Daleks or Cybermen

Which foe do you like best? I honestly love both, but the Cybermen get my vote.

I think the cybermen are a more interesting idea as their morality is more 'grey', depending on how you look at them. Both have good & bad stories, I think Nu Who messed up making them so underpowered compared to even a single dalek.

As daft as they sometimes were made out to be in Tru Who this was the final insult.

That was complete bullshit. A robotic Frankenstein's monster can bugger up a Dalek with ease in "The Chase" but a ton of Cybermen can't hold their own against them? What a joke. RTD must really not like the Cybermen.

The Daleks and its not even close IMO. The Cybermen are a great idea, but the Daleks trump the Cybermen in pretty much all areas.

1/ The Daleks have the better stories. Some of the best stories ever made are Dalek adventures. The Power of the Daleks, The Daleks, Genesis, Remembrance, Revelation, The Daleks Masterplan, Day of the Daleks etc. These are all top 20, or even top 10 material. The Cybermen really only have one story that could be top 10 or twenty material, Tomb of the Cybermen. Earthshock and The Invasion meanwhile are classics, whilst the others are either average, or poor.

The Daleks meanwhile I don't think have a single poor story. Planet is a bit unoriginal, but its much better than Silver Nemesis. Death, Resurrection, The Chase and Destiny meanwhile IMO are all much better than people give them credit for (though I agree with Dead Man Rising that the haunted house bit in The Chase might be one of the worst individual episodes of all time.)

2/ The Daleks are more genuinely alien. In terms of design there is nothing even remotely human about it which is unique among monsters. Even the Xenomorph still has arms and legs and a bipedal form. With the Daleks there is nothing we can recognise however. They aren't even like an animal we can relate too either.

Okay yes their design can look a bit silly, but even then that works in its favour. After all the Daleks are meant to be a metaphor for weak, pathetic, useless little men like Herman Goerring and Adolf Eichman who ironically despised others for being supposedly inferior.

The Daleks therefore looking ridiculous taps into that brilliantly. It also makes sense to their motive. A race that physically was so helpless would grow scared of other, more nimble life forms like the Thals being able to kill them in a fair fight and want to wipe them out first. Added to that the Daleks are nobody's idea of a perfect race.

In the DW universe most life forms are humanoid, even the Sontarans and the Silurians. So the Daleks it can be argued would always be seen as freaks and outcasts by most other races in the universe. Time Lords, humans, Thals, can all feel a certain kinship, relate to one another, and maybe even interbreed, exchange ideas, where as there are virtually no other life forms the Daleks can do that with. Most humanoids will be repulsed or scared of them, or laugh at them, so the Daleks naturally come to view other life forms as their enemies, (particularly humanoids.) Their idea that they are the master race is a great way of overcoming that inferiority they must feel.

3/ The Daleks have a better relationship with the Doctor, for want of a better term. As they are so evil, they disgust and repulse him more than any other life form. They are among the few enemies he enjoys killing, like in Planet of the Daleks. "For a man who abhors violence, I took great satisfaction in doing that."

4/ The Daleks have Davros. Davros was a fascinating character in his own right. His relationship with the Daleks had so many layers as well.

There was the great power struggle between them, the Daleks shocking even Davros at the end of Genesis, the fact that Davros had twisted his own people into his own image, and the strange father/son relationship between the Daleks and Davros.

5/ You can also do more with the Daleks. As the Cybermen have 0 emotions, then there isn't really any room for development. With the Daleks however we get to see their more manipulative side in Power, the Dalek civil war in the 80s, their twisted relationship with Davros, their race hatred for the Thals, and their cowardly side too which is a nice touch like the last Dalek begging Hartnell for help.

6/ The Daleks have a bigger screen presence. Their voices alone, and their screaming, irrational personalities mean they dominate the screen every time they show up.

There is only one area the Cybermen are better than the Daleks. The Cybermen are scarier. The Cybermen don't just kill you, they slowly and painfully turn you into one of their own.

The body horror aspects and the fact that physically a Cyberman is a towering mountain of steel that you can't fight back against, make them far scarier than a Dalek could ever be.

However even then I will say that the Daleks are scarier on a grander scale.

I liked the way that in Classic Who the Daleks are monsters the Doctor could never wipe out. Whenever he beat them (apart from the first story) he knew he had just set them back a bit. They still had millions of planets under their control, and there was nothing the Doctor could do to help them.

It was a chilling thought that there were so many planets the Doctor wouldn't even know about that they had wiped off the face of the universe. Planets as advanced as ours, with their own history, art, culture etc that the Daleks wipe out in the blink of an eye.

I voted for Cybermen but in all honesty the Cybermen haven't been written well since the 1960's,and the nuwho cybusmen were dreadful.

burrunjor wrote:
Planet is a bit unoriginal, but its much better than Silver Nemesis.

I think Planet is really boring for the most part. Silver Nemesis, on the other hand, is an absolute riot. I agree that the Daleks have had better stories (of course my favourite story of all time is a Dalek story) but in terms of the ideas behind them both I find the Cybermen a much more threatening and interesting adversary. I know the Cyberbus men are a bit bad, but as a kid I was absolutely terrified by them.

Cybermen in classic.

Kaled Hygiene wrote:Daleks every-time. Davros' spine-tingling conversation with the Doctor, 'Evil? No. No, I will not accept that. They are conditioned simply to survive. They can survive only by becoming the dominant species.', has echoes of National Socialism. Even Gharman's stirring speech later in Genesis, 'The Kaled race will survive if it deserves to survive' betrays a Social Darwinism ingrained in the Kaled Weltschmerz.

Statement of the bleedin' obvious. We've only known that for the last 40-odd years.

Kraphead Turdbath wrote:Just as National Socialism views history as a racial struggle, Communism a class struggle, I have interpreted Kaled ideology as perceiving evolutionary history as a struggle between the asexually reproducing Kaleds and the vigour of a universe teeming with feral and malignant sexual life personified by the first sexually-reproducing species the ancestral Kaled encountered, the Thal.

Yes, we know. I read. It was very boring.

Hi Gene wrote:No doubt Big-Finish have revised Davros' back-story to amend his fundamentalism to being the product of a failed romance or being jilted during his idealistic teenage years. Big Finish does not deserve to exist.

Oh, I dunno fella, it seems like a primary catalyst in your case. Pretty common really. Mummy doesn't love them, so they take it out on 'females', who rightfully recoil from their bitterness. Nonetheless the women are blamed for rejecting them ayway.

Most belligerent, self-loathing toads are that way because they have zero value in the sexual marketplace, and the resulting discordance manifests itself as strange power fantasies.