Kaled
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Doctor Who race | |
|---|---|
 The Kaled Chief Scientist, Davros (right), and his lieutenant, Nyder (left). |
|
| Kaleds | |
| Type | Humanoids |
| Affiliated with | Kaleds |
| Homeworld | Skaro |
| First appearance | Genesis of the Daleks |
The Kaleds (or Dals) are a fictional race of humanoid extraterrestrials from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and the forebears of the Daleks.
In the first Dalek serial, commonly known as The Daleks (1963), it was explained that the planet Skaro was once home to two humanoid races, the peaceful and scientifically-advanced Dals and the warlike Thals. Following a short but terrible nuclear war between the races, the Dals were mutated and became the aggressive and xenophobic Daleks.
This information was contradicted in the 1974 serial Genesis of the Daleks, in which the Doctor returned to Skaro before the creation of the Daleks. In the later serial, it was the Kaleds who were at war with the Thals, and the conflict was a generations-long war of attrition, not the short nuclear exchange previously described. The Kaleds, with their grey-black uniforms, stylized salutes and authoritarian political structure, were thinly veiled analogues of the Nazis. The serial also suggested that mutations among the general Kaled populace were not as advanced as implied by the earlier account, and that the development of the mutated creatures that became the Daleks was engineered by the Kaled chief scientist Davros — head of the Kaled Science Elite — for his own purposes.
All later serials followed the Genesis version of the story and treated the "Kaleds" as the predecessors of the Daleks.
Several theories exist to explain the discrepancies, outside of the real one: the Genesis production team simply rewrote Skaro's history. One theory holds that the account in The Daleks, which comes from centuries-old Thal oral history, is simply wrong (in the Big Finish Productions I, Davros audio dramas, the Dals are a long-extinct nation by Davros's time). Other more complicated theories, making use of the time travel aspect of the series, have also been suggested.
The mutant beings inside Dalek casings are sometimes referred to as "Kaleds" or "Kaled mutants" to distinguish them from the cyborg Daleks.
The episode The Satan Pit revealed that the Kaleds had a horned god of war, similar to depictions of demons and devils in other cultures.
