YMMV / Doctor Who S4 E3 "The Power of the Daleks"

• Accidental Aesop: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it... unless the Doctor arrives in time.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: The Dalek wondering why humans kill other humans, at a time in the series when Daleks didn't kill one another. An uncharacteristic bit of curiosity? A sadistic dig at a being the Daleks hold in contempt, and an expression of their own superiority? Or, more-chillingly, an attempt to understand how humans could be made to destroy one another and spare Daleks the effort?
• Aluminium Christmas Trees: There actually was a planet called Vulcan that was once believed to exist in the solar system.
• Growing the Beard: This serial did a lot to help flesh out the Daleks as characters; while previous serials depicted the species as a race of stock pseudo-fascist cyborgs, never before were they depicted as cunning figures; at most, there had been their "grand alliance" in "The Daleks' Master Plan", where they just duped a bunch of power-hungry races into supplying them with forces and the materials needed to build the Time Destructor. Here, David Whitaker expanded them beyond the fairly simplistic mould established by Terry Nation and showed them as capable of thoroughly deceiving an enemy population for an extended period of time in order to fulfil an ulterior motive, a concept that would be revisited in various different ways in later portrayals.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Dalek asking why humans kill other humans becomes that over the years, as the concept of the Dalek Civil War is introduced in the series. In the end, Daleks are no better than humans.
  • The dialogue exchange when a Dalek kills Lesterson, where he begs "I gave you life!", and the Dalek unemotionally responds "Yes, you gave us life" and shoots him, has a lot more meaning in the light of later stories dealing with the Daleks' messy relationship with their actual creator, Davros.
• Memetic Mutation: "EX-TER-MIN-ATE! AN-NI-HI-LATE! DES-TROY!" One of the most iconic Dalek clips of the whole series.
• Narm:
  • The "DA-LEKS CON-QUER AND DES-TROY!" chant is more than a little cheesy. The novelization substitutes a more straightforwardly sinister "EX-TER-MIN-ATE ALL HU-MANS!" instead.
  • The new animation is painfully limited, even making some of the old work of Filmation look like Hayao Miyazaki by comparison. Admittedly, this was the first instance of an entire missing story being animated from scratch instead of them just replacing one or two missing episodes, so they likely had to stretch their budget much further. The original TV cut of the animated version was also Christmas Rushed to meet the serial's 50th anniversary, so that also explains much of the poor quality; the animators would later redo it four years later to much better results.
• Pandering to the Base: Twice! Audience favourite the Daleks are brought back to smooth over the risky transition between Doctors, and it was chosen to be the first completely animated serial since Daleks stories are still a strong commercial draw.
• Special Effect Failure: The production team only had four full-size Dalek props available, which caused problems once the Daleks started to multiply:
  • The Daleks on the production line are obviously miniature models.
  • At one point when an endless army of Daleks needs to pour through a doorway, the production team clearly just has the four props they have access to going in a circle to repeatedly exit the same door.
  • In several scenes in the later episodes, carboard cutout Daleks are featured in the background to pad out the Dalek numbers. This is very noticeable in the surviving clip of the Episode Five cliffhanger which ends with "Daleks Conquer and Destroy!"
• Vindicated by History: Upon release, the serial was received with heavy skepticism, due to it bearing the burden of having to establish the idea that the Doctor could be played by a new actor for the first time, not helped by how beloved William Hartnell's version of the character was. Audience feedback was hostile towards Patrick Troughton, and that stigma carried over into perception of the story as a whole. However, as the Second Doctor's popularity increased and especially after The Nth Doctor became as routine as the TARDIS itself in later decades, the story was gradually reevaluated, with fans and critics reappraising it as a major running start for Troughton that did much to establish what the show would become. By the start of The New '10s, its reputation became far more positive, to the point where "Victory of the Daleks" was harshly criticized for repeating this serial's premise. In 2016, Doctor Who Magazine's fan poll ranked it as the 19th best story of the entire series, a far cry from its initial backlash half a century earlier.

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