarks (The Dominators). Also unsuccessful were Dalek toys made of rubber.

At the height of the Daleks' popularity, apart from toy replicas, there were also Dalek construction kits, Dalek board games and activity sets, Dalek slide projectors for children and even Dalek playsuits made from PVC. There were collectible cards, stickers, toy guns, music singles, punching bags and many other items. Between 1963 and 1965, the BBC published three annuals with short stories and comic strips featuring the Daleks, written by Whitaker and Nation. The Dalek Annual was revived in 1976 and 1977, with stories and selected reprints from the TV 21 comic strip.

In the 1970s, Palitoy released a Talking Dalek which could utter standard Dalek phrases such as "You will obey!" and "Exterminate!" Later, model kits of other Dalek-related characters like Davros, the Supreme Dalek and Gold Daleks were also released. In 2001 a new range of talking Daleks were produced, along with a talking Cyberman and a talking Davros.

The Daleks have featured in computer games since the 1980s, beginning with an unlicensed modification of the Robots game called Daleks. However, the game uses Daleks only as generic monsters, with no Dalek-specific features. Licensed Doctor Who games featuring Daleks include 1984's The Key to Time, a text adventure game for the ZX Spectrum. Daleks also appeared in minor roles or as thinly disguised versions in other, minor games throughout the 80s, but did not feature as central adversaries in a licensed game until 1992, when Admiral Software published Dalek Attack. The game allowed the player to play various Doctors or companions, running them through several environments to defeat the Daleks. In 1998 the BBC released a Doctor Who screensaver done in Macromedia Shockwave which had a built-in minigame, where the player controlled K-9 battling the Daleks through seven increasingly difficult levels.

At present, there are a few unauthorised Dalek games that can be played online, such as the Java applet game Daleks! a Macromedia Flash game, Daleks &mdash; Dissolution Earth, and a modification for Half-Life, Dalek Unbidden.

Conversely, an authorised online game is The Last Dalek, a Flash game created by New Media Collective for the BBC. It is based on the 2005 episode and can be played at the official BBC Doctor Who website.

Television

 * The Daleks - December 21, 1963- February 1, 1964
 * The Dalek Invasion of Earth - November 21 - December 26, 1964
 * The Chase - May 22 - June 26, 1965
 * Mission to the Unknown - October 9, 1965
 * The Daleks' Master Plan - November 13, 1965 - January 29, 1966
 * The Power of the Daleks - November 5 - December 10, 1966
 * The Evil of the Daleks - May 20 - July 1, 1967
 * Day of the Daleks - January 1 - January 22,1972
 * Frontier in Space - February 24 - March 31, 1973
 * Planet of the Daleks - April 7 - May 10, 1973
 * Death to the Daleks - February 23 - March 16, 1974
 * Genesis of the Daleks - March 8 - April 12, 1975
 * Destiny of the Daleks - September 1 - September 22, 1979
 * Resurrection of the Daleks - February 8 - February 15, 1984
 * Revelation of the Daleks - March 23 - March 30, 1985
 * Remembrance of the Daleks - October 5 - October 26, 1988
 * Dalek - April 30, 2005
 * Bad Wolf - June 11, 2005
 * The Parting of the Ways - June 18, 2005

Comic Relief special

 * The Curse of Fatal Death - March 12, 1999 (Comic Relief charity special)

Stage plays

 * The Curse of the Daleks - Wyndham's Theatre, London (premiere December 21 1965)
 * Doctor Who and the Daleks in Seven Keys to Doomsday - Adelphi Theatre, London (premiere December 16 1974)
 * Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure - Wimbledon Theatre, London (premiere March 23 1989)

Original novels

 * War of the Daleks by John Peel
 * Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel
 * The Dalek Factor by Simon Clark

Doctor Who

 * The Genocide Machine
 * The Apocalypse Element
 * The Mutant Phase
 * The Time of the Daleks
 * Jubilee
 * The Juggernauts
 * Terror Firma

Professor Bernice Summerfield

 * Death and the Daleks

Dalek Empire

 * Invasion of the Daleks
 * The Human Factor
 * Death to the Daleks!
 * Project Infinity

Dalek Empire II: Dalek War

 * Chapter One
 * Chapter Two
 * Chapter Three
 * Chapter Four

Dalek Empire III

 * The Exterminators
 * The Healers
 * The Survivors
 * The Demons
 * The Warriors
 * The Future