Trivia / Doctor Who S31 E3 "Victory of the Daleks"

• Creator Backlash:
  • Matt Smith told Doctor Who Magazine:
    "I never felt that we got the Dalek episode right the first time round, and I don't think we got the Daleks right."
  • Mark Gatiss later said:
    "When I saw the [New Dalek Paradigm] designs, I loved them in every respect apart from the hump. I said, "I think the hump is dodgy", because whatever has happened to the Daleks over the years, the fundamental pepper pot design has not been altered. It works. It's a design classic. What we've got now is...I think it's pushed just a little too far. They look fat. From the side, it looks as if they're slouching. Maybe if the head were bigger, to be more in scale? I think it's sad that the Daleks' new look has been the disproportionate focus of ire, because I love everything else about them. If it weren't for that hump, they'd be exactly what I wanted."
• Deleted Scene: A scene cut from the episode explained how the Doctor and Churchill had known each other for a while.
• Inspiration for the Work: Steven Moffat inspired by a visit he made with his sons, Joshua and Louis, to the Cabinet War Rooms which had been Churchill's base of operations during World War II and were now a museum. For added variety, he decided that Churchill and the Doctor should already be old friends.
• Reality Subtext: The new Daleks exterminating the last three RTD Daleks in existence. Old props out, new props in. (Or at least, that's what was intended to happen...)
• Recycled Script: Mark Gatiss borrowed big chunks of "The Power of the Daleks", but with more of a knowing, Internal Homage/Whole-Plot Reference approach. The stuff that's borrowed — Daleks feigning servitude to humans, the Doctor protesting that they're pure evil and no-one believing him, a quirky scientist who discovered them promoting them to the leader of his people as a new development that can solve all of their problems, the Daleks doing it all as a plan to grow their ranks — is all aesthetic stuff, and the actual plot machinery itself is fairly different. For example, "Power" takes place on a human colony on another planet, "Victory" is set in WWII London.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The episode was intended to be the first of several to prominently feature the New Paradigm Daleks, with future episodes planned to focus on the workings of their caste system and presumably the details of what each one was designed for. However, following the disastrous reception to the New Paradigm Daleks' design, these plans were scrapped and the RTD-era Dalek design was brought back for their next major outing (a New Paradigm Dalek appears in "The Big Bang", and another one fleetingly in "The Wedding of River Song"), with the New Paradigm Daleks restricted to cameos, and eventually being jettisoned altogether after Matt Smith left the series.
  • Mark Gatiss originally wanted there to be a green Dalek, but he decided that green "just doesn't seem to work somehow". A black Dalek, commonly used for top-ranking Daleks since The '60s, was also rejected.
  • Originally, the episode would have concluded with the Doctor and Amy watching Bracewell enter the post office about which he had reminisced, and the crack in time would have been revealed on the wall of a nearby cottage in front of which the TARDIS had materialised.
• Working Title: The Dalek Project and The Dalek Tea Party.

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