YMMV / Doctor Who S1 E2 "The Daleks"

• Awesome Music: Tristram Cary's brooding, shivering score is utterly steeped in dread and mind-boggled wonder.
• Growing the Beard: This serial is considered a huge step up from the rather middling first story, and is often credited with saving the series from being strangled in its cradle.
• He Really Can Act: If you watch the serial closely, it's evident that the Dalek actors were throwing themselves into the roles and making the most of what they had. Keeping in mind that the Dalek suit actors were not providing their voices, there are basically three ways the Daleks can physically, visibly express themselves: their eyestalk, 'hands', and physical movement. There are many small moments sprinkled throughout where they do exactly that, heightening the sense that they're all individuals desperately clinging together in a pitiable existence.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Of a hilarity so dark it borders on Harsher in Hindsight. The Doctor's fascination with the Daleks, to the point of making up an excuse to stay on Skaro, becomes pretty jarring knowing how much later Doctors, especially from the Time War onward, utterly despise the Daleks. Even before regenerating, it becomes clear how much he dislikes them in later serials with Hartnell.
  • Thanks to Characterization Marches On, the Daleks simply temporarily paralyzing Ian as a warning and giving nourishment to prisoners looks very weird knowing they would today exterminate any non-Dalek they saw on sight.
  • And then of course, there's the last surviving Dalek's final line: "Is this... the... end... of... the... Daleks!?"
• Narm Charm: Despite how it looks with a plunger heading toward Barbara, which should make it very silly, the scene works because of the creepy music that goes with it and the fact that her actress does a brilliant job of being terrified by the approaching Dalek along with the camera that closes in on it.
• Signature Scene: The cliffhanger at the end of the first episode, which sees Barbara pressed up against a wall screaming as something attached to a plunger moves towards her...
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The end of the moody and atmospheric episode "The Dead Planet" is a cliffhanger where Barbara senses something following her through a dead city, reaches a dead end, turns, sees the alien following her (obscured, by Shaky P.O.V. Cam, to the audience except for its right arm), and screams... at something that is obviously just an everyday sink plunger stuck on a telescopic pole.
  • Even for The '60s, the fake hallways painted onto the wall as Barbara is wandering around at the end of "The Dead Planet" are just laughably awful.
  • At one point, Alydon's costume falls apart. You can clearly see the strap flapping about as he moves his arm to talk.
• Strawman Has a Point: The Daleks are right, coexistence actually is impossible. The Daleks need more radiation to survive and the Thals less.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The colourisation. Some people don't like how it cut some scenes, the new music^note (Not counting the music tracked in from "The Daleks' Master Plan", which fits in better thanks to the two stories sharing the same composer) not fitting in well with the existing score and sometimes drowning out dialogue, or how some of the Dalek dialogue was redone.
  • Some fans felt that the new music wasn't itself bad, but simply unsuited to the story, seeming to be focused imitating Murray Gold's music for the revived series rather than the music of the Hartnell era. Tristram Cary's pulsing, eerie electronic score helped convey the Dalek city as a bleak, claustrophobic setting, and the Daleks themselves as incomprehensibly alien and inhuman. The new music gives the story a more pantomime feel, particularly the blaring music when the Daleks are revealed, and the action music when the gang are escaping with Ian disguised as a Dalek.