The British government’s robotic Security Drones have a sinister, secret purpose.
The remains of the Reconnaissance Scout Dalek at GCHQ.
The remains of the Reconnaissance Scout Dalek from Resolution (2018) haven’t been stored safely. The fragments have been intercepted by unscrupulous American businessman Jack Robertson and passed to Leo Rugazzi, CEO of a tech company that Robertson has acquired. Working with this imperfect template, Leo has extrapolated a design for Security Drones that resemble Daleks, and Robertson is making a deal to supply them to the British government.
The Drones have a number of design differences from Daleks. They’re slightly taller, they have a black-and-silver colour scheme, the hemispheres on their lower half are arranged in a zig-zag pattern, and they have areas that light up – as well as the eyestalk, the base and the grating section beneath the dome can glow blue or red. The Drones are primarily designed for crowd control; they’re equipped with a water cannon, CS gas and a sonic deterrent. They’re 3D-printed, solarpowered and purely robotic, driven by artificial intelligence.
Robertson doesn’t recognise the word ‘Dalek’ when confronted by the Thirteenth Doctor and her friends, and when the Security Drones are presented to the UK population their appearance doesn’t seem familiar to anyone. This seems to confirm that, as established in Victory of the Daleks (2010), the Daleks’ very visible incursions onto contemporary Earth in Doomsday (2006) and The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End (2008) have been erased from history.