According to the Digital Spy interview with Nick Briggs, the Daleks will be appearing in the Series 5 Finale.

Are they?

Interview here
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/blog/tubetalk/

I think they will appear, albeit not as a main adversary. The cybermen have already been confirmed and if this Pandora thing happens to be a prison or something, I imagine we shall see a dalek or two, maybe not necessarily the new design, maybe the old RTD one for a final appearance.

But I think the main villain will be something different.... at the moment my money is on Omega

I'm sure the cash-starved Beeb didn't allow the production team to design and built a new set of Daleks just for 15 minutes of a single episode.

The daleks will always be back though, even if not again this series, although it seems that they probably are now. Moffat better have a good story up his sleeve for this finale. Hardly anyone wanted the cybermen back for the finale, or the daleks even more so. Now it looks like we are getting both. I still think there is something even bigger at work though.

I do kind of agree even though i love the Cybermen and Daleks it will be a good final with them both in it but yeah i do think there is something bigger.

OMEGA!!! Haha, sorry I have faith in Moffat to pull something good out of the bag, or out of the box rather if this Pandorica thing is going to open. I feel a bit cheated from the dalek and cybermen meeting in Doomsday- too brief.

Out of interest, how would people feel if the series finale two-parter format were tweaked by SM to cliffhanger in to the Christmas Special (and not just a "What? What? What? moment) Would you be happy to wait or be chewing your TV screen in frustration at the prospect of a 5 month wait for a resolution?

Agreed. The one Cyberman we've seen in trailers doesn't look to be in a good way. I would not be surprised if a damaged Cyberman and beaten up Dalek are used to show how nasty and dangerous their new foe can be.

Personally I think the series needs a 'non triumphant' finale for a change. By all means tie up threads of the series to give a sense of fulfillment to those of us who have watched, but avoid complete closure.

Forgive the Star Wars reference but something more along the lines of the emotion and feeling at the end of Empire Strikes Back rather than the mutual self congratulation and back patting of Star Wars for a job well done (don't even get me onto dancing Ewoks in RotJ!). A kind of sense that we won the battle but the outcome of war is by no means clear.

There is also another brief shot with a healthy looking cyberman with two cybermen standing behind it. But this could be before the damaged cybermen scene possibly- I like your idea a lot- something that shows the daleks who's boss would be a WOW moment

Thing is, the Cybermen in 'Doomsday' acted more like cannon-fodder, or soldiers, rather than Cyber-men - if that makes sense.

They're meant to be race of people more than a race of soldiers, but obviously, being uniform and acting like walking laptops, they can be whatever they want to be when the situation calls for it. Not counting the Cyberking, I much preferred their characterization in 'The Next Doctor' which had them being cunning, deceptive and manipulative. There's nothing in the new series cannon about the Cybermen which says they can't be absolute geniuses. The only thing that separates them from the Daleks is that they're not fuelled by emotion.

They should find things like non-cyber humans and Daleks as errors in the system and eradicate them in anyway possible - an alternative to the Nazi-like racism that the Daleks possess.

Although it would be interesting if a Cyberleader had his emotional-inhibitor damaged...

There's another opposite between the two races - the Daleks strive to destroy anything non-Dalek, where the Cybermen seek to convert anything non-Cyberman. Like Windows Update in your brain.

Of course, I'd love to see what happens if a Cyber Controller were to find a live Dalek mutant in a destroyed casing...

Just a thought...but I posted elsewhere that the crack (anomaly for those of you who go Fnarr!) was [i]so[i] obvious in episodes 1-3 that it could be something of a red herring in terms of what is to come at the end of the series...now, given the way The Doctor describes the Weeping Angels as the most evil thing creation has ever produced...do we have any evidence that says they are not this series' big bad and that we might well see them evolve further from merely scary statues and explore their origins?

we're told which begs the question what else is there? we're told: why?

We know the Angels have Time Travel knowledge in order to displace their victims but now that doesn't seem enough for them as they regroup and en masse could be infinitely more dangerous than anything else - as I've also posted before: the blob inside a Dalek blinks, do Cybermen blink behind their masks? If you cannot just shatter a statue because of their quantum lock...what does it take to destroy one? Let alone an entire army?

I always remember TB's reasoning for not committing genocide on The Daleks - many opposing civilsations will unite to fight a common enemy - what if, and it's a BIG but interesting stretch...the usual big bad suspects are forced to unite against a common even greater threat?

Spoilered for those who haven't seen NEXT TIME... btw

I think I shall wait until after Flesh and Stone to draw any evaluation on 'the crack'. Although we dont know if its effects will be felt yet- they may be saved until the finale.

Slightly off topic, but I'm shocked they managed to get all through the interview without him saying 'subscribers get more at big finish dotcom'. How'd they do that?

There'll probably be an animated Nick Briggs bouncing over the screen at the end of next week's episode

Briggs describes it as

I really hope not. Thought Moffat would learn that they have seriously been overused in the finals. Well... I hope they are not the main villians. If they are part of something bigger, which its looking like they are, then I guess it will be intriguing to see how they fit in. But as the main villian and the reason behind the opening of the Pandorica... no.

After reading the Nick Briggs interview, I'm certain that both the Daleks and the Cybermen will be in the finale, but as a few people have said, I really hope that there's something bigger and badder at play in it, maybe controlling them both?

You don't create a character called an Eternal Dalek, then not do something with it. I'm intrigued to see how that works out. My theory is that the Eternal Dalek will be something akin to Captain Jack, a fixed point in time and space that must always exist. This would be a neat device to avoid the same old "I've wiped out ALL the Daleks..... but here they are again!" scenarios we've seen over the past few years.

Jack is the Eternal Dalek!!!!! They took his big face (of Boe) and shrunk it inside a dalek casing, ready to strike the doctor when he least expects it.....

dr standing in a dark alley, the he suddenly hears the screeching voice of a dalek behind him..... "YOU ARE NOT ALONE!!!!!!!"

True...although SM and MG did say on Confidential that the name Eternal Dalek was purely arbitrary and plucked out of the air to make the numbers up at the time.

I still want to know more about these 'Eternals' that have been referred to in the past- such as in The Satan Pit and in Doomsday- the Eternals referred to the Void as The Howling. Sorry for that slightly off-topic comment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(Doctor_Who)

More info here:
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Eternal

Read the following at your own peril...