Cult Spy: The genesis of 'Davros'

Following tabloid speculation this week that Doctor Who villain Davros might be returning for the next season - played by Sir Ben Kingsley no less - Cult Spy gives you the lowdown on how the legendary character was first introduced back in 1975...

Davros is most notable for being the incredibly clever, but distinctly malevolent, mind behind the creation of the Daleks. A genetic scientist on the planet Skaro, he found a way to defy his crippling injuries and the ravages of time by installing himself within a life support system that entailed a third artificial eye in his forehead and a motorised wheelchair with a casing peppered in balls. One of his arms remained lifeless though, remaining motionless with the hand submerged unseen.

This wheelchair device provided the visual inspiration for his Dalek race. For Skaro was gripped by a nuclear civil war between his own race of Kaled and the rival Thals. Both were humanoid species, but Davros's desire to exterminate the opponents took on megalomaniacal proportions as he genetically modified people from his own race into squid-like mutant blobs filled with extreme survival instincts and a lack of compassion.

Once taken out of the laboratory (when not wrapping themselves around the poor Doctor's neck) they were placed inside the Dalek casing, referred to by Davros as a Mark III Travel Machine. Sounds harmless enough, but their real name was of course an anagram of Kaled.

Davros's plans for the Daleks weren't limited to simply exterminating the Thals however. Before long, he was giving the exterminators orders to kill certain Kaleds who opposed his increasingly grand plans. In fact, such was his ruthlessness, he posed as an informant to the Thals in order to give them the means to deploy a nuclear strike on his own Kaled race to effectively wipe them out. Letting nothing stand in the way of his evolutionary plans, the scientist planned to be in the safety of his own bomb-proof bunker at the time.

Eventually though, as with many evil geniuses such as Frankenstein, their own creations turn on them. In the ultimate irony, Davros was exterminated by his own Daleks who he had engineered to believe that they are the superior beings of the universe. With an intrinsic 'dislike of the unlike' - akin to Nazism - the fiendish pepperpots were never going to simply lay back, think of Skaro, and take orders from someone who is unalike.

So at the end of his debut story 'Genesis of the Daleks', poor Davros was last seen thrashing around as he was bathed in the rays of extermination, his soft, calculating voice giving way to piercing screams of agony. Of course, he would come back from the apparent dead and feature in several more stories until 1988's 'Remembrance of the Daleks'. On that occasion, he evaded death thanks to an escape pod just before the mothership belonging to his new race of Imperial Daleks was blown-up. But will he return in 2008? Let's hope so…