Liam Trim reviews the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who…
Warning: Spoilers!
The build up to the new series of Doctor Who has been dominated by talk of bigger budgets, cinematic vision and blockbuster scale. Head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat loves a grand, complex narrative, and here he is laying the foundations for a spectacular celebration of the show’s 50th anniversary next year. Sizeable chunks of last year’s series took place in America and the trend continues in this opening episode, with the snowy scenes shot at impressive locations across the pond. Moffat and his team appear to desire nothing less than world domination for the Doctor. Recent stories have not only made use of locations in the US for the enjoyment of British viewers but for their appeal to the American market too.
Surely such backing and investment for one of our home-grown TV treasures is a good thing? Alien planets do not have to resemble a Welsh quarry these days. However, many Whovians will argue that much of the show’s creativity and wonder stemmed from the inventiveness necessitated by British thrift. The combination of money and America has soured the artistic tastes of many in the past. Even if this argument is an exaggeration I think it is certainly true that the best moments of Doctor Who are small, clever, touching and insightful, rather than big, brash and loud. For this reason I had concerns about Moffat’s claim that each episode of the new series would be a blockbuster, bottled into 45 minute form on BBC One.
There were certainly moments in Asylum of the Daleks that simply tried too hard to be epic. Rory running in pointless slow motion from a horde of barely mobile Daleks was one of the lowlights of the episode. Awkward and forced moments like this deflate drama and tension as opposed to heightening it. There was also the ‘gravity beam’ at the beginning, which probably required a lot of green screen money but added little to the spectacle or the story.
On the whole though, the attempts to be cinematic were not responsible for the faults of this opening episode. In fact, Moffat did well to cram so much in to 45 minutes or so that managed to deal with many of the important issues with decent depth. One of the weaknesses of the last series was that it became too messy as it tried to do so much in terms of plotting; Moffat’s sheer ambition left little room for the smaller magic and memorable moments. Here the recurring theme of “silence will fall when the question (Doctor Who?) is asked” is given room to breathe and even greater significance.
The weaknesses of this series opener probably have far more to do with the choice of foe than Moffat’s plotting, imagination or creativity. We have simply seen the Daleks so many times that it is hard to incorporate them into a great episode, especially at the start of a series. Russell T. Davies used to save the Daleks for the series finale, and this at least gave them a sense of threat and occasion. Maintaining their menace for the duration of a series curtain raiser is a hard trick to pull off, even for Moffat, who killed the Doctor at the start of Series 6 of New Who.
Having said this, Moffat has a good go at reinventing the wheel, just a tiny bit, as always. He gives the Daleks some human robot minions, so we can’t trust anyone resembling a person or a pepper pot. For the most part these spies are simply a way of getting some people into the story besides the Doctor, Amy and Rory, but they are briefly repulsive and frightening when it turns out the asylum’s protective nano-cloud can make killing machines out of corpses, too.
The nano-cloud slowly transforming Amy into a robot was also a clever and potentially chilling idea on paper. The moment when the Doctor tells Amy they have already had the same conversation four times was a truly unsettling and disturbing one, but the strange hallucinations Amy sees seconds later were less scary than intended. Ultimately Amy’s transformation was merely a device to allow a heartbreaking scene between the Ponds, which demonstrated Karen Gillan’s ability as an actress, as well as Moffat’s as a writer.
During the RTD era such a moment would probably have felt overly sentimental and cringe worthy. But Moffat manages to wrong-foot his audience with some surprising and hard hitting realism. At first the fact that Amy and Rory were separated seemed unconvincing, and no doubt fans were outraged. Amy as a superficial model? Rory as an angry, bitter divorcee? It didn’t fit. The explanation, delivered by Gillan, turned out to be a justified tearjerker.
A prequel to this series, entitled Pond Life, is available online. It follows Amy and Rory in the months when the Doctor is absent, careering around time and space. Moffat appears keen to make the Doctor’s absence one of the key strands of this series. The Doctor may have rescued Amy’s daughter in the last series but he does not hang around to deal with the consequences. He is not there to see Amy and Rory miss the child they could never raise. He cannot fix whatever happened to Amy at Demon’s Run. Rory will never truly be a father, as he desperately wants to be, and so Amy decided to give him up.
And yet the Doctor does manage to save the day, with a degree of insight into the workings of the human heart he sometimes lacks. He basically copies an old trick – shut the warring couple in a room together until they resolve things. Of course there is a sci-fi twist. Rory attempts to give Amy his nano-cloud wrist band protector thingy because the Daleks are “subtracting love”, which he reasons he has more of than Amy. When he says “the basic fact of our relationship is that I love you more than you love me”, and Amy angrily puts him right, the emotional intensity is through the roof. These are grown up lines of dialogue, close to the ambiguity and pain of real life relationships and love, and Gillan delivers a mature, career best performance. Certainly her best in Doctor Who since her turn as an older version of Amy in The Girl Who Waited.
Amy and Rory’s separation is merely a sub-plot in Asylum of the Daleks but the rest of the episode doesn’t really compare. There are some intriguing touches that shed light on the Doctor’s never-ending duel with the Daleks though. I especially liked the moment when the Dalek Prime Minister explained both the reason for the asylum and their inability to kill the Doctor – the Daleks see pure hatred as beautiful, hence their reluctance to kill the rogue Daleks on the asylum, and the PM alludes to the fact that the Doctor may have lasted so long because the Daleks respect his hatred for them.
Moffat promised to make the Daleks scary again and I don’t think he really achieved this. However, these comments may have just been smoke and mirrors to distract attention from the appearance of the new companion, Jenna-Louise Coleman, who wasn’t due to make her debut until the Christmas special. Instead she pops up here, as a mysterious genius living at the heart of the asylum. Much of this episode ends up being about her and Moffat therefore sidesteps many of the difficulties of a Dalek episode. We’re too busy wondering who she is, why she’s making soufflés and how on earth she gets back to Victorian London in time for Christmas day.
First impressions of Amy Pond’s replacement? Mixed. It’s not surprising to learn that many have found her irritating, as she tries to outpace the Doctor with verbal sprints and indecipherable quirkiness. My early prediction is that she could be the Rose Tyler of the Matt Smith generation. Amy Pond has been the Doctor’s best friend during Smith’s reign as the eleventh Doctor, and of course there’s been River Song, but arguably Matt Smith’s Time Lord is yet to fall properly in love. Who knows if Moffat will return to the soppy days of David Tennant and Billie Piper (I suspect he won’t) but there was something about the enchanted way Smith kept talking about the soufflé girl…
Personally I thought Coleman had some great lines, there were just perhaps too many of them, resulting in forced flirting rather than natural banter. The intriguing thing is, given the way the episode ends, she could return in any incarnation, with possibly a drastically different personality from the one on show here. I wouldn’t be that surprised if we saw her again before her scheduled Christmas appearance either.
Overall this was a solid opener, but hopefully there are more sublime episodes on the horizon. Next week surely looks too mad to be brilliant though…
Liam Trim
