Doctor Who forgot the Daleks’ most dangerous weapon – one that could have made them an even greater threat for the Doctor. They may look like a race of malicious pepperpots, but the Daleks are undeniably the Doctor’s best enemy. They are driven by a xenophobic dislike of the other, eager to prove themselves the supreme beings in the universe by exterminating everything else.
The Time Lords had good reason to fear the Daleks; twice they pursued the First Doctor into the time-space vortex, and the Second Doctor barely managed to stop them seeding all of time and space with what they called “the Dalek factor.” All this led to the Time Lords sending the Fourth Doctor on a mission to erase the Daleks from history, but he refused to do so, believing he didn’t have the right. When Russell T. Davies relaunched Doctor Who in 2005, he swiftly revealed the Time Lords had been right to believe the Daleks would one day become a threat even to Gallifrey; the Daleks and Time Lords had become caught up in the last great Time War, one that nearly destroyed all of existence. For a time, the Doctor believed both his own people and the Daleks to have been wiped out. The Ninth Doctor only learned he was wrong in the episode “Bad Wolf,” when he and his companions were transported (“transmatted” in Doctor Who lore) out of the TARDIS by the Controller of Satellite Five.
This episode showed the Daleks’ greatest weapon, but then Doctor Who forgot about it entirely after this story. The Controller had used stolen Dalek technology to scour the entire time-space vortex and locate the TARDIS; her transmat had then been able to penetrate the TARDIS’ shields, plucking the Doctor and his companions out and hiding them in the programs she ran on Satellite Five on the Daleks’ behalf. This, more than anything else, indicates just how dangerous the Daleks really are; they can identify a single TARDIS in the vortex and penetrate even a TARDIS’ shields.
Do Time Lords Have Defense Against Dalek Technology?
The Doctor was able to protect his ship by modifying a “tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator” he had stolen from a Slitheen, but this was left on Satellite Five at the end of the episode “The Parting of the Ways.” In spite of this, the Daleks have never used their ability to search the entire vortex and penetrate a TARDIS again. This is particularly ironic given the Eleventh Doctor episode “Asylum of the Daleks,” in which the Daleks went to considerable lengths to acquire the Doctor.
It’s reasonable to assume the Time Lords had a defense against this Dalek technology; after all, they’d have struggled to fight back against the Daleks if their every War TARDIS could be tracked and attacked during the Time War. Presumably the Doctor had stopped bothering to implement these safety measures when he believed the Daleks were extinct and reactivated them after his confrontation with the Dalek Emperor. That, at least, provides an in-universe explanation for the show’s oversight – but, of course, in reality, Doctor Who’s writers simply forgot the Daleks could do this.
More: Doctor Who Needs To Relearn The 2005 Relaunch’s Greatest Trick
