YMMV / Doctor Who S4 E9 "The Evil of the Daleks"

• Fair for Its Day: While Kemel suffers from some of the same issues as the following story's Toberman in terms of being an example of the "mute savage" archetype, they're not nearly as bad here since it's made clear that Kemel's muteness has nothing to do with his ethnicity, and he's nowhere near as slavishly loyal to Maxtible as Toberman is to Kaftan, siding with the Doctor and Jamie once he realises he's been deceived. Victoria is shown to love and trust him as a friend rather than viewing him as a mere servant or tool, he's shown to care about her in the same way, and Maxtible's certainty that he's Dumb Muscle just because of his size, disability, and muteness is not only meant to be transparently wrong but villainizing. Unfortunately, the show does allow Kemel to be overpowered by a crazy old man and flung to his death rather than live on to the next episode.
• Fight Scene Failure: The Daleks meet their "final end" in an utterly disjointed mess of a battle scene, interspersed with shots of a cheap-looking tabletop city and some toy Daleks exploding.
• Fridge Horror: Maxtible calls his laboratory "the only thing of value in [his] life". He has a daughter.This is tragically in keeping with his overall characterization.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The Daleks saying "Doctor. Jamie. Friends," is reminiscent of the Ood doing the exact same thing a few decades later with the DoctorDonna.
• He Really Can Act: This story is widely considered to feature the greatest Dalek performances in the Classic Series, depicting them with a range of emotions and complexity never seen before or since until the Revival Series began in 2005 and featuring some of the strongest vocal work from Peter Hawkins and Roy Skelton; a good contingency of people think that Hawkins and Skelton's performances in this serial outpace even Nicholas Briggs's rendition of the pepperpots in the Revival Series! The physical performances for the Daleks are also quite strong, featuring a broad range of movement that fits both the standard and Human Factor-infused Daleks and allows them to feel more distinct as characters than before. It's clear that with this having been planned to be the last Dalek story ever (a plan that was ultimately for naught come the 70's), the Daleks' voice actors and mechanics decided to go all out and end things off with a bang.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The serial ends with the Doctor dramatically announcing that they have just witnessed the definitive end of the Daleks. Yeah, you're allowed to start laughing at that...
  • The newly human-like Daleks repeating the word "dizzy, dizzy," sounds an awful lot like HAL 9000 singing "Daisy, Daisy..."
• Ho Yay: The Doctor has to manipulate Jamie as part of a plot and Jamie finds out, he tells the Doctor "We're finished!" and refuses to touch him. (It doesn't last long.) And the sheer terror on the Doctor's face when he finds out that the Daleks want to use Jamie in their experiments. Not until the Revival series would a Doctor go into a similar panic at the thought of a companion being harmed.
• Popularity Polynomial: Much like the following story, this story enjoyed a near-legendary reputation for several decades, only for it to decline dramatically around the turn of the century — in this story's case due to footage of the episode's final battle being rediscovered, and being widely agreed to be a colossal letdown that suffered major cases of both Fight Scene Failure and Special Effect Failure. However, this story's reputation has recovered noticeably better than that of the following one, partly due to its racial politics being less troublesome, partly due to lacking that story's profound pacing issues, and partly due to the animated reconstruction allowing the story's strengths to show through, and giving the final battle the sense of grandeur that it deserved.
• Retroactive Recognition: Toby is played by Windsor Davies, who would later be best known for playing Sergeant Major Williams in It Ain't Half Hot, Mum.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • From the few bits of footage that remain, the Dalek city appears to be a laughably poor imitation of the original from their debut story. It honestly looks like what you'd expect from a Blue Peter "how to create your own Dalek city" segment... if that show's presenters had even less money and raw materials than usual, and were trying to recreate it purely from memory.
  • The surviving footage of the last episode is notorious for featuring Dalek action figures in the climactic fight scene between the "humanised" Daleks and the Emperor's troops. (Which might have worked, except they're the Marx Toys bump-n-go Daleks, which looked very different from their full-sized inspirations.) The same action figures are used again for the shots of the frozen Dalek army in "Planet of the Daleks".
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While the Dalek city on Skaro isn't terribly impressive judging by the few surviving bits of footage and still photos, the Dalek Emperor is a different story entirely, towering at twice the height of the other Daleks and the human characters.

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