The Dalek Factor

A platoon of Thal warriors patrols a section of space looking for possible sleeper cels of Daleks and comes to a hostile planet alive with jungles and danger. The only Daleks they actually find are dead and decaying casings, but they come across a man sitting reading a book in a cave. The man has no memory but asks them to call him "Professor" and joins them on their mission, although he does not know what a Dalek is. The Thals are picked off one by one along the way to a crumbling Dalek stronghold, and once inside with the survivors, the "Professor" remembers everything, that he is the Doctor and that this is a trap; the Daleks have somehow captured him and are using him in their experiments to transplant the "Dalek factor" into other beings, which will create an army of killers all dedicated to the Dalek cause.

This was the last of the Telos novellas published, and what a way to finish the series. Daleks with the Doctor at their mercy and under their control! The alien jungle comes alive on page, complete with the sentry Daleks covered over with creepers and rust from having sat outside in the elements for so long, and the Thals are shown as better more evolved space explorers than their previous mission into space to Spiridon in Planet of the Daleks. Their confidence is high but their fear is real with the realization that their sworn enemies are all around them and watching them.

There is no real indicator that the Doctor in this story is actually the fourth Doctor. There is a theory that his adopting of the title "Professor" suggests that he is in fact the seventh or a later Doctor as one of his later companions would call him that on occasion, but the proof I believe is in the climactic confrontation between the Doctor and his captors once he regains his memory. the utter hatred he has for them, the contempt for the Emperor Dalek is not the stuff of those Doctors, but more akin to the rage the fourth Doctor felt for them, the rage he had to force himself to put in check when he had the opportunity to destroy them forever Genesis of the Daleks. Granted, the ninth Doctor gets pretty intolerant of them at the climax of 2005's Bad Wolf, but at the time that this novella was written there was not yet a ninth Doctor to pattern the character on. So I choose to put it here, giving the fourth Doctor another adventure on his own before he resumes his travels with a companion. That is, once he escapes from the Daleks...

NEXT EPISODE : THE FACE OF EVIL