Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks

Doctor Who’s Season Seven premiere.  I have SO. MANY. FEELINGS.

Thanks to Den of Geek for the image.

So a quick recap with spoliers: (beware!) The Doctor along with a newly divorced Amy and Rory (what the fuck is up with THAT?) are kidnapped and taken on board a Dalek spaceship. Why? The Daleks need the doctor to save them. There is the Asylum of the Daleks where the broken and insane (even by Dalek standards) are sent. Turns out…these rogue Daleks may escape and, I don’t know, exterminate to their proverbial heart’s content. So of course The Doctor will help.

On the asylum, The Doctor, Amy & Rory fight their way through Daleks and dead people who’ve been partially transformed into Daleks. The little eye-thingy comes out of their foreheads. Creepy. They are helped by Oswin “souffle girl” Oswald, a space crash victim who has been holed up in one room of her space craft for a year, protecting herself against the Daleks (by hacking into their mainframes, a job she insists is easy) and making souffles. (But where, the doctor wonders several times, does she get the milk for the souffles?)

While The Doctor goes to rescue Oswin, Amy and Rory have it out. Rory assumes he’s always loved Amy more.   Amy says no, she didn’t leave Rory, she gave him up because he wanted kids so bad and after the timey-wimey insanity her uterus went through in season six, she can’t have kids anymore. They make up….yay!

As the doctor goes to rescue Oswin, he realizes she’s not a girl, but a former girl who’s been transformed, full conversion, into a Dalek. The body, anyway. Her mind is still human and unaware she’s in a Dalek body until The Doctor informs her. It’s sad the Doctor has to leave without her, but she still helps him, Amy & Rory get off the planet…..

Where they’re promptly back on the Dalek ship. But one of Oswin’s tricks had been to delete certain things from the Daleks’ memories, including who The Doctor is. So the Daleks have no clue who he is, which seems to leave him gloriously shy one enemy. Amy & Rory go home together and The Doctor is all around happy.

Feelings, I has them:

• Amy and Rory. The divorce seemed to come out of nowhere. They seemed fine at the end of the last Christmas special, though the whole shit with Melody/River last year couldn’t have been easy on them. It’s hard for me to believe it would have gone so badly so quickly, and that Amy would never have mentioned to Rory how distraught she was over the children thing. I’m sure we’ve all thought what Rory did – that he loved Amy more than Amy loved him. Two thousand years he waited….most wouldn’t do that for someone they love. That said I think Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvil did a marvelous job handling the scene where they confront exactly what happened. (Though I am an unabashed fan of Arthur Darvil as Rory. I think he is the best actor on the show.)

• It took me until the second time viewing it to realize it might be the same technology molding people into partial-Daleks is the same technology brought to Earth by Jack Harkness in The Lost Child/The Doctor Dances. It’s what turned those folks, starting with little Jamie, into the gas-mask monsters. Am I right about this? I could go back and watch those other episodes (and they ARE my season one favorites), but I don’t have a lot of time.   Also, on this same note. I think the idea of turning humans into Daleks, or even partial Daleks, is a little close to Cybermen.

• I’m not a Dalek fan. I think they’re lame and silly. I don’t think there has been a good Dalek episode since Eccleston. Until now, that is. I really loved this episode, and it might be the first where I took the Dalek threat seriously. (I’m not sure this is true, but I heard the writers are contractually obligated to work the Daleks in once a season. Something to do with BBC’s ownership of the Dalek image, I think?)

Even that many Daleks aren’t that scary.

• Oswin Oswald: OK, what the fuck is going on here? A big deal was made of Jenna Louise Coleman becoming The Doctor’s companion, and I assume she will become his companion later this season. The question is, how?  I see four options.

1. Go back in time, and somehow rescue her from her timeline. In this scenario, of course, The Doctor, Amy & Rory might not be able to escape the asylum. Or they will take her out of an earlier timeline, travel with her a bit, then deposit her back to before she boards The Alaska, knowing full well what’s going to happen to her.  I like this option a lot, and I think this is where they will go. Moffatt will have to work some timey-wimey magic of course so as not to eff up the future, unless he wants it to end on a dark note, which is fine too. And it will probably end with the Daleks all remembering exactly who The Doctor is.
2. Return to the asylum, rescue Dalek-Oswin and somehow reverse engineer her back into regular Oswin.  Possible, and it might be preferable to keep her story-line from resembling River Song’s too much.
3. Jenna Louise Coleman plays a twin, or sister, or mother or daughter (from other timelines, of course) or someone related to Oswin who looks exactly like her to become his companion. This option is meh. I don’t see how that couldn’t be schlocky, even by Who standards.
4. They will never do this, but it would make me giggle if she were to become his companion as is. I like the idea of The Doctor flirting with her, and to an outsider it looks like he’s flirting with a bad sci-fi prop made out of a trashcan, egg beater, and toilet plunger. I think the Dalek body is too clunky to really consider being a companion to The Doctor.

Oswin Oswald. The new companion….? Or is that Moffat just screwing with us?

• The Zombie Daleks – Pretty fucking scary, Scarier than the regular Daleks, that’s for sure. Also, it’s always so creepy when a character acknowledges his or her own death, like that crew member from Oswin’s ship. “I died outside. The cold preserved my body.”

• Matt Smith-He’s grown into the role so much. I love him and I’ll be super sad the day he’s no longer The Doctor.

• The end of the episode, where the Daleks are all saying “Doctor, Who? Doctor, Who?” and Matt Smith tells them they’ll never stop asking.  Eh, it made me smile the first time I watched. The second time it made me roll my eyes. I think the phrase “Doctor Who,” should be used sparingly, and if it’s the last time this season we hear that, I’ll be OK with it.