Creation of the Daleks



"Today the Kaled race is ended. Consumed in a fire of war but, from its ashes, will rise a new race. The supreme creature, the ultimate conqueror of the universe, the DALEK!!"

- Davros.

Several different seemingly conflicting accounts of the Creation of the Daleks exist, with the largest body of information centering around the Kaled scientist, Davros.

Conceptual origins of the Daleks
On the planet Skaro, during the final days of the Thousand Year War between the Thals and Kaleds, both sides began to suffer mutations caused by the use of nuclear, biological and chemical agents. Some of the mutant survivors, the mutoes, managed to survive in the wastelands (DW: Genesis of the Daleks). Shan, a young Kaled scientist, authored a paper that theorized that with both Kaleds and Thals competing for resources, she called the only way out of this dilemma "the Dalek Solution". Davros took the paper and presented it to the Kaled Council as his own (BFA: Davros). Another account says that Davros had found a prophecy in the forbidden Book of Predictions which stated that one day mortals would transcend into gods. The last word, said aloud, sounded like dal ek. (BFD: Guilt)

The first Daleks
Subsequently, Davros now crippled, was one of the Kaled Scientific Elite. He had begun experiments on living subjects and hoped to deify the Kaled race. Davros pushed through legislation enabling authority (and ownership) of all Kaled infants under the age of five years old and to be delivered to Pediatric Facility K-99, which he used as a laboratory to do surgical experiments. Davros transplanted the brain from Baran, a captured Thal spy, into a Mark I Travel Machine. (BFD: Guilt)



Davros reveals the Daleks
Davros did not immediately show the results of his Dalek experiments to the Kaled Scientific Elite. He had improved and developed the shell for the organic components of the Daleks, housing them in tank-like and armed Mark III Travel Machines similar to those like his own life support chair. He maintained a nursery of embryonic Dalek young. As well as nurturing the physical form of his creations, Davros shaped their minds. The Daleks did not understand concepts such as pity. It did not exist in their "vocabulary banks".

The Doctor was sent on a mission by the Time Lords to prevent the creation of the Daleks in the first place, or at the very least lessen the damage they would do in future. Many other members of Kaled Scientific Elite attempted to shut down the Dalek project. To prevent this, Davros arranged for the Thals to aim a missile at the Kaled Dome where his people resided. (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)


 * Though he did not say so, the Time Lord representative who had approached the Doctor with this mission may very well have worked for the Celestial Intervention Agency. (NA: Lungbarrow)

The Daleks revolt against their creator
The Daleks were then sent to exterminate the Thals, supposedly in retaliation for the attack on the Kaled Dome. They later turned on Davros and apparently killed him. Accidentally, a Dalek triggered an explosion which buried the Daleks in a bunker. In the aftermath, the Doctor believed that he had only held back their progress by about a thousand years or so, and that they would return (DW: Genesis of the Daleks). Davros survived his "death" in a state of suspended animation. (DW: Destiny of the Daleks)


 * The Daleks would later consider the Time Lords' act of trying to prevent their creation as the start of the Last Great Time War. For more details on this and on the objectives of the Doctor's mission, see separate article.

Historical account
Subsequent to their creation, the Daleks confined to their city believed that the war was a quick neutronic war and also believed that both sides of the war were horribly mutated from their original near-Human forms. However, the latter part was not the case, as the Thals were almost exactly like how they were before the war. (DW: The Daleks)


 * Whether this account was real history mixed with legend or a more accurate account of a subsequent war is unclear, although the former seems more likely.

Possibly apocryphal account
Another account states tells of short blue humanoid Daleks whose warlord, Zolfian plotted to use neutron bombs against the Thals. Zolfian employed Yarvelling, a scientist to develop war machines against the survivors and ordered the factories to mass-produce more of them. Two weeks later, a meteorite strike destroyed both the factories and the neutron bomb stores. After two years, Zolfian and Yarvelling climbed out of a fallout shelter to find that a mutated Dalek which Yarvelling described to Wolfian as having "a brain a thousand times superior to ours", had crawled inside one of the war machines and used it a shell. Before they died of radiation sickness, the "machine Dalek" forced the two survivors to make more war machines. (TV21: Genesis of Evil)


 * This account implies that this same Dalek called itself the later Dalek Emperor. We do not know what became of the Thals after the destruction of the humanoid Daleks. Possibly, the Kaleds first mutated into the short humanoids, called Daleks, before mutating further. Yarvelling may also have re-created the plans originally made by Davros.

A behind-the-scenes history of the creation of the Daleks
As far as the vast bulk of continuity is concerned, Davros created the Daleks and the Fourth Doctor, Sarah and Harry nearly stopped it before it started. (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)

However, prior to the writing of that story, Terry Nation, the real-life creator and copyright holder of the Daleks, elected to allow at least three separate origin stories for his creations. The reason for the multiplicity of origins is unclear, but it likely had something to do with the time in which they were written. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Nation and the rest of the Doctor Who team didn't really believe they were creating "permanent" works. Written long before the advent of home video, the internet, or even the existence of a robust market for reprinted comic strips, the various origins told during the first decade of Doctor Who were likely considered as disposable as the episodes themselves turned out to be. Hence, Nation contradicted not just other writers, but himself, when positing various origins for the Daleks.

The Daleks
The first Dalek story, DW: The Daleks, gave viewers a tiny sliver of an idea of where the creatures came from. Far from a full-fledged origin, The Daleks tells us that the Daleks came from a race called "the Dals" who had survived an atomic war. This narrative "plank" was certainly incorporated into Genesis of the Daleks, although the name of the parent race wasn't. As it's relatively easy to explain away the difference in the two names, many fans don't necessarily see this as diverging far enough away from Genesis to be considered a truly "separate" origin. Some are happy just to consider "Dal" an alternate name for "Kaled" and skip over the inherent cultural differences between the two. Others see the Dals as substantively different from the Kaleds, because the characterization of the Dals as "teachers, artists and scientists" does not fully mesh with what we see of the Kaleds in Genesis of the Daleks. The Daleks is also seen as contradicting Genesis of the Daleks because the original, Mark III Daleks from Genesis are more advanced than those seen in The Daleks, which occurs centuries afterward.

TV Century 21 comic strips
Nation allowed writers David Whitaker and Alan Fennell to tell a Dalek origin in their 1965 TV Century 21 comic strip, "Genesis of Evil". This was the first published attempt to tell a more-or-less complete origin, and it posited that the Daleks were mutated from a race also known as the Daleks. There is no reference at all to any part of "Genesis of Evil" within televised Doctor Who, and very little more than an occasional, sly reference in other forms of Doctor Who fiction.

Nevertheless, "Evil"' made such an impression upon young readers in the 1960s that Nation's televised account was seen as an inferior creation myth by a significant portion of its original audience. Genesis of the Daleks is still eschewed by some 21st century fans. Moreover, "Evil", and other parts of the Dalek Chronicles, have been unofficially adapted on video by the amateur CGI production company, Altered Vistas. Comments left by those who have viewed the adaptation support the notion that not every Doctor Who fan considers Davros canonical.

Radio Times short story
The TV Century 21 version went unchallenged by any other story for eight years until Nation himself was commissioned to write a short prose story for the Radio Times in 1973. Entitled "We are the Daleks!", the piece substantively contradicted "Genesis of Evil" and The Daleks, and the later Genesis of the Daleks. Perhaps the most unique feature of this piece was the notion that Daleks were actually evolved from future humans.

This story was written to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Doctor Who, and it probably never occurred to Nation that he would have to take it seriously. He likely thought that it was just something for a TV programs listing and would be thrown out when the new one came in the next week. Written so close to when he produced the scripts for Genesis of the Daleks, however, it might well have served as a sort of rejected first draft of the script he would soon be required to deliver.