[Phantom Hoover]

i can confirm that, for the first time ever, a scottish actor has played the doctor without putting on an english accent

in other news the mythological payoffs are comically unsatisfying, but there are brief snippets of all the strange strange creatures and this is gallifrey and no amount of ****ty plotting can dull the joy of leitmotifs from season 3 (the best season, i will fight you)

overall: 3/10, would watch again

[Scotty]

****ty plotting?  You and I were clearly not watching the same special.

[General Battuta]

No, you really were. Moffat is a dire plot writer with maybe three devices he likes to reuse.

[Nuke]

was it really neccisary to kill off handles? he could have helped add much needed comic relief for the new guy who looked rather serious. i guess its william hartnell all over again.

[Flipside]

Can't help thinking he should have picked up Handles about a season ago, then then audience would have had time to build some kind of link with thing and at least it would have meant something to the audience. I know the Doctor spent 300 years with it, but the audience aren't going to connect to the loss of a character they had known for all of 20 minutes.

[Nuke]

hes like the doctor's wilson

[Flipside]

I suppose my take on it was that whilst I didn't find it an outstandingly good episode of Dr. Who by itself, it was a very necessary one. It's done the Reset Button thing for several questions that were raised over the seasons, even though I don't like the castration (or explanation) of the Silence, after all what point would there actually be to a Priest that you forgot as soon as you looked away, that's almost the exact opposite of what Priests are about.

At least Capaldi has been given a much cleaner slate to work with, even if it took the episodic version of a vacuum cleaner to do it. Not satisfied with the resolutions themselves, but lets hope the chance to improve the writing and structure of the show is grabbed with both hands.

Edit : One thing I really do wish someone would do is hit Moffats hands with a wooden spoon whenever he starts writing about Daleks, I know he complains about the fact they are old, slightly silly looking and hard to take seriously (Which is odd if you consider that's more or less the Doctor as written by him), but it doesn't help when he doesn't even seem to know what the Daleks are for or about. They just seem to be a spurious 'danger' that pop up out of nowhere occasionally and then vanish into obscurity again. At least Cybermen have some sort of off-screen continuity and growth, Daleks are treated more like the bogey-man.

[Nuke]

yea, learn to ****ing dalek. its not hard. da-leks con-quer and des-troy. da-leks con-quer and des-troy. da-leks con-quer and des-troy. its not ****ing rocket science.

[Lorric]

That's what annoys me the most I think. The daleks. They've gone from an ever-present threat to something that just seems to pop up every now and then once in a blue moon and the rest of the time are just off twiddling their thumbs tentacles somewhere, when before I always felt they were always doing something towards their goal of exterminating everything not dalek. Before, when you saw them again, you found out what they had been doing in the meantime.

[Flipside]

To be honest, they played the Dalek card too early in Doctor Who anyway.

It's still a bit confusing to me, considering the revelations of the 50th Anniversary, how the entire Dalek Empire could have been destroyed in that battle (but then, let's face it, when a bomb called 'The Galaxy Eater' only destroys one planet, you know you're dealing with modern Dr. Who science), but even if it was, they still managed to appear twice in the first of the new seasons, and were continually re-appearing and being made extinct again.

If the Daleks were back, and powerful enough that no other race was the remotest threat to them, they would be fulfilling their primary goal and burning a path across the entire Galaxy to ensure they are the only surviving species.

[An4ximandros]

Daleks need to die off. Then make is so that a new "Davros of the day" makes a new race or killing machines based on the ideals of genocide for the lulz the original had. Bam. Perfect solution to preserve the "Dalek threat" and even change them around if they want. Ideally the Daleks simply stay dead and are dealt with in "flashback" episodes.

[Lorric]

The daleks are the main attraction for me. They must not die.

The daleks ARE Doctor Who. It would be like having Batman take out the Joker.

[Scotty]

Dark Knight Rises did that.

It was one of the best Batman media ever.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Dark Knight Rises did that.

It was one of the best Batman media ever.

It also ended that movie series. You can't tell any more stories after that.

[Scotty]

irrelevant to the point at hand.  The implication was "Batman with the Joker is not Batman."  The counter example is Dark Knight Rises, which was very Batman, and also totally lacked the Joker.

[The E]

Dr Who can function very well without the Daleks. Hell, one of the absolutely best episodes of the new series managed to make a single Dalek into the scariest thing ever, and that's where it should have stopped. IMHO, anyway.

[Lorric]

Don't get me wrong, I don't want every episode to be about the daleks. Just one dalek story per season is quite sufficient. I think I'd prefer two, but any more than that and you start cheapening them I think, they need to have that attraction to them.

With a few exceptions, other episodes generally feel like filler to me until the next encounter with the daleks. That doesn't mean they're bad. I still enjoy them. It's like eating good food, but anticipating when you get to eat your favourite food again. You still couldn't eat your favourite food every day.

Doctor Who would still be Doctor Who without the daleks and Batman would still be Batman without the Joker, but I think they'd be losing their most valuable component outside of the protagonist himself.

[The E]

Don't get me wrong, I don't want every episode to be about the daleks. Just one dalek story per season is quite sufficient. I think I'd prefer two, but any more than that and you start cheapening them I think, they need to have that attraction to them.

The problem is that the first Season of new Who, and a big part of the characterization of the Doc in new Who, was based around the idea that the Timelords and Daleks wiped each other out completely. When "Dalek" hit, and brought all the PTSD the Doctor had back again, that was incredibly powerful. That was an episode that resonated, and worked on most levels.

When we later find out that the Daleks did actually survive in force, that the whole sacrifice of the Timelords meant nothing, that the Doctors decision to sacrifice his own people for the greater good meant absolutely nothing, that's when they were cheapened.

New Who had quite a bit of success with its own creations, like the Silence (pre-Christmas Special) and the Angels, or the Family of Blood, they didn't need to keep bringing people back from the old serials.

Doctor Who would still be Doctor Who without the daleks and Batman would still be Batman without the Joker, but I think they'd be losing their most valuable component outside of the protagonist himself.

A hero is only as interesting as his or her antagonists, and the Daleks (apart from that first one) just haven't been interesting in the new series. They're powerful, sure, but their portrayal in this show has been mostly two-dimensional. They're just DEATH KILL DESTROY all the time, there's no nuance to them, no way to interact with them apart from destroying them, and that's really bad when you build up your main character as a person who will always look for alternate solutions to problems.

[Lorric]

Don't get me wrong, I don't want every episode to be about the daleks. Just one dalek story per season is quite sufficient. I think I'd prefer two, but any more than that and you start cheapening them I think, they need to have that attraction to them.

The problem is that the first Season of new Who, and a big part of the characterization of the Doc in new Who, was based around the idea that the Timelords and Daleks wiped each other out completely. When "Dalek" hit, and brought all the PTSD the Doctor had back again, that was incredibly powerful. That was an episode that resonated, and worked on most levels.

When we later find out that the Daleks did actually survive in force, that the whole sacrifice of the Timelords meant nothing, that the Doctors decision to sacrifice his own people for the greater good meant absolutely nothing, that's when they were cheapened.

New Who had quite a bit of success with its own creations, like the Silence (pre-Christmas Special) and the Angels, or the Family of Blood, they didn't need to keep bringing people back from the old serials.

Doctor Who would still be Doctor Who without the daleks and Batman would still be Batman without the Joker, but I think they'd be losing their most valuable component outside of the protagonist himself.

A hero is only as interesting as his or her antagonists, and the Daleks (apart from that first one) just haven't been interesting in the new series. They're powerful, sure, but their portrayal in this show has been mostly two-dimensional. They're just DEATH KILL DESTROY all the time, there's no nuance to them, no way to interact with them apart from destroying them, and that's really bad when you build up your main character as a person who will always look for alternate solutions to problems.

Yes, I loved Dalek.

But why does it cheapen the daleks? They survived, the timelords didn't. Though of course, all that's been changed now, first they brought the daleks back, and now the door has been opened for a potential future return of the timelords as well. It also doesn't mean the sacrifice was for nothing even if the timelords were dead. It didn't wipe the daleks out, but it curtailed them significantly.

As for the others, The Silence never really resonated with me, the Family of Blood I had to look up just to remember what it was. The Angels however, I think they're a brilliant creation. Easily the best of the new creations.

I fully agree that the hero is nothing without the villains to go with them. But The Doctor, that's part of the reason which makes the relationship between The Doctor and the daleks work I think. He can't reason with them. They force him to do the very thing he doesn't want to. And yet, every time he still tries to, even though it is futile. The daleks are everything he despises. He also got a chance to do it his way with Dalek Sec and it was ripped away from him.

[karajorma]

I think you've got it correct there on why the Daleks really are the perfect antagonists for The Doctor. Unlike the others he deals with, he can't simply talk the Daleks round. Not in the slightest.

Dr Who can function very well without the Daleks. Hell, one of the absolutely best episodes of the new series managed to make a single Dalek into the scariest thing ever, and that's where it should have stopped. IMHO, anyway.

I'm going to have to disagree there. While Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways wasn't a great use of the Daleks, Army of Ghosts / Doomsday was. They were pretty much on form there, ignoring the Cybermen's suggestion of an alliance in favour of simply exterminating everything not Dalek. They managed to do that and be interesting because they weren't the standard Dalek models. Evolution of the Daleks even more so, with the Doctor actually aiding the Dalek Sec even though the Cult of Skaro had killed hundreds.

I will agree that we haven't seen a particularly great use of them since then though. Asylum of the Daleks was a nice enough spin on them but we really shouldn't be seeing entire armies of Daleks, simply because they'd be busy killing everything if they had those sort of numbers. Having the planet be something discovered by The Doctor, a forgotten relic of the Time War would have been better. I've always assumed that the Timelords were what stopped them from doing that in the olden days before the war.



I don't think Doctor Who would be the same without the Daleks. Lorric's right in that it's like Batman without The Joker. While you can make a series or two without them, sooner or later you need to bring them back. Even in the Christmas special the premise that you couldn't return the Timelords because the Time War would just start up again was one of the few things that did actually work about the episode. It wouldn't work for The Silence or the Weeping Angels (brilliant enemies as they are). You really need the ancient enemy for that one.

That said, they do need to be used correctly and while I don't have much of a problem with most of recent Dr Who stories, I would like to see them being used to evoke a lot more fear than they have been used for recently.