Daleks To Be Given 'A Rest' From Dr. Who 332
donberryman writes "Steven Moffat told the BBC 'There's a problem with the Daleks. They are the most famous of the Doctor's adversaries and the most frequent, which means they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe.'" And so, 400+ encounters later, both the Doctor and the daleks will take a break from each other.
Only this season (Score:4, Informative)
Re:spolier:The sonic screwdriver seems to be gone (Score:4, Informative)
At the start of Tom Baker's time the sonic screwdriver couldn't even reliably get the Doctor through a locked door, but now it is a magic wand that can do just about anything. Good to see it got written out of the plot recently.
It's been destroyed a couple of times since the reboot, and another one has been made, usually popping out the TARDIS console. He used it in the last scene of the last episode that was aired (unless you're talking about future episodes...). It is a fairly simple to use plot device though (need to move plot forward = use screwdriver to open door, otherwise, need to keep characters where they are = door is deadlocked)
Re:I guess (Score:5, Informative)
They appeared fairly regularly in the "classic" series, but not quite as frequently as peoples' memories would lead them to believe.
Indeed, Doctors 5 through 7 only met them once each on-screen. 2 & 4 encountered them in two televised stories each, 3 bumped into them in 3 stories and 1 holds the record (if you count modern two-parters as single stories) at 5 televised meetings. I'm ignoring short "guest" appearances here, like the few minutes in the 5 doctors, and counting the last segment of Frontier in Space as a run-on to the full Dalek story that followed.
The fact that they didn't appear often heightened the excitement for the fans when they did and I agree with many that they have perhaps been overused in recent series, so giving their narrative a break for a bit certainly makes good sense to me.