There is a moment about thirty-five minutes into this episode where the entire thing quietly rearranges itself, and I sat forward, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. “Asylum of the Daleks” opens a season by doing three difficult things at once, reintroducing the Daleks as something frightening, putting a marriage back together, and smuggling a new companion into the show a year before she is supposed to arrive, and it gets away with all three. It’s also, for a story with several thousand Daleks in it, remarkably interested in people.
The parliament of the Daleks
The premise is a good joke played straight: the Daleks kidnap the Doctor because they need his help, and what they need help with is destroying some of their own. The Dalek Parliament is a genuinely impressive image, a vast chamber of thousands of them in ranks upon ranks, with a Prime Minister and a hierarchy and, apparently, a functioning legislature. Below it sits the Asylum, a planet where the Daleks dump the ones that have gone wrong. The battle-damaged. The insane. The ones that survived encounters with the Doctor and came back broken. The detail that sells it is that they don’t destroy them, because they can’t. The Daleks find the concept of a Dalek so full of hatred it cannot be controlled genuinely beautiful, and destroying it would be a kind of blasphemy. That’s a properly alien piece of psychology, and it does more for the species in one line than the last three finales managed with fleets.
The nanocloud is the other good idea. Anything organic that enters the Asylum’s atmosphere is converted, living or dead, it makes no difference, and a corpse will get up with an eyestalk unfolding out of its forehead and carry on. Watching a room of long-dead crew slowly stand up is the most effectively nasty thing the show has done with these monsters in years, and Den of Geek was right that this is the first time since 2005 that the Daleks have carried any real tension. The Asylum floor itself is fan service played straight. The Daleks down there are the survivors of the Doctor’s own history, the ones from Spiridon and Kembel and Aridius and Vulcan and Exxilon, dormant casings from stories decades old, sitting in the dust. The episode doesn’t explain any of it, and doesn’t need to. The point is that a very long war has been fought, that these are the pieces left over, and that the Doctor recognises every one of them. Given how often this show reintroduces the Daleks by pretending nothing came before, an asylum built out of the things he broke is a rather elegant way of acknowledging all of it at once.
A marriage in pieces
Running underneath is the thing the episode actually cares about: Amy and Rory are divorcing. That’s a startling place to start a series, and the show doesn’t soften it. They arrive separately, they won’t look at each other, and the signed papers are in her hand. For a while it plays as the standard television shorthand for a couple who’ve drifted. Then, trapped and shouting, it comes out. Amy can’t have children, something done to her on Demons Run when Kovarian took Melody and gave her back nothing, and she has known for a while that Rory wants a family. So she threw him out. Not because she stopped loving him. Because she decided, unilaterally, to give him the chance at a life she could no longer provide, and let him believe it was his fault. Karen Gillan plays it as a woman who has been carrying this alone and is furious about having to say it out loud. Arthur Darvill plays a man realising that the worst months of his life were a gift he never asked for. It’s the best scene in the episode and it has nothing to do with Daleks at all.
The reconciliation is a touch quick, since this is a season opener with a plot to get back to, but the wound it comes from is real and it’s a direct consequence of A Good Man Goes to War rather than a new invention. The show is finally letting that cost land. There’s a second, quieter use of it that’s easy to miss. Amy is exposed to the nanocloud early and spends the episode slowly converting, and the show renders that not as a physical transformation but as an emotional subtraction: her compassion goes first. She starts seeing the people around her as objects, then as targets, and the episode is careful to note that this is what a Dalek is, not a tank but a creature with everything except hatred surgically removed. The Doctor gives her his own protective bracelet and lies about it, and Gillan plays the recovery as somebody surfacing from a very cold place. It’s the most interesting thing the show has done with Dalek biology in years, and it’s tucked into a subplot.
Oswin
And then there’s the girl in the wreck. Oswin Oswald, junior entertainment manager of the starship Alaska, has been crashed on the Asylum for a year, and she is having a wonderful time. She’s brilliant, she’s flirting through the comms, she’s hacked the Dalek network for fun, and she keeps making soufflés that don’t quite work. Jenna-Louise Coleman arrives fully formed, fast and funny and entirely unbothered, and within ten minutes you want her in the TARDIS. The reveal is devastating and it is set up with real precision. She has no eggs. She has no oven. She has never left the pod. The Daleks converted her within hours of the crash, and she was so clever and so completely unable to accept it that she built an entire year of imaginary domesticity inside her own head to avoid looking at what she is.
The Doctor opens the door and finds a Dalek. The Dalek is still trying to talk about soufflés, and the word keeps sliding, eggs, then eggs-ter-min-ate, and that is the single most upsetting thing this programme has done with its oldest monster in the whole of the revived era. The AV Club called the opener a start where anything could happen, and this is the scene that makes that true. She saves them anyway. On the way out she does something enormous: she deletes the Doctor from the Dalek pathweb, the shared memory of the entire species. Every Dalek in the universe forgets who he is. The thing he has been to them for a thousand years, the Predator, the nightmare, simply stops existing, and a chamber full of them turns to him and asks, in unison, Doctor who? Her last words are an instruction: run, you clever boy, and remember.
What it leaves behind is an asylum they can’t bring themselves to purge, because the Daleks find pure uncontrollable hatred beautiful, and that one line makes the species more interesting than it’s been in a decade. It leaves the nanocloud, with corpses standing up and eyestalks pushing out through the skull, genuinely horrible and genuinely new. It leaves the reason Amy left, since Demons Run took her fertility and she took the decision away from her husband, which makes the season’s opening scene the previous season’s bill arriving. It leaves Oswin’s soufflés, a year of imaginary baking built by a woman who could not survive knowing what she’d become, and the best-constructed reveal of the era. And it leaves Doctor who?, because he has spent two years trying to make the universe forget him and a stranger did it for him in thirty seconds. He finds it hilarious. It should probably worry him.
Rating: 4/5. A confident, dense opener that treats its monsters as a psychology rather than an army, and hands the season a mystery it genuinely earns. The reconciliation is rushed and the Parliament is never quite paid off, but the Oswin material is superb and the last five minutes reset the Doctor’s relationship with the Daleks entirely. She was never making soufflés. She was never in the kitchen. And somewhere ahead of him is a woman he’s already met, twice, who told him to remember.