YMMV / Doctor Who S12 E4 "Genesis of the Daleks"

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Nyder may have originally written as a fanatically obedient officer by his own personality, but Resurrection of the Daleks opens the possibility that he is actually under some form of Mind Control as Davros has some sort of hypnotic drug hidden in his wheelchair at all times, one that works not only on humans but even on Daleks, and those who fall victim to it act exactly like Nyder.
• He Really Can Act: Michael Wisher, previously known as a bit-part actor, gave an incredible performance as Davros despite being in a wheelchair, having a bag over his head and only being able to move his right arm. Wisher's performance immediately became the yardstick against which all later portrayals of Davros were measured, and a number of fans still consider his portrayal the most definitive one.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Everything about the Fourth Doctor's "Do I have the right?" speech becomes this in hindsight of the Time War. Saying that he'd be no better than the Daleks if he wiped them all out? He wipes out both them and the Time Lords (or at least he thinks he does) at the end of the Time War. Struggling with the moral dilemma of being as bad as a Dalek? He would be called "a good Dalek" in two revival series episodes by two different Daleks.
  • The serial ends with the Doctor musing that out of the Dalek's evil must come some good. Flash-forward to thirty years and one Time War later...
  • The Doctor asks Sarah if she could kill a child knowing that it would grow up to become an evil dictator. In "The Magician's Apprentice" / "The Witch's Familiar", he meets Davros as a child. To further drive this point home, when the Doctor meets Davros in the former episode, Davros plays back footage for the Doctor of that exact scene. Essentially, Davros winds up throwing the Doctor's words back at him in a massive What the Hell, Hero? moment.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • The Doctor tells Sarah and Harry that even though he failed to destroy the Daleks, he knows that out of their evil must come something good. This can be easy to dismiss, given all of the evil the Daleks are responsible for, but given stories such as "Journey's End" and "Twice Upon A Time", where Daleks actually help the Doctor, it turns out that he was actually right.
  • Not to mention by one definition, the Doctor was successful in that apparently it was his interference in the creation of the Daleks enabled Davros to survive when his creations turned on him by apparently convincing the Mad Scientist to install failsafes in his chair in case that seemingly unthinkable happened. When Davros was later revived, his presence threw the Daleks into violent schism and civil war, making the then divided Daleks that much less a threat to the universe as they fought among themselves.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The very opening shot of the first episode has a bunch of people in gas-masks. Elisabeth Sladen even quotes the episode in question on the DVD Commentary.
    • Harry saying the combination of gas masks and radiation detectors makes no sense sounds awfully silly to modern viewers who've been exposed to decades of post apocalyptic fiction where the combination is prevalent.
  • Guy Siner plays a Nazi-esque officer. He would later play a Nazi in 'Allo 'Allo!.
    • His commanding officer in 'Allo 'Allo! was played by Hilary Minster, who appears here as a Thal soldier.
• Ho Yay: You can make a serious argument that Nyder is Davros's Stalker with a Crush. It's one of the reasons why this is one of the serials with a massive LGBT Fanbase of its own. In the blog Adventures With the Wife in Space, Neil opines to Sue that Nyder is in love with Davros and she accuses him of 'reading too far into this'.
• Narm:
  • As pointed out by Elisabeth Sladen in the DVD Commentary, all Kaled orders are written on extremely cheap and crumpled bits of paper ("It's like Mum's shopping list!"), making it hilarious whenever any of the Kaleds are looking at one. Arguably counts as Narm Charm, since it serves to further reinforce how backwards the Kaleds are technologically.
  • The fight scene with the large fibreglass clams that 'attack' Harry when he literally puts his leg into one despite it being huge and bright orange and the Doctor warning him not to do that seconds ago. Then the Doctor tries to kill the clam by bashing it with a rock, resulting in some hilariously anguished Styrofoam Rocks overacting courtesy of Tom Baker's Hamminess that fails to accomplish anything. And then the Doctor manages to pry the clam open by breaking off a stalactite and shoving it in its mouth... and immediately after he has to bend a pair of comparatively flimsy iron bars and struggles. And all of this happens in a moody and violent story about fascism featuring the scariest Doctor Who monster.
  • Gharman's death is very over the top.
  • The Doctor grabs Davros's wrist and starts aggressively gurning in struggle with it despite the fact that Davros is clearly not doing anything to resist him. Then Davros, who has been a ruthlessly Manipulative Bastard up until this point, casually and accidentally mentions to his enemy, who is physically restraining him and trying to torture him, which switch on his wheelchair is a life support switch, which, turned off, would kill him in moments.
  • Again pointed out in the DVD commentary: In the scene where Nyder interrupts the Doctor threatening Davros by coshing him over the head, the cosh prop is obviously rubbery and looks exactly like a black jelly dildo. (Lis: "It's rather limp, isn't it?" Tom: "... It still is.") Made extra hilarious by Davros's threats to 'teach [the Doctor] the true meaning of pain'.
  • The fact that the Kaled dome self-destruct button is a cartoonishly large and bright Big Red Button on Davros's desk, which stands out a mile in the otherwise black and chrome set.
  • The shot at the end where the Doctor and his companions activate the Time Ring, which involves them all Holding Hands and spinning around like a Falling-in-Love Montage. Then rolling around and writhing on a cheesy CSO backdrop.
  • The scene where the Mutos discuss Sarah and whether or not to kill her has poetic sentiment slightly let down by some goofy delivery: "It is a NORM, all Norms must DIE!"
• Newer Than They Think: It actually wasn't until this story that the Daleks' Absolute Xenophobe tendencies were firmly established. The nearest they had gotten before was in "The Power of the Daleks", when they plotted to wipe out all the human colonists, but otherwise they were quite happy to just subjugate people, and sometimes even entered into alliances with other races (albeit usually while intending to pull a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness as soon as possible). Even after this story, the Daleks still had human slaves or mercenaries on occasion for their remaining classic series appearances, with their "exterminate every non-Dalek on sight" characterization not being firmly established until the relaunched series.
• Older Than They Think: Later in the decade, "Destiny of the Daleks" would be criticised for showing Davros to have survived this story's events (albeit left comatose and barely alive), when this story had supposedly intended for him to be permanently killed off with no hope of recovery. In actual fact, the production team had been intended all along to somehow indicate that Davros was Not Quite Dead, but it ended up being omitted from the finished episode because it was felt to be too blatant of a Sequel Hook.
• Retroactive Recognition: A Thal soldier is played by Hilary Minster, who would later be best known for playing General von Klinkerhoffen in 'Allo 'Allo!.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Among the story's detractors, one of the main criticisms is that the Doctor fails to blow up the incubator room out of moral cowardice, and thus is directly responsible for everything bad the Daleks do from that point, including the Last Great Time War. In actuality, the Doctor is still mulling over whether or not to blow up the room when Gharman arrives and informs him that Davros is ready to back down if the rest of the bunker staff vote for it — and after Davros wipes out his opponents, the Doctor actually does blow up the incubator room, even if a Dalek ends up accidentally triggering the bomb itself.
  • On the flip-side to the above, Sarah has picked up some accusations of Fantastic Racism for her immediately dismissing the Doctor's argument that blowing up the incubator room would be like pointing to a child, telling you it would grow up to be a murderous dictator, and asking you if you felt comfortable killing the child. However, it's actually very much a case of Both Sides Have a Point, since the Doctor's argument is based on the notion of killing the hypothetical child on blind faith, while Sarah has seen first-hand that the Daleks do end up as mass-murderers — namely in "Death to the Daleks", where they caused a galactic plague and attempted to subjugate the population of the planet Exxilon — meaning her position has more support than just "they don't look humanoid, so we shouldn't treat them as though they are".
• Sacred Cow: It is widely considered one of Doctor Who's all-time classics, regularly appearing in top-ten lists.
• Signature Scene: Davros' "to hold in my hand" monologue and the Doctor's "Do I have the right?" monologue, the latter of which is also the Signature Scene for the Fourth Doctor's tenure (if not the franchise as a whole).
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The clam.
  • Downplayed with the rocket, but when it's very much in the sky it's clearly stock footage.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: First time the Dalek laser beams are used and because the Dalek is often static for the shot to work, the laser is always accurate for where the gun is pointing.
  • The Daleks are generally in prime condition and consistently well operated throughout the story.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: The title is a reference to a book in the Bible. The Time Lords were originally scripted to appear to the Doctor in a beautiful garden and then cast him out into Skaro (but this was abandoned for budget reasons, as well as to make the story Darker and Edgier). There are strong themes of temptation, sacrifice and trial. Davros says destroying the universe would 'set him up above the gods' while the Doctor won't save it because he feels he does not have the right to wield that power. Davros is trying to create a race of creatures but prevent them from having knowledge of good and evil; Nyder's Meaningful Name is a play on 'neidr', Welsh for 'snake'. An obvious scene is the sequence where the Doctor tortures Davros, which is done with the Doctor kneeling at Davros's feet and holding his hand (as Davros's hand is the only part of his body he can move) while gazing up at him in a painting-of-a-disciple-like fashion. None of this appears to really mean anything.

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