Spoilers for the "Doctor Who" episode "Daleks in Manhattan" coming right up...I'm jet-lagged and this is the first half of a two-parter (the conclusion of which I haven't seen yet), so this is gonna be short.
I don't have any kind of fundamental opposition to the Daleks as a concept, but much like the Doctor, I'm starting to get frustrated with how easily they keep popping up, despite story after story in which they're erased from time, once and for all. It's like how the X-Men writers keep killing off Magneto, only to have the next writer bring him back, time after time.
This was also one of the less subtle episodes they've done, and while the Daleks themselves aren't particularly subtle villains, my head started to ache from the number of times I got beat by the clue-by-four. The wise leader of Hooverville is named Solomon, and he solves a dispute over property by dividing it in two? Sure, why not? Every single character makes a comment at some point about how mankind is capable of building something like the Empire State Building while letting something like Hooverville exist, and just in case we didn't get the point, we find out that Talullah's Broadway revue is called "Heaven and Hell"? Super!
I mean, the broadness of the dialogue and characterization match our cultural memories of 1930s Noo Yawk -- or at least of the movies about that time and place -- and there's some fun in seeing the Doctor and Martha interact with a cast of Damon Runyon types, but overall it felt disposable.
What did everybody else think?
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