The Daleks are universally recognised as Doctor Who's most iconic - and not to mention persistent - adversaries and, having first appeared on a cold winter's night in December 1963, they're almost as old as the series, too. It was inevitable, then, that the show's 2005 revival would be accompanied by their 21st century comeback but it almost never came to fruition after the BBC came close to losing out on an ongoing licensing feud. Suffice to say, the copyrighting issues were laid to rest and, while they haven't quite managed to replicate the outbreak of Dalekmania that hit the nation back in the 60s, they've tried their damned hardest to continue their reign as TV's most formidable foes. To cut a very long story short, they haven't stopped coming back since. It all began, for NuWho at least, back in the aptly titled Series 1 classic Dalek in which Christopher Eccleston well and truly paid his Time Lord dues as he discovered that he wasn't the soul survivor of the Time War after all. One of his greatest enemies had also lived to tell the tale and that scene - in which our hero comes face to face with an adversary he thought long since dead - has gone down as one of the most iconic moments in NuWho history. It was enough to send a shiver down your spine. The Dalek was pretty scary, too.
Dan Butler is the Doctor Who Editor at WhatCulture.com. When he isn't writing his own articles or editing other people's, he can be found trawling the internet for gifs of Steven Moffat laughing. Contact him via dan.butler@whatculture.co.uk.
