(A/N: this post, and the review of the following episode, actually attracted scathing criticism on Facebook. I'm not sure what amuses me more; the fact that people actually read
this, or the fact that people can become genuinely angered by my random thoughts. I guess I never really bothered to make this clear, since I said it so many times on Livejournal: I don't expect people to agree with me. Doctor Who
is a hugely popular show, and I love the fact that people have differing opinions on it. In which case, comment below, and we can have a reasoned discussion about it, rather than people just whingeing on an entirely seperate site. However: one phrase which was particularly objected to was the sentence: "I missed telling people why I was right and they were wrong." This is one of those occasions that proves sarcasm doesn't work over the internet, and I sincerely hope that no one who knows me in real life would ever think that I would say that with a straight face. Nevertheless, I don't like to offend (no, honestly), and so that sentence has been removed. Apologies.
The other specific complaint was that I am 'too smug.' Ain't nothing I can do about that, chaps.)
I’ve repeatedly said for the past year that I would return
to blogging once Doctor Who came
back. However, now I’m here…
*sigh*
well, what is there to really say about Asylum of the Daleks? It’s no better or worse than the average
Moffat-Who story, when you get down to
it, it’s just that this one happens to have things that look like Daleks (but
sure as hell don’t act like Daleks)
in it. I mean, the episode’s bad, don’t
get me wrong. It’s illogical, badly acted, and totally unable to stand on its
own feet as a piece of drama. Asylum of
the Daleks is bollocks. The problem is that I knew it would be bollocks, and precisely this level of bollocks.
This episode is totally unsurprising in its bollockness.
The reason I abandoned my previous blog, over on
LiveJournal (http://temporal-cynic.livejournal.com/), was… well, it was because everyone had left to go to Tumblr and
no-one was reading it anymore. But the other
reason was because of how utterly drained my regular Who reviews were leaving me feeling. For reasons I went into in
great detail over there, I just had no strong feelings left about the show. The
intense dislike I had heaped upon it in the Russell T Davies era had gone,
leaving me with a simple hollow feeling inside that the show had had a chance
to become so much more… and had ignored it. Under Steven Moffat, the story arcs
changed from unnecessary distractions to horrendously laboured sequences of
contrivances that took over the whole show, while the episodes themselves
changed from boring hackneyed lather-rinse-and-repeat invasion of Earth stories
to bizarre disconnected nonsense with no narrative structure that Moffat falsely
promised us would make sense at the end of the season. Even the main characters
became such vacuous ciphers that I could even muster up the hatred I’d had for
chav-bitch Rose, shouty cartoon character Donna, or the pretentious emo that was
David Tennant’s horrendous portrayal of the main character.
Nevertheless, I missed blogging. In the more... passionate area of my mind, I kind of need this outlet to let off steam so that I can think about TV shows more logically (I often look back much more kindly on episodes of Who in hindsight after the blogging process)- think of this site as a release valve. But also, as a student taking a
Creative Writing degree, I missed having something I wasn’t too chronically
lazy to write about. So, here I am, blogging again.
The Plot
I use the term ‘plot’ in the loosest sense of the word, but as far as I
could discern, this one is about the Daleks calling on the Doctor for help in
doing something that, on the face of it, a well-armed military team could do
much better. See, the Daleks have an entire planet, which they call their
asylum, which is either supposed to be ironic or shows that Moffat doesn’t know
the meaning of the word ‘asylum,’ since it is anything but.
The ‘asylum’ is a place where the Daleks stick those members of their race who
they find so beautiful, and so awesome, that they have no choice but
to abandon them on a random planet, instead of send them off to fight on the
front line. Or something.
Even though the Daleks now have the ability to control human drones with no
free will who they could send down to the planet, their first instinct is to capture the Doctor, the one guy most likely to
foil their plans, and make his involvement an integral part of their strategy.
They want the Doctor, and his personality-less companions Amy and Rory, the one
couple in the universe who even several years into their marriage still have no
idea what their own sodding surname is, to go down to the planet’s surface and
turn off the forcefield, which is controlled from within the asylum. Ah, yes.
Because only the best prisons lock the key inside
the cell.
Once the forcefield is deactivated, the Daleks plan to blow up the asylum, even
though the fact that destroying the Daleks on the planet is completely anathema
to their way of thinking is the whole reason the place exists in the first
place. The reason they are doing this is because there is opera playing from
the planet’s surface, and they are worried that someone has got in. There’s no
evidence for this, of course, as the person playing the music doesn’t make
herself known until the Doctor shows up, so for all the Daleks know, it’s just
an elaborate S.O.S.
So the Doctor, Amy and Rory travel down to the planet, and one would expect the
rest of the episode to be about their quest to find the controls that turn of
the forcefield.
Well, it isn’t. For the rest of the episode, they all just bumble about
uselessly until the Doctor finds a friendly Dalek who turns it off for them. Yes,
it turns out that the woman playing loud opera was a Dalek all along who had
gone insane and believed she was still human. It’s never made clear if it was
the Daleks on the planet or the Daleks in the ship who turned her into a Dalek,
as neither makes any sense at all, but the more pressing point is that the
Daleks in the ship would know who it was!
They would surely be able to pinpoint where the music was coming from, and say “Oh,
wait, it’s coming from that big white room we set aside for that woman from Waterloo Road who’s been turned into a
Dalek.” But more on her later. The crux of the climax is that the opera-woman
manages to erase every Dalek everywhere’s memories of the Doctor before she
gets blown up, meaning that no Dalek has a clue who the Doctor is.
Upon which the Daleks realise that nothing about their history makes any sense
anymore, and their tiny little minds explode with confusion. The End.
"In hindsight, that whole Time War thing suddenly seems like a really stupid idea, and I don't know why."
Soufflé Girl
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. I don’t give two hoots of
the O RLY owl that Oswald Mosley, or whatever her name was, is played by the
same actress who’ll be playing the next companion. I do not care. It’s an
irrelevance. What isn’t an irrelevance, however, is the pressing questions of
how a Dalek could sound like a human when she spoke to the Doctor, Amy, Rory
and the Dalek Parliament, and how she could play them Carmen. These questions have been raised by pretty much every
review I’ve read of this episode, so I won’t bother to repeat them in detail
here. The central idea behind Oswin isn’t actually a bad one: someone who has
suffered a trauma so utterly horrific that she has retreated into her own mind,
building herself a mental safe place. Done well, that could actually be the
basis of another, far better, episode.
So, which Doctor Who companion would YOU like to see hosting their own cookery show? Personally, I think there's a whole spin off to be made from the 'Susan burns the fish' scene from The Dalek Invasion of Earth...
By now, however, it should be clear that “done well” is not going to be a
phrase easy to attribute to modern Who. Imagine
how good it could have been if, as Oswin lost her tenuous grip on her sanity,
with each shot back to her, her home was in an increasingly deteriorated state,
her compputers falling apart, the walls growing filthier, her clothes becoming more
drab and ragged. Maybe she could even, in the eyes of the audience, slowly turn
into a Dalek mutant, each shot adding more Dalek make-up to her.
But no. Heaven forbid an attractive actress should have her beauty tarnished in
any way, so we’re left with Oswin essentially going “Oh no, I’m a Dalek. Huh.
Ah, well, I suppose I’d better conveniently die now.” No character depth, no
conflict, no drama.
Amy and Rory- the
couple with no name
I’m fed up with the whole Pond/Williams thing- I’ve been making fun of it
for two years now, and it’s still going on. Suffice to say, most married
couples don’t tend to alternate between using the husband’s surname and the
wife’s maiden name. Amy and Rory had the potential to be the greatest TV
companions since 1989, but because Moffat thinks ending every season with a big
‘rewriting time’ scene makes him look intelligent, the personal histories of
both characters have been erased and rewritten so many times that none of the
other writers on the show seem to have any idea who these people are supposed
to be any more and, especially evident in the last half of the previous season,
just prefer to write them out of the main action.
Anyway, Amy and Rory’s shtick this week is that Amy’s incredibly progressive
career arc has taken her from strippergram to pouty glamour model, but that her
marriage is almost over. This isn’t, as you might expect, because Rory has
realised his wife is a vacuous bimbo (although only when Moffat’s writing her,
to be fair), but because he wants children, and Amy can’t have them, either
because she’s physically scarred from last season’s events, or because her last
child turned out to be arch- cow and conclusive proof against the existence of
a loving God, River Song. Maybe Amy’s scared her next child will turn out to be
Davros, or something.
Adoption, by the way, is just one of those things we’re supposed to assume
doesn’t exist in Moffat’s universe, like logic and women’s rights.
Anyway, this whole thing is resolved so fast it’s almost as if Moffat needed an
isolated subplot to fill a few minutes of screentime, as it turns out that if
Amy and Rory had actually bothered to talk about their problems, they would
never have split up. Riiiight…
Watching AotD as a fan
Much as I like to hold up Classic Who
as the ideal to which New Who should
live up to, in general, I tend not to care too much about the likes of continuity
gaffes or ignoring established parts of the show’s mythos in the name of
telling a damn good story. Each episode should stand on its own; the viewer
shouldn’t have to do homework on the past forty-nine years of television
history to understand what’s happening on the screen. After all, Doctor Who is by nature an anthology
show. However, for some reason, both the production team and the media decided
to hype up this episode as much as possible months in advance as being a treat
for fans and continuity buffs, a cavalcade of Daleks from every era of the show
to kick off the countdown towards the half-century anniversary. This episode,
it seems, we are actively being encouraged to watch the show as an anal
retentive fanboy… which I am. So, does it satisfy through the prism of an encyclopaedic
knowledge of all things Who?
Pfft.
The Radio Times is this week giving
away a ‘free Dalek Wallchart.’ Like all things associated with that particular
publication, it’s crap. It’s a paper double page spread on the inside of the front
cover that disintegrates the second you detach it from the main magazine. On it
is a very vague and inaccurate history of the Daleks throughout the show, with
appropriate images of the different styles of Daleks which have appeared in
various stories over the years. Well, as it turns out, the Radio Times might as well have saved their money, as the supposed
collection of every single type of Dalek amounted to… a handful of the Power
Ranger Daleks introduced in Victory of
the Daleks a year and a half ago, and several million of the bronze Daleks
we’ve seen since 2005. In itself, this makes no sense, since the Power Ranger
Daleks have been shown to destroy bronze Daleks on sight, but it’s also an
incredible cop- out. Where was the treat for Classic series fans we were
promised? The Special Weapons Dalek from 1988’s Remembrance of the Daleks in the very distance of the shot? I’m
sorry, I forgot to bring my microscope to the episode.
It reaches its nadir in the ‘inner sanctum’ scene, where the Doctor is pitted
against Daleks that have faced him before, on planets such as Kembel, Vulcan
and Spiridon. Brilliant! Just what I need to survive this story, being reminded
of classic Dalek stories from the ‘60s and ‘70s, among the best the show has
ever produced!
"Take me back to Kembel! Please take me back to Kembel!" Hey, it wouldn't be me if it didn't include a completely obscure Classic Who quote.
…And it’s just another load of bronze Daleks, who don’t even have anything
interesting to say for themselves.
And it’s not as if I particularly wanted to see old-school Daleks; I’m all for
looking forward to the future. But when we were expressly promised a
continuity- heavy episode, and just get more crimes against common sense… well,
what was the point?
Like everything in this episode, I hadn’t got my hopes up enough to be
disappointed, but when one looks at that episode poster where the Doctor is
surrounded by types of Daleks that didn’t even appear in the episode… well, we’ve
been lied to again.
I was also rather disappointed that they didn't actually set Matt Smith on fire.
Thoughts on the
Ongoing ‘Doctor… Who?’ story arc:
Sod off.
What I’ve Been
Watching:
The scintillating, the sublime, the stupid: what else has been catching my
eye on the box over the past few days?
·
Paralympics
2012: I can’t help but feel terribly guilty for being so engrossed in the
Paralympic Games, after totally ignoring the Olympics a few weeks ago. It’s
almost like I’m patronising them for doing such a jolly good show even though
they can’t do all the things normal
people do. But I honestly think it’s more than that. There’s a warmer, more
good- natured feel to the Paralympics that I can’t quite put my finger on, a
stronger camaraderie between the athletes a million miles away from the tedious
posturing of the Olympics that’s hooked me right in. Even if I don’t understand
the bits with the horses.
·
New
Tricks: Last of the Summer Wine but with corpses plods on, a good six years
or so after it began to run out of steam. In all honesty, I can’t bring myself
to dislike New Tricks, with its mad
mix of twee comedy and sinister murderers. If anything, there’s a potentially
lethal drinking game to be had from all the many times someone displays an
incredible feat of memory, being able to instantly tell our creaky quartet
their exactly movements a decade before with no hesitation whatsoever. Last
week’s season opener took the show to its logical extremes for better and for
worse; the repartee between the regular cast was second to none, merging with a
murder mystery so preposterous it has to be seen to be believed to create the
show’s unique brand of silliness. There’s barely any substance to it, but it’s
fun viewing.
·
James May’s
Things You Need To Know: The tolerable one off of Top Gear presents his second series of this bonkers quick look at
science, imparting useful information via seemingly surreal questions such as “Why
are Zombies Scary” or “How did Einstein become a celebrity pin-up?” He is aided
by a bewildering sequence of quick- cut 2D animations that make it feel like a
kids’ show at times (by no means whatsoever a bad thing) but might leave you
learning more than you thought you would.
·
Our War:
This fascinating documentary series, the best thing to come out of BBC3 since…
erm… pass, takes the viewer directly to the front line in Afghanistan via video
cameras on the heads of soldiers. These bravest of men are laid bare before the
viewer, as are the facts of what Britain is doing in this war, and just how
much good is being done. Worth a look for anyone with strong feelings on the
war, or who knows someone out there personally.
·
A Mother’s
Son: Like most ITV drama miniseries a fairly pedestrian effort (I gave up
on Last Weekend after one episode), a
by the numbers story that, so far (as of the first episode of two) unfolds
pretty much as one would expect it to, although it mostly seems to be setting
things up for the second half. It’s lifted by a superb cast, including ex-Spooks Hermione Norris and Nicola
Walker, Martin Clunes, excelling in a rare serious role, and the Eighth Doctor
himself, Paul McGann. It’s keeping all the cards of its central mystery close
to its chest at the moment, and that’s also to its advantage. I look forward to
the conclusion.
What I’ve Been Listening To:
·
Just A
Minute: It’s Just A Minute. It
goes without saying I’ll be listening to it. And it’s as brilliant as ever.
·
The
Scarifyers: The Scarifyers has
never excelled at fantastic storytelling, relying more on its use of aging Doctor Who alumni to pull in interest
(this story’s even got BRIAN BLESSED in it), but it’s hard not to admire the
sheer cheek of the plots it pulls off, although it has proved in the past that
it can create genuine chilling drama.
