Dear Johnny Fanboy,

Could you please solve this one? Some of the recent Doctor Who releases from Big Finish have contradicted previous Who stories from other media. Firstly, Thicker Than Water has Mel meeting Evelyn for the first time, even though they have already met in the book Instruments of Darkness.

Secondly, another Sixth Doctor audio, The Juggernauts, tells the story of what happened to Davros between Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks, and how he became the Dalek Emperor, which contradicts the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip Emperor of the Daleks.

Finally, the Eighth Doctor audio Terror Firma follows Davros after Remembrance, something that has already been shown in the Eighth Doctor novel War of the Daleks. It has been said that the comics, novels and audios are meant to take place in separate realities, but that seems too easy and it looks like you enjoy a challenge. Good luck!

Gareth Maddieson

Johnny Fanboy replies:

I wholeheartedly agree that consigning stories from various media to parallel universes is too easy - and not much fun. There's also the fact that the various media tie in with one another as often as they contradict each other. For example, the New Adventures companion Bernice Summerfield has appeared in several comic strips, including Emperor of the Daleks, and in two Big Finish Who audios, while Big Finish's Minuet in Hell mentions the BBC Books companion Sam.

Solving the Instruments of Darkness versus Thicker Than Water conflict is actually quite easy, since Sci-Fi-Online's review of the latter, by Richard McGinlay, offers as convincing an explanation as we are likely to come by. McGinlay suggests that Instruments of Darkness is the two companions' first meeting only so far as Evelyn is concerned. Knowing this, having already experienced the events of Thicker Than Water, the Doctor could instruct Mel to behave as though it were her first meeting too, so as not to disrupt the timeline. That would make Thicker Than Water Mel and Evelyn's first encounter from the Doctor and Mel's point of view. Evelyn realises this, having already experienced Instruments of Darkness, and so she acts accordingly.

McGinlay also proposes a solution to the Juggernauts versus Emperor of the Daleks debate in his review of the former, by suggesting that the comic strip takes place after the audio drama so far as Davros is concerned. I will elaborate:

The Juggernauts tells us that the Dalek ship carrying Davros to face trial on Skaro is attacked and shot down. The ship crashes on the Earth colony Lethe, but Davros and some of his Daleks survive. At the end of the story, Davros is badly injured in a Mechonoid attack. This triggers his chair's self-destruct mechanism, which ultimately destroys the colony, taking Davros' Daleks with it.

It is not revealed how Davros manages to survive being at the centre of such a powerful explosion. I theorise that, as soon as the grey Daleks realise that Davros is about to explode, they perform an emergency open-ended transmat to transport him to the safety of their mother ship so that he can finally stand trial (and, according to War of the Daleks, fulfil his destiny). They cannot beam his chair up with him, because of course this contains the self-destruct mechanism. In order to preserve Davros, they hold his body in some form of stasis (perhaps as an energy pattern in the transmat) until they can replicate a life-support chair using their own records of its specifications. This explains why Davros' chair reverts to its black paintjob in Emperor of the Daleks, rather than the white and gold livery seen on the front cover of The Juggernauts. In order to separate Davros from his chair when beaming him up, it is possible that the Daleks set their transmat beam to filter out non-organic objects. This could explain why Davros is fitted with a Dalek claw in Emperor of the Daleks, as opposed to the cybernetic hand he possesses in The Juggernauts.

Emperor of the Daleks begins with Davros' trial already underway. During this story he takes control of the Daleks held in cold storage on the planet Spiridon. Again, his plans are curtailed by a gigantic explosion, but the Doctor knows that Davros will survive, build a new army of Daleks and travel back to Earth in 1963, because he has already experienced those events in Remembrance of the Daleks.

War of the Daleks is harder to reconcile - with anything. Fans and other writers have largely rejected author John Peel's convoluted retconning of every televised Dalek story since Destiny of the Daleks. The novel Unnatural History suggests that the Doctor, perhaps under the influence of Faction Paradox, tricked the Daleks into tying their history into such knots that it collapsed under the weight of the paradoxes! Peel's book, in which it is stated that the Daleks prevent the destruction of their home world by terraforming a planet called Antalin and fooling the Doctor and Davros into destroying Antalin instead, seems to exist solely in order to claim that the destruction of Skaro at the end of Remembrance never took place.

To achieve this elaborate retcon, Peel reveals the Movellans to be creations of the Daleks, manufactured in order to fake a war and give the Daleks a plausible reason for excavating Davros in Destiny. Oh well, at least this explains why we never again heard from the Movellans after they were declared the victors in Resurrection of the Daleks. However, engineering the genuinely deadly so-called Movellan virus just to trick Davros does seem a tad extreme, like cutting off your nose to spite your face, or using a sledgehammer to crack a nut! Maybe the virus was a creation of a group of Movellans who resisted Dalek control.

At the end of War, the Daleks place Davros in a matter dispersal unit, for execution. However, a single Dalek among the Dalek Prime's forces remains loyal to Davros, and there is a possibility that this Dalek uses the dispersal unit to transport the Kaled scientist to safety rather than disintegrate him. I theorise that Davros is transported to an escape pod, or - more likely - a Dalek cruiser that is then fired upon and destroyed by another Dalek ship, causing Davros to bail out in an escape pod. In Terror Firma, Davros speaks of an explosion causing his pod to fall through the time vortex, before he is rescued by a Nekkistani time capsule.

In War of the Daleks, Davros refuses to believe that the Dalek planet is the real Skaro. He is convinced that the Dalek Prime has terraformed another world and renamed it Skaro to cover up the destruction of their home planet. It is possible that Davros is correct in his assessment. In any case, in Terror Firma he continues to believe that the Doctor tricked him into destroying the real Skaro, a fact the Doctor neither confirms nor denies in so many words, possibly in view of Davros' erratic mental state.

And that's the last we have heard of Davros to date. Or is it...?

Events between Terror Firma and the Time War mentioned in the new television series remain shrouded in mystery. It is possible that Skaro's Daleks and Davros/the Emperor's Daleks consolidate their forces to tackle their common enemy, the Time Lords. Certainly the whole of the Dalek race is believed to have been destroyed until a lone unit turns up in Dalek, and the Emperor's last words in The Parting of the Ways - "I cannot die!" - echo Davros' final utterance in Resurrection of the Daleks, implying that the Emperor might represent the last vestige of the Daleks' creator.

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