Doctor Who Comics: Liberation of the Daleks

It’s seconds after the end of The Power of the Doctor. The Doctor has just regenerated from her Thirteenth to his Fourteenth form, which looks a lot like his Tenth incarnation. Still, she was sensible enough this time to land the TARDIS safely and step outside before regenerating, so he can simply step inside and take the trusty old time machine for a spin as he gets used to his new body. Suddenly, he picks up a distress signal, and follows it to source – apparently, someone’s summoned his aid at the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley. Well, perhaps that’s for the best, due to the massive Dalek invasion force that’s shown up.

Is that the real problem, though? These Daleks seem surprisingly rubbish – when they corner the Doctor and decide to EX-TER-MIN-ATE him, their death rays seem totally harmless. And there’s alien tourists watching events unfold and getting selfies taken against global armageddon. As the Doctor investigates further, he discovers the astonishing truth: he is in one of many simulated realities provided at the Dalek Dome, a tourist trap which creates virtual environments where visitors can go and have their very own Exciting Adventure With the Daleks. One of the park’s staff is Lt. Georgette Gold, and she sent the signal in order to seek the Doctor’s input, since she’s working her way towards a doctorate in Dalek Studies and he’d be great to interview.

Initially, the Doctor is just offended at the idea of turning the atrocities of the Daleks into cheesy entertainment – but it gets worse. The simulations are not mere holograms – they’re formed from psychoplasm, the stuff that dreams are made of, shaped by the dreams of captured Dalek specimens. (That would be why military personnel are stationed in the park – it’s how the military monetises their Dalek recoveries.) Even more disturbingly, every time someone enters a simulation the park captures a model of them to use as an NPC – so Georgy, the doppelganger of Georgette that the Doctor met at the World Cup, is a simulacrum of Georgette who exists solely to be EX-TER-MIN-ATE-d over and over again in whatever scenario she gets deployed in.

And what’s worst of all, the Doctor began to infer that the simulated worlds weren’t real when he was still inside the World Cup scenario, and he may have mentioned that to the Dalek Supreme – with the result that the captive Daleks are beginning to question their reality. Disaster may strike if they find the means of bridging the dream-world and the waking world – and in the form of TARDIS, which can go anywhere, and Georgy, who is linked to Georgette, they have possibilities to hand…