The Mad Collector said:
I'm also a little worried about this weekends episode, the Daleks are overused although that was probably also a valid critique of what is now known as classic Doctor Who. What worries me more however is what will be this series "reappearing after a long interlude classic monster". Frankly we've had most of the really good ones and one or two of the rubbish ones; The Great Intelligence being a good example. Please let us not have Quarks, Dominators, Dracorians, Mandrels or Stigorax to name just a few and definitely not The Kandyman or even worse Zarbi and Menoptra. 
As for the Kandyman, I loved The Happiness Patrol, and the Kandyman, though he could have been realised slightly better, was nonetheless a pretty damned good villain (a childish, petulant robot made of sweets has to be entertaining at least). And as for the Dominators, they were probably the most interesting characters in The Dominators (debatably the worst surviving Troughton story). Though to be fair, they didn't have much in the way of competition, even when including the Quarks. They were admittedly stupidly vicious and monolithic, but they were at least more interesting than the Quarks and Dulcians (or rather, the Dull-cians...).
Most of what can be called the dull or rubbish monsters have potential to be better realised. Look at, for example, the Tractators from Frontios. The main thing wrong was the costumes (or rather, the lack of flexibility: they were originally intended to curl up into balls, like pillbugs and the like). As monsters, they are brilliant. Gravity control, using the dead as excavating machines (there's even a macabre detail in the novelisation, presumably originally intended for the show, where a corpse's head is used as part of a translation machine for the Gravis, the leader of the Tractators).
I've also read and listened to stories where monsters that were rubbish were made into actual menaces. The Nimon were made better in the audio story Seasons of Fear, the Vardans were actually turned into fairly nasty and competent villains in the novel No Future (although they are also mocked as being outwitted by the Sontarans), and that novel was part of a story arc that made the frigging Meddling Monk into a force to be reckoned with (he also had an acclaimed revival in the audios, played by Graeme Garden). And then, there's the Mechanoids, funnily enough re-created by Davros in The Juggernauts. And finally, the Sontarans actually get a chance to show off how good their military ability can be in Starlight Robbery.
A returning obscure monster isn't automatically a bad thing, even when the monster was rubbish in the first appearance. What matters is how it's handled. The Macra appearing in Gridlock, for example, was a nice, but frankly superfluous touch. Any big vicious monster could've done. I would love to see a Macra story where they're back to being the intelligent manipulators they were in The Macra Terror.
But yes, you're right about the Daleks being overused in the classic series. It wouldn't be so bad if the stories were good, but frankly, and ironically, just about every Dalek story in the 70s, barring Genesis of the Daleks, is average at best. In fact, most of the Terry Nation-written stories about the Daleks, ironically, are average at best.
Tonyblack said:
Penfold said:
I wouldn't say no to the return of the Sea Devils. 
Anecdotes aside, I'm not sure whether they'll bring back the Sea Devils. They've already brought back the Silurians, that's all the prehistoric reptile beings needed.
