So Davros first appeared in the story "Genesis Of The Daleks," back in 1975. By this point, the Daleks were really really tired — they'd pretty much exhausted their potential in the 1960s. They'd been brought back in 1972 purely as a ratings grab, replacing some generic aliens in "Day Of The Daleks" at the last moment. (I'm guessing that story originally had a different title.) And then Terry Nation kept writing the same Dalek script over and over again, so finally the Who production team asked him to do something different: create an origin story for the Daleks. The result, "Genesis Of The Daleks," remains the best Dalek story of all time, because it uses the Daleks sparingly and takes their Nazi subtext and makes it blatant. (Nyder, Davros' right-hand man, actually wears a Nazi cross in a couple of episodes, before the BBC freaks out and removes it.)

Davros is a compelling character in "Genesis Of The Daleks." He honestly believes his race is doomed, due to thousands of years of war with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The Kaleds will inevitably mutate into unrecognizeable blobs, so their only hope is to embrace their transformation by building mini-tanks to roll around in. It's all about survival. And Davros' thinking has been shaped by a genocidal race war with the Thals, so it's not surprising he wants to engineer the Daleks genetically to be ruthless and obsessed with racial purity.

Davros' speeches are memorable and quotable in a way that Terry Nation's writing generally isn't. They have the cadences of some of Robert Holmes' great villain rants (Holmes was editing the scripts during this era) — you can hear other Holmes villains, like Morbius or Sharaz Jek in Davros — but they also have a weird lilt of their own. I heard a rumor, years ago, that actors Tom Baker and Michael Wisher sat during lunch breaks and rewrote Davros' dialog into iambic pentameter. (Probably not true, but it's a nice story.) It's certainly true that you can rewrite some of Davros' speeches into Shakesperean blank verse:

To hold in my hand a capsule that contained such power,
To know that life and death on such a scale was
My choice. To know a tiny pressure on
My thumb, enough to break the glass, would end
Everything. Yes! I would do it! That power
Would set me up among the gods! And through
The Daleks, I shall have that power!

(No, it's not perfect. But Shakespeare's iambic pentameter often has the occasional troche tossed in as well.)

Davros is cunning and manipulative, using the Thals to destroy his enemies among his own people, and then wiping out the Thals afterwards. He becomes more and more maniacal, until that great scene, quoted above, where he admits all he really wants is to achieve immortality by wiping out everyone else.

Actually, "Genesis Of The Daleks" introduces two great elements. Davros is one, and the other is the idea that the there's a possible future where the Daleks have succeeded in wiping out all other life in the universe. The Time Lords are actually scared of the Daleks, so much so that they're willing to drag the Doctor into rewriting history on an almost unimaginable scale. Davros pretty much exhausted his potential in his one outing, but the idea of trying to avert a dystopian Dalek future has almost limitless potential — so guess which one Doctor Who returns to in the next outing, "Destiny Of The Daleks"?

There's so much wrong with "Destiny Of The Daleks" that we could be here all day enumerating its faults. It's so blah, even the incidental music gets bored and quits halfway through. The Daleks wobble and have to resort to becoming suicide bombers. And Davros is a shell of his former self. It's partly the actor — David Gooderson just can't match Michael Wisher's purring mania — but also the writing. He's degenerated into generic mad-baddie #52.

Plus, none of it makes any sense. "Genesis Of The Daleks" presumably takes place in the distant past, centuries if not millennia before the Daleks invade Earth in 2165. And "Destiny Of The Daleks" takes place in the future, when humans are scattered across the universe. So Davros not only survived getting exterminated in "Genesis," he managed to activate a life-support system that operated for, what, 10,000 years? (I know, I know. This is the same program that had clones appearing fully clothed.) The point is, Davros had a perfectly great death scene in "Genesis."

And the reason for bringing back Davros is horrendous: disco robots have managed to battle the Daleks to a standstill. Instead of exploring the idea that a future timeline involves the Daleks dominating the universe, suddenly they're so weak they can't defeat an army of android Bo Dereks. It's all because the Daleks are too logical, and so they can't outthink the disco-droids' computers. (The thing I always liked about the Daleks before this was that they weren't logical. They were full of rage and hatred, and enjoyed killing inferior life forms for its own sake.) So the Daleks need Davros to help them think outside of the pepper-pot. It's insulting to the Daleks, and a waste of Davros.

A side note: I can see why people felt the need to keep bringing Davros back: it's hard to write for the Daleks as villains. In the early Dalek stories, there are long scenes of the Daleks talking amongst themselves, and it gets a bit tiresome. Like in "The Daleks," where they say things like, "We-will-lure-the-pri-so-ners-into-a-false-sense-of-security." The Daleks are better when they have someone to bounce off, or a leader. It's the same reason Star Trek's Borg got first Locutus, then Lore, then (yawn) the Borg Queen. But it's a lazy way of dealing with the Daleks. The new series managed to make them compelling on their own, in stories like Rob Shearman's "Dalek" and Russell T. Davies' "Doomsday." It's not impossible.

And then all of the Dalek stories of the 1980s have Davros, just as a matter of course. At some point, he's literally 20,000 years old, and still rattling around making repetitive speeches. It turns out the Disco-bots have created a virus that kills Daleks, and they need Davros to deal with it. (Even though we never see the Disco-mats again, and the virus goes away on its own eventually.) Davros' only good bits, apart from "Genesis," are in "Revelation of the Daleks," which is really just a generic story about a mad scientist who turns corpses and cryo-suspended humans into a food source. Davros and the Daleks are shoehorned in, presumably because a story about Daleks is more exciting than a story about mad scientists and cannibalism. (That is, there's no reason for the Great Healer to be Davros, in the context of the story.)

And then "Remembrance of the Daleks" actually does fine without Davros. The Daleks are given other human mouthpieces, including the creepy little girl — who we're supposed to think is Davros at first, when she's wearing her headpiece. And the Nazi sympathizer guy. And Marcus Scarman. "Remembrance" is proof that you can still do a great Dalek story without Davros — until he turns up and starts chewing scenery in the last 10 minutes. I feel like shouting "Who invited you?" at the screen, like in that Vernon Reid album. Sylvester McCoy and Terry Molloy have a scenery-chewing contest and call it a draw, then everything blows up. The little blonde girl is a million times more chilling and menacing than Davros and his increasingly floppy rubber mask at this point.

Really, at this point, Davros represents the failure of the Daleks. Whenever you see Davros on screen in any episode other than "Genesis," you can just know that he's there because the producers don't think the Daleks can carry a story on their own. He exhausted all his story possibilities the first time around, and now he's just the Daleks' ball and chain.

Good thing the new Doctor Who show proved so conclusively that we don't need Davros to make the Daleks interesting, eh?

I'm sure people will put down last night's Doctor Who finale by calling it fanfic, but it was actually much worse — and somewhat better — than that term implies. Russell T. Davies left no fannish button un-pressed, and made so many ridiculous logic-flops in his epic storyline, that he practically elevated fanwank to a new artform. I couldn't help comparing it to last year's finale, which was also ridiculous but didn't require a PhD in Who-ology to follow.

There were things that happened in last night's episode that I read about weeks, or months, ago. But I didn't stick them in morning spoilers, or downgraded them to "crazy rumors," because they just seemed too ridiculous. In particular, the Doctor's regeneration resulting in two David Tennants, one of whom is "human." And then the "human" David Tennant is sentenced to go off with Rose and be her boytoy. I honestly thought even Russell T. wouldn't give Rose such a ridiculously contrived happy ending.

Doctor Who is taking a break next year, with just a few one-off specials instead of a full season. Ostensibly, this is because David Tennant wants a year off, so he can star in Hamlet with Captain Picard. But it's pretty obvious, after this latest season, that the show needs a rest anyway. Even with Davies leaving and new showrunner Steven Moffat coming on, a year off would give the show a much-needed chance to rethink and recharge.

When Who came back in 2005, it was fresh and different than anything that had come before, and it was also accessible to new viewers. But recently, the show has been stuck in a tired formula, and it's giving in to the temptation to reference its own past more and more often.

Take last night's episode: I was startled by how continuity-heavy it was. It was like a clips episode. And I had vaguely wondered, in advance, if the show would mention that Sarah Jane Smith had met Davros, back in 1974. But the show didn't just mention that fact — it went on and on and on about it, in one of Davros' 100 boring speeches about destiny and souls and stuff. (Was it just me, or did Davros talk for about 20 minutes?) Likewise, the episode didn't have to bring in the fact that Torchwood's Gwen Cooper is played by the same actor as the psychic maid in season one's "The Unquiet Dead," but why not? It's not as if there's a story that's being stopped dead in its tracks while we obsess over minor fannish details or anything.

By the way, I don't think it's an insult to call an episode like this "fanfic." I love fanfic, I've written fanfic before, and it fulfills an important purpose. Fanfic is how we get to explore some of the corners of a universe that the "official" canon will never get to. It's exactly where you should have a scene where Davros meets Sarah Jane again and they talk about their first meeting 34 years ago. Fanfic also lets us have the kinds of happy endings we wish our favorite characters could have, but which we know deep down would have us hooting with derision if they actually happened: like getting a magic duplicate of the Doctor for Rose to spend the rest of her life with. (Until she gets sick of him following her around and talking like Catherine Tate. I give it a week.)

So why do I say this almost elevated fanfic to an artform? It's sort of the way Torchwood season one created the most brilliant crystalization of slashfic in television form, actually. It was every fanfic cliche, from the multiple Mary Sues, to the shipper happy ending, to the Doctor suffering emotionally and getting hurt and needing comfort, to the endless processing of minor plot details from old stories. It's like Roy Liechtenstein turning cheesy comics panels into huge paintings — by blowing fanfic up to a huge size and making it larger and more colorful than life, we see what's beautiful about it.

There was a lot to love about this episode, including Catherine Tate having the time of her life as a hybrid Time Lady/human, Daleks shouting in German, the lunacy of the Haagen Dasz device and the dwarf-star-necklace both turning out to be useless, K-9 showing up to save the day for a second, the Annihilation Wave reality bomb being such a ludicrous plot device, the naked Doctor-clone, Captain Jack having some no-doubt-delightful fantasy involving the half-Time-Lord Donna and the two Doctors. There was a pretty great splashy finale buried in all that excess and fannish drool.

Really, this should have been Donna's episode, all about her own Bad Wolf-ization. It's too bad she got a bit lost in the crowd of old companions and random supporting characters. In particular, it's clear now that bringing Rose back was a mistake. She added almost nothing to the past few episodes, except for one or two cool big-gun moments and some random shipper fodder. She was incapable of actually saying a complete sentence without sounding as if she was about to swallow her own tongue, and she drained all the energy out of every scene she was in. The gritty, determined Rose I liked in "The Satan Pit" and a few other episodes was nowhere to be seen, and it was pretty clear that she was only there so she could get her pet faux-Doctor at the end.

I've mentioned that Donna has been growing on me this season, so I was bummed that she got screwed over so badly. I mean, she gets a half hour of being a semi-Time Lord, which seems to involve imitating David Tennant's mannerisms. And then she's dropped back right where she started, being the person who doesn't even notice that the Earth got moved across the universe and dropped into a hole in space/time. Not only that, but she's in a completely untenable situation: nobody can ever ask her what actually happened on her wedding day, or her head will explode. That's going to work out great.And it's all the Doctor's fault, because he was too vain to regenerate normally. He wanted to keep his current cute hairstyle for a while, so he used the severed hand, and condemned Donna to being a ticking time bomb for life. Oh, and did it feel like a Bad Wolf rehash to anyone else? Plus the fact that we were told she would "die" and then it turned out to be a metaphorical death, just like in "Doomsday"?

That's what the Doctor should feel guilty about, not the fact that Sergey Brin sacrificed himself back in the Sontaran episode. Who cares about Sergey Brin? He was a schmuck, and he didn't actually sacrifice his life for the Doctor, he died to save the whole human race. The Doctor would have to be a collossal egotist to think Sergey Brin died for him alone. (Okay, I can believe that.) After a couple of years without pretty much any character development for the Doctor, it's a tad weird to reach for the guilty-Doctor schtick from Paul Cornell's Timewyrm: Revelation. Especially since we just saw, two weeks ago, that everybody including Sergey Brin would have been toast without the Doctor. It's a no-win situation for Sergey.

And what was all that about the Doctor-dupe being emotionally scarred by destroying the Daleks? I literally didn't understand what the Alpha-Doc was going on about there. And the idea that the clone-Doc was in the same state that Christopher Eccleston's Doctor was in at the start of season one was also baffling — wasn't the ninth Doctor supposed to be scarred by years of the Time War, and the destruction of his own people? Not just ten minutes of pushing buttons to make some random Daleks explode? And why was Beta-Doc scarred and not Alpha-Doc? I know, I know, it's just an excuse to let Rose go off with the I-can't-believe-it's-not-the-Doctor. But it felt like the most random thing in a totally random episode.

Finally... I only have one question about Dalek Caan: Why has nobody uploaded a funny rap video to Youtube yet, featuring Grandmaster Melle Mel's rap from Chaka Khan's "I Feel For You," only about Dalek Caan? You know: "Dalek Caan, let me rock you, let me rock you Dalek Caan, let me rock you, that's all I wanna do..." Oh, I have one other question: prophecies? Prophecies?? Is this Battlestar Galactica all of a sudden? Seriously, it was just annoying when Davros kept talking about Dalek Caan the prophet, but then the Doctor started doing it too. I get it that Dalek Caan saw the time vortex (the same way Rose did, and the Master did?) so now he has special insights. But doesn't the Doctor Who universe feature free will? Isn't the future still mutable? Also, the idea that Donna's transformation was so important that echoes stretched backwards in time seemed a bit piffle. Time-travel and timey-whimey are not magic. (Well, maybe they are. But in the Doctor Who universe, they're not supposed to be.)

Okay, to sum up: You pretty much expect one of RTD's season finales to be ridiculous, include a huge deus ex machina, and make no sense. And this one lived up (or down) to your expectations. But it wasn't nearly as much fun as the dancing-Master/Doctor-Gollum episode last year. There was too much standing around and talking, for three or four hours. And too much fan-service. And as for crying... I cried like a drunk toddler during Wall-E, but I mostly laughed during this ep. It really could have been 20 minutes shorter, and woul dhave been much better for it. What did you think?

Actually the thing that was new about last night's "The Stolen Earth" was the feeling of being a cross-over between three different shows in the Whoniverse. It really was like reading an issue of a comic book like Final Crisis or something. Like, meanwhile at Titans HQ, the Teen Titans react to the crisis, while at the JLA Watchtower, they're fighting Gorilla Grodd. Etc. etc. And hey, it was nice to see Luke, Gwen and Ianto finally in the Who universe proper, and vaguely interacting with the Doctor. (And maybe Gwen will get exterminated next week? We can only hope.)

Apart from that, it felt like the same deal as the previous big finales, only bigger. Crazy shit happens, and you just have to go with it and switch off your brain a little bit. So basically the Daleks stole the Earth because it's a component in the Crucible, their mega-weapon thingy, and they've hidden it in a fold of space-time. And the Daleks are swooping down and harvesting the human race. And Laurie Anderson and her army of rhinos are pissed.

I loved all the silly plot devices and loopy plot twists. Code Red! ULTIMATE Code Red! MEGA ULTIMATE Code Red! Maximum Extermination! Don't activate Project Indigo! Oh, okay, fine, you can activate Project Indigo after all. But really, don't use the Häagen-Dazs Device! Just don't! But meanwhile, we can make our telephone signal go really really far by making every telephone in England dial the Doctor's number at once. (Wha? Huh?) As long as you don't stop to worry about the fact that Cardiff's space/time rift was in a physical location that Cardiff no longer occupies, you'll just run with it. (Oh and by the way, the Doctor's phone number is out of service. Bah. If this was an American show, that number would have led to a viral-marketing rabbit hole, with three websites. And a cake, with a time machine inside. I'm just saying.)

Oh, and I loved the fact that Dalek creator Davros, one of the greatest scientists who has ever lived, was unable to figure out how to cultivate genetic material from himself without slicing his own torso up a whole bunch of times. Rock on, Davros, you crazy science guy. Rock on. Actually, even though Julian Bleach starred in the worst Torchwood episode ever, he was pretty great as Davros. He captured the character's mixture of curiosity, manipulativeness and mania better than anyone since original actor Michael Wisher. (Although I still think Davros should have stayed dead. And why does he have such a lame homepage?)

So here are some stock questions that it's handy to ask after watching part one of the giant whipped-cream-factory explosion that is a Doctor Who finale:

Is there a reset button in sight? Yes. Actually, there are at least two reset buttons — Dalek Caan traveled back into the Time War to rescue Davros. And the Time War was supposed to be "time-locked" (huh?). So maybe everything Davros has done since than can be undone using a double reverse time lock. Also, Earth is in a fold of time, away from the rest of the universe, so maybe time can be unfolded or something. But I honestly think Harriet Jones has to stay dead, because we need closure on her character or something.

Does the Doctor get fucked up? Yep. He "regenerates" at the end of the episode — similar to the way last year's finale had a cliffhanger of the Doctor being super-aged. I'm assuming there will be something similar this year, with the Doctor being messed up for part of next week's finale (in a botched regeneration?) and then restored somehow. Or maybe those old rumors about a regeneration which produces a second David Tennant (thanks to his severed hand) are true.

Is there (finger snap) drama? Yeah. There was the huge sniffly, forehead-kissy moment when the Daleks first start chanting over everybody's speakers. And there was the hilarious sequence where Rose gets all pissy because she doesn't get to have her own square on the companion-scope. All because Wilf wasn't allowed to have a webcam! So Rose is reduced to sitting there and mumbling (still sounding weird btw) about how she was there first! And who are all these other riff raff ruining her big comeback! Poor Rose.

Is there super-heroics? Yeah, lots and lots of it. Rose with a giant gun! The UNIT soldiers going down fighting! Good old Wilf (this season's most valuable player) taking on a Dalek with his paintgun! Gwen and Ianto needlessly sacrificing their lives so Jack can go off and have fun! But most of all, there was the glowing nobility of Harriet "one joke" Jones, giving her life so Dumbledore the Doctor's army could assemble. I totally would have voted for her. (And even though I was glad we'll never hear anyone say "I know who you are" to her again, I was glad she was able to turn her usual schtick into a moving speech of defiance. (It sorta reminded me of the Controller in "Day Of The Daleks": "Who knows? I may have helped to exterminate you.")

Do all those little easter eggs add up to anything? Well, sort of. Yeah, we see the Medusa Cascade, and there's an explanation for the bees disappearing, and we meet the Shadow Proclamation, etc. etc. And the missing planets from previous episodes randomly — in the whole huge universe — turn out to be among the 27 stolen planets here. It's not as if you could have guessed anything about this episode's plot by paying extra-close attention to the earlier stories, though. And I still have no clue why everything went "BAD WOLF" at the end of the previous episode, except that Russell T. thought it would be cool. And we still have no clue what's going on with Donna — except did she have two heartbeats in that scene where we hear her heartbeat and zoom in on her face? (Right before she says the thing about extra missing planets.)

Are we excited for next week? Yeah, I think so. I mean, come on. It's Russell T. Davies, who's sort of the gay Michael Bay*, going further than he's ever gone before. Who wouldn't want to see that? It won't make any sense at all, but it'll be underpants-hat crazy. And we've already had the obligatory "everybody saying the Doctor's name" moment (via telephone!) so that probably won't turn up next week. And the final cliffhanger did leave me with that awesome WTF?! feeling, like I have no clue how it could be resolved, even using crazy RTD logic.

* - Yes, I know Michael Bay is a director and RTD is a writer. But RTD is in an industry where writers have actual power, unlike Hollywood movies. And RTD really does seem to channel Michael Bay a little bit in his Who season finales.

Fans keep insisting that Davros, the disabled scientist who created the evil cyborg Daleks, will make his first appearance since 1988 this year. And it may tie in with the return of Rose Tyler, the Doctor's companion who got stuck in an alternate, zeppelin-y universe. In a suggestion that sounds as much like fanservice as genuine possibility, here's just what might be happening at the end of the current season:

Davros uses weaponry from the Time War to destroy the ENTIRE alternate universe where [Rose] is trapped; a fortunate side-effect means that anyone not from that parallel universe is shunted back to this one, so Rose, Jackie and Mickey survive, but Rose loses her alternate father, galvanising her back into battle...

This rumor is busted, unfortunately. We know from filming that Rose "appears" to Donna a few times — somehow speaking to her through the breach [between universes]. That wouldn't be possible if that alternate reality were destroyed completely. She could just have a conversation with Donna anytime now that she's back in "our world."

Hypothesis?

The Daleks were dumped in the Void between realities. Chances are, the surviving Dalek from "Daleks In Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks" has made contact with Davros, informed him of the Daleks' defeat, and Davros is experimenting with "hole punches" through reality to reach/rescue the Daleks. That would explain why Rose and Donna are able to contact each other across realities — and suggests Davros and the Daleks will both appear in the season finale.