[Lorric]

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.

Yes. There is a powerful moment in the very first dalek enconter of new Who, which is of course Dalek, where Van Stanton challenges The Doctor. "If you're so impressive, why can't you just reason with this dalek? It must want something, everything wants something." And The Doctor proceeds to explain why it can't be done. The Daleks bring out that different side of him, the hatred and disgust and rage reserved for The Doctor's nemesis that the rest simply can't bring out of him.

[Phantom Hoover]

The problem with bringing the Daleks back once a season that it cheapened them as villains and cheapened the impact of the Time War. Both Dalek and Utopia were fantastic episodes because they had a tense buildup to the reappearance of a horror which shouldn't exist in the universe of the new series, but then we get three or four different groups of Daleks who survived independently and you wonder what all the fuss was about. Maybe it could have worked if there was the one Dalek remnant who appeared recurrently, but as it was they were a joke by the middle of series 3.

[karajorma]

Yep, I think that's how they should have been handled. The premise of the season 4 finale was a good one but wasn't handled as well as it should have been. There should have been signs that the Daleks were behind the stars going out. And then there should have slowly been a dawning realisation from the Doctor about what was going on. Instead we get all that info handed to us on a plate in the first 10 minutes of the episode.

I actually think that season 2 and 3 handled the Daleks quite well. It was the end of season 1 that did things badly. If you ignore that, 2 and 3 are pretty reasonable. Why shouldn't the Daleks have their own black ops unit?

That's not to say I don't like the current show, I really do. But there are things it could be doing better.

[Nuke]

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.

im going to have to agree here. think of how many borg episodes there were in sttng, like 6 (and only about half of those were they a real threat). thats less than 1 per season. then look at what voyager did to the borg, total pussification. you need to bring out the daleks out enough to keep us interested, but not so much that they are forever ruined. do a proper dalek episode, maybe a 2 parter, do it right the first time, and dont waste them on stupid stuff like what we had in the christmas special.

[Flipside]

I feel with Dr. Who that there's often a lot of good ideas, but no planning. So many mysteries have popped up in the last three series that will never ever be resolved. little things piqued my interest but were never filled in, like why did things like the Doctors hatstand vanish, and who was the 'some woman' who gave Clara the Tardis phone number, or how the Hell did the Silence manage to trigger the Tardis destruction? Just little things like that got forgotten, and even the ones that do get closed seem to feel like the ending was a prosthetic one, that no-one had really considered what the problem actually was until it needed resolving for the series climax.

The thing is, Timelords have managed to feature and influence the show wonderfully in the new season whilst hardly ever actually appearing. They give the Doctor great character development and allow him to evoke a response from the audience, the Daleks could have played a very similar role, the Doctor committed genocide on his own people to wipe them out and save the universe, I suspect preventing their return would kind of be a priority.

[Ace]

I feel with Dr. Who that there's often a lot of good ideas, but no planning. So many mysteries have popped up in the last three series that will never ever be resolved. little things piqued my interest but were never filled in, like why did things like the Doctors hatstand vanish, and who was the 'some woman' who gave Clara the Tardis phone number, or how the Hell did the Silence manage to trigger the Tardis destruction? Just little things like that got forgotten, and even the ones that do get closed seem to feel like the ending was a prosthetic one, that no-one had really considered what the problem actually was until it needed resolving for the series climax.

The thing is, Timelords have managed to feature and influence the show wonderfully in the new season whilst hardly ever actually appearing. They give the Doctor great character development and allow him to evoke a response from the audience, the Daleks could have played a very similar role, the Doctor committed genocide on his own people to wipe them out and save the universe, I suspect preventing their return would kind of be a priority.

I liked that the current episode tried to tie up a lot of issues, but it does seem that Moffat lost track of his own lose plot threads and has been focused more on trying to "prove the internet wrong" about their speculation.

Like the whole who called Clara thing could have been a nice paradox to focus an episode on, or even a throw-away line from River...

I think my biggest disappointment from the episode was throwing away the potential of the Silence as a recurring villain (the species, not the religious order).

What I would have done:
Keep the line about "oh yeah they're genetically engineered critters" and the Doctor then wonders how he'd know that because it feels wrong and moves on.

The Silents don't get Dalek-ified but everyone else does. They help him out in the chamber and the Doctor pointedly asks what they really are and they give a cryptic "No time traveling species wants the time war to return, and we have done whatever we could over the eons to keep this from happening." sort of response.

Basically hint that they've still been around a very long time and have been pulling the strings as a third faction and that they could return as bad guys or good guys in the future depending on their agenda at the time.

[karajorma]

What I don't get is why Clara didn't attempt to kill the silence on sight. Has she never seen the moon landing?

[X3N0-Life-Form]

To be honest, I don't think I ever did, appart from maybe a snippet here and there.

[Mika]

Yeah, I saw the Christmas special. It reinforces my belief that Moffat has to go from plotting the entire season to plotting episodes; I liked his work in single episodes a lot more than the entire seasons under his steering. I recall reading that he didn't want Dr. Who to be scary, which, if true, is probably at least part of the reason why the Daleks flat out do not work under his guidance.

So, I sort of concur and add that both the Christmas episode and the Anniversary episode were a mess, as if there was an attempt to explain everything, but not giving enough time to develop it. Too many things were introduced too quickly in both of them, leading to a disappointing feeling. Handles was brought up as a prime example, and while I thought the very idea of the War Doctor was good and was developed well from what we knew about the Time War. But the problem is, the character just didn't work well in the episode, and this had nothing to do with John Hurt.

Also, has Moffat written himself in to a corner with Clara? I do like Jenna Coleman's acting, but I get the feeling that she's doing the best she can with the bounds of the script? I sort of wish Jenna doesn't get fed up and stays with the show for at least a season, but at the moment her role is getting down right silly. Given that she is now one of the most instrumental characters in the Doctor's life, she seems to know very little of him.

I'll have to admit I liked the series more under Davies's steering, though he also had his problems with poor episodes (or deus ex machinaes). But his story-arcs were generally good (Season 2 and 3 mainly), and led to the feeling that the viewer was all the time hinted about things to come, and still managed to add surprising discoveries (Face of Boe, anyone?) in the writing that didn't feel fabricated to support the case. Perhaps Moffat's problem is that he tends to emphasize wrong things?

[MP-Ryan]

I never watched or knew anything of the Who-universe pre-reboot, but I've generally enjoyed the new series immensely.

That said, I do agree that the Daleks (and Cybermen) seem to have been cheapened as the villains that people talk about them being in past series.  The trouble is with the pacing of Who, generally - unlike other recent series, Dr. Who has retained much of the episodic-everything-turns-out-all-right-at-the-end-of-the-episode that TV series always had in the past, with the exception of 2 and 3 part episodes.

We know from the beginning that even if the Daleks show up, the Doctor is going to best them one way or another.  We also know that this race that terrified the Doctor in the past was supposedly wiped out in a major sacrifice, but then they keep reappearing here and there with enough frequency that a Dalek showing up is merely ho-hum and lacks dramatic impact.  Moreover, everytime they show up in greater numbers and the Doctor bests them AGAIN, so we start to wonder what all the fuss was about and aren't these tin cans amusing?  The cybermen suffer this fate even more.

Compare that to the terror inspired by the Weeping Angels.  There's an enemy the Doctor literally cannot beat, or reason with, but rather basically has to run from constantly because they are truly unstoppable by their very nature.  Even they have been cheapened somewhat recently, but they still retain much of the terror at their introduction.

Nuke makes an excellent point - the Daleks have suffered much the same fate as the Borg in the Star Trek universe.  When the Borg were first introduced, they were essentially invincible (only Q rescued the Enterprise).  The next time they showed up, they beat the **** out of the Federation and basically everyone else - their defeat was by the smallest of margins.  After that, they got much less terrifying until, by Voyager, they were basically just as fallible as everyone else and not all that difficult to fight.

As it stands, the Daleks need a serious overhaul to be a true villain.

Also, I am noticing more and more that Doctor Who is getting JJAbrams-Lost Syndrome, and introducing mysteries at a pace much faster than the old ones are resolved, to the point where they forget about past issues and just carry on leaving gaping holes in their wake. People remember three things very well; most people can remember up to seven things reasonably well; beyond seven, facts get lost.  Writers of TV series that are shrouded in mystery would do well to remember that.

[Lorric]

The Doctor's attitude towards the daleks is a very big problem too. Compare how he used to react to seeing the Daleks to now. Before it was fear, dread, gravity, revulsion. Now it's more like "Oh, ya back for more, eh boys? You're scared of me, aren't you. I'll soon clear you lot up no problem."

[Phantom Hoover]

this is because the eleventh doctor was incapable of fear, dread, gravity or revulsion or indeed anything but zany quirkiness

[General Battuta]

I disagree, I think he could do almost all of that stuff really well, but the scripts rarely let him. Matt Smith was a great actor, he just...didn't get enough to work with.

[Phantom Hoover]

that was what i meant to communicate by saying 'the eleventh doctor' rather than 'matt smith'

[Flipside]

I kind of blame the Zealots for some of the problems. When Moffat suggested putting the Daleks into mothballs for a few years, and letting other races take the foreground, all hell broke loose from the more 'dedicated' fans, and Moffat kind of capitulated to keep them happy. Unfortunately, it shows that he doesn't really want to write Daleks and therefore shoehorns them in when he needs a figurehead bad-guy.

[Lorric]

You know whenever I see Doctor Who merchandise, it's always only four things. The Doctor, the TARDIS, cybermen and the daleks. I'm sure if I actually went looking, I'd find more, but that's all I ever see when chancing upon stuff. And easily the most frequent thing I see is a dalek. Why would you want to shove them to the side?

[Flipside]

For the same reason that Star Wars fell over in the prequels, good merchandise does not necessarily mean good for the series.

The problem with shows like those is that Fan-pressure is incredibly influential, but as countless online arguments over everything from Comics to Computer Games have shown, 'The Fans' as a group really have no clue what they want, and so the show suffers if you listen too closely.

[Lorric]

The thing is you don't need one to do the other. Give the people proper daleks and proper dalek stories, and then when that's done, you're free to focus on other things for a while.

I wonder why everyone seems oblivious to the daleks. You'd think the whole universe would turn on them.

[Flipside]

Thing is, they kind of did the right thing by erasing the Dalek mind of knowledge of the Doctor, the Daleks are wholly logical beings and yet the new versions seem almost pathologically obsessed with him, and only seem to even interact with the Universe when it is something to do with the Doctor. Unfortunately, much of that seems to have been resurrected in the Night of the Doctor as well.

In the older series' the Daleks were a threat, certainly, possibly more so than Cybermen or Sontarans, but not a total and utter threat, they were fallible, sometimes because of their logic. For example, one of the old episodes had the Daleks trapped in thousands of years of deadlock because the enemy they fought was also a machine and they were both trapped in a logical Catch-22.

I always felt it would be kind of a nice twist if it turned out that the future the Doctor was told of, the one where the Daleks were the only sentient race left in the Universe, turned out to have been made far more likely because of the Time War, and in fact the best way for Gallifrey to have ensured this didn't happen was to do the one thing the Doctor left them for, in other words, nothing. It'd be interesting to see the Doctor actually question whether the Timelord ethos of non-interference might have more reason to its existence than he thought.

[karajorma]

Well the Timelords did actually start the Time War, not the Daleks. So it could be a fair point actually, the one time they broke their rules they ended up causing the greatest war the universe ever saw.

Funny thing is that from the point of view of the Daleks, the first shot in the Time War is the mirror image of The Terminator. An unstoppable, almost unbeatable, fleshy humanoid killing machine is sent back through time to destroy the future of a cyborg race.

The Doctor's attitude towards the daleks is a very big problem too. Compare how he used to react to seeing the Daleks to now. Before it was fear, dread, gravity, revulsion. Now it's more like "Oh, ya back for more, eh boys? You're scared of me, aren't you. I'll soon clear you lot up no problem."

He has had about 400 years to get over his PTSD remember. The Doctor who was scared of the Daleks had just come out of the Time War. If anything the attitude he shows now is much, much closer to the Tom Baker era Doctor who would offer everyone a jelly baby even when in mortal peril.