Fear of the Daleks

Long ago, Zoe Heriot shared an adventure with a man called the Doctor — but she remembers him leaving afterwards. Why, then, does she have detailed dreams of travelling with him in the TARDIS? Why does she fear the Daleks, if she never met them? Can someone with an eidetic memory truly forget the past?

Zoe Heriot, who remembers only her first adventure with the Doctor and Jamie, is having detailed nightmares. She relates one of them to a psychiatric counsellor. Her dream begins with the Doctor telepathically showing her his most recent encounter with the Daleks; the experience frightens Zoe, but the Doctor assures her that the Daleks have met their "final end".

The TARDIS arrives on the asteroid Livonia, where plans are underway for peace talks between the human-descended Zantha Empire and Tibari Republic (whose citizens are of piscine descent). A renegade Tibari scientist, Atrekar, kidnaps the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie; he has identified the Doctor and Zoe's intelligence, and decides to use them in his mind projector machine. The projector, which uses Dalek technology, creates a duplicate of Zoe, controlled by her intelligence via quantum entanglement, but subject to Atrekar's telepathic command. Atrekar has allied himself with the Daleks, and plans to use Zoe to assassinate the Tibari President and thwart the peace talks. The Daleks, for their part, are planning to use Atrekar's mind projector to conquer the galaxy.

Zoe's quantum duplicate is transported to the Tibari President's spaceship, where she is taken to meet the President, Ram Vendl. Atrekar delays the assassination, hoping for maximum impact. Vendl befriends Zoe, but keeps her in detention for security. Meanwhile, in Atrekar's facility, the Daleks take over. They decide to test Atrekar's mind projector, using the Doctor as a test subject. A duplicate of the Doctor is transported to the Tibari ship, but Atrekar cannot control him. When Atrekar attempts to activate Zoe as an assassin, the Doctor prevents her from killing Vendl. Frustrated, the Daleks use the mind projector on themselves, and Dalek duplicates arrive on the ship. However, Atrekar has realized that the Daleks do not plan to keep their agreement with him, and uses his telepathy to take over one of the Daleks. He turns the Daleks' own worst fears against them, and they are destroyed. Jamie activates a switch which restores the Doctor and Zoe to their own bodies. The Doctor destroys the mind projector, and the peace talks proceed as scheduled.

After recounting the story to her counsellor, Zoe adds a footnote to her dream diary: she thought she heard the Doctor's voice telling her that the Daleks really had met their final end. "But then, he would say that, wouldn't he?", she muses.

• Wendy Padbury — Zoe
• Nicholas Briggs — The Daleks

• Most of Zoe's memories of the Doctor were erased from her mind by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games (1969).

• Big Finish Productions – Fear of the Daleks
• Fear of the Daleks on Tardis Data Core, an external wiki
• Disconinuity guide entry of Fear of the Daleks at the Wayback Machine (archived September 9, 2010)