Doctor Who 7.01: Asylum of the Daleks

[selenay]

OK, that was not in any way what I was expecting from the previews! In a good way :-D

From the previews, I gathered this would be a big Dalek episode with the Doctor versus a huge bunch of them, another mass genocide thing and in process something terrible would happen wtih Amy.

I'm very happy that wasn't what I got.

Once they got onto the asylum world, I found the entire thing quite tense and claustrophobic. Particularly the element where you never knew what could turn out to be a Dalek in disguise. Ick. I really like the idea of a prison planet that the Daleks send the most broken, unstable Daleks to. Of course they can't kill something that has reached that level of Dalek perfection, but they also have enough self-knowledge to know that those Daleks are going to be useless and even dangerous to the overall cause.

It was inevitable that one of them would lose their protective bracelts and it wasn't surprising that it would turn out to be Amy. I'm going to ignore the element of hand-wavy logic to the resolution to that side of things because I really loved Amy's scene with Rory where we learned the reason for the break-up.

Oh, Amy. So many things have happened to you. So many terrible things. And yet you still want that life. Poor, damaged, adorable Amy.

The more interesting story was the one with Oswin. When I first saw her, I was immediately thinking "hey, isn't that the new companion?" but all the rumours that I've seen indicated that we weren't getting our new companion until the second half of the series. So it was confusing and I kept second guessing myself. I'm hoping that I'm not the only person who didn't work out that Oswin had been Dalek-ed until the Doctor got through that door.

They really had me convinced.

It was actually heart-breaking to see the realisation. Oswin was such a lovely character and her actress did a beautiful job of conveying how terribly her mind had broken.

The episode left me with two massive questions. The first one, obviously, is how are they going to use the fact that the Doctor has been essentially wiped from the Daleks' collective memories (clever Oswin) in future episodes? I can see a lot of cool stuff coming from that.

Then there's the even more intriguing question, or related set of questions. Who is Oswin? How is she related to the companion that actress will be playing? Will the character she's playing be Oswin? Why was Oswin so powerful?

I seriously cannot wait to find that out. Well done, Doctor Who, this season has me so intrigued already :-D


Is it next week yet?

Comments

[nosila]

I didn't see it coming either. You're not the only one!

[selenay]

Phew! Always nice to know that I'm not alone on this :-D

Now that I've had a chance to browse around and see other peoples' reactions - I am so damn impressed with how well they kept the secret about the early companion appearance. I thought that it was just that I'd somehow missed the gossip (it's happened, it's rare but it's happened) so I'm beyond impressed that nobody saw it coming and all the people who saw the previews over the week kept quiet :-D