Name: Anonymous 2012-09-03 23:05
ASYLUM OF THE DALEKS
By now I've seen some horrible episodes, so with a Moffat written episode, that's not that dreadful christmas special, I knew that things were looking up.
I was right. This episode was serious, thrilling and dark, and with that, it pretty much trumphed all of series 6, at least in tone.
Logical inconsistencies continue to plague the series, though.
First of all, would I be the doctor, and I would recieve a distress signal aimed at my time-machine, which apparently not many people can aim at, and I saw that it was coming from the dalek home planet, I would put two and two together, and at least take some really heavy precautions against it being the daleks who sent the signal.
We're introduced to essentially the Cylon series of the daleks, which is a really scary concept. The daleks can now turn anything - living or dead - into a dalek. Imagine what they could do if they just streamed invisible dalek nanobots to Earth over the course of several years. Even before people would begin transforming into daleks, they would hate and destroy eachother with weapons and nukes, turning Earth into a new paradise for the radiation-thriving daleks.
The first thing we see of Amy Pond, is that she's now joined the dark side, judging by her make-up. She's a killer now, so I'm expecting her to turn villain by the end of this half of the series.
The daleks are very nicely portrayed.
I don't remember much of what happened to the dalek leader, but I thought he died, so I must have been mistaken. There are more puzzling things, though, like the hole in the floor leading to two different things, that the prison planet has a shield that only can be disabled from the IN-side, and that if the daleks has learned that a ship can penetrate the planetary shield, but that their cannons cannot fire through it, why are they not simply crashing a second ship through the shield, perhaps filled with explosives?
As perfected as the cylon series might be, who's a dalek and who's not, didn't come as a surprise. In the case of the first cylon, it didn't have to, but "Where did you get the milk?" made it kind of obvious from the beginning, that the mysteriously adept superhacker wasn't human either. The episode was instead just a matter of figuring out an escape.
I find it very, VERY odd, that Amy Pond and Rory broke up because they can't have children, when the last series revolved all around Amy becoming a mother. She even explains that it's because of her last pregnancy. I get that River Song "is dead", or maybe unwanted somehow, and that darkside Amy would like a normal baby to raise, but it's jarring how the story progression is moving backwards from giving birth to overcoming not being able to anymore. It's basically what happens to all women when they turn 40.
The plot of the episode is cheaply solved through some magical handwaving. Instead of the doctor figuring any essential things out, the girl hacks things at the final second and saves the day. The doctor just figures out that the girl is a cylon (which doesn't matter), that the daleks will blow up the planet (which anybody can figure out), and how to teleport inside the impregnable Tardis by using dalek technology (which is just technical mumbo-jumbo, and also pretty worrisome). How anybody can remote-wipe the memory of all the daleks from within a shielded prison planet, without even breaking a sweat, is pretty absurd.
As a final note, where did the Tardis come from? The daleks knocked the doctor out, then found his Tardis, captured it somehow, and put it next to the doctor. Why would they do that? Why didn't they send it to their R&D section in attempts to pick it apart or store it? Half of the times when the daleks has met the doctor, he has always covered in, or fled into, his Tardis. Furthermore, the first thing that the doctor did, was to calculate the most defendable area in the room, and the path to the exit doors, while both of these questions are answered by the Tardis standing just a few meters away from him, complete with the protective forcefield surrounding it.
...so to sum this up: While the settings were lovely, it lacked the intelligence - the brilliant reasoning and conclusions that used to be so typical from the doctor.