Asylum of the Daleks

At long last the new season is here. Almost a year after marrying River Song on top of a pyramid and faking his own death The Doctor returns to save the universe again.

For the first time since season 25 back in 1988 we open with a Dalek story. My over-riding memory of 'Remembrance of the Daleks' is we finally saw a Dalek fly, putting paid to the cynical sneer of the non-fan who would say  'they're rubbish, to get away from them you could just run up some stairs or climb a ladder'.

Of course, that story also saw the first and only (until last night) appearance of the Special Weapons Dalek, more of which later.

Synopsis

Asylum of the Daleks (or AOTD as I'll refer to it from now on) opened with the Doctor answering a summons to Skaro from a mysterious red-head who claimed to have escaped from a Dalek prison camp. He quickly realises this is a trap at which point Ginger sprouts an eyestalk and gun and shoots him.

The Ponds (who are, for reasons unexplained at that point, are in the process of getting divorced) also fall victim to a similar scam and are collected.

The Doctor and The Ponds find themselves on a Dalek ship facing the 'Parliament of the Daleks'. who are lead by a Prime Minister, and asked to save the Daleks by destroying the 'Asylum of the Daleks' which is the planet below. A ship has crashed into the planet, you see, and the Parliament is scared of what may be released. Only The Doctor can save them!

Oh, and there is a single human survivor of the crash trapped in the wreckage of the ship.

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Blah di blah di blah, The Doctor and Ponds go to the planet, meet some Daleks, kill some Daleks, try to rescue the human survivor but, lo and behold, she is not what she seems! She has been converted into a Dalek, only she doesn't know it and uses her last vestiges of humanity to save The Doctor and Ponds and also wipe clear the Dalek collective memory so they haven't a clue who our favourite Timelord is.

The Daleks blow up the planet but in the nick of time the Doctor and Ponds have beamed back up, directly into the Tardis. The Doc pops his head out of the door, taunts the Skaroan Death Machines and then disappears off into the vortex.

In the meantime we have found out that Rory and Amy split because she couldn't have childen, but they found love again while in the Asylum so The Doctor takes them home to live happily ever after (I almost forgot, there was some McGuffin where Amy lost a wristband that made nanogenes attack her and start turning her into a human Dalek thing by 'subtracting love').

And that, in a nutshell, is AOTD!

Analysis

Despite the gorgeous production values on display here I can only say that AOTD ultimately disappoints; it is all style, very little substance and has plot holes / continuity errors you could fly the Dalek mothership through.

To start with, wasn't Skaro destroyed in the Time War? It was also supposedly destroyed in 'Remembrance' although that may have been Skaro Mk II.

And where did all these Daleks come from? From the last surviving specimen of Metaltron owned by Van Stratten (destroyed) their numbers have grown year on year, and not only have they evolved they now have a constitutional voting system! I would love to see the Skaroan Televised Election Debates, they would be an absolute hoot! maybe that's why they are now coloured...blue for Conservative, red for Labour, yellow for Liberal (I'm English so am using UK parliamentary colours here), Green for, well, Green.

Additionally the Daleks  have developed a social conscience and, by extension, a system of healthcare to look after the sick, weak and mentally infirm. What happened to the 'we hate anything that isn't pure Dalek and will just blast the hell out of it'. It's only last season we had the Power Ranger Daleks exterminating the Ironsides for being 'old'.

In civilising the Daleks Moffat is also emasculating them. At one point we even see a Dalek who has literally lost one of his balls!

Big disappointment was the blink-and-you-miss-it appearance of the Special weapons Dalek. Surely it deserved at least a small cameo scene instead of being one of a million skulking away in the background. A definite missed opportunity.

The Rory / Amy thing: do domestics belong in the Tardis? I'm not so sure, but it was interesting to see the divorce papers scene which reinforced a)what a bitch Amy is, and b) what a wet fart Rory is. Kick her to the kerb, boyfren, she no good!

Later there is a scene that explains why the marriage has failed...Amy can't have children after being fiddled with at Demons Run. Now forgive me if I'm missing something really obvious here, but haven't they already got Melody Pond / River Song, of whom there was nary a mention?

The actress who is going to play the new companion showing up was a nice touch, but I hope it's not part of some convoluted ongoing  'timey-wimey' thing Moffat has invented for his own amusement. Once her plight had been laid out I bet I wasn't the only person who guessed she was going to turn out to be a Dalek? And why was she chained down (in the weakest chains I've ever seen in a prison by the way)?

I was watching the clock as the episode drew to it's conclusion and with minutes running out I said to my wife that there was going to be a typical Moffat 'and in one bound they were free' ending, and I wasn't wrong. Being beamed off an exploding planet in the nick of time is so old hat, and The Doctor manages to deposit himself and The Ponds in the Tardis (which had been brought ever so conveniently to the Parliament Chamber) for good measure!

But it wasn't all bad. The special and visual effects were fantastic and it's always a treat to see the Daleks. There were a few dialogue gems, including the one which made me laugh out loud when Rory asked about the Daleks, in all seriousness 'What colour? (pause) Well, all the good questions had been asked.'

All in all it wasn't a bad episode, but it was far from being a good one. Too many plot holes and an oh-so-predictable central thread leaves me to rate this as a

64 / 100 

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