Daleks in popular culture and mythology

Due to their expansionist, warmongering tendencies, the Daleks were known far and wide across the universe, including on Earth, where, by the 21st century, accounts of them and their world existed not only as matters of historical fact, but as fictional antagonists and as "the stuff of legend", in much the same way as their ancient enemy the Doctor did.

With very few exceptions, the Daleks' reputation was a wholly negative one, with the old records of the Daleks on such a remote and derelict outpost as Red Rocket Rising identifying the Daleks as "the worst of them all". (AUDIO: Blood of the Daleks)

The Dalek Chronicles


In the 1960s, alien story-cubes containing the Dalek Chronicles arrived on Earth and were translated and illustrated by David Whitaker, Alan Fennell, Richard Jennings, Ron Turner and Eric Eden. The Chronicles featured a record of the Daleks' history, including their origins, a tale entitled The Archives of Phryne, and one of their conflicts with the Mechonoids.

These Dalek Chronicles were lost for decades and only found again in 2094, when a collected edition of them was at long last released in print to the public. A newspaper article was printed to report those news, illustrated with a photograph showing a platoon of Silver Daleks. (PROSE: The Dalek Chronicles Found!)

Information from the Vault
In the mid-2010s, a BBC Radio documentary crew visited the remains of the Vault in Utah, (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) where reclusive billionaire Henry van Statten had kept the Metaltron (a lone, insane Dalek) in captivity several years earlier only for it to eventually break out, killing hundreds of personnel. (TV: Dalek) In the resulting documentary, narrator delved into past recorded encounters between the Daleks and a mysterious individual known as the Doctor.(AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests)

Government records
Records were kept of the Shoreditch Incident which took place on Earth in 1963. These records were still available in the archives during the 22nd century Dalek invasion, when they were found by the Daleks themselves. On their basis, the Dalek Prime learned that Davros was fated to, at some point, go back in time to 1963 and accidentally destroy Skaro with the Hand of Omega; this knowledge enabled the Dalek Prime to initiate a complex gambit to trick Davros and the Doctor both so as to save the true Skaro and make it so that a decoy planet was destroyed instead. (PROSE: War of the Daleks)

During the Battle of Canary Wharf, footage of a bronze Daleks' base unit and sense globes were captured and shown by an emergency news broadcast shortly before it was interrupted by an attacking Dalek. (WC: Tardisode 13)

Patchy records of mankind's previous contacts with the Daleks were available on Red Rocket Rising, but were incomplete enough that Eileen Klint came to the conclusion that as impotent mutants who owed their reliance on casings to the aftermath of a nuclear war, they should be pitied rather than feared, and could be trusted as allies of humanity. (AUDIO: Blood of the Daleks)

The Human Empire
By the year 200,100, people such as Rodrick were aware of the Daleks but believed them to have all disappeared thousands of years prior. Jack Harkness, a Time Agent from the 51st century, recalled that the Daleks vanished out of time and space at a point when they were the greatest threat in the universe. As the Ninth Doctor revealed, that had left to fight the Last Great Time War against the Time Lords, which Jack had thought to be a legend. (TV: The Parting of the Ways)

Doctor Who and related works
A television series entitled Doctor Who aired in England from 1963 onwards, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) being a sci-fi show about the time-traveller Doctor Who (PROSE: Salvation) partially based on the Doctor's adventures. Indeed, some of the Doctor's companions or the Doctor themselves wrote contributions to the Doctor Who mythos. (PROSE: Moving On, AUDIO: The Kingmaker)

Just like the flesh-and-blood Doctor, the televised and cinematic Doctor Who faced Daleks in several of his adventures, most notably three feature films where Peter Cushing played the part of the Doctor, two of which featured the Daleks. Daleks: Invasion Earth was one of those films. (PROSE: A Visit to the Cinema, The Day of the Doctor)

In an account that gave no indication the Doctor was ever real, the Daleks had appeared by 1964 in the main TV series. (PROSE: The Thief of Sherwood)

Novels by Sarah Jane Smith
After she ceased being a companion of the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith published a number of books adapted from her experiences as a time-and-space-traveller, which were billed as science-fiction novels on Earth.

Among these were her very first published sci-fi novel, World War Skaro, published a few years after her 1983 journalistic coverage of UNIT's crackdown on COBRA (PROSE: The Roving Reporter) as well as Dalek Dawn, a part of her Doctor series in which a fictionalised version of the Doctor was featured as main character. (PROSE: Moving On)

Time Surgeon
A comic-book series entitled Time Surgeon surfaced in the 21st century, based on Internet rumours about the Doctor's life. In one story called Day of the Deathroids, fearsome and exceedingly Dalek-like androids called the Deathroids were featured. The story saw them ally with the Minister to eradicate the Time Surgeon. They were capable of shooting plasma-blasts, shouting "Eradicate!" when doing so. (COMIC: Invasion of the Mindmorphs)

As a myth or legend
One Dalek's ship crash-landed in ancient Britain in 55 B.C.. The native Britons, believing it to be a deity, named the Dalek the "Bronze God". It encountered Winston Churchill and Kazran Sardick when the Eleventh Doctor took them back in time in the TARDIS. Ultimately, it was destroyed when its ship exploded. (AUDIO: Living History)

The defeat of a reconnaissance scout Dalek by human armies in the 9th century at the Battle of Hope Valley had passed into legend as the defeat of an "impossible foe" by the early 21st century when the trisected Dalek awakened and was defeated once and for all by Team TARDIS. Art of the Battle existed with the Dalek clearly visible. (TV: Resolution)

As a complete unknown
By 2012, Henry van Statten, CEO of GeoComTex who claimed to own the internet, acquired an alien specimen which he christened "Metaltron", that had crashed to Earth fifty years prior. It was only through the Ninth Doctor that van Statten and Diana Goddard learnt that the Metaltron was a Dalek, which the Doctor believed at the time to be the last survivor of its species following the Last Great Time War. A commander of van Statten's security personnel ignorantly described it as a "tin robot". The Dalek itself searched for others by downloading the entire Earth's internet, scanning satellites and radio telescopes, only to find no trace of the Daleks. (TV: Dalek)

The fact that Amy Pond, who came from 2010, failed to recognise the Ironsides as Daleks came to the Eleventh Doctor's concern as he recalled their brief theft and invasion of the Earth in 2009. (TV: Victory of the Daleks) He later found reason to believe that the memory of this event, among others, had been erased by cracks in time. (TV: Flesh and Stone)