Day 702: Dalek

Dalek ranks as one of my favourite stories in Doctor Who of all time. It's easy to see why, and I feel that this is best seen in one of the final scenes in the story. The lead-up to the scene is that a Dalek has been methodically going through a base, killing everyone that it comes across. This is thanks to Rose accidentally regenerating it by giving it power, somehow. The Doctor, meanwhile, is hell-bent on destroying it, in part because the Time War was between the Daleks and the Time Lords, and he blames the Daleks for so much. So the scene comes about when the Doctor, whilst holding a massive gun, meets with the Dalek while Rose is kept captive by the Dalek, for reasons that confuse it.

Over the course of the scene, we see the entire relationship between the Doctor and the Daleks play out. The Doctor turns up, all ready to kill the Dalek once and for all. But he can't, because he's shocked to see that the Dalek has opened up its casing and destroyed a potion of the roof, just so that it can feel the sunlight on its tentacles. Rose points out that the Doctor is the one with the gun, and that the Dalek is slowly changing, and that it isn't killing any more. The Doctor puts down his gun, in a moment of realisation of what he has done, whilst the Dalek, realising that it is becoming something impure, commits suicide.

This scene shows how much the Time War has changed the Doctor. A man who abhors violence, and has almost always sought peaceful solutions to events, even those concerning the Daleks, is now so legitimately furious at the Daleks that he needs to destroy it himself. But Rose stops him. Just as Rose healed the Dalek, so too does Rose heal the Doctor. She helps him realise what a person he has become, as well as striving for him to be someone better.

Meanwhile, in one of the story's cruellest jokes, the Dalek can't cope with the fact that it's changing, but the story desperately wants it to change and become nice. The music, for instance, by Murray Gold is at times overly sentimental, whilst the direction from Joe Ahearne desperately tries to get beauty out of sunlight dancing off the Dalek's tentacles. But being nice is so against the very nature of the Dalek that it must die, and so it does, defying the story that is being told and instead remaining true to itself. It's a slightly warped joke about the concept of the Daleks, and how we should never sympathise with them, because it's just wrong.

And that's just a small sample of what is a truly fantastic story that manages to do what could be seen as impossible: it makes the Daleks scary again.