The last time we had a proper story featuring the Doctor’s oldest foes in Doctor Who was the World War Two-set Victory Of The Daleks, during Matt Smith’s first series as the Doctor in 2010. It was notable for reinventing the evil armoured mutants, first, as tea tray carrying, Union Flag bearing, camouflaged servants to Winston Churchill. They then turned out to be heralds of the new ‘Paradigm’ - the sleeker, shinier, multicoloured evolution of the Doctor’s oldest enemies. We saw one or two of these cameo in subsequent episodes but, after their overuse during Russell T Davies’ tenure as Who Executive Producer, during which time, they got a two-part story every series, current showrunner Steven Moffat wisely chose to give the Daleks a backseat...until now.
With Asylum Of The Daleks, the opening episode of DW’s new run, The Moff brings the mad mutants back en masse, as well as introducing us to their idea of hell – a sanatorium for the individuals that even the Daleks can’t control. Problem is, someone’s crashed a ship into the planetoid on which the Asylum is built, potentially allowing its residents to escape. Understandably, the other Daleks don’t want this but are afraid to venture there themselves, deciding that this is a job for the Doctor and his companions.
After the Doc’s capture by the Daleks, we find Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) in a modelling session - complete with the prescient words ‘LOVE’ and ‘HATE’ written on her knuckles and a frizzy hairstyle reminiscent of Amy’s daughter, River Song – interrupted by her husband Rory (Arthur Darvill) with divorce papers for her to sign. The Doctor kidnapped by his nemeses? Amy and Rory divorcing? This is Serious Doctor Who, no messing about. None of that ‘timey-wimey’ malarky, just a straightforward, linear story, with some serious drama between the Ponds as they sort out their marital problems. Those words on Karen Gillan’s knuckles coming into play as Amy struggles to overcome a particularly nasty Dalek weapon. Gillan is on real fine form here. Thankfully, too, composer Murray Gold’s ‘Doctor’s Theme’ - more ubiquitous than the Daleks in the past for being used in virtually every Smith episode to heighten the drama and thereby dampening it - seems to be missing from this one.
A truly impressive episode, but not without niggles. The Time War resulting in the effective destruction of both Time Lords and Daleks seems to have been utterly forgotten here, with thousands of the robotic mutants in their own “Parliament”. Where did they all come from? Why are they mostly the same design used for the last few years, the old guard that the new Paradigm (of which there are only a handful here) supposedly regard as detestably inferior to the point of extermination? Perhaps the fact that they’ve developed a parliament means they’re less of an empire now? After the promotion for this episode promised the return of several Dalek designs from Who history, it was disappointing that most of them, even in the Asylum itself, were all the same design, albeit in various stages of degradation. Plus, it didn’t make sense how the Daleks just ‘forgot’ the Doctor after one character deletes his record from their collective memory banks, as if they are all machines, rather than aliens living inside machines. Their actual organic memories wouldn’t fail them, surely?
That ‘one character’ is the episode’s biggest surprise, the improbably named Oswin Oswald (Jenna-Louise Coleman) – the Doc’s forthcoming new companion (once Karen and Arthur have left), who quickly proves herself by aiding the Doctor and the Ponds through the treacherous Asylum. She’s a little too clever for her own good but has that pretty smile wiped off her face when the Doc sadly reveals that, rather than being, as she thought, the lone survivor of that crashed ship, she was actually caught by Daleks who, despite their knackered state, converted her in every way except her genius intellect. Oswin’s soufflé-baking, opera-playing environment is her own fantasy, concocted to keep herself sane. Outwardly, she’s all-Dalek. Yet, how is it that the apparently imaginary opera music can be transmitted to the Dalek Parliament ship for them to discover Oswin? Never mind. Oswin’s human/Dalek predicament is a classic case of Moffat writing characters into a corner from which they cannot possibly escape but for some outrageous deus ex machina that he will reveal in good time. ‘Remember me.’ Oswin tells The Doctor, and us, with a brief, knowing look to camera...
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