The New Who is incredibly Buffyish throughout - consciously so, the showrunner has said he's shooting for that vibe. Even the lame episodes are lame in the way lame Buffys were; badly done victoriana and humanising villains in a fan-ficcy way.

I didn't think humanising the Dalek was lame; in fact, I thought it was a really good episode, especially given that they didn't humanise him too far, and that they used it to point up the Doctor's alienness. Though the whole DNA-from-Rose thing was a huge plot weakness.

But then, I like fanfic, so you could still be right about it being ficcy. (Am I wrong in reading your comment as using 'fan-ficcy' in a negative sense?) I wouldn't be surprised if RTD doesn't think about writing the show in quite a ficcy way, actually, given that he's a long-time fan and writing based on an extensive canon.

Ahem. Yes, very Buffyish-- in the plot and in, for example the one-liners. And the doomed love affair between an older 'alien' man and a young strong woman, if you can bring yourself to read it as a love affair, which I'm trying desperately not to, and failing...

I've yet to read a review of Dr. Who that hasn't compared it to Buffy.

Yeah, I meant fanficcy as a bad thing - there's a tendency in a lot of the fic I've read to start "wouldn't it be cool if...", and episodes which pander to that tend, IM, to be the weakest ones. Also this was the first episode that relied on you knowing the canon to be remotely interesting, which for a teatime BBC1 show is fatal. The idea of doing Enemy Mine with Daleks was cool, but they needed to re-establish them as unstoppable relentless killing machines before they did it. If you'd never seen a Dalek before this episode - and the target audience wouldn't have - then you don't understand why they're so scary and why humaniing them is interesting. Plus the Dalek voice, when used for anything other than ' I WILL EXTERMINATE!" sounds bloody daft.

I'm just thankful that they didn't resurrect Davros yet again for this episode.

Give it time... he's the #2 recurring villain after the Master, isn't he ?

Yeah, if one Dalek fell through a rift in space-time who knows what else could.

Jim, I think it's highly likely that, despite being of a previously non-Who-watching generation, I've done more background research than the target audience, which would indeed tend to make this episode more interesting to me. Fair point.

Daniel, since the Radio Times summary of episode 11, "Boom Town", says "The Doctor comes across someone he thought was long dead", I think it's so likely as to be almost certain that something else got through from either the Dalek destruction or Gallifrey's destruction. taraljc on lj had a nice essay related to that, actually.

So episode 5 may also set a precident for furure eps. Interesting.

Um, where are all the USians watching Dr. Who? Is it on BBC-America already?