But How Does All This
Fit In With Doctor Who Canon?

I don't think this page will ever be finished and I intend to update it periodically as I discover little bits from my various sources. Right now, however, it is in a very prototypical form. I don't have much of my, er, research material with me at the moment and there are a lot of things that just can't remember off the top of my head. If I've made any grievous errors, send a note and chastise me thoroughly.

Over Doctor Who's 32 year history lots of spin-offs have been produced taking well-loved characters out of the TV show and placing them in new and interesting situations. Doctor Who comics have been doing this nearly from the beginning. They have also been amongst the most un-canonical Doctor Who sub-medium, introducing odd companions (John and Gillian or Frobisher for example), single-handedly trying to tie up all sorts of inconsistencies in the TV program while creating some doozies of their own (see below) or just doing stuff 'cuz it seemed like a neat idea and to heck with the five hundred contradictory references in the TV show.

Abslom Daak is one of the few Doctor Who comic spin-offs which have really seen any sort of sustained popularity. Some people have suggested that Daak's life should be considered canon. Having Daak, albeit a reincarnated one, appear in the New Adventures lends some creedance to this suggestion.

For this page, I want to look and the Abslom Daak stories and see how it fits in with Doctor Who as a whole. I'm going to, for the most part, ignore Emperor of the Daleks because I missed the first half of the story and don't know what's going on. What I have seen, though, creates more problems than it solves, so ignoring it seems a prudent move. Excepting Emperor, it isn't hard to fit Abslom Daak into the grand scheme of things. There's nothing that directly contradicts anything in the TV episodes.

placing it (in real time) shortly after the events in Frontier in Space is fairly arbitrary, but fits well with the political scene. Less arbitrary is the conclusion that Daak's life occured shortly before DWTNA: Love & War. Màire (a Dalek Killer herself, she says) comments off-hand that she's catching up on the latest news on "Daak." Roisa then mentions that Daak is dead. Deceit helps this theory along by placing a cloned Daak with Ace three years later.

(Love & War contradicts a throw-away comment in Deceit, BTW, where Ace is pondering Dalek Killers and Abslom Daak in a cryo-tube. We are told that no-one ever meets a D.K. which is silly, because Ace walked off with Màire at the end of Love & War. Admittedly, this isn't a big deal, but it just strikes me as odd that Peter Darvill-Evans -- who edited the NAs (and presumeably, therefore, read them) and likes Dalek Killers enough to put one in his own novel -- would miss this point, small though it is)

This means, then, that Abslom Daak is Bernice Summerfield's contemporary. That's fine, as she seems to know about Dalek Killers (from Deceit: "A Dalek Killer and Ace. You must have been expecting trouble."). I haven't noticed anything that Benny said or did in the NA's that would contradict this, except in Legacy, she says she'd never seen an Ice Warrior before and they were rare in her time. The fact that Harma is around in Daak's universe and that no-one takes much notice of him might suggest otherwise. This wasn't much more than my first impression, however. It is quite likely that Harma got his job at Slash Killerstien's Murderama precisely because he's a sort of exotic commodity.

Insert some interesting filler here...

Also of note is the Daleks themselves. The Daleks in all the Abslom Daak comics have the same oversized "bumper" as in the two Dalek movies and The Daleks TV Century 21 strip (though the Daleks in Frontier in Space -- presumeably the faction Daak is sent to fight against -- do not, of course). Some of the Daleks in Nemesis of the Daleks had claws as well. This is just a detail that might be ignored completely if, however, the TV Century 21 Emperor Dalek didn't show up in Nemesis.

Now, I admit that the TV Century 21 Daleks link might be a little tenuous. After all, the Daleks in the strip tend to change wildly from serial to serial. Also, it appears to be Doctor Who comic convention to make the Dalek bumpers large and rounded instead of rather small and cornered off as they have always appeared in the television series. But that's no fun, is it? It also seems that Emperor takes this notion and flies with it. Despite my problems with Emperor, I will too. (if somebody figures out how Zeg fits in, let me know. )

The Doctor seems to think that this emperor (in Nemesis) is Davros after discarding all of his human (or Kaled, that is) identity. The Doctor comes to this conclusion after the Emperor says "Davros? Who is Davros?"