C+Q - Asylum of the Daleks (2012)

The Series 7 opener doesn't grab me as much as I want it to. There isn't one big overriding flaw in the episode that makes it inherently bad or anything. The Dalek asylum isn't a bad premise for an adventure, and the execution of it isn't even that bad either. My problem with Asylum of the Daleks is that it's filled with lots of tiny plot holes and inconsistencies I can't ignore that build up and make the whole thing seem low-effort and sloppy. As low-effort and sloppy as that horrible filter-heavy new title sequence.

Despite Amy being willing to commit suicide for Rory in Amy's Choice and Rory spending 2000 years waiting for Amy in The Big Bang, some character development happened off screen that now means they're getting a divorce. Everyone seems to think the online miniseries Pond Life that was released just before this episode somehow explains this but it doesn't. There isn't a single line in Pond Life that justifies the divorce. Four out of the five parts of Pond Life show Amy and Rory as a happy married couple and then a short clip in part five shows Rory being kicked out. That's it. In fact, not only is this not foreshadowed in any previous episode, but there isn't a single episode after this that mentions the divorce either. The whole plotline of the Ponds getting a divorce, a major change in their lives, is contained entirely to Asylum of the Daleks. In the course of 45 minutes they go from getting divorced to being happily married again with nothing achieved. Nothing is learned from this. All it serves to do is take focus away from the Daleks and spit in the face of their beautifully-crafted character arcs from Series 5 and 6.

The Dalek parliament scene is amazing for nitpicking nerds like me. Firstly, why do the Daleks have a Prime Minister? What does the Prime Minister do? What qualifies a Dalek to be in the parliament of the Daleks? Did they all go to Dalek Eton? Are there opposing political parties of Daleks? How is the Dalek Prime Minister selected? Is there an election? How can you be expected to choose between two completely identical, unfeeling, conniving, bigoted death machines? (I guess it's sort of like the problem we have now #SATIRE.) No matter how they got to power though, the Dalek Prime Minister is a fuckin idiot. Their plan is to send the Doctor, Amy, and Rory into the asylum so that they can lower the force field, allowing it to be destroyed. Here's the problem: why have the Daleks created an asylum with a force field that can only be turned off from the inside? What if one of the insane Daleks accidently rolls over the plug and pulls it out of the socket? That seems like a really inefficient system of keeping them under control. Actually, let's take one step back: why do the Daleks not just kill the insane ones in the first place? The Dalek Prime Minister provides an answer: "It is offensive to us to extinguish such divine hatred." Clearly Steven Moffat has never seen Victory of the Daleks or Remembrance of the Daleks or Evil of the Daleks or literally any other episode where Daleks kill Daleks. The Prime Minister then says, "does it surprise you to know that Daleks have a concept of beauty?", a line which directly contradicts the episode Doomsday, in which a Dalek says the exact words, "Daleks have no concept of elegance."

Let's forget about continuity for a second because it's obvious this episode wants us to. According to Asylum of the Daleks, looking at it as a self-contained piece of fiction disconnected from the rest of Doctor Who, Daleks don't kill each other. Why then do they blow up the asylum at the end? It's obviously not because they think the inmates can escape due to a breach in their force field created by Oswin's ship because that was only brought to their attention by the Doctor AFTER he'd already been recruited. So the Daleks must have already had a different motivation for wanting to blow up the Asylum even before they found out about Oswin and the breach. So what, did the Daleks just decide that hatred wasn't beautiful anymore? Had hatred gone out of fashion? Why did they need the Doctor before they found out about the breach to the force field?

Nothing about the Dalek parliament scene makes sense. I understand they would capture the TARDIS while abducting the Doctor from Skaro but why in the name of fuck would they then put the TARDIS right in the middle of the parliament room next to our heroes so their means of escape is within their reach? Why are all the Daleks too scared to go down into the asylum? Daleks have no concept of fear. The fact that the Daleks in Bad Wolf could feel fear was a huge plot point because those Daleks weren't pure as they were created from human DNA. So are you telling me that all the Daleks who are in charge of the Dalek parliament are all tainted by human emotions? We aren't even 15 minutes in yet.

During this sequence, we are introduced to Oswin Oswald, one of the many echoes of Clara. Now that I've been able to watch this episode again after seeing how her mystery plays out in The Name of the Doctor, I can say that Oswin Oswald's inclusion in Asylum of the Daleks does make sense and fits the explanation we're given. However, the reveal at the end of the episode that she's an insane Dalek doesn't make a lot of sense. Why is it that even though she spoke like a Dalek, she sounded like a normal human over the speakers? Why does the Dalek pathweb contain music from Carmen for her to play? That music couldn't have just been in her head as all of the other characters heard it. The reveal was very well executed and it's a nice idea but the small details just don't quite add up.

I should probably talk about the good stuff in this episode: everything that wasn't the script. The acting is absolutely superb with Matt Smith constantly delivering a flawless performance as the Doctor. Despite how ridiculous the divorce subplot is, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill sell the emotions and make it a lot more bareable. In fact, the acting is so good and Nick Hurran's direction is so well done that I didn't notice half of this episode's problems on first viewing. Murray Gold provides an incredibly atmospheric music score and the episode in general looks and sounds great. It's just such a shame that the script had such holes in it.

The final insult though is the ending twist which, with the hindsight of knowing how the series ends, is completely and utterly pointless. It's revealed at the end that Oswin has deleted all knowledge of the Doctor from the Dalek pathweb, meaning that every Dalek in existence has now forgotten who the Doctor is. Because this happens at the end of a series opener, I thought that this radical change to Doctor Who canon would in some way inform the arc of the series and show us many more interesting dynamics to the Doctor/Dalek relationship that has been evolving on screen since 1963. As it turned out, that was just wishful thinking. The next time we chronologically see the Daleks is in The Time of the Doctor, during which the Daleks regain their memories of the Doctor by harvesting information from the body of Tasha Lem, thus rendering this entire subplot pointless. That's two pointless subplots in one 45 minute episode.

Yeah, this is just a bit naff.