CHRONOLOGIES AND TIME LINES: HISTORY OF THE DALEKS CONTINUES...

CHRONOLOGIES AND TIME LINES:
HISTORY OF THE DALEKS CONTINUES....

After I completely compile a long, rambling saga on the chronology of all past Dalek stories, what does Moffat do? Produce another Dalek story!

It's not hard to find a place for the, frankly, magnificent Magician's Apprentice/Witch's Familiar to fit. It can, easily, take place sometime after Into The Dalek with little or no effort. In fact, I'm hoping it takes place after Into The Dalek and that Rusty The Good Dalek eventually finds his way onto Skaro to create all kinds of trouble.

Speaking of Skaro, this is - quite naturally - the New Skaro that gets created as the Daleks make their way into the 40th Century (Part 3 of my Tymecian Dalek History essay - The Escape From Skaro and The Mastery of Time). Davros is given a nice line of dialogue that supports this. He claims the Daleks "rebuilt" Skaro. This quote, of course, is also meant to compensate for the fact that the Doctor destroyed Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks. How one actually rebuilds a planet that was completely and utterly destroyed in a super nova is difficult to conceive. But these are the Daleks - they are an incredibly advanced race. If anyone can pull it off, they can.

I'm still more inclined to believe, however, that they just found a planet similar to Skaro and renamed it. Davros' dialogue is subjective enough to support this idea. We know from dialogue in Dalek Masterplan that there is an active Dalek colony on a planet they refer to as Skaro. In my mind, it's actually the first reference made to New Skaro. The Daleks, however, are far too vain to admit their greatest enemy wiped out their original homeworld and simply call it Skaro.

Whether or not the Daleks continue operating from their homeworld as the Time Wars begin seems unlikely. It's largely insinuated in various post-Time War episodes that, as the battle against the Time Lords commences, New Skaro has been vacated and the Daleks are spacefaring again. When the Doctor briefly stops on their planet of origin at the beginning of Asylum of the Daleks, he is looking down at an abandoned colony from the giant Dalek monument. Skaro is lifeless. I think the Daleks went back into their own timeline to set this trap. That the Doctor is on Skaro somewhere between Masterplan and before the Daleks start causing trouble again in New Who. Since the Daleks were no longer on Skaro for the Time Wars, it probably wouldn't be Time Locked. But, because New Skaro was abandoned, the planet has fallen into obscurity. Dialogue in Magician's Apprentice/Witch's Familiar seems to support this idea. Everyone is shocked to be on Skaro again. It's been vacant so long that no one actually noticed it when it was rendered invisible.

This latest installment in the Dalek storyline, however, does cause me to speculate that we are witnessing factions again in their society. The Daleks we saw from Victory of the Daleks to Into the Dalek have been one group (that we shall dub: "Spacefaring Daleks"). Whereas what we saw on Skaro is a totally seperate society. One that the Spacefaring Daleks might not even be aware of.

Quite obviously, Davros escaped his fate in Stolen Earth/Journey's End and found his way back to New Skaro (perhaps, like the Cult of Skaro, he's capable of making an emergency temporal shift). Dedicated mad scientist that he is, he starts trying to re-build a Dalek empire. While he prefers the bronze-liveried Time War model, he's got to work with what he has. He finds empty husks of various partially-destroyed models scattered all over Skaro and re-builds them, first. With these Old School Daleks now working for him, he's able to pool some better resources and construct Time War Daleks and even a Supreme Dalek. But the older model Daleks are also maintained.

Davros anticipates that his plans will eventually attract attention. Old enemies of the Daleks or even the Spacefaring Daleks, themselves', could be very upset about what he's up to. So he gets to work on a massive cloaking device - leaving only one building visible that can be easilly mistaken as a mere space station (maybe he's done this so Colony Sarff can find him when he's out travelling in space!).

So we have Skarosian Daleks whose empire is being built up by Davros. Knowing his Daleks are prone to disobeying him, he remembers his encounters with the Doctor as a young boy and makes some alterations to their genetic conditioning so that they have just the smallest compensation for mercy. The Daleks may never allow Davros to run them - but they will, at least, be nice to him for what he did.

At the same time, we have the Spacefaring Daleks. When last we got a good look at their power structure, they appeared to be run by a Dalek Prime Minister. They have been expanding their empire into the Universe and may even be winning against humanity, these days. Into the Dalek certainly seems to insinuate this.

Davros knows that, eventually, these two factions will clash (experiences he had in Resurrection and Remembrance have not been forgotten) and that he's likely to lose in that battle. His Daleks still can't really measure up to the sheer power of the Spacefarers. He needs to perform an upgrade. On top of that, he needs to find a way to save his own dwindling lifeforce.

And so, the events of Magician's Apprentice/Witch's Familiar take place.

How the Skarosian Daleks will survive with such revolting sewers is anyone's guess. Perhaps they've been wiped out. Perhaps some survive but the Spacefaring Daleks might sweep in and absorb them into their own empire. Or perhaps enough of them survive to still represent a formidable force and we get another awesome Dalek Civil War (I always love it when they have one!). We'll have to wait and see....

*A QUICK FOOTNOTE:

The idea of a Skarosian Faction helps to explain why there are no "Teletubby Daleks" in Magician's Apprentice/Witch's Familiar. If Davros has been secretly building up an empire on Skaro then he might not even be aware of their existence. Or, at best, he only vaguely knows about them. So he wouldn't really be bothered to work on such a model and would just stick to the bronze guys.

Whereas if the story was meant to be yet another Spacefaring Daleks' Return to the Ancestral Seat, there should probably be some Paradigm Daleks in the mix.

Well, that's our most recent edition of (or, more accurately, addition to) Dalek History. There's a good chance that we might see the Skarosian Natives one more time before Series 9 is over. But I thought it would be fun to post this now and see if any of my wild speculations prove to be accurate. If they do show up again in Episode 11 or 12, I can have a good brag if they confirm any of the ridiculous theories I've expressed, here. More than likely, of course, they'll disprove a bunch of stuff I've just said. 

Haven't read my Dalek History posts? There's quite a few of them. Here are the links:

Episode 1 - The Early Days On Skaro - 
http://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2015/06/chronologies-and-timelines-tymecian.html  

Episode 2 - The Wars Against Earth and the Return of Davros - http://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2015/06/chronologies-and-timelines-part-2-of.html

Episode 3 - The Escape from Skaro and the Mastery of Time
http://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2015/07/chronologies-and-timelines-episode.html

Episode 4 - The Time Wars!
http://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2015/07/chronologies-and-timelines-episode-4-of.html

Episode 5 - A Possible Altered Timeline and the New Dalek Paradigm
http://robtymec.blogspot.ca/2015/07/chronologies-and-timelines-episode-5-of.html