CROSSING ZONE: ELEGY OF THE DALEKS

After showing me "Daleks In Manhattan" & "Evolution Of The Daleks" this past week, my friends Mark and Michael popped in "Revelation Of The Daleks" from the Colin Baker years of 'Doctor Who'.

"Revelation" was similar to that 1930s-set adventure for the Tenth Doctor in that it dealt with the hybridization of the Daleks using human tissue. Davros was behind that mad plan and it all took place on the planet Necros.

Ooh, what a give-away!

Back when I was running the Tubeworld Dynamic website, once a month I would link an episode of 'The Twilight Zone' with some other TV show. Sometimes it would be as simple as a common family name (as in 'Ferris', to be found in the episode "Where Is Everybody?" and in the 'Columbo' episode "Murder By The Book"). Other times it would be due to similar themes (like the claim that the three-eyed Martian in "Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?" was in fact a Traskian as found in 'Farscape').

So with "Revelation Of The Daleks", I found the perfect episode from 'The Twilight Zone' for a theoretical link: "Elegy".

In that story, three astronauts were forced to land on an Earth-like asteroid where they found deceased humans who had been stuffed and mounted for display in bizarre yet ordinary tableaux: a beauty pageant, a honeymoon suite, a poker game, etc. The place was a planet-wide viewing mausoleum called "Happy Glades", and it was run by a robot named Jeremy Wickwire.

I'm suggesting that Happy Glades was found on Necros, the same planet where the Sixth Doctor battled Davros in Tranquil Repose Valley, another city-sized mausoleum site.

Doug A. Scott has one of my favorite 'Doctor Who' websites, one in which he maps out the timeline for all of the televised stories throughout the years: The Doctor Who Chronology.

And he places the year for "Revelation Of The Daleks" to be 4610:

Revelation of the Daleks: 1,2 ("long" episodes) or 1,2,3,4 ("short" episodes):

The 6th Doctor and Peri are lured to the mortuary world of Necros by Davros in order to kill him. Davros is posing as the Great Healer, in charge of the Tranquil Repose mortuary, whose "residents" he uses to create a new army of Daleks, loyal only to him. The travellers escape death, Davros' army is destroyed through the self sacrifice of the assassin Orcini, and Davros is taken back to Skaro to stand trial by the Imperial Daleks.

[Date is conjecture. Not too much time can have passed since "Resurrection of the Daleks," as Davros was not in suspended animation this time, but enough time is needed for Davros to have cultivated his "Great Healer" identity. I am arbitrarily placing this 20 years after "Resurrection."]

So I'm thinking that the era of Jeremy Wickwire running a related business concern on this asteroid may have been at least a century earlier, due to the antiquated look of the operation. Happy Glades may have been the genesis for Tranquil Valley, in fact.

As for the astronauts, it's my belief that they were from an even earlier time, based on their ship and their space-suits, and that they unknowingly passed through a temporal wormhole that brought them further into the future. Even if they had the fuel to escape Happy Glades/Necros, they never would have been able to reach "home" as they knew it.

As for Jeremy Wickwire, the android was created by a descendant of Professor Wickwire, a forward-thinking scientist of the late 19th Century who appeared in several episodes of 'The Adventures Of Briscoe County, Jr.'.

BCnU!
Toby OB3