Exterminate the Doctor!

May 10, 2005 5:37 PM

So I'm watching the new Dr. Who series and they are dealing with the last of the Daleks, I want to know what happened to the Daleks since Tom Baker was around (possible spoilers inside).

In the current episode they mention the Great Time War, in which all of the Timelords and Daleks perished. When did this happen? With which doctor? All I know is that The Master (a Timelord himself) created the Daleks with the sole purpose of elimitating either the Timelords or Dr. Who himeself. What else happened?

posted by furtive to media & arts (9 comments total)

Crap, I meant that the Daleks were created by Davros. My bad.
posted by furtive at 5:44 PM on May 10, 2005

Surprisingly enough, Wikipedia has a great deal of information on this very topic here.
posted by ruwan at 7:04 PM on May 10, 2005

Phew, thank you for introducing me to more than I ever wished to know about the Daleks.
posted by furtive at 7:42 PM on May 10, 2005

If the Wikipedia article doesn't seem to have all the answers (skip here if all you want to do is catch up), you may be comforted by the understanding that what true fans know about this is little more than you do. The whole Time War backstory is deliberately being withheld, doled out in bits and pieces. As noted, this basically happened between the time of the last on-screen Doctor and the new one; what the episode Dalek told us is pretty much all we do know. There are hints that the end of the season -- a cliffhanger in which Eccleston will apparently regenerate -- may have something to do with the Time War, but maybe not.

It's unclear whether the Doctor, in claiming he was responsible for the destruction of the Daleks, meant the incident from the 1988 Remembrance of the Daleks where he hacked the Dalek fleet's programming to self-destruct, or another event, because at that time the "Time War" was not so named, and there was no apparent immediate threat to Gallifrey or the Time Lords.
posted by dhartung at 9:52 PM on May 10, 2005

I think it was pretty obvious that the destruction of the Daleks was in the Time War - destroyed out of time, so that there are no Daleks in the past either, along with the Time Lords.
posted by jb at 2:53 AM on May 11, 2005

[SPOILER]

Is that techie-kid they picked up in Dalek who got bizarre implants this week going to turn out to be Davros, or what?

[/SPOILER]
posted by nthdegx at 4:01 AM on May 11, 2005

nthdegx, is that the theory? Cool.
posted by graventy at 7:50 AM on May 11, 2005

Well, it's my theory ;)
posted by nthdegx at 2:46 AM on May 12, 2005

Davros was a Kaled. And I thought lived thousands of years earlier.

But hey, time travel - why not?
posted by jb at 9:36 PM on May 14, 2005