Insane In The Membrane! Asylum of the Daleks Review

The B-Movie style poster for last night's Doctor Who

So, Doctor Who returned last night by doing what it does best - not exactly what anyone expected it to. 

The gist.  The Doctor, Amy and Rory are kidnapped by human-shaped Dalek 'puppets' and sent to go and destroy a kind of Dalek Borstal - the Daleks themselves are too scared to go down there.  This must be a pretty harsh place then, we think.  We had been told (or at least it had been bandied around on Twitter) that we would see all the old Daleks over the years in action which turned out not to be sort of but not really true - quite rightly.  Although it would have given me and a lot of other fanboys a short-term thrill to see the Specials Weapon Dalek in action again, it would probably have happened at the expense of the plot and characters and other things that keep non-obsessive normal people watching.  When Davros was brought back a few years ago it didn't really work because there was no reason for him to be there other than for people to go "Ooh, look, Davros!" before going back to trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Instead, Steven Moffat's script did the exact opposite - it relaunched the Daleks, and did it by not so much rewriting the Daleks' history as just treating it as something less important than the Daleks' present.  It introduced new things like a Parliament of Daleks, complete with a blobby Prime Minister and the idea of the eponymous Asylum - a place for all the imperfections to go hang out.  It also ended the idea of the Daleks seeing The Doctor as an arch-enemy by having them forget who he is, which is such a brilliantly simple way of rebooting some established villains it reminds you there's life in the old format yet.  It also did all this efficiently and without too much fuss so it could get down to the really interesting task of dealing with The Doctor's current companions divorcing and his new companion being a Dalek (and now an exploded Dalek at that).

After the body/psycho-horror of seeing someone being converted into a Dalek again (as in Revelation of the Daleks), the Cybermen in Doctor Who are redundant again.  The idea of someone willingly being trapped in their own mind to avoid accepting the fact they're now a Dalek was done in a genuinely dramatic and shocking way.  It also upset some continuity nuts online (we'll get to them in a bit).  In fact, the whole episode had its feet firmly planted in the Horror genre instead of the Action/Sci-Fi tales one normally expects from a Dalek story.  Rory tip-toeing through a crypt with cobwebby, dormant, lunatic Daleks was much more exciting than CGI-fleets of them going 'Bang!'  And the worry that Amy might be going to turning into a Dalek felt like a genuine worry, even though everyone knows that the chances are pretty good for The Doctor and friends surviving.  There were a few things that in retrospect didn't exactly add up (like, for instance, The Doctor not realising that the Woman From Emmerdale was going to be a Dalek even though he's been chatting to her all episode), but on the whole it felt true to its own agenda.

The aforementioned continuity-nuts online weren't keen on a few aspects of the story, one of the most frequently voiced criticisms online being that the Daleks don't turn humans into Daleks.  Which is the kind of Doctor Who criticism that is great if you fancy a laugh.  When will people realise that it's so much easier to accept the fact that Doctor Who frequently contradicts its own past (and sometimes its own present) and celebrate that?  Because it's that willingness to disregard its own past that is the reason it's lasted for 50-odd years.  It's nothing new for fans to dislike rewriting supposedly established concepts and one wearily reaches for the infamous 70s review of 'A Deadly Assassin' to see why these fans end up looking a bit po-faced and silly.  In fact, a lot of the 'classic' Doctor Who stories make no sense compared to what went before them (Spearhead From Space, Genesis Of The Daleks and so on).  This is why I like the show; it's willing to keep the most important things about the show and chuck out the past if it gets in the way of a good story in the present.  There are very few 'rules' in Doctor Who story telling.  Terrence Dicks said that the rule of thumb of what was important about the past of the show was just what you could remember, and Paul Cornell said that it is the job of the fan, not the writers, to worry about continuity, if they're that way inclined.

Why can't the Daleks turn people into Daleks?  Aside from the fact it's something which has been done before anyway, they are fictional, you know?  They didn't used to be able to fly or have a creator called Davros, and they might one day be able to grow legs and go for a run, or sing Abba songs, or give birth to little baby Daleks or whatever.  It's part of the fun.  I like being a fan of a show that instead of surreptitiously changing its lead actor James Bond-style and hoping no-one notices makes it into a massive plot-device (and one that isn't really explained for over 5 years), and carries on with the more important task of making ambitious and interesting stories for anyone who fancies watching.  Because its always succeeded as a show primarily concerned with stories, not as a show aimed at a fanbase.  So when I read people writing thjings like 'Daleks turning people into Daleks makes no sense' I think 'Yeah, I was forgetting that a man travelling in a box that's bigger on the inside is exactly the premise that requires a gritty attention to detail in order to work' and move on (or write a blog about it depending on how pompous I'm feeling).  There's been more expert analysis on fans and continuity on Phillip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorium blog comment sections if that's the kind of thing that floats yer boat.

So that little rant over with, what next?  We've been told that this series isn't going to worry too much about complex story arcs and is going to do more individual stories which I think is a good thing, not because I'm against them per se but because I think Doctor Who is at its best when changing direction and we've had quite a lot of story arcs over the last few years.  Amy and Rory are going, which will make me sad; Woman From Emmerdale who turned out to be a Dalek and was blown up is going to be a new companion in Christmas, which should be interesting; and there are some dinosaurs on a spaceship next week which will be fun, though might contradict a Jon Pertwee story from the 1970s or something.  It's good to see a show approach its 50th year and  being relevant event telly again.