The Movellans

Movellans

Place of origin: Star system 4-X-Alpha-4 Appearances: Destiny of the Daleks Mentioned in: Resurrection of the Daleks

“We are infinitely superior.” ―Commander Sharrel, leader of the Movellans in “Destiny of the Daleks”

The Movellans are humanoid robots / androids who fought (and defeated) the Daleks.

The Movellans outwardly resembled physically attractive Humans of various ethnicities and both genders. All of the Movellan androids wore white, form-fitting uniforms and their hair in silver braids resembling metallic dreadlocks. Being androids, the Movellans were stronger than humans. The major weakness of the Movellan design was each android’s external power pack which was easily removed and completely shut down the android. The power pack circuitry could also be modified, reprogramming the android to obey human orders.

The standard Movellan sidearm was a small, hand-held weapon. The weapon had both “kill” and “stun” settings.

“The Dalek fleet will be wiped from the heavens and nothing will stand in our way in the conquest of the galaxy.”

Romana identified the Movellans’ ship as being from star system 4-X-Alpha-4 (Destiny of the Daleks) In the rather controversial 8th Doctor novel “War of the Daleks”, it was claimed by the Dalek Prime that the Movellans were actually the creation of the Daleks and that the war was a fake created as part of an elaborate plan to prevent the destruction of Skaro as recorded in their history.

The account given in the TV series itself is that the Movellans and the Daleks encountered each other while both sides were expanding their interstellar empires beyond the bounds of the galaxy and immediately engaged in a war which lasted for centuries. As each empire’s respective warfleets were evenly matched, neither side’s purely logical battle computers could find a successful strategy for an attack against the other and so the two fleets remained locked in a stalemate, constantly manoeuvering and probing for weakness but never actually firing a single shot.

The Daleks returned to their homeworld, Skaro, to retrieve and revive their creator Davros, hoping that he could find a way to break the impasse, and the Movellans sent their own expedition to stop them. Davros determined that the first side to take a seemingly reckless gamble would be able to gain the advantage, but the Doctor prevented either side from returning to their respective fleets with this insight. (Destiny of the Daleks).

The Movellans later developed a biological agent which attacked and was almost instantly fatal to the physiology of the mutant within the Dalek shell. They used this to win the war. The once-great Dalek empire was reduced to a few scattered colonies. What happened to the Movellans after the war has never been established on-screen.

Mr Pepperpot’s Pet Theory on the Origin of the Movellans

Being robots, logic dictates that the Movellans (or their prototypes / forerunners) were first made by another species before at some point (presumably) becoming independently self-governing. As the Movellans are humanoid in appearance it would seem reasonable to assume that they (or their forerunners) were first made by humanoids, or possibly even actual humans. The Movellans were not the first group of (human created) robots that later developed independence to be encountered and battled by the Daleks – they had fought the Mechanoids in “The Chase” (and also in the TV21 comic strips). During “The Chase” the Daleks used a robot duplicate of the Doctor before apparently destroying (and being destroyed by) the Mechanoids (although the Mechanoids returned and continued to menace the Daleks in the comic strips). Perhaps the Movellans and Mechanoids share the same origins… Maybe one is the robotic descendent of the other? Possibly surviving Mechanoids on Mechanus adopted the concept of a humanoid robot form by stealing the idea from Dalek databanks – thus creating the Movellans…. Pure speculation but that’s the current operating paradigm in the world of Mr Pepperpot.