Episode #164 : Dalek

 

The Doctor: They're never going to come! Your race is dead! You all burnt, all of you! Ten million ships on fire! The entire Dalek race wiped out in one second!

Dalek: You lie!

The Doctor: I watched it happen! I made it happen!

Dalek: You destroyed us?!

The Doctor: [somber] I had no choice.

Dalek: And what of the Time Lords?

The Doctor: Dead. They burnt with you. The end of the last great Time War. Everyone lost.

Episode 164:   Dalek.
Companions:   9th Doctor and Rose Tyler.
Air Date:         30th April 2005.

The Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler arrive in 2012 to answer a distress signal and meet a collector of alien artefacts who has one living specimen. However, the Doctor is horrified to find out that the creature is a member of a race he thought was destroyed: a Dalek.

Dalek is both our first look at the new Dalek design and a deeper explaination of what happened in the Time War. We learn that the Time Lords and the Daleks were destroyed, wiped out it appears by the Doctor himself. Filled with regret and anger at what he has done, this is why his demeanour in this incarnation is as blunt and abrassive as it is. As the story progresses we see that underneath it all the Doctor is still the same person, but one having to live with what has happened and what he did.

Way back in Remembrance of the Daleks we saw that the Daleks could levitate up stairs and once again we see that here. No more jokes can be made about escaping the Daleks by going upstairs. In this story it shows that the Daleks have had a bit of a nifty redesign. They have the same old appearance but now look a lot more menaching by the addition of a more solid metal design.

The story itself is basically a reintroduction of the Daleks for a new generation who probably only knows of them as a pop culture reference. Here the Daleks certainly come across as a lot more fearsome than before. However, in Dalek, the titular entity is restored by Rose Tyler and begins to develop human emotions mixed with the Dalek hate, eventually being forced to destroy itself because of it's corruption.

The Bad Wolf reference in this story is the call sign of a helicopter landing at the hidden base where the episode takes place.

Dalek is a good introduction to the backstory of the show for new viewers but I think could have perhaps been done better. The "human element" does detract slightly for me as it goes against the Daleks that we know from old.