Asylum of the Daleks

Chapter The 238th, which has thousands and thousands of Daleks, each more evil than the last; dizzying, endless Daleks, all here, all the time, forever, watch them, watch the Daleks, they're going to move - watch the Daleks. It's... Daleks!!! 

Plot:

The Daleks use reanimated dead humans to trick and capture the Doctor, Amy and Rory; they then take them (and the TARDIS) aboard a vast Dalek saucer containing the entire parliament of the Daleks; thousands of the tin pepperpots surround them. (The Daleks have never mentioned their parliament before - it offers the possibility of us one day seeing a Dalek House of Lords, a Dalek Black Rod, and perhaps party leadership hustings that involve cold, heartless candidates trotting out aggressive soundbites harshly and incessantly... which we're fairly used to in the UK already, to be honest.) The Daleks want the Doctor and his friends to investigate their asylum planet that contains millions of Daleks with mental health issues. The planet is shielded, but somehow a ship has crashed there, meaning that all the Daleks could escape from the planet. Something as small as a Gallifreyan or two humans if fired at the planet can get through the forcefield, though, so the Daleks shoot the Doctor, Amy and Rory at the planet. They are given bracelets that prevent the nanobots in the atmosphere converting them into Dalek slaves, but Amy loses hers after a struggle with some of the crew of the crashed ship who have been converted into slaves already. The Doctor searches for a crash survivor Oswin that he's been talking to over the airwaves, and who has helped him by hacking the Dalek systems. When he finds her though, she's already been turned into a Dalek long ago, her willpower had just stopped her from realising it yet. Amy and Rory are on the point of getting a divorce, but the Doctor manipulates them to be nice to each other as it will stave off the nanobot conversion (even though he's already put his bracelet on her with sleight of hand, as he is immune anyway) and they stay together. Oswin takes down the forcefield, and the others just manage to teleport back to the Dalek saucer and the TARDIS before the Daleks blow the planet up.

Context:

I watched this story one Sunday afternoon from the disc in the complete seventh series Blu-ray box set, accompanied by the younger two of my kids (boy of 12, girl of 10). The youngest said before I pressed play that she always thinks the trailer at the end of any story is more exciting than what's just watched, and indeed she was very enthusiastic to watch Dinosaurs on a Spaceship when she saw glimpses of it before Asylum's end credits rolled. The 12-year old said very early on that Clara (as both the children called her throughout, I gave up on trying to explain that it was Oswin, actually) was going to turn out to be a Dalek ("because she hasn't got a bracelet"). He'd essentially surmised the correct outcome for the wrong reason, imagining that Clara would, unbeknownst to herself, like the other Dalek slaves depicted, have been converted to a Dalek slave with an eye-stalk in her head. This would make a tiny bit more sense than Oswin's actual fate, I think.

First Time Round:

I often struggle to find memories of my first viewing of Matt Smith stories; it's nothing personal, just that the show wasn't so new and memorably exciting to tune in to as it had been when it first came back, and Smith's stories are long enough ago (unlike Whittaker's and maybe Capaldi's) for me to have forgotten my specific circumstances when they were broadcast. I have a few more memories of this one, but mainly of the build up rather than watching the story itself. I remember that the New Statesman, a UK politics and culture magazine, had an article that week about Dalek creator Terry Nation to tie in with the launch of the show. The magazine didn't normally cover anything as frivolous as Doctor Who, so it was a treat for this one subscriber at least. I also remember the online daily series Pond Life, five short films released one a day over the five days from the 27th to the 31st August 2012, preceding Asylum of the Daleks broadcast on the 1st September. I remember these being very good (writer Chris Chibnall's best work on the series up to that point in fact) right up until just before the end when the last part imploded by shoehorning in Amy and Rory's divorce, a subplot that I found unconvincing (a little more on that below).

Reaction:

The Dalek slaves / robopersons / puppets / whatever you call them (delete as applicable) that appear in this story reveal themselves after their infiltration by letting a Dalek eye-stalk emerge from their foreheads. Why? Can they not see without doing this? Has all their pretence and performance before the stalk extends out, when they're ensnaring the Doctor and friends, been done with their eyes effectively closed? They don't look like they are stumbling around. If they can see just as well without this protuberance then what's the point of showing it? What's the point of them having it fitted in the first place? It looks good, I suppose, if one can get over the slightly phallic nature (it's an erection emerging from their head, there's no other way to say it), but it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense in the story. I may be a bit short of praise, but I'm not here to bury Asylum of the Daleks altogether; if it were six-feet underground, though, a good epitaph would be "It looks good, but it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense". The main plot is that the Daleks have kidnapped the Doctor so he can help destroy their Asylum planet. This is necessary because the forcefield around the planet can only be turned off from inside. This is a silly way to design an asylum, and begs the question of how the Daleks condemned to rot on the planet below got there in the first place without at least one Dalek on guard down there to drop the forcefield now and again. But, we can let them have this - it's such a common flaw that it's almost a genre trope, the escape button that can only be reached by venturing past the dangerous barrier that nobody would ever create by design. Why the Doctor, though? If all the Daleks are too scared, why wouldn't they just send some slaves / robopersons / puppets? That would be a more controllable situation than kidnapping their mortal enemy, who's likely to be hostile and try to turn the situation to his own advantage.

Even if  they decided for whatever reason to proceed with such a silly plan, though - would they really choose to brief the press-ganged enemy agent in their parliament in front of thousands of their kind? Would the Daleks admit that they need the help of their sworn enemy so publicly?  It would make much more sense for it to be a covert mission, briefed on the sly, but then there wouldn't be a reason to show ranks and ranks of massed Daleks. The decision to go for spectacle does not match with the details of the narrative at all. The Daleks are panicking because a ship has managed to breach the forcefield (there's no explanation given as to how this happened, but it did). They know this has happened as they are receiving a signal from the planet playing an aria from Carmen. The Doctor tracks the signal and talks to the person sending it; she's called Oswin and she sounds like Jenna-Louise Coleman. The metatextual intrigue of this is somewhat lost watching a decade later, but I'll touch on it more in a moment; suffice to say, at the time it caused a collective "Ooh, she's not supposed to be in it yet!" from all the fans in the audience. Now, spoiler alert, but the twist is that Oswin has been turned into a Dalek but doesn't realise it yet. This explains how she's been able to access all the systems on the Dalek network, as she's plugged in (but aren't these Daleks supposed to be isolated from the rest, so why does she have access?). Instead of being turned into a slave (wasn't that an automatic process done by nanobots in the atmosphere, why didn't it kick in?), she was fully converted into a Dalek because of her high intelligence. Converted by whom, though? These aren't the Daleks from normal mainstream society, they're inmates - why have they got the equipment we see to convert humans into Daleks, and why have they organised themselves to do so? It's not made clear.

This twist is, if not an outright cheat, very unsatisfactory. It's shaped like the standard intricate constructed fantasy twist narrative of a character - usually someone with mental health issues - creating their own world that's presented at first to the audience as if it's real; this was particularly popular in films in the late 1990s / early 2000s (I'd name examples, but I don't want to spoiler - it was riffed on comedically in the series 3 Community episode Curriculum Unavailable, if you've seen that). Crucially, though, such films or shows needed to take a lot of care in how they showed the person in their fantasy world interacting with people outside their fantasy. When the Doctor finds Dalek-Oswin towards the end for the reveal, she talks in her head like a girl from Blackpool, but the voice sounds to the Doctor like a Dalek. It would be a gut punch of a moment if and only if she hadn't been broadcasting to him throughout the episode before that in her own voice - how has she been changing her voice in that context? How has she been able to broadcast the score of Carmen when it's just in her head? Someone could theorise that she's used her awesome hacking skills somehow to source a recording and play it, and to scrape together some voice-changing technology. She'd have to have a certain level of awareness of her predicament to have done this, though, and the whole point is that she does not. Okay, someone could continue to theorise that maybe her level of awareness waxes and wanes as she battles against the Dalek conditioning, and she constructs some real world reinforcement in her more lucid moments to bolster her fantasy of denial. This level of imaginative heavy lifting going on in the background in people's heads, though, takes away from what should be the straightforward pleasure of a twist reveal. The gut punch is instead a swing and a miss.

The surprise of a new regular companion introduced early but then killed off starts an arc-plot mystery that continues in the Christmas special in 2012 and the run of episodes in 2013. Even in this, though, the events of Asylum of the Daleks don't stack up. Oswin is a version of the Doctor's future companion Clara who got fragmented in time. Clara lives many separate lives undoing the timeline interference done by a baddie. None of that explains why Oswin has heightened intelligence, particularly concerning hacking (and Asylum specifies that she has this before she's turned into a Dalek). In later story The Bells of Saint John, Clara's brain was augmented with computing skills, but there was no evidence they still remained in her head by the time she was fragmented, and anyway that was a 21st century upload and wouldn't help someone to hack future systems that even the Doctor thinks can't be hacked. Again, one can tidy it up mentally if one is so inclined, but it's messy and doesn't have the satisfying locking-together moment of a plot that has been worked out well (as many of writer and showrunner Steven Moffat's other scripts do have, to be fair). The emotional subplot of the Ponds failing marriage is also unsatisfactory. If you love someone and you're worried that not being able to have kids is an issue, wouldn't you talk to them and look into adoption before you leave them without explanation so they can procreate with someone else? It's a superficial and fake confected conflict.

The only bit of Asylum of the Daleks that looks cool and also makes sense - and the whole is almost worth it just for this bit - is the hallucinatory scene where Amy walks into danger, as she perceives a group of Daleks as humans. Apart from that, jokes don't land (Rory asking what colour the Daleks will be as all the good questions have been taken), and the dramatic bits seem a bit forced (like the Doctor facing off against the Daleks). It's a rare occasion for Moffat where he's having an off day with the kind of material - twists, quips, emotional bits refracted through a sci-fi prism - that is usually his stock in trade. Maybe Daleks just bring him bad luck; his tenure doesn't feature any good use of Skaro's finest except in cameos; he seems much more content writing for Cybermen or Zygons.

Connectivity: 

There's not much of a connection between Inferno and Asylum of the Daleks; I'm reaching a bit, but both involve a plan to penetrate the depths of a planet and both feature characters coming under a malign influence emanating from that planet. That's about it. 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Doc's Holidays. Because of the Covid pandemic, Doctor Who's last series and subsequent specials (two of which have been broadcast at the time of writing, with one left to come out in a couple of months) were shot 100% in the UK. This bucked a trend in recent years of increased overseas filming. Since landing in China for the fourth broadcast story in Who's first season, Marco Polo, the Doctor has been a globe-trotter, but the show, not so much: it wasn't possible until many years after that first season for a sequence set in, say, Paris to actually be filmed in Paris. That finally happened in 1979, when City of Death became the first ever Doctor Who story to have any scenes filmed at a location or studio outside Queen Elizabeth the Second's immediate realm. My life as a traveller has mirrored Doctor Who to a certain extent. I went abroad on holiday a few times in the 80s, but by the time Doctor Who came back in 2005, I didn't tend to leave Blighty for a vacation; more recently, I started again to travel abroad with the family a bit, but - just as it did for the good Doctor - Covid put paid to that for a while. The main driver for that pattern in our family was the relative youth of my children, and general ecological concerns about flying too much. We stayed in the UK for holidays when they were younger, and only recently ventured further afield to show them a little something of the world. Covid is still around and still making travel logistics more complicated than they used to be, but we have decided to risk another foreign jaunt this year. There's no word as yet on whether Doctor Who is going to be similarly bold; all the filming for 2023's episodes that's been spotted so far has been done on home shores.

Readers with long memories (Hi Mum!) will know that some consideration is always given to the suitability of a Doctor Who story to watch at any Perry family holiday location. This started when we holidayed in 2016 at the filming location for The Androids of Tara. I have to make it clear that the holiday came first and the story second, in that and every subsequent instance. I promise I am not dragging my poor fam around the world to spot Doctor Who locations. I admit, though, that there sometimes is influence in the wrong direction: in the search online for this year's destination I came across a nice hotel in Seville, but quietly vetoed it as I wasn't in the mood to watch The Two Doctors again so soon after watching it as part of the recently released Season 22 Blu-ray box set. I'd always thought anyway that the pool of possibly apt stories was too small to fit that many holidays, except by luck or by straining the connection. I may have had my mind stuck in the twentieth century in that thinking, though. In classic series Who, there were indeed only a handful of overseas filming examples from which one could take inspiration: apart from Paris and Seville, the series had visited Amsterdam (for Arc of Infinity), Lanzarote (for Planet of Fire), and - if it counts - Vancouver for the TV Movie. It started to happen so often more recently though that I'd lost track. Even I, as a pretty nerdy fan who's into the details, might have forgotten that Asylum of the Daleks has scenes shot in Spain. When the family took their first ever foreign holiday, to Tenerife, I settled for the random story that came up Vincent and the Doctor as it happened to feature some overseas filming (in Croatia). I'd missed completely that there were two stories actually filmed in Tenerife, one I'd blogged but one I hadn't at that time (The Magician's Apprentice / The Witch's Familiar and The Pyramid at the End of the World). I humbly apologise to the worldwide fandom for being so remiss as to overlook this.

In my defence, overseas filming had become nothing like as rare or special as previously by the time of Peter Capaldi's tenure, and it was to get even more prevalent after that. It started slowly, though. The five instances before 2005 were barely added to in the early years of twenty-first century Who. The Dalek in Manhattan double-parter shot some backgrounds in New York, recently blogged story The Fires of Pompeii filmed in an Italian studio backlot, and Planet of the Dead shot exteriors in Dubai. Until the stories for 2010 and onwards, it was easy to keep track of those few instances. It exploded a bit after that: as well as the Van Gogh story, Matt Smith's first series also featured Croatian filming for The Vampires of Venice, there was filming in Utah and Arizona for the following year's two-part season opener, the year after that Spanish filming provided footage for A Town called Mercy as well as Asylum, and full cast New York filming took place for The Angels Take Manhattan. The production team for Capaldi's era loved the Canary Islands; as well as shooting the aforementioned stories in Tenerife, they went to Lanzarote (Kill the Moon) and Fuerteventura (The Zygons 2-parter amongst others). It also visited Bulgaria (The Return of Doctor Mysterio) and Valencia (Smile). When Jodie Whittaker took over, Cape Town became the destination of choice (The Ghost Monument, Rosa, Spyfall, Praxeus, Can You Hear Me?, The Timeless Children) but there were also excursions to Spain (Demons of the Punjab), and Tenerife and Bulgaria again (Orphan 55 and the Nikolai Tesla story, respectively). In Whittaker's second year, for the first time ever, more episodes had featured overseas-shot sequences than hadn't. As such, there is quite a bit of scope to allow me to find an un-blogged story with some connection to the holiday that was eventually booked for this year, and I have indeed found one. I'm all packed, and have downloaded the relevant story to watch while I'm away. When I get back and publish the blog post for that story, I'll tell you all about my family trip to... Gallifrey. 

In Summary:

It looks good, but it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.