by Scott, Cavan
He was resting on a kind of dais and his casing was made of glass. Inside, I could see the same sort of repulsive creature that the Doctor and I had taken out of the machine and wrapped in the cloak. The Dalek looked totally evil, sitting on a tiny seat with two squat legs not quite reaching the floor.
The 1964 paperback edition issued by Armada included a picture of the glass monster, but sadly this was not reproduced in subsequent editions.
In the Sixth Doctor television adventure Revelation of the Daleks, a glass Dalek is seen, encasing the Doctor’s friend Arthur Stengos, who has been turned into a mutant.
40 WAYS TO DEFEAT A DALEK
The Supreme Beings? Who are they kidding? Turns out there’s more than one way to skin a Dalek.
Stick mud in the Dalek’s eye and push it over a Thal cape to insulate it from the power supply. After that it’s a simple case of opening the top and scooping out the mutant like a soft -boiled egg! (Note to time-travelling adventurers: this only works in the Dalek city on Skaro, where Daleks pick up static power through the floor.) (The Daleks)
Feed the Daleks anti-radiation drugs knocked off from the Thals. They don’t like that. (The Daleks)
Cut the power to the city. No static electricity, no Daleks. Well, in the early days at least. (The Daleks)
If all else fails, just chuck rocks at them. It might not kill them, but it’s tremendously satisfying. (The Daleks)
Mob the pesky pepper pot, hoisting it up before chucking it on the floor. Just make sure you don’t get stuck underneath. (The Dalek Invasion of Earth)
Ram through a squad of Daleks with an enormous refuse truck. (The Dalek Invasion of Earth)
Get together a gang of angry mine workers, grab yourself a Dalek and run screaming out of the mine to freedom, still holding the Dalek aloft. (The Dalek Invasion of Earth)
Dig a hole in the desert sand, cover it with an old threadbare cardigan (thanks, Barbara!), get a Dalek to chase you and hope it falls in. (The Chase)
Dump them in a bubbling mud bath. (The Daleks’ Master Plan)
Overload them with static electricity. (Power of the Daleks)
If your country house has been overrun with Daleks, use some rope to drag one into an open fire. (The Evil of the Daleks)
If a Dalek creeps up on you when you’ve just arrived on Skaro, chuck it off a cliff. Easy! (The Evil of the Daleks)
Cause a civil war on Skaro. It’s the final end. (Hint: it isn’t.) (The Evil of the Daleks)
Disable with a scrambler made from a TARDIS tape recorder and whatever else you find in your pockets. (Planet of the Daleks)
Carelessly leave a cooling duct open. If you’re lucky a burst of molten ice will engulf passing Daleks at just the right moment. (Planet of the Daleks)
Sometimes you don’t have to do anything. There’s every chance a group of especially dumb Daleks may inadvertently trundle past some Thal explosives that had been rigged to explode by an earlier Dalek patrol. (Planet of the Daleks)
If a Dalek is riding up a ventilator shaft on an anti-grav disc, a well-aimed rock tumbled down the shaft should be enough to knock the Dalek back down to earth – or Spiridon. (Planet of the Daleks)
Dipping Daleks into a sub-zero pool of molten ice instantly kills the mutant inside. Daleks can’t handle sub-zero temperatures. (Planet of the Daleks)
Go for the direct approach and slide an explosive charge across the floor at a squad of advancing Daleks. (Planet of the Daleks)
Charges shoved into a crack of an ice wall should take out any advancing Dalek. (Planet of the Daleks)
Get it to make a mistake. Some Daleks are so self-critical that they’ll overreact and self-destruct. (Death to the Daleks)
Blow up their ship with a big bomb. Simple but effective. (Death to the Daleks)
Throw a hat over its eyestalk and clamp a convenient bomb on its side – but make sure you shove the Dalek down a narrow corridor before it blows up! (Destiny of the Daleks)
Push it into the corner of a handily mirrored corridor. It’ll no doubt fire and be exterminated by its own ricocheting death ray. (The Five Doctors)
Guarding one of the most dangerous beings in the known universe in a barely defended and poorly maintained space prison when the Daleks attack? Then stick a few mines in a corridor, it’ll take out a couple of the invaders at least. (Resurrection of the Daleks)
Topple it out of a third story warehouse door. However, always remember to check for leftover Kaled mutants amongst the wreckage – but don’t get it mixed up with Felis catus. (Resurrection of the Daleks)
If you’re Davros you can modify the Movellan virus to eradicate your own creations. Always make sure you’re not susceptible to the plague yourself though. Whoops. (Resurrection of the Daleks)
Blast it with a highly directional ultrasonic beam of rock and roll. (Revelation of the Daleks)
If that doesn’t work, bullets with bastic heads will blow it sky high. Unless it’s been through the Time War and has developed a personal force field, of course. (Revelation of the Daleks)
Zap it with a Dalek gunstick. Daleks are vulnerable to their own weapons. They really need to look at that. (Revelation of the Daleks)
Rewire a transmat so it mangles any materialising Dalek. (Remembrance of the Daleks)
Whacking a Dalek with an energised baseball bat is OK if you just want to take out an eyestalk or the odd Dalek bump. What you really need is an Anti-Tank Missile. (Remembrance of the Daleks)
Trick Davros into turning Skaro’s sun supernova. (Remembrance of the Daleks)
Talk it to death. Probably only works if its forces have been destroyed and Skaro is a burnt cinder circling a dead sun. (Remembrance of the Daleks)
Get it to absorb human DNA from a time traveller. Yes, it’ll regenerate but ultimately it’ll continue to mutate, question its own existence and self-exterminate. Job done. (Dalek)
If you’re Captain Jack and find yourself in a situation where the TARDIS has materialised around Rose and a Dalek, blast said Dalek into little bits with a big ray gun. (The Parting of the Ways)
Use the Anne-Droid to fry advancing Daleks. They are the weakest link. (The Parting of the Ways)
Stare directly into the heart of the TARDIS, absorb the Vortex and then wipe the entire Dalek race from history. Thorough, less time intensive, but risky – every cell in your body is likely to die. (The Parting of the Ways)
Get history to collapse so the Daleks are deleted from existence. Any that survive the purge will be fossilised. Even if they start to reboot, a blast of Alpha Mezon energy will kill the mutant stone dead. (The Big Bang)
Identify yourself as the Doctor. Daleks are programmed to destroy the Predator and so will self-destruct, hoping to take you out in the process. A couple of caveats: only works if a) the Dalek is unarmed, b) the Doctor’s identity hasn’t been wiped from the Dalek Pathweb. (Asylum of the Daleks)
THE DALEKS IN NUMBERS
The number of times the Daleks have banged on about their vision being impaired = 15
The number of times Daleks have insisted they will obey = 91
The number of times Daleks have claimed to be superior beings = 3
The number of times Daleks have offered someone drinks = 7
The number of times the Daleks have shrieked Exterminate or any of its variations = 469
The number of onscreen deaths caused by Daleks = 210
UNIVERSAL MONSTERS
Cinema’s classics creatures in Doctor Who.
VAMPIRES
The Daleks fought a Count Dracula robot in the 1996 Festival of Ghana’s haunted house attraction. (The Chase)
The Doctor used to be told tales of the undead by an old hermit from the mountains of South Gallifrey. In the old time, Rassilon had led a fleet of steel bolt-firing bow ships against the vampire horde that was swarming across the universe. The Doctor would later defeat the last of the Great Vampires on a planet in E-Space. (State of Decay)
On the post-apocalyptic Earth of the y
ear AD 500,000, humanity evolved into vampire-like monsters. Eventually the planet’s poisoned atmosphere killed even the Haemovores, but Fenric transported the last of their kind back in time to spawn a new race of blood-suckers as part of his game against the Doctor. (The Curse of Fenric)
Hiding from the Judoon in Royal Hope Hospital, a Plasmavore fugitive using the alias Florence Finnegan supped blood from her victims using a stripy straw. (Smith and Jones)
The Doctor, Amy and Rory came up against Rosanna Calvierri and her school of beautiful vampire girls in Venice, 1580. The nosferatu turned out to be fish-like aliens from the planet Saturnyne breeding in the canals of Venice. (Vampires in Venice)
FRANKENSTEIN
A robot version of Frankenstein’s monster attacked the Daleks while they chased the Doctor through the Festival of Ghana’s House of Horrors. (The Chase)
Mirroring Baron Frankenstein’s experiments, scientist Mehendri Solon stitched together scraps of corpses to build a new body for the brain of Time Lord criminal Morbius. (The Brain of Morbius)
Universal’s 1931 Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff as the creature was playing on 31 December 1999 as the Seventh Doctor regenerated in Walker General Hospital Morgue. (Doctor Who)
WEREWOLVES
The Sixth Doctor encountered the wolf-like Lukoser in the tunnels of Thoros Beta. As Dorf, he had been equerry to King Ycranos, but he had since been experimented on by the scientist Crozier. (The Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp)
The Seventh Doctor was trapped in the Psychic Circus ring with Mags, a werewolf from the planet Vulpana. (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)
In the 1990s, UNIT included silver bullets in their arsenal as standard. (Battlefield)
In Scotland in 1879, the Tenth Doctor and Rose saved Queen Victoria from a werewolf-like alien the Doctor described as a Lupine-Wavelength-Haemovariform. Despite the Time Lord’s best intentions, Victoria may have been infected and perhaps passed the werewolf gene on to her descendants. (Tooth and Claw)
THE INVISIBLE MAN
The Refusians became invisible following a massive solar flare in the vicinity of their planet, Refusis II. With invisibility came great strength, and they willingly invited refugee humans and Monoids to live in harmony on their world. (The Ark)
The eight-foot-high Visians of Mira were vicious and completely invisible. (The Daleks’ Master Plan)
The Spiridons of the planet Spiridon could make themselves invisible by means of an anti-reflection light wave. The Daleks duplicated the ability, but it sapped their power sources rendering them invisible, but dead as a doornail. (Planet of the Daleks)
On an unnamed planet, the Fourth Doctor encountered the remnants of a eugenics experiment run by the deranged computer Xoanon – which looked exactly like the Doctor! Part of the experiment included invisible monsters that Xoanon unleashed into the jungle to terrorise the Sevateem tribe. (The Face of Evil)
Although they were largely invisible, a blinded Krafayis predator could be seen by the artist Vincent van Gogh in 1890s Auvers-sur-Oise, France. (Vincent and the Doctor)
SWAMP MONSTERS
Like their Silurian cousins, the amphibious Earth reptile dubbed the Sea Devils by the local military, went into hibernation on prehistoric Earth but were woken in the late 20th century. (The Sea Devils)
The Marshmen of Alzarius emerged from the swamps every 50 years during Mistfall. They were highly adaptable and could even evolve into a new life form. (Full Circle)
WARLORDS OF MARS
The Ice Warriors are perhaps the noblest race ever known to the universe. A proud civilisation of soldiers, the reptilian Martians’ actions could often be misconstrued, with long periods of war and invasion attempts (with Earth as a target at least twice) making them feared across the galaxy. In periods of peace, the Ice Warriors became known for diplomacy and formed an important part of the Galactic Federation.
The Martians first appeared in 1967’s The Ice Warriors by Brian Hayles. They returned for an attempt at conquering Earth via the Moon in The Seeds of Death (1969). During the Third Doctor’s era, the Ice Warriors became a force for good in The Curse of Peladon (1972), but a faction of them was back to their monstrous ways for a rematch with the third Doctor in The Monster of Peladon (1974).
Although they would make no further appearances in the original series after 1974, the Ice Warriors remain one of Doctor Who’s great monsters. With hissing, rasping voices, and armoured green reptilian skins, they are out there somewhere, waiting for the day when they will return to battle the Doctor again…
CREATING THE ICE WARRIORS
In 1967, Doctor Who producer Innes Lloyd and story editor Peter Bryant wanted to bolster the Doctor’s rogues gallery, introducing a new monster to rival the Daleks and Cybermen.
Brian Hayles’s script for The Ice Warriors imagined a second Ice Age, with a future Earth under attack from revived invaders from Mars. Hayles’s concept of the Ice Warriors was very different to what eventually lumbered onto screen, however. Varga, the first Warrior released from the ice, was more cyborg than reptile in the original script. His hood-like, ominous helmet is fitted with electronic earpieces and a strip of photo-electronic cell glass that pulses with light. More lights are found embedded across the Martian’s vast chest and he’s accompanied by a high-pitched electronic whine.
Costume designer Martin Baugh had different ideas. Taking his cue from the helmet mentioned in Hayles’s script, Baugh based his design on a turtle, with fibreglass armour forming part of the Warrior’s body itself. Six-foot seven inch-tall Carry On star Bernard Bresslaw was cast as Varga and was immediately whisked off to the London Metalwork Company where the engineers who usually crafted fibreglass boats built his massive chest piece. His legs and arms were covered in heavy latex with clamp-like pincers for hands, coarse hair sprouting from every join. His mouth and jaw was smothered in a thick rubber half-mask, with a specially moulded fibreglass helmet completing the look. Baugh originally meant to install lights behind the helmet’s perspex eyepieces, but decided against it as the costume was hot enough already. When suited up, Bresslaw was soon sweating enough to fill a pint glass every single hour.
The Ice Warriors would return just over a year later in The Seeds of Death, joined this time by Slaar, a smaller, sleeker commander, all bulbous helmet and bad teeth. Over time, Slaar and his hissing successors Izlyr and Azaxyr who appeared in the Third Doctor stories The Curse of Peladon and The Monster of Peladon respectively, would become known as Ice Lords, although the title is never actually used on screen. When addressing Izlyr and Azaxyr, you should hold the Ice, they are just Lords, plain and simple – but they both have very nice cloaks, unlike poor Slaar. All three Ice Lords were played by actor Alan Bennion.
BRED FOR WAR – SONTARAN FACTOIDS
‘It’s all right. I’ve had a good life. I’m nearly 12.’
Strax, A Good Man Goes to War
As 12 is considered a good age for a Sontaran to reach, here are a dozen facts on the classic monster that was once described as a ‘talking baked potato’.
The Sontarans have been engaged in a war with the Rutans for thousands of years.
Sontarans are a clone species. The Sontaran Military Academy is capable of producing over a million cadets at each muster parade, allowing their forces to sustain enormous casualties on all fronts. The Eleventh Doctor claimed that Strax was the middle child of six million.
The Sontaran home world is Sontar, giving rise to the battle cry ‘Sontar-ha!’ Which they shout. A lot.
In the high-gravity environment of Sontar, a Sontaran weighs several tonnes.
Sontaran muscles are built for load bearing rather than leverage.
Sontarans do not fear death. They would rather be court-martialled than show pain.
For a Sontaran, being ordered to take care of the sick and wounded is a punishment.
Sontarans can gene-splice their bodies for a variety of functions, including all nursing duties. Some can even produce enormous quant
ities of lactic fluid.
As any space-adventuring hero knows, a Sontaran’s most vulnerable spot is its probic vent. To quote Chiswick Super-Temp Donna Noble, ‘Back of the neck!’
Because of the probic vent’s position at the back of the neck, Sontarans must always face their enemies, never turning their back on them.
To enter battle open-skinned, without a helmet, is considered a great honour.
Sontaran culture is not very progressive when it comes to equality of the sexes. They consider words to be the ‘weapons of womenfolk’. No wonder they suffer so many defeats.
SONTARAN ROLL CALL
For an identical race of clones, Sontarans have come in all shapes, sizes and heights over the years – some even sporting the height of fashion in facial hair. Here’s a roster of Sontaran personnel from on-screen skirmishes.
SONTARAN FORCES
Sontaran military forces are split into distinct groups and battalions, all serving towards the honourable pursuit of victory in the war against the Rutans (Sontar-ha! etc.). Forces mentioned or seen on screen in Doctor Who are:
Fifth Sontaran Battle Group – The Time Warrior
G3 Military Assessment Survey – The Sontaran Experiment
Sontaran Special Space Service – The Invasion of Time
Ninth Sontaran Battle Fleet – The Two Doctors
Tenth Sontaran Battle Fleet – The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky
WORLDS OF THE CYBERMEN
Once they were like us. Then they changed. They became stronger. They became more efficient. They became monsters. Now, the Cybermen want us to be like them again, but on their terms and in their image. The scourge that spread across the galaxy started very close to home.
Mondas – The original home of the Cybermen
Millions of years ago, Earth had a twin planet: Mondas. Following some unknown cosmic event, Mondas broke free of its orbit and drifted away from Earth. The effect on the planet’s atmosphere was catastrophic. With their bodies weakening and lifespans becoming shorter, the Mondasians started replacing their body parts with metal and plastic cybernetic implants. Soon, they didn’t know where man ended and machine began. Finally, the ruling powers of Mondas decreed that one final weakness needed to be eradicated: emotion. The Mondasians became slaves to logic. They became Cybermen.