"The Last Dalek", as it was foolishly not called, performed a worthwhile tidying up exercise of all the very minor, if nagging problems that fans have managed to find to beat the series with over the four episodes previously screened. There were no problems with pace here, although being a seasoned paddingophile from the Old Time it felt odd to be introduced to Van Statten's "pet" after only about two minutes, and one felt the Doctor being tortured should have been a half-hour mark cliffhanger. But enough of twenty years ago. There was crucially a proper end, and no "get out", and Christopher Eccleston did none of that wacky stuff that has felt a trifle forced over the past month or so. Only in the scene where he cries for almost killing the Dalek did it feel as if he had over-reached himself. Jon Pertwee would have been standing proudly over the blasted remains while lamenting that it was a bit of a shame.

If there had to be something wrong with it, the complaints have seemed to me to be weird in the extreme, so let's take a look at a few of them. The music. Oh how we love to berate the music, which is, lest we forget, a few bangs and tinkles that normal people would not dream of buying on CD to listen to in the car and important in the way of being good if not even noticed 90% of the time. Here it was good even when you noticed it; especially the soaring sonal 'screams' towards the end. The characterisation was also especially good, despite cries that it wasn't up to the old series standard of Bonnie Langford or Veet from "The Sunmakers". Van Statten's motivation turned from arrogance to wanting to protect the Dalek for his collection to just wanting to kill it when he realised what a danger it was. Yes, he changed his mind! Watch the scene where the Doctor shouts at him for "forcing" him to shut the bulkhead on Rose and he argues back before allowing the Doctor to open it up again. Hang on, isn't this the bit where the villain is supposed to go mad and blow everything up?

Funnily enough, where you'd expect people to have complained, nobody did. The absence of more than one Dalek can't have helped persuade people to tune in, and although the point of just having one appeared to be to show how powerful it was, corrupting the creature with Rose's DNA turned it into a pussycat and the anticipated Dalek production line or one million exterminated Salt Lake City inhabitants failed to materialise. The electrocution scene was a good start, and was bolstered by the utter silence as we cut from the scene of mass-slaughter to Van Statten's control room (the music, or lack of it, being perfectly judged again) but elsewhere there was STILL a lack of death impact, with the Star Trek Red Shirt from the soon-to-be-infamous 'stairs' scene being one such example; as important as her death was, it was still off-screen. And just how is this the last Dalek anyway, given that it's fallen back through time? There should still be loads of them in 2012.

Yet to complain about the lack of grand fanfare might be to miss the point. This was truly the prequel to bigger things; our "Mission to the Unknown". The 'one Dalek can wipe out everyone' concept cribbed from "Power" might not quite have come over, but the metal fella certainly made a good enough impression. Looking chunky, with a superb growling (and, in quieter moments, masterfully non-staccato) delivery from Nick Briggs, and impervious to bullets, "Dalek" instantly re-wrote the humiliating impression of the creatures as a joke. One feels they won't now ever dare show that Kit-Kat advert again.