20 Years Ago, Doctor Who Pulled Off The Perfect Reboot Of Its Iconic Villain
Exterminate!
One of the most impressive things about the return of Doctor Who in 2005 was the way in which the series gradually introduced the complex lore of the series. In “Rose,” we met the 9th Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), and in “The End of the World,” we got a bit of backstory about what had happened to the Time Lords since we’d last seen the 8th Doctor in 1996. But perhaps the most crucial reboot of modern Doctor Who was the sixth episode of what was then considered the new “Season 1.”
On April 30, 2005, Rose (Billie Piper) and the Doctor brought one of the greatest sci-fi villains of all time back in an episode that holds up much better than you might remember. Here’s why “Dalek” is such a banger, 20 years later.
When the TARDIS is called off course, Rose and the Doctor find themselves in an alien museum in 2012. At the time, this would have put the events in the near future. Soon, the Doctor faces off against Henry van Statten (Corey Johnson), a wealthy bully who collects alien artifacts and wields shadow power over all of America. While van Statten may not be one of the more memorable villains of the first Russell T Davies Who era, script writer Robert Shearman does a fairly good job of making the character both hatable and cartoonish enough to be merely a preamble to the real menace. But it should be noted that Shearman’s script for “Dalek” wasn’t entirely original to the reboot series. In fact, Davies was inspired directly by an earlier 6th Doctor audio story called “Jubilee,” which also featured elements of a Dalek conflict, that would become Who’s contemporary Time War.
Eventually, the episode reveals that van Statten’s facility has captured and imprisoned a Dalek, which the Doctor believes to be impossible. And it’s at this point that we learn a lot more about the Doctor’s role in the Time War. When the lone Dalek asks the Doctor why it won’t receive orders from the rest of the Daleks, the Doctor rants that the entire Dalek race was wiped out. “I watched it happen! I MADE it happen!”
Pathetically, the Dalek asks, almost sympathetically, “You destroyed us??” And it's within this moment, about 10 minutes into the episode, that the dark nature of the 9th Doctor, and, indeed, the entire story of the Time War, is given a new thematic dimension. For longtime fans, the Daleks hadn’t appeared on screen since the 7th Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) story “Remembrance of the Daleks” in 1988. And so, to reintroduce the Daleks in the form of one single Dalek, and to make the Doctor responsible for their obliteration, was quite the move.
Rose (Billie Piper) and a Dalek, before they form a different bond.
Yes, the Dalek in “Dalek” still represents the screaming genocidal cyborg maniac of the classic series, but this episode makes the Doctor now inexorably tied up in whatever war crimes the Daleks have committed. Famously, the episode ends with the Doctor wielding a large gun, telling Rose to get out of his way so he can destroy it. Rose points out that the Dalek might be changing, “But what about you, Doctor, what the hell are you changing into?”
And it's in this line that the then-new version of Doctor Who revealed a much more complex idea than we’d previously been aware of. The Doctor wasn’t just a happy-go-lucky traveler with a tragic past. He was also capable of perpetrating untold horrors and carried with him the ability to become a dark version of the character, a fate that had been only hinted at a few times in the classic show. The episode is called “Dalek,” but of all the 2005 Season 1 Who episodes, this one might be the story that is the most about the Doctor himself.
In some ways, the immoral and dangerous side of the Doctor wasn’t fully addressed or reconciled until “The Day of the Doctor” in 2013, when the destruction of Gallifrey was averted through time-travel shenanigans. However, even as the Doctor’s backstory has been revised, the 21st-century version of this character is still a deadly destroyer of worlds. And though the Doctor was always capable of wielding great power in the old days, the most dangerous version of the titular Time Lord was fully revealed at this exact moment.
