No-one could accuse Russell T Davies of lacking commercial sense. An old monster in Episode One to reassure the fans. Half the budget thrown at Episode Two to convince the CGI generation this stuff is worth watching. A gloriously historical Episode Three to flex the BBC's period drama muscles. Then relax with a money-saving two parter, coasting on the show's newly established success... And then, just as the rating starts to sag with the traditional mid-season slump - WHAM! Hit 'em with a Dalek.

Now THAT'S Doctor Who.

Previews suggested Dalek would be the pick of the season, and expectations were consequently enormously high for this episode - although perhaps not much higher than they would have been anyway, with the iconic nature of this, the Doctor's oldest foe. The BBC's pan-media publicity outlet ground into action once more after a lull for Aliens of London / World War III: a new-look Dalek graced the cover of the Radio Times; trailers popped up at all hours of the day; Blue Peter worked its usual behind-the-scenes-feature magic; Newsround Showbiz carried a feature on the story, although not until after the show aired... Even BBCi managed to make a story out of it, focusing on the monster's new abilities.

Ultimately, the episode probably ended up commanding almost the same level of public attention as Rose, the new season's opener - and much like that story, it succeeds absolutely in recreating an icon for a new generation, mixing the traditional with the innovative to invent a whole new, even more satisfying creation. The tight cast, high production values, impressive direction and top-notch visual effects are everything people had been demanded of the new Dalek, and indeed everything they should now be coming to expect from the series, but it's the writing that's the real start of this episode. It was always going to take more than a bigger laser to evolve the Dalek from a prop that crops up in Kit-Kat adverts into a really scary alien, and Rob Shearman absolutely cracks it, creating instead something that goes beyond all that and becomes, at times, genuinely moving.

The self-consciously traditional prop/costume design belies a new direction for what is a supposedly a 'monster' story, with a tense, claustrophobic storyline that makes the most of its 45 minutes by filling it with moral greys and difficult decisions rather than great big explosions. Gone are the massed armies of yester-who, the 10,000 Daleks waiting just off camera to annihiliate the universe - here we have a single lone Dalek, against a single, lone Doctor; both of them intelligent, and both of them dangerous. The result is an exquisite pair of performances, each one bouncing off the continuing wonder that is Billie Piper, and each character (and yes, it is a character) bringing out the best and the worst in the other. Between the three of them - amongst all the mayhem, and despite the occasionally overbearing incidental music and now-traditional wobbly editing - they create what are undoubtedly some of the strongest moments ever seen in the series.

Genuinely, it's hard to say much about this episode other than how good it is. It's scary, it's funny, it's tense, it's almost impossibly involving, and it's got lines that will send a thump of energy right through your tragic geeky heart. And it's got the best cliffhanger ever written, right there in the middle of the episode. And not only has it got all this, and profound emotional arcs, and powerful, moving moments of drama, AND great big explosions, it's also got the cute gay bloke off of Corrie.

Never mind aiming at the eyepiece, this one hits you right between the eyes - and stays there.

I bet some of the dedicated fan base are spitting feathers tonight. "Dalek" was all about icons - the show itself, the characters themselves, the enemy itself - enough icons in one show to keep media students happy for months. But rather than keep each element in thier own place, this series continues to chop up convention and slap heritage in the face with a kipper; the Doctor turns evil, the Dalek turns soft, and the companion gets herself into trouble an... Oh, okay, not [i] all [/i] the conventions are altered...

"Dalek" will certainly divide opinion. Maybe some fans are beyond convincing now - for some, this series is beyond a joke and as far as they are concerned, Doctor Who finished with Sylvester McCoy and has never, ever returned. This episode pushed the show further away from the assumed conventions of Doctor Who, and maintains the very high standard of the series so far. Make no mistake - this is classy, classic television, with the confidence of the show oozing from the screen. By making the Doctor far more complex, twisted even, the new series opens up the usual character traits and stuffs them full of new, unexpected details. Viewers are being asked to feel sorry for a Dalek, and for a moment actually does. The viewer - this one, at any rate - must have held their breath when they realised what was implied by the line "You'd make a good Dalek..."

For this episode to work, Christopher Eccleston would need all his ability turned all the way up. He did and gave one of the best performances of any of his predecessors. The shock seeing the trapped shirtless Doctor, urging his captor to listen to reason, was made all the more real by the constant sense of fear running through the entire episode. In 45 minutes, real terror existed in an episode destined to be remembered as a modern classic. Genuine concern at the safety of Rose, genuine shock at the electrocution of the guards, and as for the Dalek's levitation...

By making the Dalek and Doctor so closely tied, the danger always existed that the episode would be too sentimental, perhaps too domestic to use a common phrase round these parts. But how clever, how perfectly written, was the twist which saw the last surviving Time Lord turn into a gun-toting mad-man, and consequently the Dalek into the moral voice of reason. How brilliant to see the depth of intellegence which allowed humour to appear like raindrops on a windshield, giving the Doctor a real gritty drama to act through but with a background of light relief perfectly realised. Christopher Eccleston will surely be ranked fairly high on the list of 'best' or 'most convincing' Doctors. Not because he's the most recent or the better looking, but because this Time Lord has layers so thick one series wouldn't be enough to scratch the surface, and that is the kind of character the series has always needed. Of course, one series is all we have, all we get given after all these years. "Dalek" was a very different, very modern Doctor Who, played by one of the best Doctors, with one of the best narratives. Onwards, ever, ever onwards.

This could well be the best of the series so far. At no point during the episode did you feel like you had to make allowances for moments designed y'know for kids. No farting or burping here. This was a story sleekly designed to frighten the bejesus out of everyone and was all the better for it. Arguably, for the first time, the series held its back story on its sleeve throwing references for long term viewers and fans all over the place, to Davros and Cybermen, without needing to name any names. But new mythology was created for new fans, with the adversaries in the Time War spelt out for the first time and The Doctor's part in it.

Ironically the scariest moment for me were the scenes in which this story was told as The Doctor confronted the Dalek. He just ranted at it, face red with anger, veins popping out all over. We've seen Eccleston do comedy in the series, but this was the first time we saw his out and out anger and I just sat clutching the armrests of my chair. I jumped as we saw The Doctor's face bending around the Dalek's line of sight. Hartnell smirked, McCoy underplayed, Eccleston boiled over. Billie Piper was at it again too bringing even more dimensions to her work. The moment when we were led to believe the Dalek had killed Rose, even though having seen spoilery clips of later episodes we know she'll still be around, was heart breaking because the histrionics and screams which could have greeted her end are replaced with a quiet seeya to The Doctor.

But it wouldn't have worked if Nick Briggs, in his voice work as the Dalek, hadn't been there giving as good as he got. I've been following Briggs' Daleks for years in the Big Finish audio dramas but I haven't witnessed anything like the performance he gave tonight. In the diary in this month's Doctor Who magazine, he talked about how he was asked to loosen his intonation slightly and he comments that he'd been wanting to do that for years (perhaps constrained before by expectation). It really showed. This Dalek had an emotional range which made it even creepier -- as it tricked Rose into caring for it to the extent that she would touch and reinvigorate -- with that quiet whisper. Terrifying.

Much like The Unquiet Dead the episode benefited from having a small number of humans. It's tricky for the main guest cast to make an impression in circumstances such as this, but Corey Johnson's Henry van Statten had just the right level of smarm, Anna-Louise Plowman (who was previously in the Stargate tv series) oozed charisma and Bruno Langley had to just the right amount of charm without you wanting to throttle him. I like that he'll be travelling to another adventure -- he's a good counterpoint to the now slightly darker Doctor. Also want to mention Jana Carpenter who I think was the guard on the stairs who stood her ground against the Dalek -- along with Beccy Armory who played Raffalo the plumber in the second episode its an example of someone really making you care in only a few moments of screen time.

But again, to demonstrate what an intricate jigsaw this episode was, none of their work might have been as good had Rob Shearman not produced another gem. I'd thought it would be a more traditional work than Big Finish's Chimes At Midnight and particularly Scherzo. So it was with all the action and chase sequences. But there was still something else going on. You have an episode with a Dalek. What to do with it. I mean you could just drop it in a city and letting it go on a killing spree, and that might be exciting and scary (and expensive) but what would be the point we'd need to do something new. And as has been the case with this new series and Shearman's past work it was bound to subvert expectations.

They've invaded Earth, the universe and time on countless occasions. We've seen their beginning and now and then their ultimate end. What next? Make us care for them. Actually make them the wounded and The Doctor the aggressor, wanting their ultimate destruction. No crouching on the floor with two wires debating whether they should be destroyed. They just needed to die at all costs, the hero standing almost over one with a giant gun hoping to finish the job of wiping out their race for the final time. And we didn't want him to. Actually the Daleks have been given feelings before, way back in the Troughton era in The Evil of the Daleks when they were infected with the human factor leading to them inploding in on themselves in a civil war. Then it was a cool way of ending the adventure in some excitement. We never heard of that faction again (give or take a comic strip).

The programme makers knew that if you gave them feelings it took away the one thing which made them different. That they just wanted to kill everything else. Watching tonight I was reminded of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode I, Borg in which that series' version of the unstoppable killing machine was drawn away from its kind, spent time with humans and started to question its purpose. In that series it had the ultimate effect of weakening the foe for years afterward, because we knew that under their organo-metal exterior they still had the capacity to care. And even when it returned to its own kind there was that little wink at the end that it had taken the experience with it. They became too human.

Doctor Who didn't make that mistake. The Dalek might have absorbed some of Rose's DNA and was beginning to have new ideas, thoughts and feelings but it didn't know what to do with them. It could have gone either way and made it even better at its job. Instead it just wanted to die. And there it went, imploding in on itself. But we know its just that Dalek and no matter what The Doctor says it was the last of them, in our heart of hearts we know they'll back, and judging by all the flying, plungering and electricuting, deadlier and scarier than they've ever been.

Some will question whether its right that our hero would go on the offensive in that way -- all of the jellybabies and telling Leela to put away her knife out the window. But we've seen this kind of thing already this series from this incarnation with anti-plastic, withholding moisturizer, gas explosions and hunking great missiles. What people probably won't like is how direct it is, in a moment when the enemy is already effectively defeated. Which is an idea entirely inkeeping with Shearman's canon -- the deconstruction of what we know -- in previous cases through the restructuring of story, this time the audiences reaction to a Doctor who becomes an anti-hero bent on revenge.

The jigsaw continues with Joe Aherne's direction. His vampire series Ultraviolet was one of the best looking and written genre series of the past twenty years so I was delighted to hear he was directing some Who. In television series like this, it's less easy to see the individual contributions of the director, editor, photographer and producer. But for me this show seemed to flow much better than the rest. It had a fairly linear story, certainly, but the pacing seemed perfect, and it didn't throw in a camera angle to be flashy. Everything seemed in service of the story. I'd include in this Murray Gold's score which demonstrated what he is capable of, pulling back when he needed to in a very Howard Shore way.

But, finally what of the realisation of the Dalek? Considering the horror stories in the past of Spider-Daleks and humanoids I was amazed and overjoyed at actually how respectful this design is. There is something of the Battle-Dalek from their last tv appearance about it, all gleaming metal. The rationalising of the sink plunger as part of its killing armoury worked very well, as did it's new approach to the electronic keypad. The CG effects really demonstrated how far tv has come, especially as the exterminated not only went negative but also transparant, shocks flying through skeleton.

After the disappointment of the film version of The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, I feel blessed that my actual favourite franchise is being rendered so perfecting in the next century. It took that familiar jigsaw, all of the icons of the series, and cut its own pieces out to fit. Our perception of The Doctor and those Daleks will never be the same again, and that's an extraordinary thing.

Obviously wonderful and easily the most GOSH WOW ISN’T DOCTOR WHO THE BEST THING ON TELEVISION episode yet but, I don’t know, I think I preferred World War Three. Maybe it was because I have heard the whole thing before, in the fantastic audio adventure Jubilee or maybe because for all the fabulous set pieces it was just another base under siege story. Please don’t get me wrong, this was exciting, emotional and scary and easily the best ‘production’ of the show to date, it was great telly for sure but it just felt a little too mainstream to be truly Doctor Who. Whereas World War Three was outrageous and silly, this was all a bit normal for Doctor Who. Gosh, I bet I’m not making any friends, am I?

What Rob Shearman has done (in my eyes at least) is taken all the humour out of Jubilee and kept all the serious bits and despite adding some depth to the situation with further mentions of the Time War has practically pasted the entire script into a televised episode. And to be frank, I think I preferred Jubilee. There was something wonderfully uncomfortable about that particular audio and not just because we get to sympathise with the Dalek captive but because the humour was out and out disgusting in places and mixed in with the horror and drama made for a delightfully macabre experience. Whereas Dalek the TV episode goes for spectacle and frights, which admittedly it does fabulously but with the humour all but absent, I was constantly feeling there was something missing. It was no where near as uncomfortable and thus only half as effective as it could have been. Although I know somebody who will be delighted with this episode, someone who despised the humour from Jubilee but enjoyed the central idea. He will be in heaven.

However some of the humour in Jubilee was overdone and embarrassing and losing a woman asking a Dalek to marry her was greatly appreciated. And when all is said and done Rob Shearman is still Rob Shearman, which means the episode will still be powered by superb dialogue, strong emotions and clever twists. Dalek is all the best emotional bits from Jubilee strung together and that can be no bad thing. Considering how lightweight some of the series has been to this point some meaty drama can be no bad thing.

And wowza Christopher Eccleston where have you been hiding in the first five episodes? This was a bravura performance from the lead man, unleashing previously unseen anger and bitterness that highlights a particularly ugly and racist side to his personality. I adore this sort of examination of the Doctor and this was one of the absolute best attempts, his sheer hatred and fear of the Dalek led to some thoroughly uncomfortable moments. The scene where he attempted to kill the Dalek in cold blood chilled me to the bone but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of the Doctor gripping that bloody great bazooka and threatening to blow its head off at the climax. We know how dangerous these metal bastards can be and technically we should be behind the Doctor all the way but by creating an unfamiliar bond between the creature and Rose we are forced into the discomforting position of wanting him to fail. And while the much celebrated “Do I have the right?” scene from Genesis of the Daleks is powerful in its own right I don’t think any other Dalek story has convinced me that the Doctor is wrong in his beliefs and that the Dalek deserves to live. It aint pretty but it makes for compulsive television.

I am so glad Nick Briggs was given a chance to star in the new series, the delights he has lavished on fans of the Daleks with his audio series are manifold and were easily enough to convince the creators of Doctor Who that he is the right man for the job. What he does here is phenomenal, actually managing to make us care for what is nothing but a homicidal killing machine. With his voice alone he conveys the Daleks’ anger, despair, defeat and revenge. He makes it scary as shit in certain scenes and yet touching in others. Of course the creators of the actual Dalek machine deserve plaudits too, there has never been a Dalek this stylish before and several of its actions scenes, particularly the amazingly cool moment where it swivels its body around to shoot more people, are gob smacking. Everyone involved deserves a round of applause, they have managed to take this absurd looking pot and make genuinely frightening, certainly I was terrified when it rose into the air and turned the sprinkler system into electric hell.

Billie Piper is such a good performer it breaks my heart to have to say this but I think Maggie Stables is a better actress and her relationship with the Dalek in Jubilee had more charge than Rose’s with this Dalek. Rose and the Dalek hit all the right notes and more, they convincingly portray their (dare I say it) bond and bring you close to tears when she eventually tells it to commit suicide. The scene where Rose asks the Dalek what else it wants apart from killing is superb drama. But Maggie played the Evelyn as though she was thoroughly terrified of the creature whilst she was understanding it which made for far more edgy scenes whereas Rose clearly cares for the Dalek which guts some of the tension. Plus I couldn’t really take the sunlight scene as well as others have, there was something a bit too twee about it (well this is set in America!) reaching out its tentacle into the sunlight. Of course Dalek only had half the time Jubilee had to get inside its characters heads and I think it still deserves kudos for doing something with a bit more depth than most mainstream sci-fi shows would dare or indeed have the ability to do. This is far, far from the unbearable sugariness of Star Trek the Next Generation’s I, Borg which similarly humanised one of its biggest baddies. At least Dalek got to kill over two hundred people and sucker someone death for a laugh!

There was definite step up in production values and direction too which help to give this episode a filmic quality. The news of Joe Ahearne directing Doctor Who got a lot of fans excited as he has been the perpetrator of some fantastic telly in the past and this was like all his best work put together. The pace of this story never lets up and there is a genuine sense of danger. The POV Dalek scenes were giddily dramatic and added a lot of weight to the interrogation scenes. Some of the shots were painfully violent and all the better for it, the kids must have been terrified of this one. The cameras never stop moving and there is a pleasing mixture of complex long shots and intimate close ups. This is the work of a man who understands telly; the build up to the Daleks’ escape is nail bitingly tense. Murray Gold once again provides fine accompanying music; I loved the heavy vocals as the Dalek rampages through the complex. And the lighting and special effects were flawless, conveying danger and spectacle in equal measure.

Performances never falter but nobody tops the work done by Eccleston and Piper and more than ever you can feel their bond. The Doctor’s violent reaction after he shuts her in with the Dalek and thinks it has killed her made me sit up and gasp, clearly he has more complex feeling for this woman than we ever dared to think. And his heartbreaking reaction when she asks what he has become, pointing a gun at her because she standing between him and the Dalek, shock at how ashamed he feels proves he really does care what she thinks of him. Equally Rose’s painful “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world” when she thinks she is going to die speaks volumes.

Riveting drama then, and easily the most sit up and pay attention episode yet. I would not be surprised if Dalek won the best episode of the season poll as it clearly is oozing with talent. Maybe the humour of Jubilee would have poisoned such a dramatic episode but in the end of the day I will probably stick on the much more uncomfortable audio rather than watch the episode in the future.

Dalek' was the episode of this first Season of the new Doctor Who series I was most looking forward to; more than 'Rose' for me personally this was the story that excited me, the one I was most looking forward to. So did 'Dalek' meet my fevered expectations?

The answer has to be a resounding YES! This is perhaps the best Dalek story ever made and one of the best Doctor Who stories in any medium ever. So impressed was I by the way every aspect of this story, from the script, to the acting, to the special effects, to the music gelled together to create a story truly deserving of that much over used descrition 'classic', that it is difficult to know where to begin.

The script, by the very talented Rob Shearman, was simply superb and has significantly raised the standard for the other writers, including RTD himself. The concept of the alien museum owned by the self-centered Van-Straten was an interesting one and the idea of the Dalek machine having passed through several hands before it reached him an interesting one. The emphasising of just how dangerous even one lone Dalek can be was long overdue and surpassed even the audio adventure 'Jubilee' by the same writer in that regard. The rising up the stairs had, of course, been done before, but suddenly that sink plunger is no longer funny. The intelligence of the Daleks has never been more ably portrayed and this was only a lowly warrior; imagine how the intelligence of the Supreme Dalek compares. Other elements of the script worthy of praise include the Doctor's extreme reaction to the Dalek, the connection between the Dalek and Rose and the inventive ways in which the Dalek killed and manipulated. The ending was just perfection, the revealing of the truly vulnerable Dalek creature (looking almost exactly as I had always thought they would), Rose's anger at the Doctor and the Doctor's hatred, giving way to a kind of understanding. this wasn't just good Doctor Who, it was good drama period. So far as I could tell from one viewing there were no plot holes, no padding and no unnecessary characters or incident. This was a tight superbly wriiten script that I cannot praise Rob Shearman highly enough for.

'Dalek' was the episode that finally proved for me that Christopher Eccleston was the right choice to play the Doctor, and that made me regret that we will only see his excellent Ninth Doctor for one season. There was no unnecessary grinning here, no hint of sending the character up (something I have occassionally felt he was doing) but a tight focussed performance that made me forget completely this was a television series and that there was an actor playing the part of the Doctor, it was the Doctor there on screen, a real Time Lord fighting a real Dalek. Whether he was portraying pain, anger, concern or fear Eccleston was utterly convincing! If Christopher Eccleston is as good in the rest of the season his moving on from the role will be all the sadder.

Rose Tyler was, of course, just as central and important in this episode as the Doctor and once again we had a superb performance from Billie Piper. Like her co-star, she made me forget there was an actress playing the part and created the illusion of reality. I wasnt watching Billie, I was watching Rose Tyler.

The real star of 'Dalek' was, of course, the eponymous villain itself. The Dalek casing looked superb, the slightly retro design actually looking far more effective and menacing than the previous update in 'Remembrance of The Daleks. This was a Dalek that convinced you it was dangerous. The Doctor's comments about how dangerous it was were, to a large extent, merely the icing on the cake since it was obvious from the Dalek's appearance and new abilities that it was very, very dangerous. I have already mentioned the elevation and deadly sucvker arm, but the force shield was an idea long overdue and very welcome and the swivelling mid-section inspired. All these abilities were, however, overshadowed by two things, the superb Dalek voice by Nick Briggs that conveyed every nuance of the Dalek's intelligence and emotions and the aforemention intelligence itself, combined with a cunning that truly convinced that this was, possibly, the most dangerous creature in the universe.

The supporting characters were uniformly excellent with no hammy performances, even from those who were exterminated by the Dalek.

Murray Gold's music was also excellent, the operatic feel perfectly suiting the tone of the episode.

Thinking about it again, this is not only the best Dalek story ever, but possibly the best Doctor Who story ever!

Much better than last week: atmospheric, imaginative and scary. This was also an episode that worked well in the 45 minute format. I've waited 17 years for this, and on balance I wasn't disappointed.

My 'problem' with this episode, however, is its portrayal of the Dalek psychology. If the Daleks are supposed to be fascists - racists, like the Nazis - then that is first and foremost a social doctrine rather than an individual philosophy. So, it was always going to be interesting to see a Dalek in complete isolation. The episode obviously played on this a lot, but I wonder if it exaggerated the importance of genetic engineering as opposed to social philosophy, which I think is more interesting and relevant to our own experience. If you truly believe that something is evil because of its genes, then doesn't that make you a bit of a racist too? Also, the Doctor said the Dalek wanted to exterminate humans simply because they are different, but this misses an opportunity to explore another interesting idea. The Daleks, like all fascists, seek to dominate or exterminate other races because ultimately they feel threatened by them. Extermination is a sort of Bushesque pre-emptive doctrine. This ties in with their self-identification as survivors of a nuclear war. In that sort of social and technological environment you 'have' to adopt totalitarianism and genocide in order to protect your species.

Of course, the Dalek evolving after coming into contact with Rose touched on their genesis as survival - or 'travel' - machines in 'Genesis', and also on their search for the 'Human Factor' in 'Evil', and this was all good. However, it didn't quite ring true in the absence of the social context. The implication was that the Dalek in fact could not evolve - it was damned by its genetics, which is kind of interesting and poignant, but a bit morally suspect.

Other complaint: the Doctor's character. Of course, it was one of the well highlighted ironies of the episode that the Doctor 'would make a good Dalek', and again this is interesting and clever, but do we really want a hero who behaves like a Dalek? Are we happy with the Doctor being prepared to sacrifice his companion (and then try to blame it on someone else)? Are we happy with him being 'emotional' and torturing a creature vindictively, or committing genocide out of hatred and bitterness - oh, Tom, where are your two pieces of wire now? This petulant Doctor - who is becoming more and more like your mate's dysfunctional older brother - couldn't be more removed from McCoy's confronting the Black Dalek at the end of 'Remembrance', when he effectively reasons the Dalek to death - far more Doctoresque.

Having said that, Eccleston's portrayal of this dubious character is admittedly very good.

Finally, as someone who thinks 'Marco Polo' is arguably the best of all Doctor Who stories, I do hope we have another episode set in the past - even if it is a 'pseudo-historical'.