Thal (Doctor Who)

Doctor Who alien
Thals
Type	Humanoids
Affiliated with	Thals
Home planet	Skaro
First appearance	The Daleks

The Thals are a fictional race of humanoid aliens from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, originating on the planet Skaro.

History within the show

According to Thal history as given by them in the original Dalek story (1963), they were once a warlike race, but following a terrible war with the peaceful and scientific Dals who shared their planet, they renounced violence and became pacifist farmers. After centuries of this lifestyle, they were forced to take up arms again when the Dals — now developed into the aggressive and xenophobic Daleks — returned and attempted to wipe them out.

This history was revised in Genesis of the Daleks (1975), which revealed the detailed origin of the Daleks. The race (or nation) the Thals were at war with was the Kaleds, who at the time of the fourth Doctor's arrival were a fascistic society involved in a generations-long war of attrition with the Thals (whose use of slave labour did not make them much better, although all slaves were freed and given a blanket pardon after the war was over). The prolonged conflict had turned Skaro into a wasteland, and radiation sickness was a common hazard. The Kaled chief scientist, Davros, accelerated the mutation of the Kaled species and put the results into tank-like travel machines, which became the dreaded Daleks. Davros simultaneously tricked the Thals into wiping out opposition to his plans by providing them the technology that they needed destroy the last city of the Kaleds.

In The Daleks, the Doctor helped the Thals defeat the Daleks on Skaro, apparently returning them to a peaceful age before he left.

At some point, the Thals established a space-faring civilisation. In Planet of the Daleks (1973), set in Earth's 26th century, and several generations after the events of The Daleks, a Thal expedition was sent to the planet Spiridon. Together, the Thals and the Third Doctor defeated a Dalek plan to duplicate the natural invisibility of the planet's inhabitants and launch a ten-thousand strong Dalek army hidden on the planet. What happened to the Thals after this is not revealed in the series, though in Destiny of the Daleks (1979) Skaro was shown to be an abandoned planet. Skaro was destroyed in Remembrance of the Daleks (1988), when the Seventh Doctor sent the Omega Device to the future to destroy the Dalek/Thal homeworld, although nothing further has been noted about the Thals after the aforementioned Spiridon encounter.

It was never made clear whether the Thals and Kaleds were intended to be separate species or simply a different race or nation.

Other appearances

Thals as they appear in the film Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965).

A Thal expedition captured by the Daleks is featured in the Telos novella The Dalek Factor by Simon Clark. They also appear in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel War of the Daleks by John Peel, which depicts them having become a warlike society willing to destroy an inhabited planet simply as part of a trap to defeat a Dalek attack fleet- although the Doctor's disgust at their actions lends some hope that they will begin to reconsider their stance-, and the Big Finish Productions audio plays The Mutant Phase, where their attempt to use a biological weapon against the Daleks nearly creates a monstrous insectoid race, and Brotherhood of the Daleks, where the Sixth Doctor discovers a Thal project to brainwash Daleks to act as 'sleeper agents', only for the plan to fail when the Daleks' true natures assert themselves.

External links

• Thal on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki