3. The Daleks Made The Doctor
BBCAlthough this would make sense for anybody who has seen the first few stories of Classic Who, Into The Dalek marks the first time it has been made officially canon. Everything the Doctor is fundamentally comes down to his first trip to Skaro in 1963s The Daleks. While inside Rusty, the Doctor tells him this and it all goes back to the Doctors initial moral ambiguity. In the programmes first story An Unearthly Child, the Doctor is shown to have incredibly flexible morals; abducting Ian and Barbara in order to hide his identity, and later attempting to smash a cavemans head in with a rock. An Unearthly Child is all about surviving. But The Dalek is where things change tack for the Doctor. At the start, the Doctor still has a lot of moral ambiguity but its being faced with a life-form as repugnant as the Daleks that truly awakens the fire of wanting to do right in the universe in him. That first encounter with the Daleks is the moment where the Doctor is truly born, and when he sets out to make the universe better. If they were still alive and had legs, those Daleks would be kicking themselves.