The Movellans, from star system 4X-Alpha-4, are tall, dark-skinned humanoids with heavily lined eyes and lips. They wear tight white suits with silver edging. Ribbed white pads cover the shoulders and torso, with flaps below the metal belt around their waist. On each shoulder is a glowing green ampoule held in a metal frame. They also wear white boots. All Movellans have silver dreadlocks; the commander's dreadlocks have black tips rather than silver.
They carry cone-shaped pink guns with a white cover into which the hand fits when holding the gun. These fire no visible ray, but they do have different settings - level 3 is a long-term stun. Touching the guns to the back of the neck also works as a stunning method. The guns can be made powerful enough to blow a Dalek up, and they can stun other Movellans as well.
But the Movellans are not actually humanoids: they are robots, locked in a war with the Daleks for centuries because they are too evenly-matched; neither group possesses the illogic to do anything unexpected. Because they do not wish to reveal their mechanical status to others, they do not allow aliens to see them in death, claiming such a thing would be against their code of honor. On their belts, the Movellans wear a metal rod which seems to be their energy source. If the rod is unclipped, the Movellan loses its power and collapses. These rods can be rewired so that the Movellans serve others. The Movellans are also susceptible to dog whistles, which scramble their minds. Also, their hands are easily knocked off. But most things that would kill a human merely knock a Movellan temporarily out of commission, until it reactivates and rejoins its comrades.
The Movellans' spacecraft fix on their landing spots with a targeting beam, and once they have landed, the lower half drills into the earth as a means of camouflage and defense. These ships have an intergalactic range and time-warp capability. Inside the ship, some Movellans wear headphones, presumably as a way of interfacing directly with the ship's computer.
The Movellans' main destructive weapon is the Nova device. This invention counts down to zero, at which point it alters the molecular structure of the atmosphere so that the atoms become flammable. Without protective shielding around the device, it would burn up an entire planetary atmosphere. It can, however, be turned on without being armed (making it into basically nothing more than an elaborate egg-timer).
The Movellans try to gain information from the Doctor as to how they could move past the impasse of logic in which they and the Daleks are stuck; the first computer to do something irrational would win the war. Meanwhile, the Daleks are hoping to achieve the same results through Davros' help. But when the Doctor intervenes, the Movellans are put out of commission and the Daleks defeated, and the Daleks' slave prisoners take control of the Movellan ship to return home.
The Dalek / Movellan war continued raging on for some time, and a virus developed by the Movellans to attack the Daleks' organic components nearly succeeded in destroying them utterly.
