The Daleks

Exterminate!  Exterminate!  Exterminate!  I’ll never forget how scared I was the first time I saw the Daleks move across the old black and white television set in the family room of our old house in Illinois. In those days, Tom Baker was settling in as the lead character in the British sci/fi series, Doctor Who.  And it never failed, everywhere he traveled in his little blue police box, there was shure to be lots of danger lurking around every corner. But, in those episodes where he met up with the Daleks, I was always finding myself curled up behind a large piece of furnature out of sight.
During the Tom Baker years, there were only two main encounters between the Doctor and the Daleks.  The first encounter was called Genesis of the Daleks.  Apparently, this story was an attempt on the part of Terry Nation, one of the writers of the Doctor Who series, to go back and explain how the Daleks came into being.  The Daleks had appeared in a number of earlier stories with other incarnations of the Doctor, but by the time I started watching Doctor Who, I wasn’t aware of the other actors who had played the role.  It wasn’t until many years later that I was able to watch some of the earlier episodes and obtain DVD copies of the movies involving the Daleks where the Doctor was played by Peter Cushing outside the normal series.

The second story involving the Daleks, during the Tom Baker years, was entitled “Destiny of the Daleks”.  This time around the Doctor was on the run from an entity called the Black Guardian as a result of the Doctor’s refusal to turn over the key to time during the previous seasons last episode. Using a randomizer to skip about through time and space, the Doctor and his companion Romana end up on the planet Scaro, which is the Dalek’s home world.  Before long, he discovers that the Daleks are locked in a war with a race of androids called the Movellans.  Since neither side was able to gain an advantage over the other, the Daleks had returned to Scaro to try to recover their creator Davros in hopes that he could provide the Daleks with some sort of tactical advantage.

Now that i am much older, the Daleks no longer strike fear in my being like they once did so many years ago.  And even though they are just pepper pot shaped objects on wheels with a single eye scope, I still think they provide lots of character to the Doctor Who saga that would be missing if they weren’t there to make the story more complete.  So, the next time you are having a bad day, just remember, it could be worse.  You could be chased down by a bunch of pepper pot shaped robots screaming “Exterminate!  Exterminate!”