Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks

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Genesis of the Daleks is the fourth serial of Doctor Who Season 12, originally broadcast in six episodes from 8 March to 12 April 1975. It was written by Terry Nation and directed by David Maloney. It stars Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, Ian Marter as Harry Sullivan, and Michael Wisher as Davros.

The Time Lords send the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry to war-torn Skaro to stop or alter the creation of the Daleks, dropping them into the bitter conflict between the Kaleds and the Thals. In hidden bunkers and dangerous wastelands, the trio face Davros’s experiments and the ruthless logic behind his new race.

Episode 1

On a blasted world of trenches and wire, a Time Lord intercepts the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry and sets a terrible task: go to Skaro’s distant past and prevent, delay, or divert the birth of the Daleks. The trio arrive amid a chemical bombardment between the humanlike Kaleds and Thals, choking on gas, stumbling through corpses and mines.

They witness twisted Mutos scavenging in no man’s land, the by-products of a war that has lasted generations. Separated in the chaos, the Doctor and Harry are dragged into Kaled lines and hear fearful talk of a brilliant scientist named Davros who commands the bunker laboratories. Sarah is seized by Thals and taken to a forced-labour camp preparing a rocket to obliterate the Kaled dome. Beneath the ground, the Doctor learns of Davros’s “Mark III travel machine,” an armoured casing designed to house the ultimate Kaled mutation: creatures engineered to survive by shedding all weakness.

Security chief Nyder prowls the corridors, sensing spies and traitors everywhere. In a dark test chamber, Davros himself conducts a weapons trial, voice cool, eyes burning. Metal glides from the shadows on a skirt of wheels, weapon stalk rising. The prototype swivels toward the viewing slit. The word is not yet spoken: but death is.

Episode 2

Sarah labours under Thal guards, hauling components for the great rocket that will finish the Kaleds. She plots with prisoners and a garrulous worker named Sevrin to slip away along the gantries. Underground, the Doctor and Harry bluff their way through Kaled checkpoints and glimpse Davros’s nightmare blueprint: not just a vehicle, but a philosophy of survival stripped of mercy.

Davros demonstrates the travel machine’s power on a terrified captive; the casing obeys without hesitation. Nyder’s suspicion tightens, and the Doctor is forced to flee through service shafts. On the surface, Sarah’s group makes a desperate break across the rocket scaffolding, climbing out over a lethal drop as spotlights rake the night. In the bunker, Davros records his cold manifesto for Kaled supremacy and orders Nyder to prepare a “cooperation” with the Thals: one that will doom the Kaled city.

Sarah leaps for a cable, fingers slipping as rifle fire shatters metal around her. The Doctor and Harry fight through patrols, calculating how to disable the launch systems before it is too late. The rocket coughs with test ignition. Whistles scream. On the gantry, Sarah’s grip fails; she plunges as the guards surge forward, and the night explodes with alarms, searchlamps, and gunfire.

Episode 3

Sarah survives the fall onto a net and rallies the prisoners, while the Doctor and Harry sabotage control relays to stall the rocket. In the bunker, Davros convenes the Kaled elite and sells them a lie about safeguarding the future, even as he reaches out to the Thals with a secret bargain. Gharman, a principled scientist, starts to doubt the path they’re on.

The Doctor pieces together Davros’s endgame: sacrifice the Kaled city, root and branch, to cement absolute power over what comes next. He struggles to reach the dome to warn them, but Nyder’s security screens close like a trap. Sarah and Sevrin scramble through ducts to escape the camp; Harry hammers at blast doors while the Doctor rewires a launch inhibitor with trembling hands. Sirens wail. The Thals swarm their firing stations.

In a sterile chamber, Davros watches impassively as the countdown proceeds, his hand hovering above a single switch that will lift the final safeguard. The Doctor is seized before he can complete the sabotage. Outside, a white flash swallows the horizon. The Kaled city disappears in a boiling sun of dust and fire. Shockwaves roll across the plain. In their wake, Davros promises a new creation to inherit the ashes.

Episode 4

With the Kaled city annihilated, Davros assumes control of the bunker and its research. The first true Daleks roll from the production lines, their programming hard-coded with obedience to Davros and survival at any cost. Nyder hunts dissenters; Gharman and a small faction whisper of ethics and oversight, appalled by genocide. The Doctor and Harry are captured and interrogated.

Davros demands knowledge of the Daleks’ future. The Doctor refuses but is tortured until he gasps out fragments: names of worlds, defeats, and the single word that will someday terrify galaxies. Sarah slips back into the complex with Sevrin’s help, dodging patrols through ventilation shafts. Davros orders a vote among his scientists to legitimise the project; Gharman calls for restraint and control, and for a moment hope flickers.

The Doctor, bruised and desperate, hides a recording of Dalek weaknesses, knowing Davros will abuse it but needing time to act. In the incubation chamber, he sees the unarmoured, squirming mutants and understands the horror of what is being bred. He lays plans to destroy the tanks, even as Davros tightens the net. The cliffhanger closes in the operating theatre: the Doctor strapped to a chair, the dial rising, Davros’s voice soft, the truth of the future dragged from him.

Episode 5

The scientists’ revolt flickers into open challenge. Gharman gathers signatures; Nyder smiles and files the names. The Doctor reunites with Sarah and Harry and sketches a desperate plan: rig explosive charges in the incubation room to end the Daleks before they spread. Sarah, grim, agrees; Harry fetches cables and charges; Sevrin keeps watch.

Davros plays statesman, promising Gharman a pause, a review, a vote: then invites the dissenters to a meeting and locks the doors. The Daleks glide in. Energy bolts crackle. Screams echo down sterile corridors and fall abruptly silent. The Doctor threads detonator wire around the tanks, breath catching at the twitching, hateful life inside. Outside, Daleks take over guard posts, their casings gleaming with oil and ash. Nyder corners Sarah; she bolts, draws him off, and lives by inches.

Davros returns to his interrogation, spooling through the Doctor’s tape of future defeats, gleaning every tactic, every vulnerability, drinking the future like poison and turning it to armour. The Doctor arms the charges, only to be discovered by Nyder, gun level, lips thin with triumph. Dalek shadows fall across the room. The countdown to annihilation (of a species or its destroyers) ticks louder than the bunker’s hum.

Episode 6

The Doctor stands over the primed charges and hesitates. If he touches two wires together, he ends the Daleks forever. But he also erases every future in which their evil is opposed and overcome; countless civilisations would be changed. “Do I have the right?” he whispers. Before he decides, guards burst in and drag him away.

Davros, drunk on destiny, summons his Daleks to swear obedience. Gharman makes a last appeal for conscience; Davros gestures, and the Daleks execute him. Nyder flinches; even he sees the abyss. The Daleks turn their guns on Davros’s consoles, severing his control. He orders them to stop. They do not. In panic, he tries to destroy the incubators; they swing to him, cold and implacable. The Doctor, Sarah, and Harry snatch the time ring and scramble to sabotage power feeds and door locks, triggering bulkheads and explosions that seal the lower levels.

In the incubation chamber, the Doctor delays development with a jury-rigged device, buying centuries of stagnation. Rubble rains as Daleks chant over the collapsing bunker. Davros, fingers on a dead switch, is swallowed by dust and darkness. On the surface, the survivors watch the entrances cave in. History has not been erased: only shifted. The time ring hums, and the travellers spiral back toward Nerva.

Themes

As the moral centre of the Hinchcliffe–Holmes years, Genesis of the Daleks stands as one of the programme’s defining achievements. Set against touchstones like Pyramids of Mars and The Talons of Weng-Chiang, it is unquestionably their equal; compared with The Ark in Space, it is thornier and more reflective.

The battlefield bleakness, the Doctor’s “Have I the right?” dilemma, and Davros’s cold logic give it a gravity few serials reach. If some corridors blur together, the ideas never do, and the result earns a place in the very top tier of classic Doctor Who.

The serial also stitches past and future with rare precision. It reaches back to the foundations laid by The Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and The Evil of the Daleks, while lighting the fuse for later reckonings in Destiny of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks, and Remembrance of the Daleks.

Within the season’s thread, the Time Lords’ detour from The Sontaran Experiment strands the TARDIS team here, and the time ring will pull them back to Nerva for Revenge of the Cybermen; the uneasy Gallifreyan interference foreshadows The Deadly Assassin. By its final moments, Genesis of the Daleks has reshaped continuity and character alike: closing one history and opening many more.

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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Fourth Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Fourth Doctor. It is available on Amazon.

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