HISTORY OF THE DALEKS
The Daleks are a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television seriesDoctor Who. Within the series, Daleks are cyborgs made from their original forms, extraterrestrial Kaleds from the planet Skaro, genetically modified and integrated within a tank-like robotic mechanical shell. They were created by the scientist Davros during the final years of a thousand-year war against the Thals. The Daleks are a powerful race bent on universal conquest and domination, utterly without pity, compassion or remorse. Various storylines portray them as having had every emotion removed except hate, leaving them with a desire to purge the Universe of all non-Dalek life. Collectively they are the greatest enemies of the series' protagonist, the Time Lord known as the Doctor. They are popularly known by their catchphrase "Exterminate!" and are a well-recognised reference in British popular culture, and are listed in several major dictionaries.
Physical characteristicsExternally, Daleks normally resemble human-sized salt and pepper shakers[1] with a single mechanical eyestalk mounted on a rotating dome, a gun mount containing an energy weapon (or "death ray") and a telescopic manipulator arm which is usually tipped by an appendage resembling a sink plunger. Daleks have been seen to be able to use their plungers to interface with technology,[9] crush a man's skull by suction,[9] measure the intelligence of a subject,[10] and extract information from a man's mind.[11] Dalek casings are made of a bonded polycarbide material dubbed "dalekanium" by a member of the human resistance in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and by the Cult of Skaro in "Daleks in Manhattan".[10][12]
The lower half of a Dalek's shell is covered with hemispherical protrusions, or "Dalek bumps", which are shown in the episode "Dalek" to be spheres embedded in the casing.[9] Both the BBC-licensed Dalek Book (1964) and The Doctor Who Technical Manual (1983) describe these items as being part of a sensory array,[13] whilst in the 2005 series episode "Dalek", they are shown to serve a function in a Dalek's self-destruct mechanism.[9] Their armour has a forcefield that evaporates most bullets and resists most types of energy weapon; this seems to be concentrated around the Dalek's midsection (where the mutant is located), as normally ineffective firepower can be concentrated on the eyestalk to blind a Dalek. Daleks have a very limited field of vision, with no peripheral sight at all, and are relatively easy to hide from in fairly exposed places.[14] Their own energy weapons have also been shown to be capable of destroying them.[15] Their weapons fire a beam that has electrical tendencies, is capable of propagating through water and may be a form of plasma. The eyepiece is a Dalek's most vulnerable spot, and impairing its vision often leads to a blind, panicked firing of its weapon whilst shouting, "My vision is impaired; I cannot see!" Russell T Davies subverted the catchphrase in his 2008 episode "The Stolen Earth", in which a Dalek vaporises a paintball that has blocked its vision while proclaiming "My vision is not impaired!".[16][17]
The creature has an amorphous body, slightly smaller than the man's head, and several tentacles, some of which are partly wrapped around the man's body.
The creature inside the mechanical casing is depicted as soft and repulsive in appearance and vicious even without its mechanical armour. The first-ever glimpse of a Dalek mutant, in The Daleks, was a claw peeking out from under a Thal cloak after it had been removed from its casing.[18] The actual appearance of the mutants has varied, but often adheres to the Doctor's description of the species in Remembrance of the Daleks as "little green blobs in bonded polycarbide armour".[19] In Resurrection of the Daleks a Dalek creature, separated from its casing, attacks and severely injures a human soldier;[20] in Revelation of the Daleks, there are two Dalek factions and the creatures inside have a different appearance in each case, one resembling the amorphous creature from Resurrection, the other the crab-like creature from the original Dalek serial. As the creature inside is rarely seen on screen, a common misconception exists that Daleks are wholly mechanical robots.[21] As of the new series Daleks are shown to be mollusc-like in appearance, with small tentacles, one or two eyes and an exposed brain.[9]
The voice of a Dalek is electronic; the Dalek creature is apparently unable to make much more than squeaking sounds when out of its casing.[20] Once the mutant is removed, the casing itself can be entered and operated by humanoids; for example, in The Daleks, Ian Chesterton (William Russell) enters a Dalek shell to masquerade as a guard as part of an escape plan.[18]
An Imperial Dalek flies up a flight of stairs (from Remembrance of the Daleks)
For many years it was assumed that, due to their design and gliding motion, Daleks were unable to climb stairs, and that this was a simple way of escaping them. A well known cartoon from Punch pictured a group of Daleks at the foot of a flight of stairs with the caption, "Well, this certainly buggers our plan to conquer the Universe". In a scene from the serial Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor and companions escape from Dalek pursuers by climbing into a ceiling duct. The Fourth Doctor calls down, "If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us?"[22] The Daleks generally make up for their general lack of mobility with overwhelming firepower; a joke among Doctor Who fans goes, "Real Daleks don't climb stairs; they level the building."[23] Dalek mobility has improved over the history of the series: in their first appearance, The Daleks, they were capable of movement only on the conductive metal floors of their city; in The Dalek Invasion of Earth a Dalek emerges from the waters of the River Thames, indicating that they not only had become freely mobile, but are amphibious;[24] Planet of the Daleks showed that they could ascend a vertical shaft by means of an external anti-gravity mat placed on the floor; and Remembrance of the Daleks depicted them as capable of hovering up a flight of stairs.[25]Despite this, journalists covering the series frequently refer to the Daleks' supposed inability to climb stairs; characters escaping up a flight of stairs in the 2005 episode "Dalek" made the same joke, and were shocked when the Dalek began to hover up the stairs after uttering the phrase "ELEVATE", in a similar manner to their normal phrase "EXTERMINATE.".[9] The new series depicts the Daleks as fully capable of flight, even space flight.
Dalek in-universe history has seen many retroactive changes, which have caused continuity problems.[78] When the Daleks first appeared in The Daleks, they were presented as the descendants of the Dals, mutated after a brief nuclear war between the Dal and Thal races.[79] In 1975, Terry Nation revised the Daleks' origins in Genesis of the Daleks, where the Dals were now called Kaleds(of which "Daleks" is an anagram), and the Dalek design was attributed to one man, the crippled Kaled chief scientist and evil genius, Davros.[80] Instead of a short nuclear exchange, the Kaled-Thal war was portrayed as a thousand-year-long war of attrition, fought with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons causing widespread mutations among the Kaled race. Davros experimented on living Kaled cells to find the ultimate mutated form of the Kaled species and placed the subjects in tank-like "travel machines" whose design was based on his own life-support chair.[80]
Genesis of the Daleks marked a new era for the depiction of the species, with most of their previous history either forgotten or barely referred to again.[81] Future stories in the original Doctor Whoseries, which followed a rough story arc,[82] would also focus more on Davros, much to the dissatisfaction of some fans who felt that the Daleks should take centre stage rather than merely becoming minions of their creator.[83] Davros made his last televised appearance for 20 years in Remembrance of the Daleks, which depicted a civil war between two factions of Daleks. One, the "Imperial Daleks", were loyal to Davros, who had become their Emperor, whilst the other, the "Renegade Daleks", followed a black Supreme Dalek.[37]
A single Dalek appeared in "Dalek", written by Robert Shearman, which was broadcast on BBC One on 30 April 2005. This Dalek appeared to be the sole Dalek survivor of the Time War which had destroyed both the Daleks and the Time Lords.[9] A Dalek Emperor returned at the end of the 2005 series, having rebuilt the Dalek race with genetic material harvested with human subjects. It saw itself as a god, and the new Daleks were shown worshipping it. These Daleks and their fleet were destroyed in "The Parting of the Ways".[14] The 2006 season finale "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday" featured a squad of four Dalek survivors from the old Empire, known as the Cult of Skaro, led by a black Dalek named "Sec", that had survived the Time War by escaping into the Void between dimensions. They emerged, along with a Time Lord prison vessel containing millions of Daleks, at Canary Wharf due to the actions of the Torchwood Institute and Cybermen from a parallel world. This resulted in a Cyberman-Dalek clash in London, which was resolved when the Tenth Doctor caused both factions to be sucked back into the Void. The Cult survived by utilising an "emergency temporal shift" to escape.[11][84] They would later appear in the two-part story "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks", in which whilst stranded in 1930s New York, they set up a base in the partially built Empire State Building and attempt to rebuild the Dalek race. To this end Dalek Sec merges with a human being to become a Human/Dalek hybrid. The Cult then set about creating "Human Daleks" by "formatting" the brains of a few thousand captured humans, with the intention of producing hybrids which remain fully human in appearance but with Dalek minds.[15] The plot is ultimately foiled due to interference by the Doctor, and Cult members Daleks Sec, Jast and Thay are destroyed. The remaining Cult member, Dalek Caan, once again escapes using a temporal shift.[15]
The Daleks returned in the 2008 seasons' two-part finale, "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End", accompanied once again by their creator Davros. The story reveals that Caan's temporal shift sent him into the Time War where he rescued Davros, in the process gaining the ability to see the future at the cost of his own sanity. The episode depicts a Dalek invasion of Earth led by Caan, Davros, and a red Supreme Dalek, who has kept Caan and Davros imprisoned in "The Vault", a section of the Dalek flagship, the Crucible. Davros and the Daleks plan to destroy reality itself with a "reality bomb". The plan fails due to the interference of the Doctor, his companions and Caan himself, who has been manipulating events to destroy the Daleks after realising the severity of the atrocities they have committed.[17][85] The Daleks returned in the 2010 episode "Victory of the Daleks", the third episode of the series; Daleks who escaped the destruction of Davros' empire fell back in time and, by chance, managed to retrieve the "Progenator".[86] This is a tiny apparatus which contains 'original' Dalek DNA. The activation of the Progenator results in the creation of a "new paradigm" of Daleks. The New Paradigm Daleks deem their creators inferior and exterminate them; their creators make no resistance to this, deeming themselves inferior as well. They are organised into different roles (drone, scientist, strategists, supreme and eternal), which are identifiable with colour-coded armour instead of the identification plates under the eyestalk used by their predecessors.[87] The Daleks only cameo in subsequent finales "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang" (2010) and "The Wedding of River Song" (2011) as Steven Moffat decided to "give them a rest" and stated "There's a problem with the Daleks. They are the most famous of the Doctor's adversaries and the most frequent, which means they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe."
Dalek cultureDaleks have little, if any, individual personality,[11] ostensibly no emotions other than hatred and anger,[9] and a strict command structure in which they are conditioned to obey superiors' orders without question.[89] Dalek speech is characterised by repeated phrases, and by orders given to themselves and to others.[90] Unlike the stereotypical emotionless robots often found in science fiction, Daleks are often angry; author Kim Newman has described the Daleks as behaving "like toddlers in perpetual hissy fits", gloating when in power and throwing tantrums when thwarted.[91]They tend to be excitable and will repeat the same word or phrase over and over again in heightened emotional states, most famously "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
In terms of their behaviour Daleks are extremely aggressive, and seem driven by an instinct to attack. This instinct is so strong that Daleks have been depicted fighting the urge to kill[15][38] or even attacking when unarmed.[9][92] The Fifth Doctor characterises this impulse by saying, "However you respond [to Daleks] is seen as an act of provocation."[38] The fundamental feature of Dalek culture and psychology is an unquestioned belief in the superiority of the Dalek race,[89] and their default directive is to destroy all non-Dalek life-forms.[9] Other species are either to be exterminated immediately, or enslaved and then exterminated later once they are no longer useful.[38]
The Dalek obsession with their own superiority is illustrated by the schism between the Renegade and Imperial Daleks seen in Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks: the two factions consider the other to be a perversion despite the relatively minor differences between them.[37] This intolerance of any "contamination" within themselves is also shown in "Dalek",[9] The Evil of the Daleks[89] and in the Big Finish Productions audio play The Mutant Phase.[93] This superiority complex is the basis of the Daleks' ruthlessness and lack of compassion.[9][89] This is shown in extreme in Victory of the Daleks, where the new, pure Daleks destroy their creator, impure Daleks, with their consent. It is nearly impossible to negotiate or reason with a Dalek, a single-mindedness that makes them dangerous and not to be underestimated.[9]
Dalek society is depicted as one of extreme scientific and technological advancement; the Third Doctor states that "it was their inventive genius that made them one of the greatest powers in the universe."[92] However, their reliance on logic and machinery is also a strategic weakness which they recognise,[40][37] and thus use more emotion-driven species as agents to compensate for these shortcomings.[37][38][89]
Although the Daleks are not known for their regard for due process, they have taken at least two enemies back to Skaro for a "trial", rather than killing them immediately. The first was their creator, Davros, in Revelation of the Daleks,[36] and the second was the renegade Time Lord known as the Master in the 1996 television movie.[94] The reasons for the Master's trial, and why the Doctor would be asked to retrieve the Master's remains, have never been explained on screen. The Doctor Who Annual 2006 implies that the trial may have been due to a treaty signed between the Time Lords and the Daleks.[95] The framing device for the I, Davros audio plays is a Dalek trial to determine if Davros should be the Daleks' leader once more.[96]
Spin-off novels contain several tongue-in-cheek mentions of Dalek poetry, and an anecdote about an opera based upon it, which was lost to posterity when the entire cast was exterminated on the opening night. Two stanzas are given in the novel The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch.[97] In an alternative timeline portrayed in Big Finish Productions audio adventure The Time of the Daleks, the Daleks show a fondness for the works of Shakespeare.[98] A similar idea was satirised by comedian Frankie Boyle in the BBC comedy quiz programme Mock the Week; he gave the fictional Dalek poem "Daffodils; EXTERMINATE DAFFODILS!" as an "unlikely line to hear in Doctor Who".[99]
Because the Doctor has defeated the Daleks so often, he has become their collective arch-enemy and they have standing orders to capture or exterminate him on sight. In later fiction, the Daleks know the Doctor as "Ka Faraq Gatri" ("Bringer of Darkness" or "Destroyer of Worlds"), and "The Oncoming Storm".[14][85] Both the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) suggest that the Doctor is one of the few beings the Daleks fear. In "Doomsday", Rose notes that while the Daleks see the extermination of five million Cybermen as "pest control", "one Doctor" visibly un-nerves them (to the point they physically recoil).
Physical characteristicsExternally, Daleks normally resemble human-sized salt and pepper shakers[1] with a single mechanical eyestalk mounted on a rotating dome, a gun mount containing an energy weapon (or "death ray") and a telescopic manipulator arm which is usually tipped by an appendage resembling a sink plunger. Daleks have been seen to be able to use their plungers to interface with technology,[9] crush a man's skull by suction,[9] measure the intelligence of a subject,[10] and extract information from a man's mind.[11] Dalek casings are made of a bonded polycarbide material dubbed "dalekanium" by a member of the human resistance in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and by the Cult of Skaro in "Daleks in Manhattan".[10][12]
The lower half of a Dalek's shell is covered with hemispherical protrusions, or "Dalek bumps", which are shown in the episode "Dalek" to be spheres embedded in the casing.[9] Both the BBC-licensed Dalek Book (1964) and The Doctor Who Technical Manual (1983) describe these items as being part of a sensory array,[13] whilst in the 2005 series episode "Dalek", they are shown to serve a function in a Dalek's self-destruct mechanism.[9] Their armour has a forcefield that evaporates most bullets and resists most types of energy weapon; this seems to be concentrated around the Dalek's midsection (where the mutant is located), as normally ineffective firepower can be concentrated on the eyestalk to blind a Dalek. Daleks have a very limited field of vision, with no peripheral sight at all, and are relatively easy to hide from in fairly exposed places.[14] Their own energy weapons have also been shown to be capable of destroying them.[15] Their weapons fire a beam that has electrical tendencies, is capable of propagating through water and may be a form of plasma. The eyepiece is a Dalek's most vulnerable spot, and impairing its vision often leads to a blind, panicked firing of its weapon whilst shouting, "My vision is impaired; I cannot see!" Russell T Davies subverted the catchphrase in his 2008 episode "The Stolen Earth", in which a Dalek vaporises a paintball that has blocked its vision while proclaiming "My vision is not impaired!".[16][17]
The creature has an amorphous body, slightly smaller than the man's head, and several tentacles, some of which are partly wrapped around the man's body.
The creature inside the mechanical casing is depicted as soft and repulsive in appearance and vicious even without its mechanical armour. The first-ever glimpse of a Dalek mutant, in The Daleks, was a claw peeking out from under a Thal cloak after it had been removed from its casing.[18] The actual appearance of the mutants has varied, but often adheres to the Doctor's description of the species in Remembrance of the Daleks as "little green blobs in bonded polycarbide armour".[19] In Resurrection of the Daleks a Dalek creature, separated from its casing, attacks and severely injures a human soldier;[20] in Revelation of the Daleks, there are two Dalek factions and the creatures inside have a different appearance in each case, one resembling the amorphous creature from Resurrection, the other the crab-like creature from the original Dalek serial. As the creature inside is rarely seen on screen, a common misconception exists that Daleks are wholly mechanical robots.[21] As of the new series Daleks are shown to be mollusc-like in appearance, with small tentacles, one or two eyes and an exposed brain.[9]
The voice of a Dalek is electronic; the Dalek creature is apparently unable to make much more than squeaking sounds when out of its casing.[20] Once the mutant is removed, the casing itself can be entered and operated by humanoids; for example, in The Daleks, Ian Chesterton (William Russell) enters a Dalek shell to masquerade as a guard as part of an escape plan.[18]
An Imperial Dalek flies up a flight of stairs (from Remembrance of the Daleks)
For many years it was assumed that, due to their design and gliding motion, Daleks were unable to climb stairs, and that this was a simple way of escaping them. A well known cartoon from Punch pictured a group of Daleks at the foot of a flight of stairs with the caption, "Well, this certainly buggers our plan to conquer the Universe". In a scene from the serial Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor and companions escape from Dalek pursuers by climbing into a ceiling duct. The Fourth Doctor calls down, "If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us?"[22] The Daleks generally make up for their general lack of mobility with overwhelming firepower; a joke among Doctor Who fans goes, "Real Daleks don't climb stairs; they level the building."[23] Dalek mobility has improved over the history of the series: in their first appearance, The Daleks, they were capable of movement only on the conductive metal floors of their city; in The Dalek Invasion of Earth a Dalek emerges from the waters of the River Thames, indicating that they not only had become freely mobile, but are amphibious;[24] Planet of the Daleks showed that they could ascend a vertical shaft by means of an external anti-gravity mat placed on the floor; and Remembrance of the Daleks depicted them as capable of hovering up a flight of stairs.[25]Despite this, journalists covering the series frequently refer to the Daleks' supposed inability to climb stairs; characters escaping up a flight of stairs in the 2005 episode "Dalek" made the same joke, and were shocked when the Dalek began to hover up the stairs after uttering the phrase "ELEVATE", in a similar manner to their normal phrase "EXTERMINATE.".[9] The new series depicts the Daleks as fully capable of flight, even space flight.
Dalek in-universe history has seen many retroactive changes, which have caused continuity problems.[78] When the Daleks first appeared in The Daleks, they were presented as the descendants of the Dals, mutated after a brief nuclear war between the Dal and Thal races.[79] In 1975, Terry Nation revised the Daleks' origins in Genesis of the Daleks, where the Dals were now called Kaleds(of which "Daleks" is an anagram), and the Dalek design was attributed to one man, the crippled Kaled chief scientist and evil genius, Davros.[80] Instead of a short nuclear exchange, the Kaled-Thal war was portrayed as a thousand-year-long war of attrition, fought with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons causing widespread mutations among the Kaled race. Davros experimented on living Kaled cells to find the ultimate mutated form of the Kaled species and placed the subjects in tank-like "travel machines" whose design was based on his own life-support chair.[80]
Genesis of the Daleks marked a new era for the depiction of the species, with most of their previous history either forgotten or barely referred to again.[81] Future stories in the original Doctor Whoseries, which followed a rough story arc,[82] would also focus more on Davros, much to the dissatisfaction of some fans who felt that the Daleks should take centre stage rather than merely becoming minions of their creator.[83] Davros made his last televised appearance for 20 years in Remembrance of the Daleks, which depicted a civil war between two factions of Daleks. One, the "Imperial Daleks", were loyal to Davros, who had become their Emperor, whilst the other, the "Renegade Daleks", followed a black Supreme Dalek.[37]
A single Dalek appeared in "Dalek", written by Robert Shearman, which was broadcast on BBC One on 30 April 2005. This Dalek appeared to be the sole Dalek survivor of the Time War which had destroyed both the Daleks and the Time Lords.[9] A Dalek Emperor returned at the end of the 2005 series, having rebuilt the Dalek race with genetic material harvested with human subjects. It saw itself as a god, and the new Daleks were shown worshipping it. These Daleks and their fleet were destroyed in "The Parting of the Ways".[14] The 2006 season finale "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday" featured a squad of four Dalek survivors from the old Empire, known as the Cult of Skaro, led by a black Dalek named "Sec", that had survived the Time War by escaping into the Void between dimensions. They emerged, along with a Time Lord prison vessel containing millions of Daleks, at Canary Wharf due to the actions of the Torchwood Institute and Cybermen from a parallel world. This resulted in a Cyberman-Dalek clash in London, which was resolved when the Tenth Doctor caused both factions to be sucked back into the Void. The Cult survived by utilising an "emergency temporal shift" to escape.[11][84] They would later appear in the two-part story "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks", in which whilst stranded in 1930s New York, they set up a base in the partially built Empire State Building and attempt to rebuild the Dalek race. To this end Dalek Sec merges with a human being to become a Human/Dalek hybrid. The Cult then set about creating "Human Daleks" by "formatting" the brains of a few thousand captured humans, with the intention of producing hybrids which remain fully human in appearance but with Dalek minds.[15] The plot is ultimately foiled due to interference by the Doctor, and Cult members Daleks Sec, Jast and Thay are destroyed. The remaining Cult member, Dalek Caan, once again escapes using a temporal shift.[15]
The Daleks returned in the 2008 seasons' two-part finale, "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End", accompanied once again by their creator Davros. The story reveals that Caan's temporal shift sent him into the Time War where he rescued Davros, in the process gaining the ability to see the future at the cost of his own sanity. The episode depicts a Dalek invasion of Earth led by Caan, Davros, and a red Supreme Dalek, who has kept Caan and Davros imprisoned in "The Vault", a section of the Dalek flagship, the Crucible. Davros and the Daleks plan to destroy reality itself with a "reality bomb". The plan fails due to the interference of the Doctor, his companions and Caan himself, who has been manipulating events to destroy the Daleks after realising the severity of the atrocities they have committed.[17][85] The Daleks returned in the 2010 episode "Victory of the Daleks", the third episode of the series; Daleks who escaped the destruction of Davros' empire fell back in time and, by chance, managed to retrieve the "Progenator".[86] This is a tiny apparatus which contains 'original' Dalek DNA. The activation of the Progenator results in the creation of a "new paradigm" of Daleks. The New Paradigm Daleks deem their creators inferior and exterminate them; their creators make no resistance to this, deeming themselves inferior as well. They are organised into different roles (drone, scientist, strategists, supreme and eternal), which are identifiable with colour-coded armour instead of the identification plates under the eyestalk used by their predecessors.[87] The Daleks only cameo in subsequent finales "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang" (2010) and "The Wedding of River Song" (2011) as Steven Moffat decided to "give them a rest" and stated "There's a problem with the Daleks. They are the most famous of the Doctor's adversaries and the most frequent, which means they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe."
Dalek cultureDaleks have little, if any, individual personality,[11] ostensibly no emotions other than hatred and anger,[9] and a strict command structure in which they are conditioned to obey superiors' orders without question.[89] Dalek speech is characterised by repeated phrases, and by orders given to themselves and to others.[90] Unlike the stereotypical emotionless robots often found in science fiction, Daleks are often angry; author Kim Newman has described the Daleks as behaving "like toddlers in perpetual hissy fits", gloating when in power and throwing tantrums when thwarted.[91]They tend to be excitable and will repeat the same word or phrase over and over again in heightened emotional states, most famously "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
In terms of their behaviour Daleks are extremely aggressive, and seem driven by an instinct to attack. This instinct is so strong that Daleks have been depicted fighting the urge to kill[15][38] or even attacking when unarmed.[9][92] The Fifth Doctor characterises this impulse by saying, "However you respond [to Daleks] is seen as an act of provocation."[38] The fundamental feature of Dalek culture and psychology is an unquestioned belief in the superiority of the Dalek race,[89] and their default directive is to destroy all non-Dalek life-forms.[9] Other species are either to be exterminated immediately, or enslaved and then exterminated later once they are no longer useful.[38]
The Dalek obsession with their own superiority is illustrated by the schism between the Renegade and Imperial Daleks seen in Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks: the two factions consider the other to be a perversion despite the relatively minor differences between them.[37] This intolerance of any "contamination" within themselves is also shown in "Dalek",[9] The Evil of the Daleks[89] and in the Big Finish Productions audio play The Mutant Phase.[93] This superiority complex is the basis of the Daleks' ruthlessness and lack of compassion.[9][89] This is shown in extreme in Victory of the Daleks, where the new, pure Daleks destroy their creator, impure Daleks, with their consent. It is nearly impossible to negotiate or reason with a Dalek, a single-mindedness that makes them dangerous and not to be underestimated.[9]
Dalek society is depicted as one of extreme scientific and technological advancement; the Third Doctor states that "it was their inventive genius that made them one of the greatest powers in the universe."[92] However, their reliance on logic and machinery is also a strategic weakness which they recognise,[40][37] and thus use more emotion-driven species as agents to compensate for these shortcomings.[37][38][89]
Although the Daleks are not known for their regard for due process, they have taken at least two enemies back to Skaro for a "trial", rather than killing them immediately. The first was their creator, Davros, in Revelation of the Daleks,[36] and the second was the renegade Time Lord known as the Master in the 1996 television movie.[94] The reasons for the Master's trial, and why the Doctor would be asked to retrieve the Master's remains, have never been explained on screen. The Doctor Who Annual 2006 implies that the trial may have been due to a treaty signed between the Time Lords and the Daleks.[95] The framing device for the I, Davros audio plays is a Dalek trial to determine if Davros should be the Daleks' leader once more.[96]
Spin-off novels contain several tongue-in-cheek mentions of Dalek poetry, and an anecdote about an opera based upon it, which was lost to posterity when the entire cast was exterminated on the opening night. Two stanzas are given in the novel The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch.[97] In an alternative timeline portrayed in Big Finish Productions audio adventure The Time of the Daleks, the Daleks show a fondness for the works of Shakespeare.[98] A similar idea was satirised by comedian Frankie Boyle in the BBC comedy quiz programme Mock the Week; he gave the fictional Dalek poem "Daffodils; EXTERMINATE DAFFODILS!" as an "unlikely line to hear in Doctor Who".[99]
Because the Doctor has defeated the Daleks so often, he has become their collective arch-enemy and they have standing orders to capture or exterminate him on sight. In later fiction, the Daleks know the Doctor as "Ka Faraq Gatri" ("Bringer of Darkness" or "Destroyer of Worlds"), and "The Oncoming Storm".[14][85] Both the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) suggest that the Doctor is one of the few beings the Daleks fear. In "Doomsday", Rose notes that while the Daleks see the extermination of five million Cybermen as "pest control", "one Doctor" visibly un-nerves them (to the point they physically recoil).