by Sarabeth Pollock:
Doctor Who Recap: “Asylum of the Daleks”
Original Air Date (BBC): Saturday September 1, 2012
Series 7 Episode 1
Doctor Who, BBC’s long running global phenomenon, returns in its seventh season with a new introduction, complete with bright new colors in the time vortex and a Dalek-dot-inspired font. We hit the ground running with a trip to Skaro, the home planet of the Daleks. The Doctor has been summoned by a mysterious woman dressed in robes. She claims to have escaped from the Dalek prison camps and needs the Doctor’s help to find her missing daughter, Hannah. The Doctor, however, is wary of this mysterious woman. No one escapes the Dalek prison camps. She’s cold to the touch. What is she? The Doctor knows that this is clearly some kind of trap, but what he doesn’t expect is for the woman to morph into a human-Dalek hybrid. An eyestalk pops out of her forehead and zaps him. “The Doctor has been acquired,” comes the familiar Dalek voice over a speaker.
Amy is a posing for a fashion shoot; she’s a model, as we recall from the previous season. She poses with the words “hate” and “love” written on her fisted fingers. Her assistant lets her know that her husband is there to see her. “I don’t have a husband,” she replies haughtily. WTF!? Rory is in her dressing room and he needs her to sign…wait a tick…those are divorce papers! He leaves quickly after getting her signature, and Amy’s makeup artist quickly enters the room. She sprouts an eyestalk, too, and zaps Amy. “Amelia Pond has been acquired.” Rory’s bus driver also has an eyestalk. Looks like we have a complete set of companions. They wake up on a spaceship. “How much trouble are we in?” Rory wonders. The Doctor walks in, preceded by a Dalek. “How much trouble, Mr. Pond? Out of ten.. eleven,” he replies. Eleven…Eleventh Doctor. Funny.
As it turns out, the Doctor and his companions are in the midst of the Dalek Parliament. They have captured the TARDIS. The Doctor wants to know what they’re waiting for. The Daleks have finally captured him. What do they want? “Save us,” the Daleks say. “You will save the Daleks.” Whoa.
A young brunette woman dressed in a red dress is reinforcing the hatch leading into her room. She is recording a journal, indicating that it’s day 363, she baked another soufflé and failed, it’s her mother’s birthday (she made her a soufflé but it was “too beautiful to live”), and “they” keep coming for her. They always come at night. Are they vampires? She turns up the volume of her music (she’s listening to the opera Carmen) to drown out the sound of them. They noise she’s referring to is the sound of lots and lots of Daleks.
Amy does a play-by-play for Rory of what the Doctor is thinking about as he walks through the chamber and tries to figure out what they are doing there. They have arrived at the Dalek Asylum, which, as the Doctor explains, is a planet that houses Daleks that have gone wrong. They’re battle scarred and insane. Why haven’t they been destroyed, wonders the Doctor. The Dalek Prime Minister tells him that it would be “offensive to extinguish such divine hatred.” That Daleks find that concept of hatred beautiful. Perhaps, he offers, this is why they have never killed the Doctor.
The Dalek Asylum takes up the entire core of the planet. They don’t know how many Daleks are down there, and there is no need for supervision. Suddenly, the sounds of Carmen come through the room’s speakers. The Doctor suggests that they trace the signal, where we meet Soufflé Girl, also known as Oswin Oswald. She has been shipwrecked for over a year, keeping herself safe from the intruders outside. The Doctor asks what she has been doing for that long, and she says that she’s been making soufflés. “Soufflés, against the Daleks,” marvels the Doctor. If a ship can crash onto the asylum planet, he reasons, then the Daleks who have been confined there can escape. The force field can only be turned off from inside the asylum. While it would be easy enough to send a team down to turn it off, we learn that they have brought the Doctor there because the Daleks are too afraid to go down to the planet themselves. And when the Daleks are too afraid, they call upon their greatest adversary, the Predator, to do it for them. The Daleks brought the Ponds because it is widely known that the Doctor always travels with his companions. As they prepare for teleport, the Doctor asks Amy if she’s scared. “Scared, who’s scared?” she asks, grinning. “Geronimo!”
Three beams of light descend upon the surface, which is covered in snow. Amy lands near a man dressed in a white snow suit. His tool bears the name “Alaska.” His name is Harvey and he chases after Amy as she searches for the Doctor and Rory, believing her to be part of a rescue team. On the other side of the peak, a little Dalek eyeball pops out of the snow and Carmen fills the air. It’s Soufflé Girl—she’s able to hack into the Dalek technology. She thinks she’s somewhere underground. Is the Doctor there to rescue her? Her signal fades away as Amy and Harvey approach. Harvey saw a third beam fall somewhere on the other side of the mountain. All they find is a deep hole leading into the core of the planet. Rory is at the bottom of the hole. Upon closer inspection, he’s in a dusty cavern full of even dustier Daleks. He pushes one, and it rolls backwards. Are they deactivated, sleeping, or waiting for something?
Harvey leads the Doctor and Amy to the hatch that goes down inside his ship. They crashed two days ago, he explains, and there were 12 escape pods. The ship is called the Alaska, which is the same as the one Soufflé Girl was one…only she crashed over a year ago. The crew is all dead and decayed, even though Harvey claims to have left them two hours prior. Then Harvey remembers that he died outside, and the cold preserved his body. He’d forgotten that tiny detail, and once remembered he turns into a Dalek hybrid. Amy and the Doctor lock Harvey into another chamber on the ship. The Doctor realizes that the cloud of nanogenes on the planet are capable of turning anything, living or dead, into Dalek hybrids as part of the asylum’s security measures. As he explains this, Amy looks around at the dead crew members, and they suddenly sprout eyestalks and stagger to their feet. Zombie Daleks! As they flee, Amy admits that she has missed their adventures. Soufflé Girl returns over the ship’s speaker to guide them out of the ship. She teases the Doctor about his chin (you might poke an eye out with it) before telling them about the hatch that will lead into the asylum. While they work, the Doctor wants details about Amy and Rory’s relationship. Stuff happened, they split up, life happened. It isn’t something you can straighten out like a bowtie. Just then, they realize that Amy’s bracelet is in the other room with the Zombie Daleks.
Rory, meanwhile, is examining the dusty Daleks. He moves one, and it moves on its own. Its movement wakes up the other ones. It starts talking. “Ex-ex-ex,” it stammers, in a perfect Max Headroom impersonation. Rory thinks it’s saying “eggs,” and he offers it one of the balls that has fallen off of its exterior shell. “Ex-ter-min-ate,” it finally manages. Soufflé Girl’s voice comes over the speaker and tells Rory to run for the door. Rory manages an Indiana Jones-style slide under the closing door. Soufflé Girl asks his name; Rory was the name of her first love, she says, but then she corrects herself and says her first love’s name was really Nina (it was part of a phase she was going through). Rory is safe for now, she tells him. She requests that he takes off his shirt, and he starts to comply before asking why. Does there need to be a reason?
The Doctor explains to Amy that the nanogenes are mini-machines that reconstruct matter into other forms. You’ll recall that it was the nanogenes on Captain Jack’s ship that fixed Rose’s hands, and they created the creepy kid looking for his mummy in the 2005 episode The Empty Child. Soon they will take over Amy’s body. He admits that the process has already started—he has already explained this whole thing to her four times.
Soufflé Girl Oswin leads the Doctor to a map. She tells him that Rory is safe. Amy starts to hallucinate and sees a man standing in the next room. Then she sees lots of people inside the room, and she starts dancing, envisioning herself as a ballerina. The Doctor wakes her up and shows her that she’s in a room full of Daleks. One of the Daleks follows the Doctor down the hallway. He recognizes the Doctor as “the Predator” and must destroy him. The Dalek initiates a self-destruct sequence, so the Doctor programs him to reverse himself into the adjoining room, where he blows up the other Daleks. Rory looks around. “Who killed all the Daleks?” he asks. The Doctor enters, carrying an unconscious Amy. “Who do you think?” he asks.
Amy wakes up and slaps Rory (yes, she recognizes him). Oswin explains that you create a Dalek by taking away love and adding anger, and doesn’t Amy seem a lot angrier? Evidently Oswin has never been to Scotland, Amy mutters. The Doctor wants to know why Oswin isn’t a Dalek yet, and she explains that she is protected by the shield. They need her to lower the shield so they can escape on the teleport, but she wants the Doctor to come get her. He still wants to know where she was getting mils for her soufflés. She ignores the question and wants to know why the Doctor is called “the Predator.” The Doctor agrees to come get her, and he assures the Ponds that he will be able to get Oswin, lower the shield, escape from the asylum and save their marriage. He just has to get Oswin first. This, of course, would be a lot more complicated than having her hack the lock on her own door and free herself. So off the doctor goes, intent on rescuing her. He tells Rory to leave if things become too “explody-wody” and he implores upon him not to let Amy subtract her love.
Rory, claiming to be cold and logical, wants to put his bracelet on Amy to delay the process. After all, the nanogenes will need to work harder since he has always loved Amy more than she loved him. She doesn’t want to hear him say it, and he insists that he waited outside the Pandorica for two thousand years for her. If that isn’t love, what is? Finally, the mystery is revealed when Amy tearfully admits that she can’t have children, and Rory has wanted children since he was a child himself. Whatever they did to her at Devil’s Run, they took that ability away from her and so she felt she had to give Rory up in order to allow him to seek out the life he wanted and deserved. Then she shows him that the Doctor had already put his bracelet on her to save her life. He didn’t need it, and evidently he wanted them to talk things through. Clever trick, Doctor.
The Doctor is about twenty feet away from Oswin’s chamber when she tells him that he must first pass through the Intensive Care Ward of the asylum. She says they are survivors of various battles, and the Doctor realizes that they are all Daleks who survived him. They start to wake up when they hear his name. They chase after him until he gets to the door, their plunger things out, and then Oswin announces that she wiped his memory from their memory banks, which stops their attack. The door opens and she invites him to come in and meet the girl who can do all of this and more.
Alas, there’s a problem, he announces. The Doctor asks Oswin what she remembers. As it turns out, she is trapped in a white honeycomb room and Oswin is actually a Dalek with a human consciousness. The Daleks needed a genius, so they did a full conversion with her but couldn’t manage to wipe out her humanity. She asks in an eerily-emotional Dalek voice why the Daleks hate him so much. The Doctor replies that they have fought each other many times, and she tells him that the Daleks grow stronger as a result of their fear for him. Oswin tells the Doctor to run, but she pleads for him to remember her as the human who fought the Daleks. “Remember me!” she cries.
Back at the teleport, Rory and Amy are in the middle of reconciliation. As the planet starts to fall apart, Rory asks how long they can wait for the Doctor. “The rest of our lives,” Amy replies. They kiss, and they’re so into their kiss that they don’t notice that the Doctor has returned. “We’re good, let’s go!” he says. As they teleport away, the asylum blows up, taking Oswin with it.
They return to the Dalek ship. The Daleks have blown up the asylum, and now they have an intruder on board the ship. It’s the Doctor, and he teases the Daleks for not counting on his ability to drive a teleport. They don’t seem to know who he is. He tells them he’s the Oncoming Storm, the Predator, the Doctor.
These titles mean nothing, they say. They want to know who he is. A chorus of Daleks asks the same question over and over again: “Doctor who?” The Doctor gleefully realizes that Oswin not only wiped out the memory of the Daleks at the asylum, she also wiped out all knowledge of the Doctor from every remaining Dalek.
Amy and Rory return to their home together. It looks like the Ponds have mended their relationship, leading Rory to do a celebratory dance on the front porch. “I can see you!” Amy shouts.
The Doctor returns to the TARDIS and we see that it has been upgraded since the last time we saw it. With the flip of a switch he sets off on his next adventure.
Well, fellow Whovians, what did you think of the season premiere? Was it everything you wanted? Did you happen to notice that the woman who played Oswin Oswald is also the actress who will play the newest companion? What are you looking forward to the most this season? (Spoiler—I can’t wait for Dinosaurs on a Spaceship) Please leave your comments and let me know what you think!
“Geronimo!”
Sarabeth Pollock is a contributor for DarkMedia. She covers True Blood, Doctor Who, Fringe and American Horror Story, as well as the True Blood comics and whatever movies and books happen to catch her fancy. She’s an avid writer, reader, and pop culture fan, with interest in everything from True Blood to Doctor Who to Anne Rice to Deborah Harkness. Follow her on Twitter at @SarabethPollock and check out her blog at http://sarabethpollock.wordpress.com
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