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| The Space Museum and The Chase Box
Set |
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 Name: The Mechanoids
Format: Television
show and Audio
Time of Origin: First encountered by The Doctor on the planet Mechanus, but were active on various planets from around the fortieth century.
Appearances: "The
Chase", "The
Juggernauts" and "Dalek Universe 1 - The House of Kingdom"
Doctors: First
Doctor, Sixth
Doctor and Tenth Doctor
Companions: Barbara
Wright, Ian
Chesterton, Vicki, Steven
Taylor, Melanie
Bush, Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven
History: Although essentially robots designed to assist human colonists, the Mechanoids have become an interesting threat to The Doctor in their own right, although most of these encounters have been due to programming errors or deliberate external tampering rather than the Mechanoids being dangerous on their own.
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| The Chase |
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The
Mechanoids were created to protect the human colonists on the
planet Mechanus, a jungle planet with massive mushroom-like plants
called ‘fungoids’ capabile of independent motion,
the city being balanced on stilts 1 500 feet above the ground,
but the Mechanoids were abandoned when the colony never received
any inhabitants due to Earth being caught up in interplanetary
wars, leaving no opportunity for colonisation. The planet remained
uninhabited for some time afterwards until space pilot Steven
Taylor crash-landed on the planet, where the Mechanoids took
him for analysis as he lacked the code that the colonists would
have used to identify themselves.
After being trapped on the planet for two
years, Steven was rescued when the First
Doctor, Barbara
Wright, Ian
Chesterton and Vicki landed on Mechanus while attempting to evade the Daleks,
who were currently pursuing the TARDIS in their own time-travel
machine ("The
Chase"). Having survived the swamps of
Mechanus and retreated to the city to escape the attacking Daleks,
The Doctor and his companions learned what had happened in the
colony from Steven shortly before the Daleks arrived. As the
Daleks and the Mechanoids clashed, the resulting battle destroyed
both sides and the city, giving The Doctor and his friends time
to climb down the support struts of the city and return to the
planet surface, Ian and Barbara using the Dalek time machine
to return home while The Doctor and Vicki departed with Steven
as their new companion ("The
Time Meddler").
After
five lifetimes, the Sixth
Doctor encountered the Mechanoids
again, although on this occasion they had been modified
by Davros, the creator of the Daleks ("Genesis
of the Daleks"), as part of his plans for revenge against
his creations. After Davros was captured by the Daleks
and taken back to Skaro to be put on trial for crimes
against the Dalek Race ("Revelation
of the Daleks"),
the ship he was on was attacked and crashed on the doomed
mining colony Lethe. With Davros the only survivor of
the crash, and his identity initially concealed due to
the injuries he had sustained, Davros was able to use
an engineered virus to make the colonists perceive him
as simply an old man in a wheelchair and assumed the
alias of Doctor Vaso, subsequently creating the ultimate
anti-Dalek weapons by adding human nervous tissue to
the Mechanoids after they were discovered among excavations
of previous colonies on the planet. Renaming the redesigned
Mechanoids the ‘Juggernauts’, Davros turned
them into the ultimate anti-Dalek weapon, making them
self-repairable as long as the right resources were available.
As an interesting coincidence, Davros was aided in their
programming by none other than The Doctor’s companion
Melanie
Bush, who had become separated from The Doctor
after the medical spaceship they were on was attacked
and Mel was forced to leave in an escape pod.
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The Juggernauts
(Scott Alan Woodard) |
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While Mel made a life for herself on Lethe, working with ‘Vaso’ to
complete the Juggernaut despite outside attempts to take control
of the program, The Doctor was captured by the Daleks to help
them find Davros, as Lethe’s atmosphere contained an anti-Dalek
toxin that was harmless to humans. Having identified Vaso as
Davros, The Doctor learned about his work on the Juggernauts,
quickly recognising them as Mechanoids rather than the new Daleks
he had expected Davros to be creating. Although Davros told
The Doctor that he was genuinely interested in atoning or his
past, assuring him that the Juggernauts would revert to their
default programming as terraforming robots after the Daleks
had been eliminated, his use of living human subjects to provide
the necessary nervous tissue - complete with a personality print
wipe so that the Juggernauts had no trace of their original
identities - proved to The Doctor that Davros hadn’t changed,
forcing him to call in the Daleks to battle the Juggernauts.
Outraged at Davros’s true nature, Mel activated
a backdoor she had installed in the Juggernaut program that
allowed her to take control of the Juggernauts, allowing her
and The Doctor to escape a Juggernaut that was escorting them
to a cell to investigate and sabotage the Juggernaut manufacturing
facility. With the Daleks and the Juggernauts now facing each
other, and Davros revealed as the monster he had always been
when he ordered the Juggernauts to kill the escaping colonists,
Mel used her backdoor code to order the Juggernauts to perceive
Davros as a threat. As the Daleks and Juggernauts fell fighting
each other, Davros’s self-destruct system was activated
as a result of the damage that his chair had sustained, forcing
The Doctor and Mel to flee to the TARDIS before the subsequent
explosion wiped out the colony (Although Davros survived under
unspecified circumstances).
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Dalek Universe 1 - The House of Kingdom
(Andrew Smith) |
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When a complex temporal paradox drew the Tenth Doctor back into the pre-Time War universe ("Dalek Universe 1 - The Wrong Woman"), he and his current companions, SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven, were rescued from a space pirate attack on a transit station by Anya's grandfather Merrick Kingdom ("Dalek Universe 1 - The House of Kingdom"), who was supervising a terraforming experiment on Neptune with his own division of Mechanoids. However, the three soon learned that Merrick was taking part in experiments to turn Varga plants and other life-forms indigenous to Skaro against the Daleks, to the extent that his research team had been responsible for the space pirates attacking the station, deliberately infecting the pirates with modified Varga plants to see the results. Merrick's colleague, Doctor Abigail Crane, attempted to have The Doctor and Mark killed to keep the project secret, only keeping Anya alive out of deference to Merrick's request, but when they were taken out to be killed, Mark created a distraction that allowed The Doctor to hack and reprogram the Mechanoids to help his allies. After Merrick was shot by a Varga sample while trying to protect Anya, he sacrificed himself to stop Crane while a Mechanoid took Anya back to The Doctor and Mark, The Doctor instructing the Mechanoids to destroy all of Merrick's Varga-releted research.
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