Dalek War Chapter III
Suz slowly recovers from her Dalek-inflicted ordeal, which reveals that she is indeed in possession of the Emperor Dalek’s consciousness. In Earth’s solar system, Kalendorf’s crew explores the terraformed Jupiter with disastrous results, and the Mentor – the leader of the alternate universe Daleks – strips him of his command. When his ship is attacked, Kalendorf takes advantage of the confusion to escape, and makes a beeline for Mirana’s ship, which is also returning to the solar system under Dalek control. When he reaches the ship and is reunited with Suz, Alby begins to suspect the same thing of which the Mentor has accused Kalendorf: the leader of the rebellion has switched sides.
written by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Nicholas BriggsCast: Sarah Mowat (Susan Mendes), Teresa Gallagher (Mirana), Gareth Thomas (Kalendorf), Mark McDonnell (Alby Brook), Dannie Carr (Morli), Jeremy James (Herrick / Trooper / Vaarga Man), Ian Brooker (Marber / Sparks), Hannah Smith (The Mentor), Steven Elder (Siy Tarkov), Karen Henson (Saloran Hardew), Nicholas Briggs (Daleks), Simon Bridge (Scientist), Mark Donovan (Allenby)
LogBook entry by Earl Green
Hundreds of years after the Great Catastrophe that reduced many of the galaxy’s civilizations to rubble, Galactic Union agent Sy Tarkov seeks the expertise of Saloran Hardew, a researcher who has a theory that the Catastrophe was caused by one man named Kalendorf. She tells Tarkov of Kalendorf’s seeming betrayal of his own friends and allies, and how Kalendorf even handed Susan Mendes over to the Daleks he had pledged his life to fight, all in a cunning scheme to infiltrate the Daleks’ command network. And she tells Tarkov that, despite Kalendorf’s apparent defeat of the Daleks centuries ago, there are signs that they’re about to return – and this time the decimated galaxy isn’t ready to repel them. 
On the planet Gallifrey, oblivious to the coming inauguration of the new President of the High Council, an author known only as the Doctor spends most of his days in an illegal Possibility Generator, researching and reliving events from the history of a primitive world called Earth, upon which his books are based. As his robotic drudge Badger tends to his needs, the Doctor stays in seclusion and fends off the recurring visits of his dreaded great-grand-uncle, Ordinal-General Quences, who has long harbored an ambition of maneuvering the Doctor into the presidency to gain prestige and influence for their family. Another member of the Doctor’s family, claiming to be his great granddaughter Susan, appears, and the Doctor learns that Susan is the new President-elect, and Quences hopes to follow her into a life of prestige. Having dreamt for years of stealing a TARDIS and fleeing Gallifrey with Susan under his wing, the Doctor finally rebels against Quences by overloading the Possibility Generator and flooding the Capitol with its alternate realities. Now, at last, perhaps the Doctor can escape his staid life – or perhaps he won’t. And perhaps Susan will come with him – or perhaps she won’t.
The Doctor parks the TARDIS in orbit of the planet Veln to make some minor repairs, when his time vehicle is further damaged by a toxic gas leaking from a nearby freighter on a collision course. He slips the TARDIS forward by a century and sets down on Veln, finding that the atmosphere is saturated with the same deadly gas. He goes to warn the residents of a nearby mansion of the danger, and leaves Nyssa at the TARDIS. A young woman approaches Nyssa, armed with a scalpel and intent on committing suicide. When the authorities arrive, Nyssa is charged with murder, taken to Veln’s central security block, and is interrogated brutally. The Doctor’s attempts to help are blocked by Lady Forleon, who owns the mansion and seems to have a secret of her own to keep – and her agenda may or may not include preventing the Doctor from trying to rescue Nyssa. In the meantime, blood tests have revealed that Nyssa is an alien, throwing Gilbrook, a Veln security officer, into an increasing state of paranoia. Veln’s own past history with alien visitors hasn’t been pleasant, what with the Koteem freighter which, four generations ago, veered off course to avoid a collision and fatally polluted Veln’s atmosphere…
Martin Bannister, in 1961, was voted one of the Times‘ ten most promising young writers for his innovative stage plays. But he tried to venture into television, and was recruited for a new BBC science fiction program called Doctor Who. Despite his extraordinary efforts to define the show’s characters, themes and parameters, Martin watched as Doctor Who made it as far as one failed pilot episode before being abandoned by the BBC. Now, 40 years later, Martin is confined to a nursing home, subjected to unsettling visits by his adult son, who’s still bitter that Martin divorced his mother when he was only six. Martin isn’t sure what is the truth and what isn’t from what his son tells him, and this isn’t the only place he’s having problems with reality – he imagines a burgeoning romance with a nurse, he imagines that he’s being tapped to write the celebratory 40th anniversary comeback of Doctor Who (but why celebrate a show that was never made?), and he imagines that he is the Doctor, that most mysterious traveler in time and space. Will Martin Bannister trade his unpromising reality for an unrealized fantasy?
Trapped by the Time Lords and tried for the crime of interfering in history, the Doctor is scheduled to be exiled to Earth – but he escapes into his TARDIS and leaves Gallifrey. Not that this really does him much good, as he winds up trapped on Earth anyway. A few incarnations later, the Doctor’s situation has become even more unsettling – he has not only changed bodies, but changed gender as well. Without her TARDIS, the Doctor becomes bored, listless, and – with the help of two friends she makes on a job she takes to eke out a meager existence – perhaps just a little bit alcoholic. Or perhaps a lot – the Doctor begins to see and hear her previous (male) incarnation, warning her of alien invasions and labyrinthine plots against modern-day Earth. When the Time Lords send two agents to track the Doctor down and bring her back to justice (though they don’t know that the Doctor is now a woman), the only thing standing between the Doctor and her doom is an increasing reliance on the bottle. When it comes right down to it, which oblivion will the Doctor choose?
A virus called NFS – Neurotransmitter Failure Syndrome – has swept the galaxy, laying entire populations to waste. Siy Tarkov, after discovering evidence of an impending Dalek invasion, fell victim to NFS after leaving Velyshaa and placed himself in suspended animation after helplessly watching the rest of his crew die. His desperate distress signal, warning of the Dalek approach, has gone undetected…except by a mysterious man named Selestru, who hires a space traveler named Galanar to find Tarkov’s drifting ship and bring Tarkov back. Selestru wants to know more about the Daleks, and he wants to know about the planet Velyshaa, which has fallen off of the galactic star charts and into the realm of myth.
Galanar, traveling incognito as a doctor, backtracks Siy Tarkov’s two-decade journey, and decides to investigate the planet Skelanis, where “the Healers” are rumored to be fighting the NFS plague. On Graxis Major, when one of Commander Saxton’s crew refuses to obey a Dalek order, the Daleks show their true colors by exterminating him on the spot. Saxton and the surviving Wardens are rounded up and imprisoned, but Saxton stubbornly insists on formulating an escape plan. Without realizing it, Galanar is being spirited away to Skelanis VIII, which the Daleks have “geoformed” and turned into a massive medical facility. Having only heard Tarkov’s word that the Daleks are a force for evil, Galanar wonders if the Daleks – known here as the healers – are as bad as their reputation. And as Selestru continues to demand more information from him, Tarkov wonders precisely who his rescuer and benefactor is.
Selestru takes Tarkov to meet with the leaders of the Galactic Council, warning them of the imminent threat posed by the Daleks, but the warning is dismissed as unfounded hysteria. Selestru’s case isn’t helped by the fact that he hasn’t received any new information from Galanar. Desperate to bring new facts about the Daleks to light, Selestru sends Tarkov and a woman who claims to be his daughter on another intelligence gathering mission. But the chairman of the Council confronts Selestru with proof that the woman with Tarkov may not be who Selestru thinks she is. And when he breaks cover in the heart of the Dalek base on Skelanis VIII, Galanar is captured and brought before the Dalek Supreme, who says that Galanar isn’t who he thinks he is, either.
Galanar is told that he is a creation of the alternate Daleks who emerged from the Project Infinity dimensional rift two millennia ago. Genetically engineered to have abilities beyond normal humans, Galanar is one of the only experiments to survive. And it turns out that someone else on Skelanis VIII is another one of the surviving experiments, a woman named Elaria. Galanar also learns that the Daleks are trying to find the planet Velyshaa. With Elaria’s help, Galanar frees Tarkov – posing as a patient in the Daleks’ treatment center, and the only man alive who has been to Velyshaa and knows how to go back – and together they launch a desperate escape attempt.
Commander Frey Saxton leads a charge against the Daleks, with hundreds of Graxis Wardens as her army and an armed but battered freighter at her disposal. During the attack on Skelanis VIII, Frey’s crew rescues Galanar, Elaria, and Tarkov from a waiting Dalek force. Once aboard Frey’s ship, however, Tarkov turns against his rescuers, believing that they work for the Daleks, until Frey manages to smooth things over and Tarkov agrees to lead the Graxis Wardens to Velyshaa. There, he believes, they will find the final telepathic imprint left by a man called Kalendorf who fought in the last great war against the Daleks, though what information he might have left behind 2,000 years ago is anybody’s guess. Something else that no one can even begin to guess at is the true nature of the cure that the Daleks are offering to the plague sweeping the galaxy.
Notes: One of the Daleks refers to a refueling station called Exxilon Gamma 9 – apparently despite the trouble they encountered on Exxilon during their final clash with the third Doctor, the Daleks prevailed against the planet’s many perils.
Galanar, Tarkov and Frey’s crew are finally en route to Velyshaa, only someone has betrayed them to the Daleks, who will soon follow. The source of the plague is discovered to have been the Daleks all along, only their cure is merely a way to mutate the victims into a new army of Daleks. The Graxis Wardens find the evidence they need on Velyshaa to warn the Galactic Union of the Daleks’ plan, only their ship is destroyed before they can leave with that evidence. The human race may finally have the means to destroy the Daleks, only they’ll have to become equally ruthless – and perhaps, in the end, as inhuman as the Daleks themselves.
Professor Bernice Summerfield is contracted by a man named Lynton, claiming to be a representative of a mining consortium whose operations on Tysir IV have been brought to a screeching halt by an underground discovery that could be of great archaeological importance. That, and the fact that he’s a fan of Benny’s books, is what prompted him to secure her services to investigate the find. Benny warns Lynton that her appraisal can’t be bought for any price, but when she sees it for herself – with Lynton insisting that he must accompany her – she is stunned: a huge metallic structure with doors has been uncovered. Once she and Lynton figure out how to open the doors – which can only be unlocked by solving a logic puzzle – Benny realizes that the enormous chambers are a sleeping tomb of Cybermen. And only then does she realize that Lynton knew this all along. But why would he want to unleash the Cybermen?
An attack on a space cruiser they’re visiting forces the Doctor and Melanie to evacuate by any means necessary. Mel manages to make her way to an escape pod, which takes her to a research colony on the planet Lethe. The Doctor and the TARDIS, however, are captured by the Daleks, who offer to send the Doctor to Lethe too…so long as he reports back on what their creator, Davros, is doing there. When the Doctor arrives, he finds that Davros has managed to conceal his appearance and is calling himself Professor Vaso – and worse yet, he has unearthed specimens of one of the Daleks’ worst enemies, the Mechonoids. Davros has quietly set up self-replication facilities for the Mechonoids, aware of their potential for battling the Daleks, claiming that he hopes to atone for his past by ridding the universe of his creations. But even with this claim of a noble mission, the Doctor sees Davros up to his old tricks, leaving a trail of death in his wake. But when the Doctor fulfills his end of the bargain and alerts the Daleks, who still want to capture Davros and try him for crimes against them, things only get worse, with an entire colony of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of a new Dalek-Mechonoid war.
On the eve of the launch of the new series of Doctor Who in 2005, Anthony Stewart Head (of Buffy fame) narrates a series of behind-the-scenes interviews conducted with the cast, crew and creative staff behind the new show during filming.