In an amusing twist, Doctor Who has revealed the Doctor technically became a father – to what he believed was the last of the Daleks. There is no love lost between the Doctor and the Daleks; he was there on the day they were created, sent to avert it by the Time Lords. His actions in "Genesis of the Daleks" were the beginning of the Time War, but the enmity between the Doctor and the Daleks would transcend the hatred the Daleks feel for anyone else.
In the end, the Doctor was the one who fired the final shot of the Time War. As seen in "The Day of the Doctor," he used an ancient Time Lord weapon to shift Gallifrey out of ordinary space-time, with the Daleks exterminating one another when their shorts missed the vanishing planet. Unfortunately, the Daleks survived. The Doctor first learned there were survivors in the appropriately-titled Christopher Eccleston story "Dalek," in which he discovered a single Dalek held captive on Earth. This is generally considered one of the best Dalek episodes of modern Doctor Who, and an official novelization – written by the story's writer Robert Shearman himself – has just been published by the BBC.
The novelization of "Dalek" features a number of scenes from the point of view of the Dalek itself. This is the first time Doctor Who has ever really treated a Dalek – or, rather, one that is not malfunctioning – as an individual in its own right. As such, the perspective is absolutely fascinating, because it reveals Dalek troopers have been created with twisted versions of familiar needs. A Dalek requires a father figure, but as with all things Dalek this need has been warped so the Dalek perceives any commanding officer as its father. Dalek troopers are bred with only two imperatives; to obey, and to exterminate.
This explains the solitary Dalek's priorities in the episode. Its primary objective is to seek orders, without which its very existence has no meaning; this correlates perfectly with previous betrayals of the Daleks, specifically in the Sylvester McCoy era, where the Doctor persuaded one Dalek it was the last of its kind and it self-destructed without orders. In the Eccleston story, the Dalek goes to any lengths to find evidence there are other survivors of its race, but there is no trace of them; it is alone.
And this is where the novelization becomes particularly intriguing. The Dalek seeks a father figure, which it interprets as anyone who is willing and able to give it orders. Its mind crumbling by now, driven insane by its sense of isolation and the genetic impurities it had absorbed from the Doctor's companion Rose Tyler, it fixes its attention upon the Doctor himself. When the Dalek shouts at the Doctor to give it orders, the creature is actually appealing to the Doctor to accept the role of father. He rejects this, an act filled with more meaning than he could possibly know at the time. Instead, the Dalek turns to Rose and commands her to give it one final order - telling it to destroy itself. The Doctor had briefly become a father figure to the Dalek, and rejected the role; but Rose, in a strange way, is probably the first mother to a Dalek in the history of Doctor Who.