Emperor's Machine

Many sources depicted the first, Golden Dalek Emperor's rule over the early Dalek Empire within a special casing, referred to as simply the Emperor's Machine by one source. (COMIC: Genesis of Evil)

On at least one occasion, the same Emperor used a somewhat different casing of a similar shape, but with a spike at the apex of the dome. (COMIC: Invasion of the Daleks) It was recorded by the Dalek Survival Guide as the Emperor Type 2. (PROSE: Dalek Survival Guide)

Characteristics
The original Emperor's Machine was made of Flidor gold, quartz and Arkellis flower sap. It was golden in colour, with a bulbous dome section with three horizontal golden bands and a "wreath" of red luminosity dischargers. It had a normal manipulator arm and gunstick, plain bands instead of slats, (COMIC: Genesis of Evil) and only three rows of sense globes on the base section, making the Emperor slightly shorter than ordinary Dalek drones. (COMIC: Power Play) The casing's eyepiece was supported by five black insulator discs which increased in size as they met in the middle. (COMIC: The Penta Ray Factor)

The spherical dome section contained memory cells augmenting the organic Emperor's mental capacities, making him the most intelligent Dalek on Skaro. Other components included sonic guards and a built-in time machine. (COMIC: The Secret of the Emperor)

Origins
According to most accounts, the Dalek Prime was originally housed by Davros in a grey Mark III Travel Machine casing, in which it exterminated Davros.

After being entombed for a thousand years, (TV: Genesis of the Daleks, PROSE: The History of the Daleks) the Dalek Prime reemerged to find that the descendants of the Kaleds had fought a brief and devastating neutronic war with the descendants of the Thals and were now naturally mutating into creatures similar to Dalek mutants, (PROSE: The History of the Daleks) as Davros had foreseen in his early experiments. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks)

Presenting himself as a recent mutation, the Dalek Prime appeared to surviving humanoid Daleks Yarvelling and Zolfian in a blue and silver Dalek War Machine casings, one of those created by Yarvelling for use by his people in the war. He then ordered them to rebuild the Dalek war factory and create more casings to house the new mutations. Declaring himself the Dalek Emperor, he ordered them to create a "special casing" using Flidor gold, Arkellis flower sap, and quartz. The "Emperor's Machine" was the final project completed by the two humanoids before they succumbed to radiation poisoning. (COMIC: Genesis of Evil, PROSE: The History of the Daleks)

The Dalek Prime used an Emperor Type 2 casing when he addressed a crowd of Dalek officers in the Great Council Chamber on the eve of the 2400s Dalek invasion of the solar system. (COMIC: Invasion of the Daleks) However, by the time of Jeff Stone's odyssey through the Dalek City, the Emperor had returned to his earlier, spike-less casing. (COMIC: City of the Daleks)

Discarding
Over time, the Dalek Emperor's casing became damaged. This first became apparent during the 2415 Dalek invasion, when the Emperor's time machine proved "faulty" and sent him on a long, strenuous journey through human history before he could find his way back to his own era and the rest of the Dalek Empire. Shortly later, his sonic guards were cracked during the Invasion of Uranus by human colonists using supersonic waves.

The faulty Emperor's failures piled up, and were ultimately called out by the Red Extra-Galactic Squadron on the occasion of the Super-Skaro year. Though the Black Dalek Leader exterminated the Squadron's leader for its insolence, the Emperor admitted that he was faulty, and had Scientist Daleks take him apart to try and find the flaw. Reviewing the damage and also the digital memory cells contained in the casing, the scientists realised what had happened. (COMIC: The Secret of the Emperor)

Trading in mobility for increased mental capabilities thanks to an augmented electronic brain that hooked into all the Dalek City's systems, the Dalek Emperor mutant had himself transferred out of the sphere-headed casing and into a huge, towering one in the Great Hall of the City. (COMIC: The Secret of the Emperor, PROSE: The Evil of the Daleks) According to another, slightly different account, the change was prompted by the simple fact that the Emperor mutant had grown far larger as a result of the experiments he had been conducting on himself to expand his organic brain's mental capacities. (PROSE: The History of the Daleks)

At any rate, it was in this casing, dubbed the Emperor Type 3 by the Dalek Survival Guide (PROSE: Dalek Survival Guide) and the Emperor Type I by the Dalek Combat Training Manual, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) that he oversaw the plot to distill the Human Factor and the Dalek Factor. (TV: The Evil of the Daleks)

Later casings of this type
By the time of his conflict with Davros, the Emperor was using a new mobile casing similar to his original Emperor's Machine but with a conventional middle section atop the base unit and beneath the enlarged dome section. (COMIC: Emperor of the Daleks!) The Emperor was operating this casing as he oversaw the capture of the Doctor's TARDIS, carrying the Fifth Doctor. (GRAPHIC: Trapped in the Time Corridor)

During the Emperor formerly known as Davros's encounter with the Seventh Doctor, his Emperor Dalek casing sported a standard eyestalk and weapons platform with slats, a manipulator arm and gunstick having been added to the casing, making it almost identical (COMIC: Nemesis of the Daleks) to the casing used by the Golden Emperor on the eve of Davros's takeover. (COMIC: Emperor of the Daleks!)

In the 24th century Dalek Dome, where psychoplasmic duplicates of various real and hypothetical Dalek eras were used for the entertainment of tourists, one zone was home to a classic-style Golden Emperor, who would go on to learn of his fictionality and breach containment. In an effort to stop him, the Fourteenth Doctor rallied the psychoplasmic Dalek leaders of other zones, including a Dalek Emperor resembling the casings used during Operation Genocide and on the even of Davros's takeover. (COMIC: Liberation of the Daleks)

Legacy
The Emperor of the Restoration, who founded the Restoration Empire from the ashes of the Imperial Dalek faction following the close of the Imperial-Renegade Dalek Civil War, adopted a golden casing with a large bulbous dome, deliberately hearkening back to the Emperor of the bountiful, unified pre-Civil War Dalek Empire. (PROSE: The Restoration Empire) During the Time War, the Time Lords recorded this Emperor as a separate "anomaly" from the original Golden Emperor. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

In their scrutiny of the Daleks' timeline during the Last Great Time War, the Time Lords' Dalek Combat Training Manual acknowledged "some of the earliest work on Dalek history" as presenting "a very different origin story" for the Daleks, seemingly conflicting with what the Time Lords knew about the creation of the Daleks as involving Davros. This included the history of the golden, mobile casing of the first Dalek Emperor. They listed this whole history among a list of anomalies in the Dalek timeline, with opinions varying as to whether they were apocryphal or evidence of Dalek activity in parallel dimensions. They did, however, acknowledge that Davros's Emperor Dalek casing appeared to reflect this design. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Human historians in the post-Time War universe were also aware of the alternative origin story but regarded it as a myth which may have briefly become reality as history changed during the Time War. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Some accounts suggested that despite appearances, the "two" creation stories were actually continuous events within a single timeline. (PROSE: The History of the Daleks)

The Daft Dimension
In the Daft Dimension, the Dalek Emperor wore the "Emperor's Machine" casing during the Emperor's speech on Christmas Day. (COMIC: The Daft Dimension 546)

Behind the scenes
Although the Golden Emperor debuted in Invasion of the Daleks, his classic casing design's debut was actually in City of the Daleks, printed later in the same annual, The Dalek Book. Invasion used a variant design with multiple discrepancies, including a large spike atop the dome.

Early publicity for Big Finish Productions' "Dalek Empire" audios featured the Golden Emperor on the cover before BBC Worldwide forced them to depict a standard Dalek casing instead. Nonetheless, it was the intention of writers Gary Russell and Mike Tucker that the character was still the Golden Emperor, while Nicholas Briggs voiced it as the Emperor from The Evil of the Daleks.

A computer-generated image of the Doctor Who Magazine Emperor features on the cover of Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection.

Invalid sources
Most of the original stories of the 1970s Dalek annuals did not feature the Emperor directly, outside of reprints of 1960s TV21 Daleks comic stories. However, Terry Nation's Dalek Annual 1979 did contain a narrative game which confirmed the Golden Emperor as the leader of the Daleks during the conflict between the Dalek Empire and the Anti-Dalek Force that formed the narrative backbone of these annuals. This game, Race to the Golden Emperor, featured the Emperor having become stranded on an island on an uninhabited planet following a space battle between his "special squad" and ADF forces. Players could play either as Daleks attempting to extract their leader from these hostile conditions, or as the ADF agents trying to take the Emperor prisoner before the Daleks can get him back.

The Golden Emperor appeared in an additional episode of The Dalek Chronicles, Deadline to Doomsday, a Doctor Who Magazine back-up comic and follow-up to Return of the Elders which was under production with Ron Turner, the artist of the original TV Century 21's The Dalek Chronicles, when the artist passed away. The first two pages, with no text or header art, were printed in the end of Doctor Who Magazine 276 among an article remembering Turner. Years later, the comic was completed and printed in the fan magazine Vworp Vworp! 's third issue.

Distinguished by his golden casing, the Dalek Emperor gave a televised speech which was watched by Ebeneezer Davros and the Dalek family on Christmas Day. (NOTVALID: The Daft Dimension 546)