What I really liked about the RTD era was the introduction of the Cult of Skaro.
I loved how they showed up in series 2 (and had that amazing argument with the Cybermen) to ultimately Dalek Thay in Journeys End.
Felt like a proper reason for the Daleks to have a motive and story and wrapped up nicely with what Thay did, all interconnecting throughout the Tenths time as the Doctor.
I really love a
lot of Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks because when you push past the obvious low budget (the difference between this attempted representation of New York and what we'd later get in Smith's run is astonishing), and bad New York accents (complete with Andrew Garfield practicing his Spider-Man accent!) the actual Dalek drama in it is probably the most thematically interesting Dalek story told since Genesis. This is them breaking their code at last. Sec becomes an interesting character as humanity creeps into him and the actor does a magnificent job of blending the Dalek staccato into more human speech, but more interesting is how Thay, Jast and Caan slowly begin to turn on him. There's a truly wonderful shot that I absolutely adore, down in the Manhattan sewers...
"Request Information: What is your opinion of Dalek Sec?"
"We were created to follow him."
"But you have doubts?"
[draws closer]
"Affirmative."
This exchange in this episode really drives home why I think it's thematically special, and also is demonstrative of how I think the Moffat-era portrayal of the Daleks, with asking the Doctor for help, forging alliances etc, took a step wrong. The most important thing to Daleks is order, orders, the chain of command - but when Sec begins to show emotion and even asks for the Doctor's help, it is blasphemy for them. You got them unsure of what to do, down in the sewers,
bitching about their commander and then eventually snapping. Then they quietly betray, and when the betrayal becomes clear they kick off and go mad. "The Doctor will step away from the controls! He is an enemy of the Daleks - and so are you! You have lost your authority!" And the great line -- "You told us to imagine, and we imagined your irrelevance."
It's a deeply flawed episode and it looks cheap as fuck, but I
love the subtext of the episode for the Daleks as a race. It's brilliant.
Similarly, I sort of think the Moffat-era representation of Cybermen ran aground around Gaiman's episode where they became all-powerful, invincible against everything, able to 'upgrade' to beat anything. That episode really irritates me because the point of the Cybermen (and what separates them from the Daleks) is that they are the science fiction/space/kid-friendly sanitized (IE no blood) version of zombies - the reason them waging war is deadly is because for every one of you that is killed, they gain a new soldier by upgrading them. They swarm you - they don't need to be invincible... which is why they're still effective in Doomsday even though they can't even scratch the Daleks and we see Mickey and his crew blasting them to pieces like they're nothing. Mind, this year's representation of them was better, and it seems like the invincible angle is being slowly eased back out of existence. (Indeed, a weird thing about this year's episode is that when the newer Cybermen start to appear most of them (though not all) are the RTD-era design and not the new, snazzy upgraded design... again. Weirdly they sort of swapped places - the Cybermen became more like the Daleks and the Daleks became more like Cybermen, and neither is as effective for it.
