21st century Dalek invasion The 21st century Dalek invasion was a war fought between the New Dalek Empire and other races — mostly human s . It was fought in the Medusa Cascade in a pocket dimension that was put one second out of sync with the rest of the universe in 2009 . ( TV : " The Stolen Earth " / " Journey ' s End " ) An online news article about Adelaide Brooke , posted on 22 November 2059 , incorrectly dated the event as 2008 . ( TV : " The Waters of Mars " ) History . Background . In the first year of the Last Great Time War , Davros ' command ship flew into the jaws of the Nightmare Child at the Gates of Elysium . He was rescued by Dalek Caan , the last survivor of the Cult of Skaro ; after activating an emergency temporal shift , Caan entered the time - lock ed Time War - " flew into the wild and fire " , as he put it - and rescued his creator . Caan lost his mind and gained psychic abilities following this event ; it is unclear whether it was the act of breaking the time lock , or entering the War , that caused this . Davros made Caan his prophet and set to work reviving the Dalek Empire of before the Time War . After building the Crucible , restoring the Dalek Fleet to two hundred ships and creating thousands of Dalek s with the Kaled mutant s inside grown from the cells of his own body , ( TV : " The Stolen Earth " ) Davros set to work creating a reality bomb . This superweapon was to destroy all of reality in every universe except the Crucible , leaving Daleks the only species in existence . ( TV : " Journey ' s End " ) To power the reality bomb , twenty - six planet s and one moon were stolen from times and places across the universe so their gravitational fields , once aligned , would act as a gigantic engine . ( TV : " The Stolen Earth " / " Journey ' s End " ) These included Earth , which brought the problem to the Tenth Doctor ' s attention . The Shadow Proclamation , after the Doctor ' s visit to them , wanted to go to war with the as yet unknown perpetrators of this event . However , the Doctor did not wish for a full - scale war and left for the Medusa Cascade . ( TV : " The Stolen Earth " ) Invasion of Earth . Not long after the planets were brought into the Cascade , the Dalek Fleet attacked . Most of the efforts seemed to go to Earth . The Unified Intelligence Taskforce and the armies of Earth fought back , but were no match for the Dalek onslaught and were quickly slaughtered . The " Valiant " was destroyed almost immediately ( TV : " The Stolen Earth " ) , the RAF retreated over North Africa and military bases across the planet were attacked and personnel exterminated , although Martha Jones used Project Indigo to teleport away with an Osterhagen Key . A subwave network , created by the Mr Copper Foundation and developed by Harriet Jones , former British Prime Minister , was used by Harriet to try to contact the Doctor . While the Daleks attacked Harriet ' s house , killing her , Harriet , Torchwood , Martha and Sarah Jane Smith ( with the help of Mr Smith ) transmitted a message to the Doctor , helping him find the location of the stolen Earth . The Daleks traced the signal and attacked Torchwood . ( TV : " The Stolen Earth " ) The Doctor arrived as the Dalek assault continued . Thanks to a time lock in the Torchwood Hub , the Torchwood team survived the attack on them . Sarah Jane , trying to find the Doctor , was found by Daleks but saved by dimension - hopping Mickey Smith , Rose Tyler and Jackie Tyler . When Rose and the Doctor reunited , he was shot by a Dalek . Jack quickly teleported to them , destroying the Dalek . Jack , Donna and Rose then helped the Doctor back to the TARDIS and watched him prepare to regenerate . However , the Doctor managed to abort the process by channelling the energy into his severed hand . Although he did not change his face , it did use up one of his regenerations . ( TV : " The Time of the Doctor " ) They surrendered to the Daleks to find the Doctor , who had been taken prisoner with Donna Noble , Jack Harkness and Rose Tyler and taken to the Crucible . ( TV : " Journey ' s End " ) Reality Bomb . The Daleks , using Davros ' plans , had created a weapon called the reality bomb . Powered by the twenty - seven planets the Daleks had stolen , this ultimate weapon was capable of literally reducing the entire universe to nothing . They ran a test of the bomb on a small group of human prisoners , including Sarah Jane Smith , Mickey Smith and Jackie Tyler . Mickey and Sarah Jane escaped to a side chamber and Jackie teleported to it with her dimension jump just before the weapon was tested . This saved them from being reduced to atoms . This terrible weapon would wipe out all life in every universe . In Pete ' s World , a universe which the Doctor said was further ahead in time than his , the reality bomb had already put out the stars . Meanwhile , the Daleks captured and tried to destroy the TARDIS with Donna Noble still inside . The regenerative energy in the Doctor ' s severed hand triggered a Meta - Crisis in conjunction with Donna Noble . A new version of the Tenth Doctor was produced . This Meta - Crisis Doctor and Donna escaped in the TARDIS , which everyone else thought destroyed in the Z - Neutrino core . They prepared to turn the reality bomb on the Daleks themselves . Sarah Jane , Mickey , Jackie and Captain Jack threatened to detonate a warp star to destroy the Crucible if the Daleks did not back down and Martha Jones threatened to destroy the Earth with the Osterhagen Project to make the required twenty - seven planets twenty - six if the same thing wasn ' t done , but the Daleks teleported them all to the Vault and trapped them there with the Doctor and Rose . The Meta - Crisis Doctor and Donna arrived in the TARDIS to put their own plan into action , but were quickly stopped by Davros , who zapped them with his electricity - shooting prosthetic hand . For a moment all seemed lost . However , the shock that Donna had received caused her Time Lord side to activate . She had become part - Time Lord when the Meta - Crisis Doctor was created , causing her to gain the Doctor ' s intelligence . She manually deactivated the reality bomb by closing off all of the Z - Neutrino energy relay loops using an internalised synchronous back - feed reversal loop , disabled the Daleks ' weapons and systems by locked the Daleks ' weaponry in a self - replicating energy blindfold matrix through macrotransmission of a K - filter wavelength and creating a trip stitch circuit - breaker in the psycho - kinetic threshold manipulator . She also released the others from their cells . ( TV : " Journey ' s End " ) Destruction of the Crucible . With the reality bomb disabled and Dalek controls malfunctioning , the Doctor ' s companions got rid of all of the Daleks in the Crucible . Mickey held off Davros with Rose ' s gun . The two Doctors and Donna started returning all twenty - seven planets to where they belonged , but the Supreme Dalek descended to the Vault and attacked , disabling the machinery before Jack killed him . All of the planets but Earth had been returned , but the Doctor readied the TARDIS to tow it back . The Doctors also realised that Dalek Caan had been manipulating everything to lead to the end of the Daleks . With his warped mind no longer truly Dalek , he had realised how evil they were . Goaded by Dalek Caan and knowing the Daleks had sufficient numbers to take the universe by force without the reality bomb , the Meta - Crisis Doctor used the control panel to overload all of the Daleks ' Dalekanium and blast it back , destroying the Daleks and their ships and blowing up the Crucible . The two Doctors and their companions escaped in the TARDIS . Although the Doctor offered , Davros refused to come with them and suffered an unknown fate when the Crucible blew up , along with Dalek Caan . With the help of Mr Smith , K9 , Ianto and Gwen , the Doctor towed the Earth back to where it belonged with Sarah Jane , Mickey , Rose , Martha and Jack acting as co - pilots in the TARDIS . ( TV : " Journey ' s End " ) Aftermath and legacy . The reality bomb and the Void . The effects of the reality bomb broke down the Void , destroying the millions of Dalek s and Cybermen that were previously trapped there in the Battle of Canary Wharf . However , a small portion of Cybermen fell to Victorian era London around December 1851 . They were later stopped by the Tenth Doctor , who sent them into the time vortex , where they disintegrated . ( TV : " The Next Doctor " ) More groups of Cybermen , however , also apparently managed to escape the Void before being destroyed and went on to develop space travel , allowing them to begin expanding again . Most of the Cybermen , however , perished . ( TV : " The Pandorica Opens " , GAME : " Return to Earth " ) In Pete ' s World , as the reality bomb was stopped , dimensional retroclosure restored the damage and sealed the Void again . ( TV : " Journey ' s End " ) Effect on Earth . Shortly after the invasion , by September 2009 , at least half of Earth accepted the existence of alien life , while the other half were in denial . The events , combined with other invasions , led to an increase in suicide from crises of faith . Prime Minister Brian Green was left fatalistic by the invasion . ( TV : " " ) When Clyde Langer admitted to his father that he fought aliens , Paul used the Daleks as a frame of reference . ( TV : " Mark of the Berserker " ) Adelaide Brooke , commander of the first mission to colonise Mars in the 2050s , was a little girl at the time of the attack on Earth . Both her parents were lost and presumed killed . Her father ' s last words to her were to stay inside . She did , but a hovering Dalek approached her house . It saw Adelaide , but , apparently realising she was a fixed point in time , did not exterminate her . This encounter with an alien inspired her to explore in space . According to the Tenth Doctor , Brooke ' s exploration of Mars , destined to end with her death , not only inspired generations of her family to reach beyond Earth , but also had a major impact on the human race leaving the confines of Earth . ( TV : " The Waters of Mars " ) The Eleventh Doctor said that it would be impossible for anyone from 2009 not to recognise a Dalek . He realised something was wrong with Amy Pond ' s memories / timeline when she didn ' t recognise the Daleks . ( TV : " Victory of the Daleks " ) The Doctor and his companions . Due to the creation of his half human clone , this left the Doctor with one final regeneration in his first cycle . ( TV : " The Time of the Doctor " ) This event caused the Doctor to lose all of his companions : Martha and Jack returned to their normal lives with Mickey joining them as he no longer had anything to tie him to Pete ' s World . Sarah Jane also returned to her family , the Doctor returned Jackie to Pete ' s World where he left Rose against her wishes , but left the Meta - Crisis Doctor with her who , due to being half - human , would be able to live a normal life with her . However , while Donna was willing to stay with him , having a Time Lord mind overwhelmed her and the Doctor was forced to erase all knowledge of his existence from her mind and return her to her family . ( TV : " Journey ' s End " ) As a result , the Doctor chose not to have any permanent companions any more until he regenerated into the Eleventh Doctor . ( TV : " Planet of the Dead " , " The Eleventh Hour " ) State in the timeline . Despite the impact the invasion had on the people of Earth , the Eleventh Doctor discovered that his companion , Amy Pond , despite being from 2010 , knew nothing of it . ( TV : " Victory of the Daleks " ) The Twelfth Doctor ' s companion Bill Potts , who was from the year 2017 , ( TV : " Knock Knock " ) was also unaware of what Daleks were . ( TV : " The Pilot " ) The Doctor later linked this to the nature of the time field , a form of crack or entity that had erased people and events like this from history by unwriting their / its existence . When the cracks erased an event from history , the change to history was usually minor . In some cases , the consequences of the event still remained . ( TV : " Flesh and Stone " ) The Big Bang Two restored some individuals unwritten by the cracks , like Amy ' s mum and dad , but the status of this event was not addressed . ( TV : " The Big Bang " ) Although the memories of the invasion remained suppressed until the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald reopened them , Rusty the Dalek still knew of the invasion . ( TV : " Into the Dalek " )