Oh, and D – great stuff. I completely take your point – its not the colouring I had a problem with, and the codes do seem to add a really interesting new element to them as an enemy. So I’m pro that. I don’t particularly like the new shape though: they look (if possible) slight more unwieldy than the predecessors, and if they’re thinking of using the old battleships, they have a bit of door widening to be getting on with!

No one’s mentioned the best thing about Mark Gatiss’ series 5 Dalek episode: it restores the classic Who naming convention with regard to Dalek stories. “Victory of the Daleks” sounds like something straight out of the Pertwee era. For all its faults (and there are a few; I’ll let the recent RFS commentary make the case for me), this is a very good thing for Nu-Who.

The iDaleks
There has been a lot said on the subject of the new paradigm Daleks, a lot of it negative.
Their introductory story, “Victory” wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t really firing on all eight cylinders either.
Many people have complained about the new design, but I think that they’ve been redesigned in a very clever way, from the inside out.
The Daleks have always had a huge problem from a story telling point of view, they’re too hateful, too well armed, too numerous and too intelligent to lose against the Doctor.
Daleks are supposedly these super smart homogeneous hate machines with total intolerance for other living things, but you can’t just have them glide into a room and exterminate everyone without some threats and dialog first. It’s not a great way to tell a story.
The writers have always had to deal with this problem, had to concoct some reason or another why the Daleks aren’t acting like their nature dictates that they should, exterminating first and asking questions later (if at all).
There are quite a few ways around this narrative problem, some of them brilliant, but they’ve pretty much all been done before in the long history of Doctor Who, and with repetition they’ll seem more contrived every time.
Enter the iDalek-
Now instead of one race of identical killing machines, we have five distinct Dalek types; A Drone (red), a strategist (blue), a scientist (orange), a mysterious Eternal Dalek (yellow) and a Supreme Dalek (white).
I’ve heard plenty of people dismiss this as an artless attempt to sell more toys.
I really don’t see it that way. It seems to me like it’s literally a new paradigm, a whole new way of thinking about the Daleks.
Now for the first time they can have conflicting opinions and debates among themselves and realistically be unsure of which course of action to take, instead of constantly failing in the same way over and over again like a villain from the 60′s Batman TV show.
Maybe the scientist Dalek is against exterminating the Doctor because he wants to question him about time travel, maybe the strategist Dalek is against exterminating the Doctor because he wants him to be free to rally their enemies and bring them out of hiding.
All of a sudden the Daleks can have differing opinions and therefore much more complicated goals and motivations, not to mention, dialog amongst themselves more in depth than “I Obey!”
If they sell a few extra toys, that’s great too. From what I remember of playing as a child, it’s a lot like story telling. Let’s not forget Mr. Moffat’s in the same line of work.
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D

One of the reasons I enjoyed Victory of the Daleks more than some (even with the garish colour schemes), was because the Daleks were small in number and were intelligently used. And because there was a Dalek ship. For me, it was a more traditional, proper Dalek story with a ship to blow up…