Break from the Daleks?

No!

Personally, I think we’ll get a flurry of Master related releases for this unofficial Year of the Master.

I do like the Daleks but even I can admit I do get weary of them sometimes. Thankfully, when they inevitably start doing less Time War related releases we’ll probably end up seeing less of them.

If the story’s good, I’m totally on board with the Daleks showing up every year. If there’s not anything interesting to do with them, though, I’d rather they stay in the background. As I understand it, the show has to use the Daleks every series - even if it’s just a cameo - or else they lose the rights to use them? If that’s the case, I think overall the show’s done a remarkable job keeping them around every series but sometimes making you feel like they aren’t there - I actually couldn’t recall if they ever showed up in Series 6 until I remembered that brief moment in the finale.

In the case of Big Finish, if I ever get tired of the Daleks, there’s still SO much more content that doesn’t involve them and it’s so often the case that you’re not obligated to buy the less interested stories involving them in order to complete an arc anyways. I think if you follow a specific Doctor too, it’s also a lot more spread out than if you look at everything at once. For instance, in the ongoing Eighth Doctor boxsets, not counting the Time War sets, the Daleks haven’t really shown up since Dark Eyes. The Fourth Doctor hasn’t faced them in a few years and none of his upcoming announced sets include them either if I recall correctly. The Fifth Doctor hasn’t faced them since 2017, Seventh Doctor not since 2015 and neither times were essential to an ongoing storyline and therefore I wouldn’t consider them to be mandatory purchases (though Alien Heart/Dalek Soul is so good, I’d still call it a must for anyone who likes the Fifth Doctor).

I’m sure if you buy everything and listen to everything then it’d be much easier to get tired of the Daleks. But since that’s not how most people getting into Big Finish are going to buy things and since the Daleks presumably sell well and allow Big Finish to afford other ambitious projects, I don’t think it’s that much of a problem if they show up so often.

I never have been sold on the Daleks very much.
But I did not grow up with Doctor Who, so I am certainly missing the nostalgia element.
I find that they can get pretty grating on audio, and sometimes I become a bit fed up with them...

Right on. Stevo is the impartial voice in this debate. See, his icon tells us he's a hardcore Krotons fan!

I was thinking before about the question posed by the thread topic and I was reminded of the fact that JNT only used the Daleks in three stories (not including the Five Doctors) during his 9 series of 50 stories. In terms of story count, that's about 6%. If you put aside the likes of Dalek Empire, Dark Eyes and the Time War, then they have been used quite sparingly in the context of the Big Finish ranges. Only 24 in the Main Range, I believe, which is around 9%. 4 times in the Fourth Doctor Adventures, and about the same in the Eighth Doctor Adventures.

In the context of how often they turned up on TV in the 1960's & 70's, then you can do a lot of BF listening without coming across them. The Box Sets seem to cater for those who want easy access to more of 'Doctor Who & the Daleks', which is reminiscent of how many new Character Options B&M sets keep including Dalek variants as a selling point.

Your numbers got me curious so I went and did some number crunching of my own

So starting at the beginning of January, there have been 32 BF Whoniverse releases. This includes Doctor Who (various formats), Bernice Summerfield, Class, Counter-Measures, Donna Noble, Gallifrey, Lives of Captain Jack, Susan's War, and Torchwood. Rounding runtimes, ie Monthly Range = 2h, Short Trips = 0.5h, etc., there has been 77.5 hours of Whoniverse output in calendar 2020 as of today.

How much of that content features Daleks? In full disclosure I couldn't remember how many episodes of Gallifrey Time War 3 and Susan's War the Daleks actually appeared in, so for the sake of argument I assumed they were in every episode of each of those releases. That in mind, those plus every other Dalek appearance comes out to 13 hours of Dalek appearances.

13 hours out of 77.5 works out to Daleks appearing in 16.7% of Big Finish's 2020 Whoniverse output to date.

I'm in love with this whole thing

I must be bored, but thought I'd do a 60's & 70's comparison too. Given that the Dalek stories were generally longer, i went for episode, as opposed to story count. There were 253 B/W episodes, 45 of which featured the Daleks, which stands at 17.7%, just above Big Finish's average for this year.

The 1970's is skewed by Hinchcliffe and Williams only using them once apiece. So out of 300 episodes, they appear in just 25 (10 in the whole of Tom's 7 seasons) episodes, including part 6 of 'Frontier'. That pulls their 70's airtime to just 8%, but still not far off the BF Monthly Range output as a whole. 

So I guess it probably balances out relative to the Classic Series. I'll leave it to someone else to do a more comprehensive tally.