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.
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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 due to the fact that 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.
[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.
[edit] Civil wars
The Dalek Empire, however, is not always a unified one. Prior to the unearthing of their creator Davros by the Daleks in Destiny of the Daleks, the Empire was supervised by a Dalek Council and headed by a Supreme Dalek. The one exception was in The Evil of the Daleks, where a Dalek Emperor was seen, although most fan speculation places Evil at the end of Dalek history. The end of Evil sees the eruption of a Dalek civil war which the Second Doctor pronounces as the Daleks' "final end."
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 the 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 force on Earth, including the 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 plays 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 the novels and audio plays, however, is uncertain.
[edit] Recent history
In the 2005 series, the Doctor stated that the entire Dalek race, all ten million ships, had 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 survived and over the course of centuries the Emperor rebuilt the Dalek race using genetic material secretly culled from the human race, establishing itself as the god of the Daleks. These new Daleks, half a million strong, were 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 opened up on 21st century Earth. Emerging from it was 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 called the Genesis Ark. Eventually the new Dalek army was 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 — initiated an emergency temporal shift and escaped. Its whereabouts are unknown.
