Doctor Who: EVERY NuWho Villain And Monster Ranked Worst To Best
3. Daleks
The Doctor's ultimate nemesis will, naturally, see third place as a flagrant failure. However the top 3 are pretty much interchangeable, and should the Daleks happen to suddenly burst in with fury and firepower like they did with brave Harriet Jones, former prime minister, then top spot they shall have!
We've covered the Dalek bigwigs, so this is all about the foot soldiers - the best-known bronze Daleks, the ones that do the vast majority of the exterminating work: Rusty, the Death Squad, Executioners, and the hybrids who were deemed impure. And a shoutout to the insane ones banished to the Asylum and those discarded to the sewers of Skaro.
The sight of Terry Nation's creations assembling en masse for a Crucible chorus chant of "Daleks are the masters of Earth" then vanquishing the vaunted Valiant, and seeing the spectre of one, then hundreds, of Daleks descend onto Arcadia from a first-person perspective is enough to make you submit like a Tivolian.
The Daleks' Nazisms are eerily invoked when they screech Exterminieren! in German, and laid brutally bare when seeing them gruesomely blast a young family to death, before giving Thanos some Decimation stylistic tips by doing a Reality Bomb test on a group of unfortunate souls.
Yet, as the Gallifreyan soldier points out during The Last Day: "If just one Dalek made it through, it could destroy this entire city. That's all it would take. One Dalek. One Dalek acting alone and we're finished."
The superlative Dalek episode from Series 1 best represents how acutely dangerous they are as a single Dalek exterminates its way up through Henry van Statten's bunker with a casual relentlessness. Moreover, the bigger production budget for a 21st century audience showcased how deadly their egg whisk and plunger weaponry are, along with the forcefield to dissolve bullets and how repulsive their true tentacley form is.
They truly are the most frightening pest control experts in the universe.