11 Best Doctor Who Dalek Stories

Daleks, Daleks, Daleks... What can we say about Daleks that hasn't already been said about them, especially with a new Dalek story just having aired? Not a whole lot, actually, so we're going to do what every other Doctor Who fan has ever done: rank half of the 22 televised Dalek stories from good to great. Then we'll do it all over again next week with the bad to the worst. Nothing too original there, but as usual, it's bound to get some arguments started... though it'll be fun to see how many readers think a story from the Worst list belongs on the Best list and vice versa. There are a few ground rules that need to be covered, though: what we define as a 'Dalek story' is a story in which the main antagonists are the Daleks themselves, not a story in which they simply happen to feature with a bunch of other villains. This excludes The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, since the Daleks just happen to be there. Oh, spoilers, by the way. These lists also exclude the 50th anniversary special since it's not so much a story about the Daleks as it is about the Doctor's decision to destroy both the Daleks and his own people. Another rule: any two-parters from the 2005 series will be treated as single stories - because, let's face it, they are. They're the closest thing that you young whippersnappers who call yourselves Whovians these days will ever get that equals the multi-episode stories that some of us grew up with. And finally, we are including missing stories, because we have enough evidence from telesnaps, novelisations, scripts, and so on to judge the quality of these without having to see them. Granted, we were all wrong about Tomb of the Cybermen, but how were we supposed to know, really? And what constitutes a good Dalek story, you may ask? Read on and see...and if you disagree, tell us in the comments below!

Honourable Mention: Mission To The Unknown (1965)

The reason for this story's special status requires some explanation: it's definitely a Dalek story, and it's even a Doctor Who story, but it seems strange to include a Dalek story on either list that doesn't feature the Doctor himself in it. If this one-episode wonder deserves to go on either list, though, it's on the Best Episodes list, mainly because it gives us a good idea of what a TV series centered on the Daleks might have looked like. In the main, it might have looked pretty good: there's some impressive tension in this story even in audio form, and the few surviving clips from it show us that seeing the Daleks without the Doctor around to save anybody makes them even creepier. The Daleks are honestly menacing in this one, making a good recovery from the nearly comical figures they had previously cut in The Chase. If you'd like to see what this story might have looked like, of course, there's always this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTUTDaOB-A0 To borrow a phrasing from Dawn French, it's a tiny bit marvelous.