Dalek Empire
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The Dalek Empire refers to the sphere of influence of the Daleks, a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Dalek Empire is also a series of audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions, featuring the Daleks. The series begins in Invasion of the Daleks. In 2006, a short-story collection, Short Trips: Dalek Empire was published by the same company.
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[edit] Organisation
The concept of a Dalek Empire is alluded to many times during the course of the programme's history when the Daleks have appeared. Charting the exact development of the Dalek Empire is a problematic exercise because the exact timeline of the Daleks is highly debatable. The time travelling nature of Doctor Who means that the Doctor's encounters with the Daleks take place out of chronological sequence. At times, the Dalek Empire is under the command of the Emperor Dalek, and at other times, the Dalek Supreme (also known as the Supreme Dalek).
The extent of the Empire was never made clear in the television series. In one of the few firm dates the programme provides, in the year 4000, the Empire is said to consist of 70 planetary systems (The Daleks' Master Plan). In Resurrection of the Daleks the Daleks, having lost a war with the extragalactic Movellans, have been reduced to a few colony worlds.
While Skaro, the home planet of the Daleks and the location of the Dalek City, is often assumed to be the centre of the Empire, this has not always been in case. In Destiny of the Daleks the Daleks returned to Skaro to find their creator Davros, implying that they had abandoned their ancestral seat at that point. Planets like Kembel were often seen as primary bases. However, by Remembrance of the Daleks the Daleks have reoccupied Skaro and made it once again the centre of the Empire.
In the Big Finish Productions audio plays the Daleks abandon the Milky Way galaxy altogether. Using a superweapon known as the Apocalypse Element, they wipe out all sentient life in the Seriphia galaxy, which is four times as large as the Milky Way, consisting of 600 billion stars. They then occupy the Seriphia galaxy and use it as their base of operations in the Dalek Empire audio plays, eventually launching an invasion of the whole Milky Way.
[edit] Life in the Empire
In whatever guise, the purpose of the Empire is not for glory, trade, or to act as an extension of Dalek patriotism, but merely to seek planetary systems that can provide exploitable resources for the Daleks' main purpose — to conquer the universe and cleanse it of all life besides themselves.
The Daleks usually subjugate the indigenous populations of the planets they conquer, using them as slave labour to exploit the planet's material resources to the point of exhaustion, and then once their usefulness has expired, exterminate them by whatever means is most efficient. Biological warfare is a favoured tactic for both conquest and subsequent extermination (The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Planet of the Daleks). In The Dalek Invasion of Earth and Day of the Daleks, the population of Dalek-occupied 22nd century Earth is enslaved and put to menial labour, kept in check not just by Daleks but also by human overseers.
In The Dalek Invasion of Earth these were in the form of Robomen, humans converted into mindless drones obedient to the Daleks' will. In the alternate timeline of Day of the Daleks these supervisors were in the form of collaborators who co-operated with the Daleks for fear of being exterminated. In addition, the Daleks used Ogron mercenaries as a police force to keep the slave population in line. These Dalek agents were themselves supervised by Daleks in control centres that monitored operations from behind the scenes.
An elite group of Daleks known as the Cult of Skaro also existed by the latter years of the Empire which were tasked with finding new ways of exterminating their enemies, and of ensuring the survival of the Dalek species should the worst happen.
[edit] Civil wars
The Dalek Empire, however, is not always a unified one. When Davros was revived, he decided to take over the leadership of the Daleks himself, and as a result this led to a schism within the Empire, with one faction remaining loyal to the Dalek Supreme and another faction either joining or being converted by Davros. Davros's Daleks were distinguished from the others by their gold and white livery, and were created from Kaled mutants like the other Daleks, as well as engineered from the corpses and bodies of other species.
By the time of Remembrance of the Daleks, Davros had installed himself as a Dalek Emperor, calling his new breed of Daleks "Imperial Daleks", and the deposed faction becoming the "Renegade Daleks". Both sides considered the other as genetic abominations by Dalek standards. At the end of Remembrance, the Renegade Dalek task-force on Earth, including a Supreme Dalek, was wiped out. At the same time, Skaro, the seat of the Imperial Daleks, was destroyed when its sun went supernova. Presumably this meant an end — or at least severe disruption — to Dalek ambitions of conquest for a time.
The BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel War of the Daleks by John Peel picked up where this left off, and saw another civil war between those grey Daleks loyal to the Dalek Prime and those loyal to Davros. At the end Davros's forces are wiped out and Davros himself seemingly executed.
The Big Finish Productions Dalek Empire series of audio stories also saw Daleks battling Daleks, as the Daleks from this universe came into conflict with an ostensibly peaceful and benevolent species of Daleks from a parallel universe. The canonicity of stories in various media in relation to each other, however, is uncertain.
[edit] Recent history
In the 2005 series, the Doctor states that his own homeworld Gallifrey, the entire Dalek race and its entire fleet of ten million warships have been wiped out in the last great Time War between the Daleks and the Time Lords. However, as revealed in the episodes "Bad Wolf" and "The Parting of the Ways", the Emperor Dalek's ship survives and over the course of centuries the Emperor rebuilds the Dalek race using genetic material secretly culled from the human race, establishing itself as the god of the Daleks. The Emperor uses agents such as the Jagrafess to manipulate human society, keeping the population ignorant of the growing Dalek army. By the year 200,000 the Daleks are nearly ready to invade Earth. These new Daleks, half a million strong, are destroyed along with their Emperor in "The Parting of the Ways".
In the 2006 series episode "Army of Ghosts", a void ship (a craft built to travel through the nothingness between universes) being examined at Torchwood Tower on 21st century Earth opens up. Emerging from it are a squad of Daleks, members of the elite Cult of Skaro who had escaped the Time War by hiding in the Void, together with a Time Lord prison ship containing millions of Daleks which they call the Genesis Ark. Eventually the new Dalek army is pulled back into the Void due to the actions of the Tenth Doctor in "Doomsday". However, the black Dalek leading the army — named Dalek Sec — initiates an emergency temporal shift and escapes along with the rest of the Cult of Skaro.
The Cult of Skaro resurfaces in 1930 New York in the 2007 two-parter "Daleks in Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks". There, the Cult kidnaps humans in an experiment to create a new species of human-Dalek hybrids in order to evolve the Dalek race and survive. Dalek Sec himself merges with a human, but finds himself influenced by more pacifistic thoughts, even negotiating with the Doctor to find a new world for the hybrids to repopulate. However, the remaining Cult members cling to the Dalek notions of racial purity and turn on Sec. Eventually, thanks to the Doctor inserting some of his DNA into their makeup, the hybrids revolt against the Cult in a battle that leaves Dalek Caan as the only survivor. Dalek Caan, too, escapes by means of an emergency temporal shift.
