After how cool and original 'Genocide' was, this was a bit disappointing. I didn’t adore this, but I did like it.

This is very much a Dalek story about Daleks fighting to see which Dalek is Dalekier. Even the Doctor in the end is inconsequential to their shenanigans; the Dalek Prime is kinda like “oh, the Doctor’s here?? uh, okay i guess put him on hold, get him some tea, I’ll talk to him in a bit”. The writing style wasn’t all out bad or anything, but the poor Doctor has metaphorically look the reader in the eye and explain the plots of like 3 separate classic Who stories, which was a kind of lazy way of setting the stage here. Not sure how I feel about the twist with Skaro never having been destroyed. I get your frustration, Davros.

It’s cool to see the Daleks being crafty, and I love their infighting, but this plot took so many turns and had so many “but AHA! it’s not over!!!” moments that I was as dizzy as Sam by the end of it. Speaking of Sam, congrats on your first Dalek encounter, girl! One thing that I disliked in this story was that, like in ‘The Bodysnatchers’, Sam didn’t get to do much. She asked a lot of “what’s that” and “what’s going on”, and she did have at least one important conversation with Ayaka, and consoles the Doctor when he gets upset, but there was no big moment for her. Any clever insight she had on the Daleks’ plan was something any character could have noticed, so it didn’t feel like those bits belonged to her. Again, Sam herself notices that the side characters get much more to do than she does. Okay, she is a teenager from the 80s with no technical skills, fine, she can’t reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. If her role is more of a ‘moral compass’, that’s great, but it wasn’t as well done as it could have been. Like, Sam herself got some development, internally, but her being there for this adventure didn’t help the other characters or the plot develop, I guess is the feeling I have.