Skaro

This article is about the fictional planet. For the island in Denmark, see Skarø

Skaro is a fictional planet from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who created by the writer Terry Nation as the home planet of the Daleks and, at times, the centre of the Dalek Empire.

Skaro was a planet of roughly the same mass and dimensions as Earth, and the twelfth planet from its sun. It had a single continent that was divided into east and west halves of almost equal size. When the Doctor first visited the planet in the 1963 serial The Daleks, Skaro was a nuclear wasteland, whose principle features were a petrified forest, a lake containing ferocious failed Dalek mutations, and the Dalek city. Some footage of Skaro was shot in the quarry Winspit.

Prior to the rise of the Daleks, Skaro was the home of a humanoid species with two races, the Kaleds (or Dals) and the Thals. Both races went to war with each other, and the resulting mutations set in motion by the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons used were soon seen by Kaled scientists as being the end of their species in its (ideologically defined) "pure" form. In the serial, Genesis of the Daleks, the Kaled chief scientist, Davros, accelerated the mutations and placed the results in tank-like "travel machines". These cyborgs then became the successors to the Kaleds, the dreaded Daleks (an anagram of Kaled).

The Thals were eventually driven from Skaro by the Daleks. The inheritors of Skaro ruled a devastated planet, its seas dead and its surface devoid of almost all life. However, Skaro was rich in minerals which the Daleks used to build armies to conquer and destroy other worlds, building an interstellar empire. Some time afterward, the Daleks also abandoned Skaro. It was later reoccupied by the Imperial Dalek faction, apparently at the behest of Davros.

Skaro was apparently destroyed sometime in the 30th Century through the actions of the Seventh Doctor, when the stellar manipulator device known as the Hand of Omega triggered a supernova in Skaro's sun (Remembrance of the Daleks).

At the start of the 1996 Doctor Who telemovie produced by the Fox Network, the Master was put on trial on Skaro by the Daleks and exterminated. Presumably this took place in the relative past of Skaro's timeline before its destruction, as the Eighth Doctor does not comment on it.

In the BBC Doctor Who novel War of the Daleks by John Peel it was revealed that Skaro had not in fact been destroyed. The Daleks, via time travel, had discovered records that showed Skaro's destruction. After an attempt to change history (in Day of the Daleks) was unsuccessful, they terraformed the planet Antalin to resemble Skaro and manipulated Davros and the Doctor into ensuring that Antalin was destroyed in the original's place. This novel, like the others based on the series, is generally not accepted as part of official continuity. Indeed, War was so badly received by fans that some even disavow it within the continuity of the novels.

In the 2005 series episode Dalek, it was revealed that the last great Time War was fought between the Time Lords and the Daleks, ending in the obliteration of both sides and with only two apparent survivors; the Doctor and a lone Dalek that had somehow fallen through time and crashed on Earth. At the conclusion of that episode, that surviving Dalek self-destructed, leaving the Doctor believing that he was the sole survivor of the Time War. Skaro was not mentioned.

Doctor Who serials that take place on Skaro or feature Skaro prominently are The Daleks (aka The Mutants),The Evil of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks, Destiny of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks. Skaro was also the setting for the Peter Cushing feature film Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965).