Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks (2012)

There's something that just feels right about Doctor Who returning in the autumn. Ever since the show was resurrected in 2005, it has usually begun a series run in March or April, with one off Christmas episodes bridging the gap over the winter. To me it's never really felt like a show I wanted to watch in the height of summer - it doesn't seem to suit being on while it's still light outside. So I was strangely anticipating it starting in September this year, knowing that I'd be able to sit down to watch it in at least vague twilight, preferably with a cup of tea and some humanoid shaped gelatin based sweets.

Still, I have always been happy to see new episodes of Doctor Who and going back to it's first rebooted season I thought it was all great at the time - though I've revised my opinion since then. One episode that still remains a high point of Chris Eccleston's tenure however was Dalek. After so many dodgy, clunky outings for the Doctor's most iconic foe, here was an episode that showed a single Dalek as a force to be reckoned with and more importantly showed the Doctor in fear of them. Though pretty much all of that goodwill was undone by the end of that series and now we find ourselves coming full circle again, with the Daleks just as much of a joke as they were beforehand.

So Asylum of the Daleks definitely takes a stab at rectifying some of this and I think it was pretty successful. Though it didn't have me hiding behind the sofa the Daleks were certainly threatening, with good reasoning for why they weren't always deadly. Notably it also showed the Doctor in fear of them again, which I think is important in selling them as a real danger. There were points where it created a brilliantly tense atmosphere, not unlike something from Alien and to be honest in one section I would rather that tension was kept up instead of diffusing it with comedy. Though I did like how that little joke was touched on again at the end.

The episode also worked well as a mini-reboot/retcon of the Daleks and I was happy to see the overly mythical status of the Doctor among the Daleks removed (though I'm still not sure about the final lines of the episode). It also introduced a rather disturbing new method of human enslavement, which was especially shocking for the time it was shown. I have to be honest, I wasn't expecting to see Zombie Daleks with eye stalks bursting out of their foreheads...

I hadn't caught all of the mini-episodes of Pond Life before watching this, so I was surprised by how it opened with Amy and Rory's relationship in tatters. On reflection I thought that this was quite a good opening though and after watching the remaining Pond Life episodes it made a lot of sense. I liked the idea that life goes on while the Doctor's away and that it's not always for the better. And that the Doctor's presence can then bring what's important into focus in a life or death situation when things could be left to slip away in mundane daily life.

I kind of wanted to touch on this after Anita Sarkeesian was heavily critical of Steven Moffat's 'disastrous' writing of female characters on Twitter. Perhaps Twitter is not the place for this kind of thing as it doesn't really allow you the ability to go into detail but the idea of Amy now being unable to have children sadly felt all too real to me. As I've learned over time, difficulty in having children is more common than you might think and can easily have an effect on a relationship. In this case having children wasn't really the critical issue anyway - as many people say the biggest problems in any relationship can come from a lack of communication. So in a way the Doctor forced them into a situation where they had to confront each other, rather than allow themselves to drift apart due to Amy's assumptions about Rory's feelings. To extrapolate from this scenario to some kind of awful series finale involving a miracle birth seemed to be overly reaching, though I will eat my words if it does come to pass.

I can't really finish this without mentioning Oswin played by Jenna-Louise Coleman, who at the time I couldn't quite remember whether she was to be a new companion. The knowledge that she will be makes it intriguing to wonder just how she will turn up again and whether she will remain as an intellectual match for the Doctor as she was in this episode. I wasn't sure whether this episode was suggesting that she was naturally a genius or if it was a by-product of her involvement with the Daleks but she seemed like she would hold her own either way and it will be nice to see a companion who isn't from present day Earth. I'm not sure if the Doctor will actively seek her out or whether it will be a case of cosmic convenience, which I think gives just the right amount of intrigue for now in a season supposedly focussing on one off episodes.