Doctor Who: Every Dalek Story In The New Series Ranked WORST To BEST

Every science fiction franchise has an iconic villain that even people who aren't fans will instantly recognise. Star Wars has Darth Vader. Star Trek has the Klingons. And Doctor Who has the Daleks.

Since debuting in the second ever televised serial some fifty-seven years ago, the psychotic cyborgs on wheels have been terrorising the Doctor and his companions all over the universe. The Daleks proved to be so fearsome, in fact, that they very nearly wiped out the Doctor's home planet and species for good.

Their reputation has not diminished at all in the revival series, with twelve stories since the show came back in 2005 featuring them as leading antagonists for several different TARDIS teams.

And that number will soon be thirteen, once the upcoming festive special Revolution of the Daleks has aired.

So what better reason to take a look back at every previous Dalek outing in the revival series to see which encounters with the psychos from Skaro are all-time classic episodes and which duds make an hour-long adventure feel like a lifetime?

Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor got off to a rocky start to say the least. While Series 8 is not without its highlights it definitely has a lot of moments where it stumbles, and the first real disappointment comes in only the second episode with Into The Dalek.

First of all, the concept of being shrunken down to go inside someone else’s body has been done to death, chiefly by animated programmes. The Doctor, Clara Oswald and a few guest characters running around inside a Dalek isn’t necessarily an awful idea, but it ultimately leads to little more than dashing down corridors away from ‘Dalek antibodies’.

Secondly, the thematic execution here really leaves something to be desired. The question of whether there can be such a thing as a good Dalek and, by way of metaphor, whether the Doctor himself can still be good after doing bad things is old hat for the new series.

It’s so old hat, in fact, that the very first Dalek appearance in New Who did the exact same thing to far greater effect almost ten years prior to this episode.

Time to get some new ideas.