A sequel to "Sympathy For The Devil", although both episodes also work very well as standalone stories.
This Unbound release features an alternate Third Doctor (played by David Warner) who landed near the Brigadier in 1997, instead of next to UNIT base during the first Auton invasion. Because of this, UNIT has had to face off against the Earth's invaders without the Doctor's help, and history has been altered significantly as a result.
The TARDIS lands the Doctor and Alistair on Skaro, a few centuries after the Thal uprising on the mutant forces. The Doctor has become a hero of legend in Thal history. The two are immediately captured and interrogated by the Daleks, who turn out to have returned to Skaro, captured the main Thal city and turned it into an Orwellian dystopia. They're rescued with a few clever lies from La Résistance and taken to a secret base. Alistair immediately realises that La Résistance has no idea what they're doing, and once team TARDIS has gained the trust of the Thals, they set about devising a plan of attack. Alistair has some experience against the Daleks (which, at the time, cost him the lives of dozens of his trusted men) and fully realises the danger he's in.
Once the newly formed resistance manages to capture a Dalek, the Doctor cleverly re-programs it into believing that it's Davros, then sends it back to Dalek HQ. The Black Dalek in charge tells it that it's insane, but the reprogrammed Dalek insists on being the second coming of the Daleks' creator. This causes terrible problems for the Daleks, since this particular group was created by Davros after the earlier experiments — that Alistair knows from his encounter on Earth — would inevitably betray him. Tired of being seen as inferior by his own creations, Davros had implanted this particular group with a stronger sense of loyalty and a rudimentary moral compass and respect for life. But while ensuring his own safety, this does make the Daleks less effective in combat. And when confronted with the alleged return of their creator, the Daleks now turn against each other and quickly fall into arguments, then conflict, and soon enough, all-out civil war.
Which is immediately complicated when the real Davros shows up.
He's arrived back near Skaro on a massive alien spaceship, working as a chief engineer for a transdimensional ethereal race called the Quatch. When he announces his presence to the Daleks that he expects to be loyal to him, they wearily accuse him of being another impostor. Davros forces the Black Dalek into loyalty using some good old-fashioned torture, and offers the Daleks on Skaro an ultimatum: either they join him in the fight against the Thals, or they will be destroyed by him and the Quatch along with the rest of Skaro. The Daleks are right confused at this development, since they came back to Skaro in the first place to look for their beloved creator... and to protect the Thals. Their improved moral compass, however rudimentary, also makes them see themselves as the protectors (and enslavers) of the weak. Their violent subjugation of Thal society was simply their definition of being benevolent.
When the Doctor and Alistair realise that Skaro is being invaded, they take charge of La Résistance, manage to de-program their re-programmed pet Dalek and give it back its free will, and set about preparing for the Quatch invasion. They offer the Daleks an ultimatum: work together with the Thals, as equals, to defeat the enemy. Most Daleks have some serious moral issues with the concept, and although the suggestion causes even more strife between Dalek factions, a number of them join La Résistance and prepare a saucer to attack the Quatch fleet.
The Doctor assigns himself to leading the Thals and Daleks within the city, and Alistair takes charge of the military aspects and of the strike. As it turns out, the Quatch are after a transdimensional source deep within the diamond core of Skaro, which would enable them to quickly travel between their home dimension and this universe at the cost of turning Skaro inside out. Currently, they're being kept dimensionally stable using cyborg implants developed for them by Davros. The Quatch' main war tactic depends on statistical analysis of their opponents' combat moves, based on many years of experience — in practice, this means that every strike against them only makes them more cunning. The Doctor, realising this, orders his soldiers to attack using only a single saucer, and to focus on diversion tactics. A captured Quatch (whom the Daleks want to torture, before the Doctor expressly forbids it) adds more information: this is not the first Quatch strike on Skaro. The first one was many centuries ago, when the Thals were a thriving, war-like empire and the Kaleds (the species the Daleks originally came from) were peaceful scholars. The Quatch attack back then came seemingly out of nowhere... and it provoked an all-out war between the two groups, resulting in everything we know about Skaro.
The Doctor can barely believe it, never having met a warlike Thal or a scholarly Dalek (though he's heard of the latter), but realises that this information gives him leverage against Davros. Using diversion tactics, he decides to take a massive risk and sneaks aboard the warship, where for the first time in their lives, he and Davros come face to face. Davros is all set to give his grand Motive Rant, but the Doctor tells him the truth: Davros' entire life, the war, the air strikes, and the accident that left him burned and crippled, were caused by the Quatch. Although Davros had planned to betray them anyway after the (in his eyes, welcome) destruction of Skaro, he had never expected that they were the cause of every moment of his pain and grief. He tells the Doctor to get off the ship, and — in a glorious sacrifice — uses the built-in failsafe he installed in the Quatch' cyborg implants, ripping the entire ship out of the universe and back to its home dimension.
La Résistance, meanwhile, had already surrendered (which the Doctor strongly approves of — it saved their lives, after all) and celebrate the victory, hoping to rebuild society together with the Daleks from now on. The Daleks don't quite agree, since they're still Daleks after all. Alistair realises that he could spend the rest of his life travelling with the Doctor at breakneck pace looking for a home somewhere in the universe, but that a real home is one you build yourself. He stays behind to mediate between the two factions, happy to have found a new cause in life.
Masters of Tropes:
- Absolute Xenophobe: The Daleks provide a surprising aversion to this trope. As these Daleks are toned down from the initial batch, the first having gone against Davros due to his not being a Dalek, they're not so gung-ho about exterminating anything not genetically pure. They exterminate things incredibly quickly, still, but they aren't so stringent about what is actually inside of a Dalek's casing - Daleks are not only superior beings, but all equally superior. Even Thals being made into Daleks would be considered equals among the other Daleks. It's a subtle but great difference from how they otherwise end up.
- Big Brother Is Watching: The Daleks have set up a complete surveillance system on Skaro, and constantly broadcast propoganda about Davros’ teachings and their own superiority, though the Thal resistance knows how to work around it. The Doctor gladly makes use of the propoganda to learn the Daleks’ mindsets.
- Character Development: Davros gets a good helping of it. It doesn't change who he is in the slightest, but adds more perspective to his motivations.
- Continuity Nod: The Doctor repeats that "a Dalek can't change its bumps". Then comments that the bumps are actually quite easily replacable, and that it's a rubbish saying.
- Conversational Troping: Every trope associated with the Daleks is discussed, dissected and questioned in this episode, to great effect.
- Didn't See That Coming: The Quatch in general, once the Daleks team up with the Thals. It helps that they had planned perfectly for every Dalek strategy... only for the Brigadier and the Doctor to be planning the assaults against them.
- Dramatic Irony: The Doctor notes that he shouldn’t have thought of the Daleks as being beyond redemption. Anyone familiar with the main universe would find that sentiment to be a very strange statement.
- Enemy Mine: Between the Doctor and the Brigadier, the Thals and the Daleks against the Quatch.
- Davros is on the other side of the fence, unknowingly working for the forces who crippled him. Once he learns the truth, he does a swift and thorough backstab.
- Evil Is Hammy: The Dalek that is made to think it is Davros has some...unusual speech patterns.
- The Fettered: This Doctor very calmly states that his job is to protect the oppressed. If the Daleks want him to stop fighting them, they should stop being the oppressor.
- For Want Of A Nail:
- Due to not being able to meddle in the creation of the Daleks (or not being sent back in time yet), the Daleks that inhabit Skaro are actually somewhat reasonable. It turns out these are a 'second batch' of Daleks, made to be loyal to Davros and to have a kind of rudimentary (if skewed) moral compass. While they're still Daleks, it turns out their occupation of the Thal city was actually to protect the Thals from a greater enemy - not to oppress them. Well. They still do, just for their own good.
- Without the Doctor coming and interfering, Davros’ experiments with the Daleks never went anywhere. His first batch tried to exterminate him, and all other attempts who were loyal to him had pity. Without the Doctor to unintentionally install a great motivation for him, Davros ended up burning out on the project and, when found by the Quatch, took the first chance to leave he could. He still has some attachment to them, though.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Completely subverted in Davros' final actions, as they were entirely about personal revenge... and yet it was also to save his creations and home world.Davros: "Although it is not quite the end I envisaged, I feel... it strikes the appropriate note!"
- Played straight by a heavily-damaged Dalek attack saucer with a Thal/Dalek crew deciding to buy more time by being a bigger distraction for the Doctor and Brigadier's own saucer, rather than risk getting shot down as they ran away. It was the one thing they agreed on.
- Completely subverted in Davros' final actions, as they were entirely about personal revenge... and yet it was also to save his creations and home world.
- Logic Bomb: The Daleks are faced with a simple but effective one: a Dalek emerges claiming to be the long lost Davros returned to Skaro, and that it is to lead the Daleks. The Daleks follow the belief that all Daleks are equal and thus none lead them ... except that if their creator has returned he must then be given the role to lead them. Not helping matters is the fact that a defective Dalek must be "corrected", yet if it is their creator they cannot afford to destroy it. Throw in "Davros" having just as much a trigger finger as all the other Daleks and is it any wonder a civil war broke out?
- Noodle Incident: The episode starts with the Doctor and Alistair running away very quickly from an angry fake God with an energy weapon. Apparently, Alistair hadn't been able to stop laughing at the guy.
- One-Gender Race: The Daleks, who no longer have any concept of gender, also refer to all Thals as "it".
- Truth Serums: The Doctor employs one on the Quatch, in order to prove his point to the Daleks that cold blooded torture is not a preferable method of dealing with enemies - he even does it solely with their own equipment.
- We ARE Struggling Together: The Daleks and the Thals have incredibly differing opinions on how to pull off fighting the Quatch. Fortunately, they manage to grit it through to the end.
