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Genesis of the Daleks question

EJA

Fleet Captain
In the classic serial Genesis of the Daleks, the Fourth Doctor is sent back in time by the Time Lords to Skaro's past. Just how much of the Dalek's history is altered by the Doctor's actions here? This is something I don't think has really been addressed much.
 
As you say, it hasn't been addressed much, but it is worth noting that prior to Genesis the Daleks were -usually- portrayed as a very large, cohesive space power. After Genesis they seem considerably weaker, having to repeatedly return to their creator for help.
 
That makes me wonder what became of Susan, if the Daleks didn't invade Earth in the 22nd century?
 
The Seventh Doctor briefly mentions the Dalek invasion of Earth in the 22nd century in Remembrance, and the way he said it seemed to imply that it was still part of the current timeline.
 
First off, they were the only life form the existed in seven galaxy's closest their science was capable of cataloguing?

It's pretty obvious that Skaro was protected as everything within a trillion trillion trillion light years march of itself was raised and blanched by some super weapon. Now whether that was the Timelords first attempt at killing the first Daleks which the future Daleks cockblocked because it was such an inelegant fumble they couldn't help but pary, that the timelords had no choice but to follow up using a more surgical strike through a third party to have all seem on the level as the daleks were trying to knock Gallifrey out of orbit millions of years before the Timelords climbed out of the oceans, like 90 percent of what happened in South East Asia from 1949 through 1975... OR it was the future Daleks who devastated their former neighbours into a state of non-existence to increase the natural xenophobia they grew up with a billion fold that now other life in the universe was not merely just intolerable but insistently impossible and then if/when confronted with any specious differing opinion, that they were not alone, they would bloodily move all the heavens to maintain that impossibility as status quo, FACT and an incontrovertible "good".

Note, from the dalek Invasion of Earth:

IAN: Doctor, I don't understand this at all. We saw the Daleks destroyed on Skaro. We were there.
DOCTOR: My dear boy, what in Skaro was a million years ahead of us in the future. What we're seeing now is about the middle history of the Daleks.
IAN: I see. They certainly look different, don't they.
It's plain to see that in the first Dalek story set in around the earth year 1,001,964 (Where it was claimed that the daleks evolved from humanioid creatures called "Dals"), that if the creation of the daleks took place some time during I would think earth's dark to middle ages given that their were space faring human slave workers being used in destiny of the daleks to excavate towards where Davros was woken after only many many many centuries after his assasination during Genesis of the daleks, then certainly we have to conclude that the Daleks never ever left Skaro in the most original timeline and that over and over again their history has been played with by a bunch of cowboys.

(Unless this was a Zoo in the first adventure where the last daleks were programmed to live out their lives in the belief that they free and that there was no other life in the universe after they'd gone through all the shenanigans we have been led to believe is in their character.)

Speaking of the Dalek Invasion of earth, a decade later, Day of the Daleks kicked that history in the nuts and saw probably completely another fate for Susan too, as the Daleks had claimed to have "reversed their loss in 2157 with Time travel". Was the earth "mobile" in Day of the Daleks? And if it was, what attracting force was keeping all those time travellers moored tot he same locusses? Though I suppose the planet is revolving around the sun which is revolving around the galactic core which is revolving around god? Oh, and if the earth was mobile in day of the daleks, where the daleks obviously in command of a much lower technological sophistication still, for the first time, trying to make a/the Crucible?

but to answer your question:

SARAH: The incubator room, were you able to do anything?
DOCTOR: Yes, with a little help from a Dalek. But I'm afraid I've only delayed them for a short time. Perhaps a thousand years.
SARAH: What?
DOCTOR: In the total time scale, no more than that.
Every masterplan the Daleks had, got delayed for a thousand years, every enemy they did fight whom that had fought before in some previous timeline is now a thousand years stronger and wiser or more likely to be lulled or already quite extinct, leaving the Daleks less "familiar" playmates this time around to face a completely different rogues Gallery altogether. Consider the different strategies the Daleks would have had to use if they attacked our Earth a thousand years ago, today, or a thousand years from now?

Genesis was not the first time their history had been screwed with and it would most likely not be the last.

Consider how the Doctor says that all the Daleks are dead in Season one, but Jack says that all the Daleks just vanished one day in his future during the 51st century. obviously that just means that the Daleks used a paradox machine to draw reinforcements from every point in history simultaneously for some great push during the time war which completely fucks with any sense of destiny and predestination that Daleks can still be invading Earth who have already been removed from time thousands and thousands of times ad infinitum as they are still Jove help us, exterminating Thals, Humans and whatever for the benediction of greater Dalek good.
 
Which might mean that after the both ends of the war were locked, and the strife that remained inbetween and ongoing, that Harry and Sarah continued to have somewhat alternate adventures on Skaro and other places if the time ring could no longer take them back to earth from out of the locked war? Although a burnt earth described in the Space Station Nerva trilogy(?) does track well against the revelations of timelord corruption from the Trial of a Time Lord serials two decades later.

Consider, if they wanted to keep the Doctor out of it during the first phases of the war, either because they didn't trust him, or they didn't "believe" in him so much as yet, or keep him safe since they were waiting for Eight to be their soldier in the War, how else to bring about those coincidences than to exile the Doctor on Earth and force a regeneration on him all because he stumbled across a secret gallifreian recruiting drive for the timewar which is REALLY what was happening during the War Games?
 
Calling GotD the beginning of the Time War was RTD's attempt to retcon it into his own mythology. Calling it a significant act of hostility on the part of the Time Lords that would give rise to the eventual conflict makes more sense. Means we don't have to worry about any of the classic show in terms of the Time Lock or any of that caper.
 
That's the words of The Discontinuity Guide, by Paul Cornell, Keith Topping, and Martin Day. (I don't see them credited on those pages, though.)

Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood argue in About Time that it doesn't:
Besides, whatever the Doctor may say at the end of "Genesis," all later Dalek stories assume that history hasn't been changed. The Doctor never regards his memories of early Dalek encounters as unreliable.
And later:
And this is perhaps the most straightforward way of looking at things. The Doctor does make a difference, but only a local scale, and from our point of view history still looks more or less the way it did. His history certainly doesn't alter. Nor does the history of Earth, which is far too central to the Daleks' plans to be spared by the Doctor's meddling. It's doubtful that his claim to have held back the Daleks by 'a thousand years' is really meaningful, as the Daleks can surely tunnel their way out of the bunker and re-stock their lab much faster than that. If you like, you can take his words as being figurative rather than literal.

Lance Parkin's Ahistory draws the same conclusion that Dalek history isn't changed. After addressing the Cornell, Topping, and Day's assertion in the DisCon Guide that history has changed, Parkin writes:
All told, it looks like the Doctor setting the Daleks back a thousand years in Genesis of the Daleks is part of the timeline we know, not a divergence from it -- again, they still invade Earth in 2157, not 3157.
And Parkin even finds a way to reconcile Davros and Genesis of the Daleks with Yarvelling and Genesis of Evil. :)
 
But in 2157 they hammered the planet from orbit with plague, and then sat back for half a decade waiting for the population to decline into a manageable workforce which would be expedient to conquer once they actually committed ground forces. One would think that if they had access to scab labour that it would have taken them far less time to kill all humanity than it had been just to kill most of them...

The Dalek's would get their asses handed to them if they tried such kids tricks on a fully actualized space faring and space weaponized human race.
 
That's the words of The Discontinuity Guide, by Paul Cornell, Keith Topping, and Martin Day. (I don't see them credited on those pages, though.)

Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood argue in About Time that it doesn't:
Besides, whatever the Doctor may say at the end of "Genesis," all later Dalek stories assume that history hasn't been changed. The Doctor never regards his memories of early Dalek encounters as unreliable.
And later:
And this is perhaps the most straightforward way of looking at things. The Doctor does make a difference, but only a local scale, and from our point of view history still looks more or less the way it did. His history certainly doesn't alter. Nor does the history of Earth, which is far too central to the Daleks' plans to be spared by the Doctor's meddling. It's doubtful that his claim to have held back the Daleks by 'a thousand years' is really meaningful, as the Daleks can surely tunnel their way out of the bunker and re-stock their lab much faster than that. If you like, you can take his words as being figurative rather than literal.

Lance Parkin's Ahistory draws the same conclusion that Dalek history isn't changed. After addressing the Cornell, Topping, and Day's assertion in the DisCon Guide that history has changed, Parkin writes:
All told, it looks like the Doctor setting the Daleks back a thousand years in Genesis of the Daleks is part of the timeline we know, not a divergence from it -- again, they still invade Earth in 2157, not 3157.
And Parkin even finds a way to reconcile Davros and Genesis of the Daleks with Yarvelling and Genesis of Evil. :)

Well it's easy to look at the Daleks before and after Genesis and see the differences in them, before Genesis they were a major player in galactic events afterward they're little more than scattered groups eventually fighting among themselves.
 
How much of Genesis could have occured without the Doctor's involvement? Without him, the Kaled war council probably wouldn't have gotten on Davros' case, Davros wouldn't have had to blow up the Kaled city, and the embryo Daleks in the incubation chamber would not have been destroyed.
 
Can the Doctor, or the Timelords, even know that what they did in "Genesis" didn't change anything at all, but was rather part of what history was supposed to be all along? A predestination paradox, as it were.
 
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