YMMV / Doctor Who S27 E6 "Dalek"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • When the Dalek told Rose to order its suicide rather than force it to endure its human mutation — proclaiming; "This is not life. This is sickness. I shall not be like you" — there's a couple ways to read that. The most obvious is that the Dalek is disgusted at its impurity and is staying true to its kind's genocidal mindset to the end. But another way of seeing it is that the Dalek is actually referring to the new human emotions it's obtaining from Rose's DNA because it just can't bear to live with all these overwhelming and new feelings. As a second alternative (backed up somewhat by Dalek Caan's later Heel–Face Turn several seasons later) that developing a human sense of morality from Rose while still knowing it's a Dalek and what that means was more than it could live with.
  • The Dalek's Armour Piercing Response to the Doctor's furious speech—"You would make a good Dalek"—can be read two ways. It seems to be a "Not So Different" Remark and insult deliberately designed to hit the Doctor where it hurts the most...but given that the Daleks are an Omnicidal Maniac race, it could also be the creature complimenting the Doctor for his own genocidal rage. Or both.
• Awesome Music:
  • "The Daleks"' a rising surge of choral chanting, which very much befits a demonic creature of pure, unadulterated evil, who exists for no purpose other than to hate.
  • "The Lone Dalek," a softly desperate chorus, captures the sheer, desolate wastefulness of a creature engineered to revile all life, and the futility to which this has driven it.
• Broken Aesop: While the Doctor is certainly being unpleasant in torturing the Lone Dalek, he is treated as wrong for wanting to kill the Dalek and treating it as absolutely evil. However, when the Dalek gets free it kills over 200 people, and it is clear it intends to wipe out all humanity. It does gain human feelings, but it's clearly an exception and Rose's sympathy towards it is largely born from ignorance, while the Doctor knows firsthand how dangerous the Daleks are and is proven right.
• Character Rerailment: This episode managed to do this with the Daleks; prior to this episode's airing, the species had an established reputation of being fairly silly monsters, being remembered as hammy, ineffectual wastebins who couldn't climb stairs, couldn't turn around, and could be wiped out en-masse by a small militia. Even though "Remembrance of the Daleks" from nearly 20 years prior had already reestablished their menace to longtime fans, said longtime fans were the only folks still watching Doctor Who at that point, and the general public still believed that the Daleks were a relic of shoestring-budget 70's sci-fi television. Thus, "Dalek" sought out to address every criticism and misconception about the titular monster and turn it on its head. The gamble worked; in the years since its premiere, "Dalek" has garnered a reputation for being the story that made the Daleks scary again.
• Fan Nickname: "Rusty", for the Dalek. The Dalek from "Into the Dalek" was called this as a Shout-Out to this episode.
• Growing the Beard: Considered to be this for the revived series in general. Christopher Eccleston was a great Doctor, but in the previous episodes, most of the the monsters were of the quirky and wacky sort, save for maybe the Autons and/or the Gelth. Here, he faces the most iconic monster of the show, and exaggerates the Darker and Edgier aspects of his personality. This is the episode that cemented the reputation of the revival series, and it hasn't looked back since. Some people even said that it wouldn't be Doctor Who without the Daleks, and that this episode made the Daleks "scary" again after the latter half of the classic series merely made them Davros' Mooks.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • As seen in the picture on the Recap page, Rose is still wearing Mickey's sweetheart ring. Come "Boom Town", that relationship will be a thing of the past.
  • The line "You would make a good Dalek" becomes a lot more meaningful and tragic by the time we learn about the fate of the Eighth Doctor. Cass's reaction to the Doctor as a Time Lord — claiming they are no better than the Daleks — eventually brings this Doctor through Despair Event Horizon.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Doctor refers to a Cyberman head as "old friend", before correcting himself by saying "old enemy". In "The Time of the Doctor", the Doctor ends up befriending an actual Cyberman head, Handles.
  • An otherwise throwaway line used in Van Statten's Establishing Character Moment successfully predicted the results of the 2012 election.
  • There is mention of a meteor landing in Russia in 2011. Fast forward to 2013, and the Chelyabinsk meteor would explode in midair over Russia, scattering fragments over the area.
  • Van Statten claims that he owns the internet. Fast forward to 2012 and SOPA, and it nearly became a reality.
  • With the rise of meme culture and other internet developments by the time 2012 came and went, the idea that the Dalek was driven further mad from downloading the entire internet has made the rounds in various jokes and videos in later years.^note  The 2021 novelization would even acknowledge this with the Doctor joking that the Dalek had download a multitude of porn and "revive Buffy" petitions, though the Dalek claims such "irrelevant" data was deleted.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Van Statten is such a scummy excuse for a human being that a Dalek is significantly more sympathetic by comparison.
• Strawman Has a Point: The Doctor wanting to kill the Dalek and wipe out their species is portrayed as bad, except he knows how dangerous the Daleks are, which is aptly demonstrated in this episode when the Dalek kills hundreds of people, and the Dalek makes it quite clear it wants to wipe out humanity. Rose tries to give the moral judgement, except she doesn't know about the Daleks, so this is out of ignorance. Later, she is terrified of the Daleks and shows no remorse on wiping them out (apparently). The Doctor actively torturing the Dalek was going a bit too far, but him being ready to kill it certainly seems justified.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • While "Remembrance of the Daleks" was the first successful attempt at showing a flying Dalek on-screen, it was clearly limited by the production team's ability to move the physical Dalek props. This time around, that's no longer an issue thanks to CGI, and the lone Dalek demonstrates to spectacular effect what it can do with flight.
  • On a similar note, the new extermination effect. "Remembrance" only had the budget to show one such extermination, and with graphics that may have been impressive for the time, but are somewhat cartoonish in retrospect. Advances in technology allowed this episode to once again perfect what "Remembrance" had pioneered.
  • The new Dalek design itself is an example, and quickly became near-universally regarded as the definitive Dalek design by fandom and casual viewers alike. It's likely that there would have been a massive backlash over the attempt to replace it in "Victory of the Daleks" even if the New Dalek Paradigm hadn't been regarded as such a bad redesign in its own right.
• The Woobie: A Dalek as a Woobie? It's the first Dalek seen in the Revival Series. Tortured into near-insanity; alone in the universe of space and time; cut off from orders and companionship; forced to pollute itself to regain power; adapts to survive, in the process becoming "no longer pure Dalek". Eventually, it finds that it can no longer kill its enemies, and admits fear and disgust at itself, and is finally Driven to Suicide. "This is not life. This is sickness." It may have a different set of values, but despite its high body count and stated goal of wiping out all life on Earth, you can't help but feel bad for it throughout much of the episode.

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