8×01 June 20, 2003
DALEKS VS CYBERMEN (Serial 115)
Setting: San Francisco, 2003
Regular Cast: Rowan Atkinson (The Doctor), Scarlett Johanssen (Alice)
Guest Cast: Anthony Stewart Head (The War Chief), Cam Clarke (Voice of the Daleks), Peter Cullen (Voice of the Cybermen), Dominic Keating (Captain Carter)
Plot: Extrapolating the War Lords’ course back to Earth, the TARDIS detects a ship in stationary orbit over the dark side of the moon. Sneaking aboard, the Doctor discovers that the ship belongs not to the War Lords, but to the Cybs. The Doctor is surprised, as he thought the Cybs did not have space travel in this time period. These Cybs, who still refer to themselves as “Cybermen”, are from a research expedition which left Mondas hundreds of years ago. They had planned to rendezvous with their planet and are now low on power. Before they are forced to flee, the Doctor and Alice learn that the Cybermen have detected a power source on Earth and are planning to make a covert landing to claim it. The Doctor locates the energy source on Earth and arrives to find that the US Navy has recovered a Dalek ship from the Pacific Ocean. The War Chief, passing himself off as a scientific adviser, helps the Navy gain access to the ship. The Doctor assumes the War Chief means to awaken the Daleks, but the War Chief actually wants to give Dalek weapons to humanity to make them more warlike. When several seamen turn out to be under Cyber-control, the Doctor awakens the Daleks himself, hoping they can be convinced to leave Earth rather than let the technology fall to either humans or Cybermen since their own resources are so limited that they have to revert to more primitive, tank-style battle suits. Most of the humans are killed in the ensuing battle, but the Daleks and Cybermen fight to a standstill, and decide to negotiate. The War Chief and the Doctor briefly join forces to keep the two sides fighting. Before he leaves, the War Chief convinces the Navy to sterilize the Dalek ship by exposing the nuclear reactor of the recovery vessel. This causes the Cybermen to malfunction, but the Daleks are able to channel the radiation and use it to launch their ship. In orbit, the Dalek ship destroys the Cyber-fleet, but is itself destroyed by a fault in its engines which the Doctor had concealed by sabotaging the internal sensors. After the TARDIS leaves, one Cyber-ship turns out to have survived, and salvages the Dalek auxiliary engine, allowing them to leave the solar system and survive in deep space.