In December I wrote a short fictional diary account from the perspective of the First Doctor as part of my celebration of Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary (see Doctor Who S01E01 - An Unearthly Child). I enjoyed writing that entry, pretending for a short while to be William Hartnell’s Doctor. I decided to continue with a weekly visit to the Whoniverse.
To begin I thought I would move to one of the most famous (and well-liked) Doctor Who stories of all time, Genesis of the Daleks. We’ll begin with part 1, where the Doctor unexpectedly finds himself on ancient Skaro, just as the Daleks are about to be born!
The Doctors Journal
Where are we? This isn’t a space station. Too much mist. Too much atmosphere. That was my first thought as I rematerialized from the transmat beam. We had just dealt with a small group of Sontarans on an otherwise deserted Earth. In doing so, we had saved the last survivors of a shipwrecked crew of humans from one of Earth’s colony worlds. That hadn’t been our mission of course. Sarah, Harry, and I had just popped down there using Space Stations Nerva’s transmit beam, to fix the refractors. We were going out of our way to help the humans cryogenically frozen on the station. Now, though, something had gone very wrong.
The answer to my query soon became apparent, and it was an annoying one. The Time Lords have come to me again to do their dirty work. It’s typical really. I’m just getting going with this new face and in they come, intercepting the transmat beam we were riding back to Space Ark Nerva. I know that I owe them a debt for freeing me from the exile that they imposed on me in the first place and allowing me some autonomy, but I have repaid that debt many times now, more than I can remember, I think. I have to ask myself, when will I truly be free again?
This time their ‘request’ is more than a little troublesome. My mission is to destroy the Daleks before they exist. The Time Lords are concerned about the growing threat that the Daleks represent. They believe that all other life will eventually be exterminated in the universe if they are not stopped. I suspect, although I cannot prove this, that they also fear for themselves. The Daleks are, after all, one of the few species other than the Time Lords, to know how to time travel. This is about removing an enemy and a rival, more than the safety of other species.
Having encountered the Daleks on a variety of occasions, I can’t quite convince myself to refuse their request, despite wanting to reject them outright. Finding a way to stop the Daleks, perhaps not to stop their creation, but to find some way of limiting them, tempts me. The Daleks are a danger. There is little to like about them and much to fear.
I reluctantly agree, but the one thing that I don’t have (and need) is the coordinates for Skaro. The last time that I visited the Dalek’s home world was purely by accident. That was a long time ago. For a moment, I allow myself to think back to the time I helped the Thals defeat the Daleks. It was near the very beginning of my journey through time and space. I was still travelling with my granddaughter back then. Ah, dear Susan! I should try and visit her sometime. I had just picked up two of her teachers who had interfered and blown our cover. That was the start of something special, although I didn’t realise it at the time. I haven’t stopped travelling with one human or another, ever since.
Of course, on that occasion, we had arrived about 500 years after a neutron explosion had nearly wiped out all life on Skaro. The war was long over, leaving only the danger of mutation and radiation poisoning. This time I would need to go to the very beginning of the Daleks. That would mean entering a warzone at a very dangerous point in the history of Skaro.
Returning my attention to the moment, I realised that the Time Lord’s messenger was smiling. I didn’t like that. He informed me that they had presumed I would agree. Arrogance! And that they had already redirected me to Skaro at the moment of the Dalek’s creation. Anger again boiled inside me, but I resisted it. Now was not the time.
The Time Lord gave me a Time Ring which would allow me to return to the TARDIS when the mission is completed. He warns me to be careful not to lose it. As if I would? The Time Lord uses his own Time Ring to disappear back to Gallifrey or wherever he came from, just as I realised that I had no idea where Sarah and Harry had ended up. Are they still on Earth? Did they transport safely up to the space station? Did the Time Lords take them to the TARDIS? Or are they here on Skaro? I needed to know. Typically, the Time Lord isn’t bothered at all and simply vanishes.
Thankfully, my question was answered immediately afterwards, with Harry and Sarah running over the wasteland calling my name. Little did they realise the danger they were in. We don’t have time to chat though. Heavy artillery fires overhead and we are forced to flee. Once the bombardment calmed, we found dead bodies everywhere: soldiers killed in the fighting. Interestingly the weapons are a curious mix of old and modern equipment. This tells me something interesting.
I explained that they must have been fighting for a long time, perhaps a thousand years or more, so the technology that they used had started to regress as resources became scarcer. I didn’t tell them that I knew this was likely to be the case from the records I had once studied on Skaro, which the Thals had kept. They didn’t need to know this and asides, it would have taken too long to explain.
We moved further through the wastelands. There were dead bodies everywhere and the stench of munition fire soiled the air. The mist blocked most of the view, which was probably a good thing. On our way, we ended up in a minefield, which almost ended up in disaster. Luckily Harry kept his calm and saved me when I accidently stood on one. Eventually, we came to a vantage point and could see a large protective dome on the horizon. Soon after that, we found a garrison post, filled with more dead bodies.
The dead soldiers had been propped up to look as if they were still guarding it. There were, however, no actual guards. We were alone here, just as we had been everywhere else so far. Suddenly, disaster struck! Gas shells dropped down on us just as a squad of soldiers attacked. From behind a door suddenly burst open and an opposition squad of black-uniformed soldiers counterattacked with old-fashioned submachine guns. It all resulted in a lot of noise and chaos, I must say. The original attackers who had thrown gas shells at us, were eventually overwhelmed. In all the confusion, Harry and I were captured and dragged against our will into the bunker. Whatever happened to Sarah, I couldn’t tell.
As they dragged us through corridor after corridor, I thought about how young these soldiers were. Even the General was in his early twenties as best. General Ravon, that was his name. He tried to interrogate us but in doing so let slip some important facts. Firstly, that they are the Kaleds and that they have fought the Thals for dominance of Skaro for a very long time. This surprises me a little. Kaled makes sense. It’s an anagram of an all too familiar name, the name I have come here to defeat. No, my surprise is that this is the name of the Dalek’s creators. I had thought it to be Dals, or at least that was how the Thals had described their enemies when I first visited Skaro, several lifetimes ago, and some 500 years into the future of when I was now. I can only guess that their archival records and collective memory had corrupted the true name over the centuries since the neutron bomb exploded.
Harry and I make several attempts to escape. Overpowering Ravon wasn’t hard but convincing an older Security Commander proved more challenging. The Security Commander, a rather humourless fellow by the name of Nyder, refused to believe that we might be aliens from another world. He agreed with his rather useless General who had decided that we must be Mutos; the descendants of those mutated by chemical weapons when the war first started. We learned that these ‘Mutos’ had been banished into the wastelands to maintain ‘Kaled racial purity’! In the way that Nyder was talking, I could hear the echo of the Daleks; racial purity would become their goal too. It was obvious then, that Nyder was somehow involved in the genesis of the Daleks. But he was not alone in that association. He mentioned their greatest scientist, a man named Davros. He is never wrong, Nyder claimed. That too, sounded very Dalek.
Notes
This account records events from Genesis of the Daleks Part 1.
This story continues directly from the events of “The Ark in Space” and “The Sontaran Experiment”, two inter-linked stories about a ship full of cryogenically frozen humans returning to Earth once it is inhabitable again.
In this journal extract the Doctor recalls the events of “The Daleks” when he was the First Doctor. At the time he was travelling with his granddaughter, Susan, and her two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. It was during that adventure that he was able to review the archival records of the Thals. He has encountered the Daleks quite a few times since.
Continuity Points
The “Genesis of the Daleks” is stated as taking place about 500 years before “The Daleks”. The war to this point has been going on for 1000 years at this point.
In essence the Time Lords sending the Doctor to the origins of the Daleks was the first shot fired in the eventual Time Wars. The comic story “Hunters of the Burning Stone” specifically makes this claim.
This is not the first time that the Time Lords have sent the Doctor on a mission. On TV, he was previously given missions in “Colony in Space” and “The Mutants”.