Asylum Of The Daleks
(Series 7, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory and Oswin, 1/9/2012, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Nick Hurran)
Rank: 178
In an emoji: 🥚
'Hello and welcome to The Great Intergalactic Bake-Off with Paul Holly-Ood, Pru Vervoid and Mr Kipling's ghost. In today's show we'll be making souffles with Oswin - good job she has a ready made whisk to beat those eggs after being transformed into a Dalek - before making a Human 'Death By Chocolate' cake. Not sure if we've got that translation right given that it killed half the crew in rehearsal, but, well, we were going to take over the universe eventually. For any viewers still alive for tomorrow's show join us when we'll be making some Weeping Angel slices, Menoptera Butterfly cakes and a Sontaron baked potato, Don't forget the Kinda surprise!'
Well, this is new. And more than a little bit mad. By which I don’t necessarily mean the Doctor helping the Daleks (we’ve had that a handful of times before) or even the fact that the story features an asylum of creatures considered too mad by a race who, by our standards, should all be in an insane asylum, but the whole feel of this story. Even by Steven Moffat standards swipes you off your feet every time you think you’ve got a hold on it, with pay-offs that won’t be revealed for another year yet. Never more have you felt as if you’ve missed an episode and they’ve accidentally put the stories on in the wrong order. We’re flummoxed by what’s happened to Amy and Rory during the off-season, confused by the Doctor’s opening conversation with a girl who turns into a Dalek mid-sentence and totally knocked off your feet by the new companion turning up unannounced five stories early and under a different name to the one she had in the publicity. And then flabbergasted when she snuffs it at the end. I mean, we’d only just had the press release that Jenna Coleman was joining the cast as new companion Clara from contemporary London and who would definitively be starting in the next series, which was then followed up by a story where…Jenna Coleman was playing a different character altogether on Skaro. I would hate to play chess against Steven Moffat: of all of Dr Who’s writers he’s the one whose always the most moves ahead of everyone and that can get irritating quick, but this was one of his better plays, as well as being one of the trickiest to get right. Dr Who is all about change, but usually we go from one era to another seamlessly or across a season break – to have them both in one episode together, rubbing up against each other, is, well, part insane and part genuinely egg-citing (sorry, there’ll be a lot of these puns for good reason).
A quick word about why this happens now in a way that it couldn’t pre-series five. One of the big changes between DW now and in the ‘olden days’ of the 20th century is how much information we get about the stories before we even see them. In the dim and distant days a Radio Times listing a few days before transmission was all we got and it had to be accepted, signed off by a whole department and be accurate on pain of extermination (well, termination anyway). Sometimes people genuinely got things wrong, but mostly the Radio Times – the mouthpiece of the BBC – was gospel and if they said something was going to happen, then it was. Back then there was a ruckus if a sports match went to extra time and/or penalties and made everything five minutes late because there was no easy way of updating people what was going on (they couldn’t even add a caption to the bottom of the screen the way they do now, because that would have meant hours in the editing suite). It’s all different now of course: we have those captions, websites, social media and the Radio Times is just one of several cheaper and more affordable competitors: they need Dr Who more than Dr Who needs it. They can be ‘played’ in a way they never could before, especially because in a world of leaks and spoilers and people trying to break news stories about this series no fan ever quite knew when they sat down to watch something if what they’d heard was the truth or whether it was all complete made-up nonsense. Russell T Davies, re-starting Dr Who from the valley it had fallen into, was never going to burn a bridge as big as the radio Times when he needed every bridge he could get and even after series one was a success it wasn’t in his nature to play around like that and annoy people. Give or take some of the digs from Christopher Eccleston down the years, he’s a diplomat. Steven Moffat however is a magician. The story serves everything and part of telling a strong Dr Who story in an era when everyone can read a synopsis online as soon as the read through is to shock, to keep up suspense, to keep us watching. Moffat will take it too far, often but this story (in many ways his biggest magic trick) is egg-stremely clever and well played. This was, the anniversary special a year later aside, the last time I remember the general public being quite so gripped by the questions posed by an episode of Dr Who. Who was she? Was it the same person under a different name? Did she have a Tardis of her own? Was she a timelord? Did they really kill her off in her first appearance? Was she secretly a Dalek and this was her last story a la River Song and the Doctor would have to keep it a secret?! And for once it was a secret they managed to keep quiet from us: Thanks to the way the story’s constructed Jenna Coleman recorded her scenes separately to anyone else, after the end of official recording, so as few people as possible would know about it. The yolk, you could say, was on us.
We’re used to secrets in this show of course, but this is one that straddles two distinct eras, as if we’re experiencing time travel by getting a peak into the future and the interest comes from the way the two timelines bump up against each other, mostly because it’s the opposite way to what you expect. Traditionally the few times we’ve had a crossover in the past, when new companions come along in a story when the old ones are leaving, they’re new, green, full of energy and enthusiasm but not much knowhow. The old companion takes them under their wing and nods ruefully at the person they used to be: think of Steven in ‘The Chase’ gently teased by Ian and Barbara, Ben and Polly finding the Doctor’s world brilliant while poor Dodo is physically ill from what’s done to her in ‘The War Machines’, Turlough’s gentlemanly treatment of Peri in ‘Planet Of Fire’ or Mel and Ace in ‘Dragonfire’. Here, though, it’s Amy and Rory who are lost on Skaro running away from Daleks while Jenna Coleman guides them to safety, with the extra knowledge of having been trapped in this city for a full year (and a plot twist that explains why she knows quite as much as she does). She’s brimming with enthusiasm and wisecracks and is already verbally jousting with the Doctor, while Amy and Rory have been out of this world a bit too long before being kidnapped by Daleks, still overwhelmed with events in their own lives to cope with this one. Perhaps with half a mind to the 50th anniversary story ‘The Day Of the Doctor’ being set up in a year or so’s time (a story we know Moffat started early) we also see verbal sparring between the old and new companions that’s almost spiky: ‘You’re too angry’ says Coleman’s character Oswin (most decidedly not the name she’s been given in the Radio Times) to Amy at one point. ‘Well, someone’s never been to Scotland’ she snaps back. Osgood also flirts heavily with Rory, as if she remembers who he is, something that deeply flummoxes him as he’s never met her and is currently running for his life. While Amy knows all about Daleks thanks to ‘Victory’, Rory is totally clueless (did Amy never talk about her adventures? It would be very in keeping for this couple to have a ‘no talk of past adventures when the Doctor’s not around’ agreement between them, spoken or unspoken). There’s one point where her assumes the Daleks are talking to him about ‘eggs’, instead of struggling to say ‘exterminate’. Oswin, however, knows the Daleks like, well, the back of her head case.
I wonder, too, if this is more symbolic of a wider change. Amy is, to some extent, Steven Moffat’s mouthpiece: for Russell it was mostly the Doctor himself (with a dash of Donna) but Amy is the character whose most often commenting on the action in a Moffat type way (and she was Scottish, like him, long before Karen Gillan was cast). Here, though, Amy’s become jaded, cynical, tired and grumpy at just the point where Moffat’s hit the third year mark of the hardest he’s ever worked in his life and both are running on fumes. Oswin/Clara is him breathing new life into his job, finding new ways to tell these stories from a different side of his brain. Amy is Moffat’s emotional feisty side, the more traditional type of companion we’ve had before, even if she comes with a quirky back story and a husband (not something we’ve ever seen a companion have in the past). Clara/Oswin, though, represent a logic puzzle and tests his more cerebral side (his ‘egghead’ side, you could say). As luck would have it Moffat (and fellow Who author Mark Gatiss) scored one of the biggest hits of his career right at the point when he was asked to take over Dr Who: ‘Sherlock’. It’s been a huge success that’s taken up all of Moffat’s spare time when not writing for Who and even though there are only three episodes per year most years (not thirteen and a Christmas special like Who) it’s still a lot of extra work. ‘Sherlock’ though, by virtue of being newer and being a ‘shared’ series, still feels like fun in a way that Who suddenly doesn’t (not always). So Clara is a Sherlock type character: we hear here how the Daleks keep her brain alive because ‘they need geniuses’ (something toned down a little when Clara arrives for real), she has a brain that works at a million miles an hour, is always problem solving, is generally more able to keep pace with the Doctor and who herself is a conundrum, full of contradictions. A lot of fans don’t like this technique (it’s generally accepted that Amy makes for a better companion simply because she feels more ‘real’, like a puzzle) but it’s as clever and inventive a way to stay enthusiastic as any. Because Moffat, for all his weariness, is still having too much fun and has too much to say to give this series up yet. As sure as eggs is eggs.
Ah yes, the eggs. You can’t have a tasty omelette without breaking eggs. Or characters. Or showrunners. And you can’t have a mystery like this one without a sad ending that clears the pieces away for Jenna Coleman’s character to make her appearance proper, later. It turns out that (mega huge spoilers) Oswin knows so much because she’s a converted Dalek. All those teases she’s given us about how she’s spent her time trapped making soufflés and listening to Carmen (in the script Elvis Presley, before the licensing rights proved to be too much of a nightmare) and it’s all a cover story she’s built for herself to cover up what’s really happened to her, a folk memory of the ‘real’ Clara once we meet her (we’ll gloss over the fact for now, that in the rest of the time we see her she only ever makes one more soufflé and never listens to any opera). The question the Doctor keeps coming back to: how can she get the milk? And the eggs? I was really hoping for the revelation that there’s a Skaro farm round the back full of metallic cows and chickens with bobbles on their hides (presumably not a free-range one) but it’s a clue hidden in plain sight to what’s really happening. Poor Oswin’s discovery of who she really is at the end is really quite moving, especially when – as we assumed at the time – we were watching a future beloved character’s final moments (a la River Song) as opposed to, you know, her being (spoilers again) a fragmented splinter of Clara sent back into time to restore the timelord’s timelines when The Great Intelligence erases him from all time in ‘Name Of the Doctor’. Very clever, even if in retrospect the whole soufflé plot is a misnomer and just a way of getting round the fact the Dalek she’s in is saying ‘eggs…terminate!’ (This should have been an Easter special…)
The Daleks are well served in this story too, even if they get surprisingly little screen-time. The idea of a Dalek parliament is wonderful: the very idea that a bunch of zealous egocentric narcissistic tincans bent on domination can contemplate the idea of democracy is hilarious (and really not all that different to the real thing: lots of different factions who disagree doing their best not to blow each other up. Especially the British one – it’s a fact that there is s till a place in our House of Commons for MPs to leave their swords before they walk into the chamber and nothing to stop them pulling them out again behind the scenes. And especially in the Coalition era when Conservative David Cameron was beating up on Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg so it was less democratic than it had been since the days the unelected Royal Family were calling the shots). The fact that they’ve got some mad relatives they don’t much talk about stuffed away in the Skaro attic, driven insane (shell-shocked?) by their brushes up against the Doctor, is a glorious idea too. After all, most Daleks (all Daleks?) are on the verge of a nervous breakdown already and if their one prime directive in life is to exterminate then what can it possibly do to their psyche when they fail? Something tells me fellow Daleks aren’t going to be that sympathetic. It’s a welcome, glorious chance to see all Daleks from all eras on screen, even if it’s in scenes that – for budgetary reasons– don’t last anywhere near long enough. For the record here they are, with the cases mostly ‘borrowed’ from collectors: a specially commissioned grey Dalek that looks like the ones from colour stills from the first Dalek story in 1963, refugees from Aridius (‘The Chase’), Kembel (‘Dalek’s Masterplan’), Vulcan (‘Power Of The Daleks’), a specially built black Dalek from ‘Evil Of The Daleks’, Spiridon (‘Planet Of The Daleks’), Exxillon (‘Death To The Daleks’), a specially made Special Weapons Dalek from ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’, plus from storage the bronze Daleks from the Russell T Davies years, Dalek Sec (‘Doomsday’), the ironsides (‘Victory Of The Daleks’) and the Dalek Supreme (‘Wedding Of River Song’). There are additionally some new red Daleks. The sweetest inclusion is the mock-up of the model from ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ which was borrowed from a very special collector, Russell T Davies, who’d bought the Dalek with one of his first BBC pay cheques long before he ever worked on the show and who had kept it in his hall to terrorise visitors. He’d spent years being asked excitedly which story the Dalek was in and was sad to always have to say ‘err, actually it’s not canon because the BBC wouldn’t let me take a real Dalek home, so technically it’s a model not a prop’. One of those friends was Steven Moffat. Who have Russell the gift of making that Dalek canon by putting it in this story, with a few tweaks, so from 2012 onwards Russell could say proudly ‘why yes it is a prop, thankyou very much for asking! Isn’t it wonderful?!’ Weirdly there are no Daleks from ‘Day Of The Daleks’ (although there never were very many, so it’s probably forgivable that there were no survivors from that skirmish)or ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ which is more surprising, but we do get that story’s sound effects recycled, alongside an old friend that’s been used on and off since the first Dalek story in 1963. All in all there are 26 Daleks physically on screen at any one time, along with the looped CGI that make the parliament seem huge, a record on both counts for the amount of Daleks seen on screen.
Alas (here comes the egg over easy) the Dalek plot kind of runs out quickly, ducked in the mix to bring us more of the mystery of Oswin and more Amy-Rory action, so that we barely see any of this and after such effort putting them all on screen it seems a waste they don’t show them off a bit more or have Dalek-on-Dalek action. In fact the whole story feels a bit rushed and low on scenes like this one and it perhaps should have been a two-parter, as it feels as if it’s forever rushing from one big set piece to another (legend has it a lot of this series was planned to be two parters before Moffat got talking to the budget department and found out that, contrary to the 20th century, multi part modern Who stories weren’t actually any cheaper, kick-starting a phase where ‘every day would be a big extravaganza with its own publicity movie poster’, of which this story had one of the best, even if this too was a red herring, the Doctor cradling an unconscious Amy in his arms surrounded by swathes of Daleks). Talking of which Amy and Rory are a bit hard done by too compared to Oswin – the plot wouldn’t really make much of a difference if they weren’t there (and it’s really odd that the Daleks should upload these two to Skaro along with the Doctor just because they always have companions with him. I mean, they don’t know where he is in his timeline when they pick him up. Things could have been interesting if they’d uploaded the ‘real’ Clara before they’d met and she’d bumped into Oswin, while the obvious ‘killers’ to pair him with would be Ian and Barbara with three stories each, which would have made for a very interesting story; mind you why give him a companion at all? You’d think they’d know not to risk giving the Doctor too many get out of death free chances). Some fans find the plot a bit far-fetched but actually I like the idea of them going to their enemy cap in hand and asking him to rid them of a spaceship full of insane Daleks because he is, after all, the best known Dalek killer around. After all, it helps up the ante: the Daleks would have to be at their absolute limit to bring in their mortal enemy to help them and they’re pretty easily defeated too given that they’ve had time to put all sorts of contingency plans in order to make him work for them (surely, though, it’s far more Dalekky to have the Doctor chained to one of them under threat of extermination rather than everyone try to be helpful?) Moffat has teased us with so many traps down the years but this one, that we think is going to have a twist to the tale, actually surprises us more because it doesn’t have one and for once their word can be taken at face value (for once they’re not the rotten eggs we think they are). It’s the second half where things go wrong because, when you stop and think about it, the plot resolution really hinges on Oswin being able to press a single button, which isn’t the greatest plot resolution Moffat ever wrote and rather heavily depends on good fortune rather than the Doctor’s cleverness (as he didn’t know Oswin would be there at all when he set out on this story). It’s also true that, like many a Moffat script it has to be said, you can’t reheat a soufflé, as it were, and now we know the answers this story isn’t quite as interesting on re-watches as it was on first broadcast which knocks it down a couple of pegs: it’s basically a bunch of mysteries rubbing up against each other and a collection of big dramatic scenes rather than a cohesive complex well written whole, which feels slightly manipulative once you can see the series plot-points being moved into place. It’s a story made to make a big splash on first showing in 2012, not one that you can come back to and love over and over again because of how brilliant it is as a standalone bit of drama (although I’m sure some fans do – I’m a firm believer that there’s a fan for every story they were made to love above all others, yes even ‘Orphan 55’). Some of the lines are pretty undercooked too: are Daleks really just people where you ‘subtract hate, add anger’?
Nevertheless (sunny side up) there are some great lines too (I love a good pun and ‘Eggs-terminate’ in a story that’s already involved a soufflé and has the mystery of what’s providing eggs is delicious). There’s also an emotional heart to this one that gives the story a kind of funereal grace and lets it just about get away with everything, from the actual death of Oswin to the symbolic death of Amy and Rory’s relationship, with the sense of a darker, more sombre 11th Doctor who’s lost his childish glee and is already dreading the day he will be forced to travel alone. It’s unusual for a series opener and rather sets the tones for a season that finds everyone trying hard to have fun and wild excitement (I mean, the next story has dinosaurs…on a spaceship!) but ends up being mostly one about learning hard life lessons for everyone involved. Everyone barely survives this episode and the ‘new’ companion, the one who would normally be guaranteed to last even when the ‘old’ ones aren’t necessarily, snuffs it before we even meet her. It looks spectacular too: the first half of series seven was designed with a ‘big budget movie look’ in mind but of the five this is the one that wears that coat best without the spectacle being superfluous to the plot: Skaro looks amazing. There’s even a last minute switch of recording to the snowy plains of Spain (Sierra Nevada National Park to be precise) recorded during down the road from the location shoot for ‘A Town Called Mercy’, when it was discovered that the budget could stretch to the same place they shot the ‘snowy scenes’ of Star Wars back in 1977 comparatively cheaply and despite it being Spring there was still snow on the ground, which at the time seemed ridiculously frivolous for just a few short scenes but really helps sell the idea of this being an actual planet not just a city. Even if it’s a story that doesn’t use some other parts so well (there’s an entire spin-off series to be had out of the idea of insane, dangerous Daleks roaming around Skaro terrifying the locals) this is a story with so many parts to it that there’s always something good coming along in a couple of scenes anyway and no chance to get bored. ‘Asylum’ is a story that has a lot going on and tells most of it really well, especially the parts we weren’t expecting and when was the last time we had a Dalek story that had any surprises? (2005?) Things will go downhill fast from here, but series seven of modern Who starts off being really cooking!
POSITIVES + We’ve only known Oswin about half an hour but the moment when (spoilers) the Doctor discovers that his dream pixie soufflé girl, feisty and brave and clever and all the things he admires in Humans and who clearly already has one foot inside the Tardis in his mind, is really a manifestation inside a Dalek who is beyond saving, is a heartbreaking moment for them both. Matt and Jenna really sell the emotion well (a lot of companions take a while to get going and come out of their shell, as it were, but Coleman has an extra difficult task coming up with a variant of a character she hasn’t played yet and is egg-cellent), while the dialogue is Moffat at his cruellest and saddest, taking no prisoners by revealing Oswin is one. And (spoilers) its all the sadder when the revelations of ‘Name Of the Doctor’ make it clear that she is Clara, just a version of her that’s confused and has forgotten her own name and background after entering the Doctor’s timelines to save him. The hint is that other stories are impacted by other Claras who dropped into the Doctor’s life at key points and might have died in equally horrific ways (we see clips of ‘The Invasion Of Time’ and ‘The Arc Of Infinity’ on screen in that story, as well as a few others that could be from anything and the 1st Doctor escaping stealing the Tardis and escaping Gallifrey before we even meet him).
NEGATIVES - By comparison, even though we’ve known them for so long, Amy and Rory’ don’t feel quite so ‘real’ this week and their divorce doesn’t fly at all, no matter how long it’s been since we last saw them. The idea feels randomly stuck on for some extra drama that the script doesn’t need and is really badly handled, both in writing and acting. It would be in keeping with DW that the ‘fairytale’ aspect of their time has faded since the Doctor left their life and stayed away, but though the amount of time between visits is unspecified its clearly not that long looking at both of them and their lives seem to have changed way too much too quickly (of all the fairytale things about Amy that don’t make sense, the way she walks into a high flying modelling job just like that without even an apprenticeship is the most unfeasible and annoying, as is Moffat’s script directions that ‘this should be a typical wowzahs Karen Gillan shoot’). One of the most believable things about Amy and Rory was how much they talked to and trusted each other, so for Amy to ‘pretend’ to resent Rory for wanting children, while resenting herself for not being able to give him any, after events involving Madame Kovarian in the previous series, seems incredibly out of character. This isn’t someone good at keeping secrets or holding her feelings in: this is Amy. Rory, too, is good at reading people and particularly his wife he’s known since they were children, but misses this one completely, thinking that she just never loved him as much as he loved her, while his switch from loving to loathing seems remarkably quick for someone who once stood guard over Amy for 2000 years. For once Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are way off beam with how they portray this on screen and neither of them can do smouldering anger well at all. The pair also reconcile blooming quickly when the script needs them to, after a single heart to heart conversation (the most manipulative part of the script, when the pair only have one ‘wristband’ that will keep their memories intact before they turn into a Dalek). Worse still, they don’t really do anything with what should be a really big moment and there’s no comeback or payoff: the original script had an additional extra scene of the Tardis automatically dropping Amy and Rory back off at their Leadworth house even though Rory’s moved out and Amy warily inviting him in, but that wasn’t a lot and the televised version has nothing. The divorce is never mentioned again after this and they’re all smiles chasing dinosaurs round spaceships not long after. It’s all very unlikely and makes the pair of them oddly unlikeable too, after two full of series of being amongst the most believable companions the Doctor ever had. Besides, I never understand this with couples in scifi dramas that have seen all of time and space and how small they are and who are still oddly insistent on spreading their genes: why not adopt? There’s a universe of beings who need care out there (as it turns out this is exactly what they’ll do, but not yet, it’ll have to wait till they are sent back in time to 1930s New York and even then is a solitary line rather than the resolution of a full plot arc).
BEST QUOTE: Oswin - ‘Run you clever boy – and remember’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: A minute-long prequel available on the BBC red button in the run up to the episode being on. This one is basically an elongated opener where a hooded messenger gives the Doctor a request to go to Skaro.
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