Genesis of the Daleks

Template:Doctorwhobox Genesis of the Daleks is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was originally broadcast in six weekly parts from March 8 to April 12, 1975.

Synopsis

The Doctor and his companions, while using a transmat beam between Earth and The Ark, are diverted by the Time Lords to the planet Skaro, in the distant past. The Timelords have found a possible timeline where the Daleks would become the dominant life form in the galaxy. To prevent this, the Doctor must either prevent the creation of the Daleks, or find some weakness that will make them less of a threat in the future.

The planet has been devasted by a centuries long war which has reduced the two native peoples the Thals and the Kaleds to a ruinous state in their two cities. The Doctor is captured with Harry by the Kaleds while Sarah ends up with the mutos; mutants expelled from the Thal and Kaled cities in an effort to maintain racial purity.

The Doctor and Harry are transferred to the Kaled's special scientific unit led by their top scientist Davros. Sarah is captured along with the muto, Sevrin, for use as expendable slave labour on a Thal missile project which would destroy the Kaleds city completely. However the Kaled dome has been strengthened by a secret formula.

Davros holds a secret meeting with the Thals and offers them the means to damage the city dome first citing a weariness with the war. Despite the Doctor's intervention the Thals fire their missile utterly destroying the Kaled city.

Davros uses the destruction of the city as the motivation for a revenge attack by the Daleks on the Thals, which leaves many dead.

Remnants of the Thals seal the bunker entrance with explosives. The Daleks coldly exterminate the remaining Kaleds in the bunker and then finally turn their weapons on their creator, Davros killing him too.

Notes

1. Genesis of the Daleks is the most-repeated Doctor Who story on BBC Television, having been re-shown in edited form in 1982 and again in its full form in 1993 and 2000. It has also been regularly transmitted on satellite television station UK Gold, and was released on VHS by BBC Enterprises in 1991. In a 1998 poll of readers by Doctor Who Magazine, over 2500 voters placed it top of a poll to find the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time, and it has regularly featured in the top-tens of other similar polls down the years.
2. Some fans argue that the Doctor was more successful in his mission than he realized. In addition to entombing the Daleks for what he believed to be a thousand years, his intervention led to Davros surviving the betrayal of his creations. When Davros was later revived, his presence created a schism within the Daleks ranks and made them less effective as conquerors.
3. This serial forms part of a continuous series of adventures for the TARDIS crew, beginning from the end of Robot and continuing through to Terror of the Zygons, although the Virgin Publishing novel A Device of Death takes place in a possible gap between Genesis of the Daleks and Revenge of the Cybermen, and BBC Books' novel Wolfsbane is set in another such gap between Revenge and Zygons.
4. Dalek creator, Terry Nation, supposedly based the Daleks on the Nazis, and this episode abounds with parallels. A madman leads his own race to its destruction. He is supported by security services that ride roughshod over the military and anybody else that gets in their way. They dress wholly in black, and salute each other by raising their hands and clicking the heels of their boots together. Their bespectacled leader is cold-hearted and ruthless. Much of the action takes place in "the Bunker".

External links

• Cast and Crew list, on the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/episodeguide/genesisofdaleks/castcrew.shtml)