Sunday, September 2, 2012

Asylum of the Daleks



THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS!

This morning I woke up at 4:58am. That is just nuts. We woke my brother up by way of sonic screwdriver, made tea and settled ourselves on the lounge. We watched Doctor Who and then we made pancakes and ate them in the sun.

I was sceptical about this whole iView thing. But I loved this morning.

iView turned out to be kind of excellent. First of all the ABC’s servers didn’t crash, which I thought might happen. Plus the picture quality was actually really decent. Massive kudos to the ABC for orchestrating the whole thing, and doing it RIGHT.

One of the things that makes me mourn the decline of broadcast television is the loss of the shared viewing experience. One of my favourite things about TV is the collective building of excitement and the ongoing speculation. There was something so special about arriving at school on a Monday morning and yelling at each other about Doctor Who. I miss that. I miss everyone falling in love with shows at the same time.

Today, Doctor Who was basically a global experience. There are an awful lot of countries that are going to be, LEGALLY, watching the new episodes within hours of each other. That’s kind of great.
There’s something really amazing about getting to be in the thick of the whole Doctor Who experience for the first time in years without sacrificing my morals.

And what a year to be in the thick of.

I loved Asylum of the Daleks. I thought it was just the right mix of warm honey, magic and gung-ho action. There was romance and drama and suspense and funny bits and sad bits and EVERYTHING.

The fact that Jenna Louise Coleman (henceforth know as J-Lo) is in this episode was kept spectacularly under wraps. That was such a wonderful surprise. I loved her character too. Clara (I’m calling her Clara, even though she was Oswin in this episode) is going to have such massive shoes to fill and it looks like she might actually pull it off.
The soufflé part was beautiful. I loved that she took that seed of doubt and uncertainty and made it into soufflés. She turned Dalek into human. With nothing but hypothetical eggs.

I’ve got no idea where Steven Moffat is going to take it from here. The obvious thing is that he’ll travel backwards along Oswin/Clara’s personal timeline and meet her before she crashed on the Asylum. But somehow that’s all a little too River Song. It’s too simple and… I just don’t think that’s what they’ll do. For some reason I sort of like the idea of there being two of her. Maybe that’s a hangover from my “River is Lintilla” theory (which never really took off because no one really understood the complicated cross-references involved and also it was stupid).

My favourite theory is one Alex and his friend Ian came up with – the new companion is actually a Dalek. So everything that happens involves her being a human in her imagination and a Dalek in reality. This would be very hilarious and cool.

But before we meet Clara/Oswin for real, we have to say goodbye to the Ponds.

Rory: How long can we wait for him?
Amy: For the rest of our lives.
Anyone who’s familiar with Press Gang will know that “the rest of my life” is an awfully loaded and inherently tragic phrase. I really hope it’s not foreshadowing.
That line right there gave me an awful lot of Spike and Lynda feels. I’ve never really noticed the parallels between Amy and Rory’s relationship and Spike and Lynda’s but now they’re there, clear as day, and I’m really unsure where Moffat is going to take them. Having addressed the tension in their relationship so beautifully, I really hope they run with it.

I cried a bit when Amy talked about not being able to have kids. What did happen to Amy at Demon’s Run? We don’t know. Not really. But her infertility hints at all sorts of horrors. The Doctor hasn’t exclusively been a blessing in their lives. You could argue that he hasn’t been a blessing at all. I get the feeling they’ll be a lot more crying before Moffat is done with us.

On top of all that we’ve got this huge thing of The Doctor being wiped from the Dalek mainframe. Seriously guys. THAT IS SO HUGE. It raised the issue that The Doctor’s reputation is a destructive force. The Daleks are more powerful for their hatred of him. Is he constantly saving the human race from enemies that he himself has helped create?

The Doctor said “Doctor who?” for only the second time in this episode (Let’s Kill Hitler was the first). I still think that him saying it is more important than anyone else uttering the words. It isn’t simply the phrase that will cause silence to fall, it’s the question. The actual question. Which no one really asks. Doctor WHO? The Doctor himself saying it is a contradiction to his usual denial. He ignored the question because it can’t be asked.

What Moffat has done is set the series up magnificently. He’s addressed a lot of things that have only been hinted at before now, suggesting that there’s a lot more stuff to come. The last two series have been loaded with a lot of awful loose ends and it’s starting to look like an awful lot of those will be tied up by the end of next year.



SPECULATION CORNER:
The issue of Matt’s regeneration, and when that will happen, is still a contentious and difficult one. Thing is we just don’t know what the deal is. BUT there’s another big change that looks like it might be on the horizon – a new show runner. While there’s no official word of this, I think it’s pretty unlikely that Moffat will stay beyond next year. He’s done his dash, written a mammoth story arc and once it’s finished I think he’d actually be ready to bow out. At the moment we’ve got two theories about who’ll take over-
Chris Chinball. 
More to come on this later.

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