Thought I'd open a thread deciated to the Doctor's current and future nemeses, (really looking forward to seeing what the new crew does with the Cybermen!) .

On the Daleks, I was very skeptical about whether the new series could portray them well without making them look either too dated or too dorky. Hoo boy was I wrong. The titular Dalek in "Dalek" (which should have been titled "I, Dalek") was very effective and even to a degree sympathetic. However, the Dalek armada in "Bad Wolf/PotW" was surreal and cree-pee! Hope they return soon!

I was very happy to see the Autons as the baddies in the first episode. They were Pertwee's introductory villains and he is my favorite Doctor; continuity be praised!

I hope the Daleks never return.  Parting of the the Ways was such a perfect and wrenching episode that it deserves to be the last.

Edited because "quote" and "spoiler" are very different words.

I think the Daleks will probably return eventually. But it probably won't be for a little while. After all, there have been LOTS of Dalek stories that deserved to be the last, until someone came up with a cool idea to use them again!

(All my posts are black. Ah, well...)

Their end was heart-wrenching, but I still hope they come back because they're such awesome villains and I get excited whenever I hear them speak.

There's also the fact that we'll probably get more clues about the Time War in series 2 and the Daleks played an integral role.

Very much enjoyed what was done with the Dalek in "Dalek," although the pathos was spoiled a little by reading the dalek LJ while watching the episode. However, the shots of the daleks sans pepperpot armor and the dalek emperor were not entirely what I expected. In my mind, they never looked like cthulu's 2d cousin.

I was so excited about seeing the Daleks again, mainly because a large part of my youth was spent behind the sofa on Saturday nights or, at the very least, behind a cushion, heh. Loved the new bling on the Daleks and I found the whole notion of it absorbing humanity fascinating, particularly as the very thing it was experiencing was the one thing that was anathema to it. Brilliant idea. And you know, hearing the Dalek screaming "Exterminate!" is still pretty terrifying, all these years on. Mrs Gaymo saw the Daleks for the first time ever and was like, "Huh?". I suppose sometimes you really have to have seen the rumbling, bumbling, wheelie ones from the 70's to understand how awesome they were in this season.

Here is something wicked funny about with Daleks. However, it has alot of spoilers so watch at your own risk Dalek Song

BWHAH!!!! That was really crazy. I'm looking forward to seeing the treatment that the new series will give the Daleks.

That Dalek song rules. A lot. Heeeeee.

The Dalek song is the best thing ever. That voice, gah. Thanks for sharing!

Sounds like one of the Seventh Doctor's (Sylvester McCoy) stories, ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ - he and Ace go back to WWII to a code-breaking station.

Yep, that is certainly The Curse of Fenric.

And the monsters are the Haemovores, vampires created by future pollution, who can be driven off by unshaking faith in something: for Ace it was the Doctor, for the Doctor it was his companions, for the Russian soldier it was the Revolution, and the poor minister had no faith in anything and was taken.

There have been rumors running rampant on-line that in season two the Daleks do return. The rumor mill has them battling the returning Cybermen in the season's two-part finale. Seems there was a photo leaked on-line earlier this week that seemed to lend credence to this theory.

I don't necessarily believe that one myself. As a Who fan, I'd love to see the Daleks go toe to toe with the Cybermen..but only if done for the right reasons and done well.

As a Who newbie, I must say that (besides obviously being a huge dork) I found the Autons sufficiently creepy; they reminded me of a short story we read in tenth grade about living cannabalistic mannequins in a mall. Ick...needless to say, mannequins are creepy. I am very excited as a first time viewer however, to see Daleks for the first time. I spose I should check out some older eps with Daleks to see how they were in the 70s however.

The gas mask kid in Empty Child really is creeping me out, largely for the fact that it's so hard to figure out just what he is. An explanation for monsters always helps, and in EC we're just not given one, the same thing that makes movies like Night of the Living Dead so effective.

This is a very random thought, but I just realized why the Daleks never struck me as particularly scary (not that they can't still be effective villians): they seem almost petulant when they go on a long-ish run of EXTERMINATE! EX! TERR! MIN! AAAATE! I have this image of them as a kid screaming at not getting a toy, eyes screwed up and limbs flailing, and then I think of the Daleks flinging their arm things around in rage and I start giggling and the moment is lost.

That had nothing to do with anything, it just struck me as I re-watched "Dalek." Oddly enough, I still like them as villians.

I always liked the Daleks as villains, despite their ridiculously low-tech design during the Classic Who series. It's not exactly frightening when your main weapon kind of resembles a toilet plunger and you sound ridiculously twitty with the ear-aching "EX-TERRRR-MIN-ATE!!!!!" chorus. But I loved them all the same.

[Season 2]: Have Cybermen always been this way? Victims of a crazy person and thus void of individualistic thought/action (or so it seems at this point)? Because I was expecting like a standalone race of evil aliens or something along those lines, a mercenary army of metal, rather than a group of machines who used to be people and who now have to follow orders. I think I would have liked that better. But either way, CYBERMEN! They're pretty much kind of awesome.

airylli [season 2]: Heck, no. Cybermen are usually teetering on the edge of destruction, ruthless, unemotional creatures. Occasionally, they've allied with others, to turn on them when they are no longer useful to them. I love in "Tomb of the Cybermen" when the logician who wants to use the Cybermen to conquer Earth thinks that they will be grateful for being revived (gratitude was an emotion last time I checked) and the Cyber controller just forces him to his knees as the Cybermen plan to convert them all. The best part of RotC was "you will be like us." That's classic Cybermen for you.

Ok, is it just me, or do the two lights on the top of the new Doctor Who daleks give them a vaguely whimsical quality? Sort of like they have light up puppy ears?

It's not just you. Every time I see them, I want to reach out and play with them.

The new versions of the Daleks definitely brought the creepy with them, especially when they were attacking the Game Station and were floating around outside. Had no idea that they could withstand vacuum!

The space battle stuff from TPOTW was a total nod to the Century 21 comic strips of the 60's, in which assorted colour Daleks (including gold) would zip around on hover discs, flying and exterminating, thrashing the Mechanoids and just generally being totally cool. In fact, I think those very 60's circular Dalek battle ships were a direct lift from the comic strips.

It's a wee bit camp really isn't it

Victor Lewis Smith certainly thought so. None of those are exactly work friendly by the way (though I suppose it depends on where you work).

If anything the new series has proven how deadly the Daleks truly are. No one should ever make jokes about sink plungers again.

The old series Daleks never scared me. (The only Classic Who villain that I remember scaring me was the Master in The Deadly Assassin.)

But when I saw Dalek, I believed these things could conquer the universe, which I never could in Classic Who.

Just ran across this in an old issue of NewScientist (7 January 2006):

Must....Share!

The Dalek Song!

That last sentence is sending me to bed giggling..thank you!

I don't know how far the US showings have got, so I'll break up spoilered text by episode number.

4.4: I found the Sontarans pretty poor, a step down from their old-series mood - the little "Sontar, ha!" song in particular - actually I rather got the impression that Helen Raynor didn't really like them either. It's the first time we really see Ten showing the lazy contempt for monsters that was Four's trademark (changing the channel while they make a big speech). I did like the general apologising to the soldiers he was going to hypnotise, and seeming to mean it, though.

4.3: On the other hand, the return of the Ood was amazing. Not just because I liked the explanation of their existence, but it was good to see an episode where the creatures - especially creatures so hideous - were the victims, while the villainy was confined to humans.

4.13: A couple of pages ago, I said I hoped that Parting of the Ways was the last ever Dalek story, as it was a perfect "last" one. Randomling thought I might change my mind and I did; Evolution was good, but I now feel that way about Journey's End: the first time in years that Davros hasn't seemed showhorned in, Sarah Jane's full-circle presence, Caan seeing what Rose saw and learning what Sec learned, and the destruction of the Daleks coming from one of them turning on Davros (just as they began). Plus, they come to within a hair's breadth of destroying the universe and that's a tough act to follow.

The US has seen all of Season 4. Personally I loved Davros and the Daleks in the finale. They worked incredibly well.

Ah, thankyou. (And thankyou Bayliss).