Day 4290: DOCTOR WHO: The Angels Take the St Michael

Saturday (flashback bonus):


In their own way, the Angels are like history: they look fixed, but that's only our perception.

The opening of "The Angels Take Manhattan" is narrated, in character, in film noir style, by "private dick" Sam Garner. But the fingers we see typing his voiceover are manicured with scarlet nail varnish, which Mr Garner is not otherwise seen to wear. This is a first allusion to the writer's power.

In the Moffat-verse, it seems, history is contingent, memory unreliable, time itself as he keeps endlessly saying can be rewritten. But once it's written down it is sacred.


In an odd way, it's like the flip-side of "Logopolis": there, the ability of "living minds" to perform Block Transfer computation – to make TARDISes work, to Time Travel even – depends on a certain flexibility. A computer would be altered by the process as it made the calculation; the implication is that it would suffer a critical paradox. And thus the link from Russell's Paradox to Existential Mathematics is made via the Turing Test.

Does Moffat see the structure of time, that big ball of timey-wimey stuff, in similar fashion? Is it that same flexibility of perception that allows you to alter the past that you think you know, while the written record, like the "computer mind" with "absolute knowledge", is fixed and invariant? Is this, essentially, the central paradox of writing: the ability to know something is fiction and still true?

When they were first introduced in "Blink" the Angels were specific, living creatures that turned to stone when you looked at them. In "The Time of Angels" we heard that they were actually living ideas, idea-shaped holes in the continuum that we just perceived as statues – and in return, anything that we perceived as an Angel could become one. Now, they seem to have evolved again, into, it would seem, ideas that choose to occupy statues, any statue (and not just stone ones, as the enormous metal lady from Liberty Island attests). River certainly seems to say that the Angels have "occupied" every statue in 1938 New York.

And possibly the more powerful the idea – or the more "time energy" it has fed on – the larger the statue it is able to occupy, hence the "baby Angels" using smaller cherub bodies… and you need a really big Angel, who's had all the energy of the Winter Quay battery farm to feed on, to occupy Lady Liberty.

We're left with the same puzzles: do the statues actually move – as we saw them start to in "Flesh and Stone", and as the thunderous "Statue of Liberty sized Grandmother's footsteps" imply – or is it just the idea that moves, incredibly quickly, so that when we look again we perceive the statue in a different place. That is, not that the atoms and molecules of the statues actually translate from place to place, but that the way we perceive the arrangement of those atoms changes, the original statue ceasing to have any meaningful pattern, and a whole new statue being created from different atoms just by how we perceive their (usually much closer to us) arrangement.

This might also explain how they displace you in time: it's not the physical atoms of your body that get sent back, only your conscious mind. Your perception of yourself includes your body around you, so naturally you perceive the atoms at your arrival point as a you-shaped body. The "you-shaped arrangement of atoms" at this end ceases to have any perceptual meaning as a person, and that – if you like – is where the Angels get their conceptual dinner from.

Alternatively, adding information – i.e. you – to an earlier time zone is the same as adding entropy to the Universe: almost whatever you do will interact chaotically with your foreknowledge of events, making the Universe more random, which is the definition of entropy. The trade-off, so that the Universe remains consistent, is a sharp decrease in entropy of the Angel at the same time as an increase in entropy of everything else.

Or possibly it's all a load of nonsense.

The thing about entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as explored extensively in "Logopolis" and summarised as "things fall apart", is that most people react to it with denial or horror. The Master himself reacts this way – "Horrible! Horrible!" – on seeing the leader of the Logopolitans, the Monitor, reduced to a drifting ember by the entropy wave, and this from a man who shrinks people to death for a living. Underlying "The Angels Take Manhattan" is a clear horror of ageing.

Of course, there's always been something of that about the Angels, the fear of your life being snatched away by time: literally "Blink" and you miss it. From that point of view, they're the world's fastest ever zombies. But this time it's really hammered home, from Mr Grayle with his collection of old things to River's philosophy of her relationship:

"Never let him see the damage," she says, and she refers to the Doctor as an "ageless god who insists on wearing the face of a twelve-year-old".

It's not really strong enough to be a proper satire on our youth-obsessed culture, but it certainly looks like it's playing on Mr Moffat's personal demons.

But it's the institutionalisation of old age that is particularly Moffat's fear, as we see all the Angels' victims trapped into living out their days in an old folks' home from Hell.

A better writer than Steven Moffat – yes, I know about all the awards – is Charles Dickens, and we recently watched a modern-day take on his third novel, "Nicholas Nickleby". As Alex pointed out at the time, it's one of the best adaptations of Dickens we've seen because it got past the "look at the gorgeous frocks"-ness that so overwhelms such rightly-acclaimed recent Dickens as "Bleak House" and "Great Expectations" and gets down to the brass tacks of what Dickens was writing about: a sharply direct critique of the society he was living in.

Adapted by Joy Wilkinson, she recognises, like Moffat's own take on Conan Doyle, that Dickens was writing a contemporary drama, not a period piece.

So, "Nick Nickleby" based on "The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby" is set in 2012 and addresses itself to a contemporary concern: old age care. "Dotheboys Hall" becomes "Dotheolds Care Home"; Nick's companion, the simple Smike, becomes traumatised old lady Mrs Smike; wicked uncle Ralph and the infamous Wackford Squeers profiteer from the mistreatment of the abandoned elderly rather than unwanted offspring; and so on. All very broad brush, I'm sure you'll agree, but actually the kind of sharp social satire that Doctor Who ought to do from time to time (whether in "The Green Death" or "Bad Wolf").

The point is that it's actually making a point; it's not just taking something that scares the Mister Moffster – being the child left out in the cold, the monsters under the bed, and now, getting old – and using it to add a frisson of feeling to the clever mechanics of the plot.

Well, to a certain value of "clever".

Over the many deaths of Rory Pond, I've been increasingly reminded of, ironically, his first time, during the encounter with the Dream Lord in "Amy's Choice" (a lot of that referenced in "The Angels take Manhattan" as well – Amy twice more not willing to live in a world where Rory is dead). Most pertinent is this particular exchange:

The Dream Lord: You die in the dream, you wake up in reality. Ask me what happens if you die in reality.

Rory Williams: What happens?

The Dream Lord: You die, stupid. That's why it's called "reality".

Tossing in post-modern references to the Rory's many returns from the dead ("When don't I?") doesn't actually excuse the fact that each time you do it you're basically writing "It's a dream, it's a dream, it was all a dream" all over your script like you're a five-year-old who's never been told what a crushingly banal cliché that is.

Why do they so-conveniently wake up back in 2012?

The Doctor says it would take "incredible power" to create a paradox enough to destroy this timeline and set them all free. Or, apparently, jumping off a building five minutes later.

(And it's not like the Angels couldn't save the Ponds from falling. They've got wings haven't they? Or that big Lady with the Torch could just catch them.)

Why not wake up Captain Jack-like on the sidewalk in front of Winter Quay. Still in 1938 (i.e. you can't get killed because it would be a paradox, but you don't escape from the Angels that easily. An outcome that could save Rory but leave Amy dead, actually, and then he surrenders to the Angels and lives out his life in Winter Quay as ordained.)

Ultimately we're left with Moffat as the boy who cried (Bad) Wolf, protesting "no, this time I really, really mean it!" after an episode full of even his own characters saying "yeah, I always come back from the dead". Why should we invest in this instance? What have you done to convince us that this time it's different?

We're supposed to believe that once it's "written in stone" it is impossible to save Rory. And yet the very next thing that Amy does is change what is literally written in stone.

How exactly is the Doctor prevented from ever seeing his friends again?

Yes, I get that something about 1938 makes it difficult to land the TARDIS in that time and place, and that the paradox used to defeat the Angels increases that to "impossible" but... what's to stop him landing in 1932 and just living the difference? Or in Boston in 1938 and just taking the train? He could, quite literally, get there before them and be waiting to rescue the Ponds with no time wasted (from their point of view).

But that isn't really the problem.

Actually, there is a question of whether they're in 1938 at all.

The evidence for just how far back you are sent is, obviously, just as contradictory, with both "Blink" and "Angels take Manhattan" supplying examples that they send you back by the exact amount of life you have left to live (Billy Shipton and P.I. Sam Garner are both seen to expire within minutes of the moment when their younger self is touched) or that a given Angel sends you back to a given point in time (Billy arrives in 1969, the same year as the Doctor and Martha were displaced to; everything points to Amy arriving in the same year as Rory).

So could Rory and Amy get sent back fifty years (based on Rory's age: 82 on his gravestone and 31 in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship") not to 1938 but probably the early sixties? Well, in fact no, not if we take into account "P.S." which reveals that they adopted a son, Anthony, in 1946.

But let's be fair: the Doctor doesn't say that he can't get to when Amy and Rory are (whenever that is). What he says is that one more paradox will tear a whole in the fabric of time and drop New York right through it. It's not that he cannot get there, but that he must not.

Except, except, except... even this is just a different spin on "The Impossible Astronaut", a "fixed point" in time that depends on what we think we've seen, but like the conjuror's art, could be a case of misdirection, something the Doctor himself could do just by "popping back in time" and commissioning that headstone himself – a variation on his Tesselector "you only thought you saw me die" gambit.

It would not establish a paradox for the Doctor to find and collect Amy and Rory from the relative past. It would not change anything that he personally knew.

(Ironically, if the Doctor had met Anthony then there would be a paradox in rescuing Amy and Rory because it would contradict the implied history of bringing up their adopted son.)

Basically, you do not get points for cleverness for beating the rules of time travel if you made the rules up in the first place, you're changing them all the time and you won't tell us what they are anyway.

That's why "The Impossible Astronaut" feels like a cheat and this feels like a cop-out.


I have to confess, the prospect of reviewing "The Angels Take Manhattan" did not fill me with overwhelming joy.

It's beautifully filmed, contrasting the sunlit Central Park with the noir-toned nights in 1938 and the overcast graveyard in Queens where the Ponds final resting place catches up with them.

The film noir theme works very nicely. Alex, who loves a film noir, was particularly pleased to see an effective evocation of the era and the appearance of Forties films. He also praised the decision to use River as the hard-boiled gumshoe and not as the more obvious femme fatale. With the Angels present, the story had quite enough femmes fatale anyway.

And Mike McShane's Mr Grayle (film noir reference "Farewell My Lovely") is an interesting stooge, his relationship with the Angels slightly ambivalent – the opening sequence could be read as him feeding private detectives to the Angels' battery farm; and he knows enough about their M.O. to place River literally within one's grasp.

Matt Smith and Alex Kingston are as top-notch as ever. He gets to wear the "brainy specs" by stealing Amy's reading glasses. She gets to spell out what we've mostly already guessed this year: that he's erased himself from every database in creation (annulling her prison sentence into the bargain). In spite of this being "Professor" River Song, she's not as smug and unlikeable as she appeared back in "Silence in the Library", perhaps because she can now be more honest with us about who and what she is but I suspect largely because Alex Kingston has more control of the role now, and her relationship with Rory is rather sweet in the brief scene they get together when we first discover who Melody Malone really is.

Murray Gold does everything he can to yank on your heart-strings. It's too much really; I don't need the music to be forcing me to feel the emotion. I remember back in 2005, Christopher Eccleston could break your heart with a single glance and it was all the more moving because he did it in absolute silence. But some of the references to Amy's theme – and there are many – are quite poignant, for example the long moment as the Ponds fall, Amy's hair streams up around her and I wonder if it's not a visual and musical reference to the first scene of "The Beast Below" where she floats in space with her hair floating about her.

But it's so... predictable.

Apart from the whimsical introduction of the "cherub" Angels, and the monstrous error of the Statue of Liberty (I mean seriously? ) what does this actually add that "Blink" didn't already do? Grandmother's Footsteps with live (if Timey-Wimey) ammo, defeated by a paradox (this time a Grandfather Paradox rather than an Ontological Paradox, but they're both classics!). All it needed was the addition of a scene where the lost Ponds' offspring deliver a letter to the as-yet-unaware Brian... oh, wait... Here comes Mr Chibnall to prove he can run the photocopier over a Moffat script with as much aplomb as he can ape an RTD episode.

Why would the "Lonely Assassins" even want an army? Given that their Achilles Heel in "Blink" was what happened if they were caught looking at each other, is it entirely wise to have filled the statues of an entire city with Angels? In particular one really, really big one? Surely she paralyses half the Angels in the Big Apple whenever she decides to saunter over to Winter Quay. And with her staring at that roof, with her big snarly face, no other Angel can sneak up behind you, making that surely the safest place in New York!

It was a good send-off to give the Ponds, but it was way past time for them to have gone. One of them long-suffering and exasperated with all things Who, the other Scottish, spikey, smart and very occasionally incredibly selfish... but enough about Sue Virtue and Steven Moffat, Amy and Rory have been the longest-serving companions of the recent Who era, and yet it's still incredibly hard to say we really know them, what with their secrets and altered histories and all. And such a shame that, at the end, Moffat undoes all the good he did by keeping Mrs Pond a Pond, finally subsuming her to the identity of her "man".

Time for something fresh and, in the form of Jenna Louise Coleman, engaging and cheeky. And let the Ponds go to their Big Sleep at last.

Next Time... It's Christmas and what could be more Christmassy than Moffat the Grinch pinching another Christmas favourite. Never mind Aled Jones, the Doctor is walking in the air and Kim Newman's wintery "Time and Relative" is the next book to look suspiciously familiar when we face a not-so lick-the-mirror-gorgeous Richard E Grant and "The Snowmen".

Day 4283: DOCTOR WHO: The Power of Twee

Saturday (flashback):


It's possible that I may have been unkind to Mr Chris Chibnall, back at the start of season two of "Torchwood", when I suggested in my review that Russell Davies had written "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" for him.

It becomes clear from "The Power of Three" that he can at least write a very good pastiche of RTD. All the tropes are here: the emphasis on character; the way they stand around and emote heavily at each other to tell us how very special they are; the kisses to the fans; the adoration of the Third Doctor/UNIT era; the failure to do the research; the hand-wavy non-resolution; the implicit xenophobia...

Let's start with the basics: if you want to call your story "the power of three" and especially if you want to finish with that as the valedictory line, then you really, really need a resolution that depends on a contribution from all three leads. Ideally, something unique to each of them, that proves how vital is the contribution each one makes, but failing that at least have each of them do something.

It is surely not beyond the wit of man to think of something. How about an invasion from the second dimension – moving shadows! – but which can be trapped when approached from three directions at once.

You would be better off calling this something like "Real Life (Interrupted)" or "How the Doctor Couldn't Sit Still" which at least would draw attention away from the largely-irrelevant invasion plot.

Because what we have here is just a bog standard invasion plot (and, judging by starship design and alien make-up, it's an invasion from the "Babylon 5" universe); it's the Master's "plastic daffodil stratagem" without the plastic daffodils. Or the Master.

Certainly, the cubes start off as intriguing. They spend a year carefully waiting, infiltrating human society, scanning us to identify our key vulnerability (which disappointingly does not turn out to be a weakness for the Apple company's product design), and then take advantage of that to suddenly wipe out a third of the human race.

(Handy, incidentally, that it's a third. So you can have the Doctor – who can survive it – get zapped and let his two companions be the "other two thirds". Though no one else who gets actual screen-time is among the casualties either. Brian, of course, has been conveniently kidnapped otherwise he'd have certainly been watching his cube and been killed by it. But we don't even get the horror of seeing someone we've "met" – the married lesbians, say, or Rory's friend from the hospital – collapse. Even without the absurd "nobody dies" miracle ending, this is shying away from the truth of the plot.)

Almost it would be better if there was no explanation. They do their thing and just as mysteriously vanish.

Sometimes, awful things just happen.

Thematically, that would go quite nicely with Brian's conversation with the Doctor about what happens to former companions, and would neatly foreshadow the events of next week, while at the same time being an almost literal "you could be hit by a bus tiny black cube tomorrow; you might as well get out there adventuring".

And, hey, after the events of "Miracle Day" maybe the cubes were just reversing Earth's massive overpopulation problem. Whadda ya mean 'how could Chris Chibnall be expected to follow plot developments in "Torchwood"?'. Oh...

Instead, we veer off sharply into a string of the most dreadful Who clichés: the ancient and terrible foe, known in the legends and bedtime stories of Gallifrey, who we hear of for the first and probably last time when the Doctor pulls an "oh, I know all about you" out of his fez; and their motive to unravel human history, to prevent humanity colonising space… we make the universe messy.

And they would have been unstoppable too so long as no one from Earth could make it onto the command ship and have the entire plot explained to them and then be left alone with the "off" switch... oh. These aliens are so dumb they don't even deserve to have nearly gotten away with it except for those meddling kids.

(Actually, I'm now regretting making that throw-away remark about "correcting" the events of "Torchwood", because the next biggest Dr Who cliché is of course the ancient and terrible thing from Gallifrey left behind by the Time Lords, because the Shakri are just begging to be renamed the Mother's Little Helpers of Rassilon.)

Given the brief "life with the Doctor from the Ponds' point of view"; given that this is the last adventure before their last adventure, couldn't we have had something more about what makes the Ponds so special to him, rather all the dialogue just saying they're "oh so special to him!"

Rory in particular is back to being badly served (a shame as one of the few good aspects of the dire Silurian two-parter from 2010 was that Chibnall handled Rory quite well).

Rory is exactly the guy you want to be stood next to when your heart gets stopped, because he can fix you... but he's been sent off to another part of the plot. (One which, for all its intriguing cube-mouthed orderlies, will just peter out and vanish).

But still – by an unbelievably massive coincidence – he's also the guy in exactly the right place to tell the Doctor where the portal to the alien ship can be found and... instead gets removed from that plot too and the Doctor just finds the portal anyway (and indeed rescues the now-unconscious Rory with a wave of his illicit smelling salts).

Amy doesn't fare much better, being all doe-eyed and "you're so wonderful, Doctor" a lot of the time – yes, yes, "I'm running towards you before you fade from me" is a lovely scene, and Matt acts it beautifully, but still – and of course she kills the Doctor stone dead with a defibrillator. Oh no wait, it's a magic defibrillator that doesn't work like any other defibrillator on Earth and can restart a heart that's stopped while not stopping one that's working properly. How clever is that!

(Seriously, folks: the clue is in the name – a de-fibrillator is used to normalise the pulse of a heart that is in fibrillation i.e. firing irregularly. If your heart has stopped you need CPR and pretty damn quickly too. It's quite bad that Amy doesn't know this, but when Nurse Rory suggest "mass defibrillation" as a response to all those people who've been cardiac arrested by the cubes... well, you wonder just how much professional training he's skipped while having larks in time and space.)

The fan-pleasing moments (Zygons under the Savoy aside) are, of course, the return of Mark Williams as Rory's dad Brian and the (re-)introduction of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in the appropriate setting of UNIT's secret base under the Tower of London.

Or possibly an impressively-badly-done green screen of the Tower of London.

Kate is a lovely character. Not quite consistent with her single-mum appearance in the BBV story "Downtime" (aka the The Worldwide Web of Fear), but as a scientist leading the military, certainly a step on the way from the Brig's "action by havoc" UNIT to the "zen military" that the New Adventures repeatedly imply they evolve into. Played perfectly by Jemma Redgrave with a dry sense of humour that really did seem like she might have inherited it from the late, much-loved Nick Courtney, it would be nice if she was intended as a recurring character. If there's any truth in the rumour that Chibbers is being groomed as the next show runner (or at least is one of the possible candidates, along with Toby Whithouse and Mark Gatiss), then Kate may be "his River Snog".

But even if it's not Mr Chibnall setting out to create a recurring character (or Mr Moffat, for that matter – he too has form) I would like to see more of Kate Stewart and her UNIT bloodhounds. And her Ravens of Death.

It's sad that we're almost certainly not going to see Mr Brian "Pond" Williams again, as in just two appearances he's made himself the Wilf de nos jours. Grounded and dependable, occasionally the butt of the joke, but clear-sighted enough to cut through the Doctor's blether and speak it how it is.

I also rather like that he seemed to be able to stay awake for forty-eight hours solid watching the cubes while in the TARDIS. A property of the timelessness inside the time ship, or just "dad power"?

Brian, of course, is the one who first puts his finger on what's going on when he asks the Doctor about how companions leave.

That's the underlying sadness to this episode (which again is totally opposed to the "everybody lives" cop out of the conclusion). This is clearly playing out as a tragedy.

There's a wistfulness on the part of the Doctor: you can see that somehow he knows that this is his last time with the Ponds. He's already confessed to Amy in front of that green screen that he can tell they'll soon be going their separate ways. And from the moment of his conversation with Brian which is immediately followed by asking if he can stay with Amy and Rory, he does not want to leave them alone because – it seems – he is certain that the next time they part it will be forever. That's why he tries to wish them a hearty farewell at the end and, ironically, it's Brian himself who then urges them into the TARDIS for the fateful trip to New York that is coming.

Some people have taken this apparent foreknowledge to suggest that these first five episodes of season thirty-three are in the "wrong" chronological order, that, for example, the Doctor in "Asylum of the Daleks" is actually from after the events of "The Angels Take Manhattan".

I think that there is a possible case for the suggestion that "A Town Called Mercy" takes place within the seven weeks away during Amy and Rory's wedding anniversary party. (One episode inside another – how very "The Time Monster"!) A throwaway reference to King Henry VIII – Rory leaving his phone charger in the Tudor monarch's bed-chamber – takes on a different resonance when we see our heroes hiding in said chamber. Sloppy script editing or a sly tie-in? I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt in this case and accept that these are the same incident seen from two angles.

The case for "Asylum" being out of order is weaker. That the Daleks might kidnap Amy and Rory from earlier in their time stream is not impossible, collecting the 21st Century versions rather than the strictly contemporaneous back-to-the-20th Century Ponds, and thus "filling in" a gap in their lives that the Doctor had skipped over, namely Amy and Rory's temporary divorce – though I still cannot see how that fits with their characterisation in any other episode.

But otherwise... no, I think that these stories have to take place pretty much in broadcast order. Brian meets the Doctor for the first time in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" and the Doctor meets Brian for the first time in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship"; it's not a tricky timey-wimey thing. They know each other in "The Power of Three" so those episodes must be in the right order. And, although it's not explicit, it would diminish the tragedy of Amy and Rory leaving on their final trip after Brian give them his blessing for them to pop back several more times. There's not really any coming back from "The Angels Take Manhattan".

So I think that the Doctor's behaviour is more a matter of being old enough and wise enough to see the cards on the table, perhaps with a dash of Eighth-Doctor prescience thrown in.

On the subject of relative time though, there is Amy's unexpected reference to having spent ten years of her (and Rory's) life with the Doctor on and off. Which seems like an awful lot of unseen adventures. Certainly the Moffat-era creators are far more willing to embrace the idea of lots of life being lived off-screen than almost any earlier era. The Troughton stories, for example, on occasion seem to take place all on the same afternoon, such is the tightness of continuity between episodes; while the UNIT era definitely appears to take place in "real time", despite disagreements about how far into the future said time is taking place.

It's possible that this explains Rory's "I'm thirty-one" remark in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", although not Brian's lack of incredulity, if Amy and Rory have been "doubling up" their time by having the Doctor return them to Earth "later that same day".

(And isn't that at least bending the Laws of Time? Oh well, there's no one left to spank him now. Except his wife!)

So what we have here is a mash-up between a series of character vignettes without a plot and a crude cartoon of old-style Doctor Who each getting in the way of the other.

(Was it just me, by the way, who thought that "Pond Life" was made from off-cuts from this episode? The fact that the first four "minisodes" are a minute each and that this under-runs by about four minutes? But it's not like "The Power of Three" needed more Ood-on-the-loo related fun, so why was Chibnall writing this instead of a much-needed explanation of what happed to the cube-faced porters or why they were kidnapping patients from Rory's hospital? And, whatever the reason for kidnapping them, the victims are definitely left behind to get exploded along with the Centauri cruiser Shakri spaceship. Which is a bit harsh.)

The character scenes are trying to tell us about death or separation being forever and that's directly contradicted by the Moffat-lite "everybody lives" invasion story. And lovely as Kate Stewart is – and she is lovely – she's still a bit of sleight of hand by a writer tossing some continuity red meat to the wolves of fandom to cover his lack of coherence.

Finally, if this was the power of three, why make such a fuss about the significance of seven? Seven minute countdown, seven portals, seven Shakri ships (which we never see). And why, like so much in this episode, does it not go anywhere?

It's not awful, but it is a mess. A sign of a writer, and a series perhaps, in transition, not yet either one thing or another.

Next Time... Angels 3... Doctor nil. Yes, it's time to "Blink" one last time, as River narrates her own flashbacks and the Ponds finally get permanently killed by living happily ever after to death. Prepare to be clubbed over the head with the meta-textuality of "The Angels Take Manhattan". Also, the Statue of Liberty... give me strength!

Day 4276: DOCTOR WHO: A Town Called THIS IS A METAPHOR

Saturday:

Jokes we wish we'd thought of a fortnight ago: a PARLIAMENT of the Daleks could also be a DIET of the Daleks, and THAT is why those New Paradigm bottoms have gotten smaller!

Oh, never mind.

Here's Daddy Richard's review of Doctor Woo and the Gunfighter. Note: Singular.

There will be spoilers.

If you'd stopped me halfway through watching this episode and asked me what I thought of it... I'd have refused to answer. But what I'd have been thinking was that it was good. Really good. Sadly, for me, the ending rather let it down with pat cliché.

There are two scenes in particular which are absolutely electric: the first where the Doctor loses it, tosses Kahler-Jex over the town boundary, leaving him at the mercy of the cyborg Gunslinger, and pulls a gun on him to keep him there, where Amy gets to deliver the possibly-series-defining line "This is what happens when you travel alone too long"; and the second was the "look me in the eye; end my life" talking down of bravo Dockery (Sean Benedict) by the Doctor, using only his words to persuade the young man that violence was never the way.

It's just a shame that the two scenes were so closely juxtaposed because they were completely at odds with each other. In the former, the Doctor is at his most wrathful, furious at what Jex has made him confront about himself and the consequences of his actions; in the second he's at his most Doctor-ish, doing the right thing even though it's the hard thing, determined to make people better. It's not that both of these personae are not contained within the Doctor's complex character. What was missing was a sense of why the Doctor has performed this emotional volte face.

It isn't what Amy says to him that turns him around. It ought to be, but – and actually I think it's a nice touch – his response is much more "Yeah, yeah, okay mom". It could have been the death of the Marshal, Isaac (Ben Browder, excellent but underused), but that comes across more as him being dumbfounded, lost for once for words. It could even have been one of those so-interesting conversations between Jex and the Doctor where the clever Kahler forces the Doctor to consider himself and his own questionable moral statue.

There needed to be a transformative moment when the Doctor admits, if only to himself, that Amy is right this time. And it's missing.

In a similar way, there seemed to be a missing scene where the Doctor explained why painting Jex's facemark on other people was a good idea. Bearing in mind, at this point the Gunslinger has declared his intention to come into the town and slaughter everyone until he gets Jex, why then provide him with plenty of potentially valid targets? Isn't this asking him to shoot first and not care that he's killed the wrong person again later? Of course, we later discover that the Gunslinger's compassion actually won't let him kill innocent people even to get his revenge. But at the point he's doling out the facepaint, the Doctor can't know that.

Like on several occasions this season, it seems that something has survived from an earlier draft when the necessary exposition has been pruned to fit the blockbuster to the forty-five minute slot.

But, to return to the point, there are, of course, three wars we are talking about here, and they're all metaphors for each other: the American Civil War; the Kahler Civil War; and the Time War.

Superficially, you can see why Dr Kahler-Jex, an affecting multi-faceted performance from Adrian Scarborough, would get the Doctor's back up: he's a scientist who has experimented on his own kind to create cyborg war machines with the aim of bringing a terrible war to an end. If that's not screaming Davros at you then you need to review your "Genesis of the Daleks". But, of course, he also gets under the Doctor's skin by being a (another) dark reflection of the Doctor himself – he ended the war but at terrible cost, and is now "the only survivor" trying to make a difference to the lives of others.

It's an ambiguity that the episode dances down nicely for a long time, but it falls off with the conclusion where Jex does "the only honourable thing" and blows himself up. As with the Doctor's moral handbrake turn, this isn't so much out of character as a reversal missing a necessary explanation. And if you're going to paint a character so closely as an analogue of the Doctor, do you really want to suggest that the only moral action he can take is suicide? Even if you do believe that some crimes are too big to be forgiven, where does that leave the Doctor after double-genocide?

And there's actually a better answer to be found in the episode.

Jex recounts the Kahler belief that the afterlife is a Sisyphean climb bearing the burden of the souls you've harmed.

The interesting point of this philosophy, of course, is that it directly refutes what the Doctor says about victims – the Daleks' victims, the Master's victims, all the rest. The burden of all the people who died because of the Doctor's mercy is not the Doctor's to bear; that weight falls upon the perpetrators of those actions, on the Daleks, on the Master, on Jex himself. What the Doctor is actually doing is trying to lay off his true burden, which is the weight of all those Daleks that he did kill.

But surely the opportunity was there for the Doctor to reply to Jex that after you're dead is no good; no, justice demands that you bear those souls while you are still alive.

Assuming that there can even be justice after war.

In a subtle and world-weary performance from Ben Browder, he manages to suggest that the Marshal has a secret past of his own, and that he's putting everyone's past behind them because it is charity not justice which is necessary if you're going to reconstruct after a war like the US Civil War.

I suppose it's inevitable that a Western would be another episode to laud the "noble warrior".

Jex, you'll notice, is a doctor, a healer, and so he perverted his gifts by using them to create the cyborg warriors. Obviously he has to die.

(And look! He keeps recordings of his victims screaming as he operates – because clearly he knows how to cure cholera but hasn't heard of anaesthesia. Really, that's a cheap trick to make him look "evil".)

Kahler-Tek of course was a soldier (and presumably made the choice to kill people before becoming a controlled cyborg, as well as doing so again after breaking his control programming). As a cyborg his "gifts" are "greater powers to kill". But since that's what he uses his powers for, that means his killing spree should be measured against "honour".

This can't be right, and even the gunslinger himself admits at the end that he's probably been a bit of a dick about this whole revenge thing.

It's supposed to be a "twist" that it's the naughty doctor who's the monster and the cyborg is the victim. But you know what, that guy who's a murderous vigilante – actually, he is a monster too.

The "cyborg as victim" trope has a long history as a metaphor for "war changes you". Everyone who comes back from war bears the scars, on the inside, if not the outside, and the cyborg externalises that in a very literal way, saying "look, they turned me into a weapon". It preys on our ancient fears of bodily violation while at the same time being a walking symbol of mutilation. (Doctor Who has a long and ignoble tradition of equating bodily imperfection with moral evil, from Magnus Greel to Sharaz Jek, and starting with the Daleks themselves, of course – coming so soon after the Paralympics this all might be in slightly poor taste.)

Oh, and if we're in the business of saying that it's wrong, evil even, taking away someone's self-will, turning them into a weapon, sending them out to destroy the enemy (even if it's to save your friends)... didn't the Doctor do that to a Dalek two weeks ago? The difference being, of course, the Dalek didn't volunteer. And the Dalek died. Er...

To me, the differences between Jex and the gunslinger are ones of scale, not of kind. But no one even suggests this, that going round killing people for the personal pleasure of revenge might be a bad thing to do, and the episode presents his fate as reward rather than penance.

Basically, he's got what he wanted – Jex and all the others dead – and it's left him unsatisfied. For which the Doctor gives him a pat on the head and a shiny star.

Really, the ending of this story should not have allowed the Gunslinger to get away with it. If Jex had to die, it would have been more honest for the story to have let Kahler-Tek take his final revenge, and then for the Doctor to have told him: "All those souls that Jex had to bear... they're you're burden now. See if you can figure out a way to earn their forgiveness. "

The biggest crime of disconnection, though, is that "A Town Called Mercy" does not feel as though it resolves the situation regarding the murder of Solomon that occurred in the previous episode (whether or not caused by the Dalek nanoswarm in the episode before that). Without actually alluding to it, it makes the series appear to say "Putting someone in the path of missiles is fine, but putting them in the path of a vigilante cyborg is a bit off". That's contradictory at best.

(Not that that's really writer Toby Whitehouse's fault, and on the whole I find his take on Doctor Who vastly more acceptable than the "Carry On Assassinating" version we got from School of Saward last week. No, the flaw is that we have to put the pieces together ourselves because the script editor, sorry "head writer", has chosen to make everything stand alone. I have to say, Chibnall may have an alarmingly different ethical stance, but at least he appear to have one; Moffat seems not to have even noticed that this episode needs to be stood up as a rebuke to the preceding one.)

Alex, insightfully, spots another, more worrying parallel: with the West's current preference for peppering enemy states with indiscriminate drone missiles rather than risking the lives of our soldiers. An old-fashioned kind of morality would see the Gunslinger as more noble because he can at least look his victims in the eyes before killing them. In a reversal of this, the difference between "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" and "A Town Called Mercy" is that that while the latter sees the Doctor getting his hands dirty and so raises its moral outrage, the former doesn't even notice that a crime has occurred. Blowing someone up with missiles "doesn't count"; it's the video-game-isation of death.

Visually, "A Town Called Mercy" had a near dream-like quality. Westerns have almost always existed on the fringes of reality anyway, but somehow the bright sunlight – more alien to Doctor Who than any Dalek – gave this a feeling of the unreal. With the town boundary marked by a literal line in the sand, a line that the Doctor steps over – something he'll do so many more ways this episode – it was a surprise that this didn't turn out to be a realm of the Dream Lord, out to teach the Doctor a lesson about going too far.

(It would even have been a creditable excuse for the presence yet again of Amy and Rory, if they're "just a dream" too. Especially with them "on the way to the Day of the Dead" foreshadow, foreshadow!)

The Guardian seems thoroughly delighted that this was all really, really real, but to me naming the town "Mercy" for a story about the quality of mercy was a bit on the sledgehammer side.

The Gunslinger was an okay piece of design, possibly a little familiar to anyone whose seen any Red Dwarf or The Terminator or read any Judge Dredd, though his teleporting walk was inspired, not so much jumping from place to place as carrying his own heat haze with him to walk out of.

The direction, all Spaghetti Western by way of Back to the Future Three – yes, we saw that lightning bolt strike the clock tower, although the over-keen undertaker measuring Matt up for a pinewood suit made me think "Carry on Cowboy" instead – made excellent use of the location, and made Matt look great in all the clichés of the genre. And though they might be clichés, they're good clichés.

Nice use of the running joke about the Doctor speaking every language in the Universe, with his temporary equine companion. And isn't "A Horse Called Susan" good enough to be an episode title on its own?

Oh, and can anyone explain why an episode that otherwise looks this good appears to open with the world's clunkiest robot? (Yes, we're later told the Kahler are ingenious and can cobble together anything from anything, and that is clearly what has happened, but...) Is it just so we can have the Gunslinger hunting down and killing the BBC One ident?

Next Time...The World's been invaded by little black boxes. Rory's in his pants and Chibnall is back in the driving seat. Anticipate the villain to be Dusty Bin in "The Power of Three, Two, One". Or, you know, not.

Day 4269: DOCTOR WHO: One Million Years P.C.

Saturday:

On the shiny new DVD of "Vengeance on Varos" there's an (unbroadcast) French and Saunders sketch, using the "Trial of a Time Lord" set, in which the duo appear in costume as aliens from Planet Siluria. Oh, how fans laughed at the ignorance of the Not-We not getting that the Silurians come, not from "Siluria", but the alien planet... Earth!

So, the Doctor's postcard from "Siluria" at the end of "Dinosaur Writes a Space Script" is a gag about another gag, itself a gag about "Trial" which, in turn, makes Mr Chibnall gag. And the wheel turns full circle...

A teenage Mr Chibnall dreams of the day he can write Doctor Who PROPERLY.

With Big Guns.

And Knob Jokes.

Mr Christopher Chibnall first made a name for himself by appearing on the telly being quite rude about "The Trial of a Time Lord" to the then current writers of Doctor Who.

And some might argue that his entire subsequent career has been a case of "Well, if you think that you can do any better..." and largely demonstrating that he can't. Given that the writers he was berating were Pip and Jane Baker, you can see where in my esteem league Le Chibnall usually resides. Two diabolical seasons of Torchwood, one dreadful one of Camelot and the unspeakable "The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood" have all contrived to place him there. "42", I will concede, was a brighter spot amid the gloom.

So, you can imagine my quandary when assessing this episode.

On the one hand, he does appear to have actually constructed it well: given a shopping list by Moffat of "dinosaurs" and "spaceship" he's made the fact that this is a spaceship that has dinosaurs on it central to the plot: it motivates the villainous Solomon and drives the conflict with the Doctor. And he's actually got a very good in-series reason for combining those elements by making this the Silurians' very own Ark in Space (and always good for sucking up to the boss, as it's said to be Mr Moffat's favourite story).

But on the other hand we get a series of crude innuendos – the Doctor's psychic paper getting a honk-honk ringtone when Nefertiti (yes, that Nefertiti) presses her advances; the big game hunter flourishing a stun rifle and boasting of the size of his weapon; and Mark Williams as Rory's dad, Brian, mustering all the dignity he can to respond to the question "What have you got in your trousers" with "only my balls". I swear, at that point I very nearly began to implode with embarrassment.

It's not that the jokes aren't funny – though they aren't – or even the generally disparaging attitude to women – because Chibnall tossing in an aside about gender politics isn't funny either – it's the cringing inappropriateness, like your dad suddenly making knob jokes. At a children's party.

Jenny seems to have had similar difficulty with the episode's ambiguities, labelling it "passable", while Simon was much more willing to give it credit as a comedy romp.

And I'm reluctant to mark it down for the cringe-worthy moments, because there is much here to enjoy, not least the eponymous dinosaurs, finally redeeming "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" with some lovely CG renderings and excellent models – bonus marks for Ankylosaurs, Alex's favourite dino. The fight with the raptors was exciting and well-staged – and let's say they're Utahraptors which really are person-sized, rather than the infamously turkey-size veloceraptors. The pterosaur attack was nicely done, too; lovely moment where the Doctor tells the Williamses that "they're not kestrels" just after I'd remarked that "that pterodactyl's getting a bit close", even if it was yet another return to Bad Wolf Bay, a location that is becoming as ubiquitous as the Temple of Peace in Cardiff.

I do like the idea of powering the ship with waves. It might even work, if the water is somehow collecting the kinetic energy from planets as the ship orbits and releasing it for use it in flight. Although the idea of a basically tidal power system being constructed by the Silurians ought to be unlikely if you remember that their reason for launching the ship in the first place is that in their time the Earth has no moon, and so no tides.

On the subject of technology, though, I'm afraid Solomon's robot sidekicks didn't do it for me. Their bickering dialogue was, I felt, neither clever enough nor funny enough to be worthy of the talents of Mitchell and Webb. And the fact they suddenly couldn't shot the broad side of a triceratops was enough to break the suspension of disbelief. (They should have made a joke of it and had them miss Brian when ordered to shoot him at point blank range.)

But I liked the rest of the guest cast. Riann Steele as the Egyptian Queen, once we got past Chibnall's cack-handed reprise of Moffat's equally cack-handed "Amy throws herself at the Doctor" scene, demonstrated steely competence (pardon my pun) while Rupert Graves as big game hunter Riddell (does Chibnall not know that Allan Quatermain is well out of copyright?) gave the role both barrels and was clearly having a whale of a time playing what M would no doubt call a sexist misogynist dinosaur (pardon my pun again). Personally I'd have thrown in a world-weary "Oh, all right" on being made to use stun guns on the dinosaurs, and I'd rather have reversed the positioning in the final shot of Riddell and Nefertiti so that she is the Queen of the African veldt and he is her nubile tent-slave, but if you can't have all the gender politics you want I'll settle for Amy demonstrating that she's the equal of the Doctor and then saying she's worth two men.

The scenes where Amy gets to be Doctor with Nefertiti and Riddell as her companions gave something back to the character that had been taken away last week. It was good to make use of her history with the Silurians too to help her figure out what's going on (although, as Alex said at the time, those carefully sculpted-to-fit masks make it painfully clear that they've only got two actors who can "do" Homo Reptilia). The "show me the difference between then and now" was a reasonable shorthand for a proper Doctor-ish investigation (better, actually, than Mr Sonic-Waver manages these days) though it did leave me feeling "Yeah, but in the sixty-five plus million years this things been up there, there may have been more than one thing that's changed...". Also, it doesn't half make it obvious how the mobile phone would have short-circuited a lot of "classic" era Doctor Who.

And to be fair, there were lovely moments for Rory and for his dad too: the Williams boys bonding over the things they keep in their pockets; Rory getting to be a nurse; and the moment of Brian sitting with a sandwich gazing out at the Earth. Brian's postcards from all over the world, having overcome his fear of travel, were a happy return to the idea that the Doctor makes people better.

Although the whole business of the Silurians programming their ship with "from the same genetic path" rather than "is Silurian" that meant Rory and his dad could between them fly the spaceship raised "contrived" to new levels. Sure, you can post-facto justify by saying the TARDIS recognised the ship and worked out what would be needed, and hence chose to pick up the Ponds from a time when they had a parent and child to hand, but really... wouldn't you choose to pick up Amy and River in that case, at least one of whom actually can fly a spaceship?

There's also the question of Rory's age – apparently he's thirty-one now (and too old for a Christmas list).

However, his (misprinted) hospital I.D. back in "The Eleventh Hour" was dated 1990 which many take to be his year of birth, so if he's thirty-one "now" then the year is 2021, and the Ponds are just back from waving to themselves in "The Hungry Earth". (Presumably this is the 2021 where both of them still exist.)

Given that "The Big Bang" firmly establishes Amy's wedding day as 20 June 2010, and hence the events of "The Eleventh Hour" as 2008 for grown-up Amy and 1996 for seven-year-old Amelia then, by reversing the calculation, Amy is twenty-one in season five/thirty. Rory's been at school with Amy since childhood, as seen in "Let's Kill Hitler", and can't be more than a year older or younger than her. (A birthday in 1990 would see him six when she is seven, which is consistent.)

But even if Rory's two years older, so twenty-three when not dead in season five, it's difficult to see how eight years could have elapsed for the Ponds (and if he's younger, it's even more). Particularly given Amy's complaint that "it's been ten months this time". Of course there could have been many, many unseen visits in the meantime, but still.

Having said that, the ten months could be indicative of the Doctor's feelings towards the Ponds having cooled – a possible connection to the Daleks "deducting love" last week.

And, in that vein, I do find interesting the Doctor's current choice of companions. He denies to Amy that Nefertiti and Riddell are "the new Ponds", and in a way this is true, because he's clearly picked new travelling companions who have a moral compass somewhat South of "Twenty-First Century".

Does the Doctor have a problem with mercy now, following his decision to give Amy his protection from the Daleks' nanoswarm?

There's been a lot of comment on the Doctor's treatment of Solomon. (Though I notice that no one at all seems concerned that he murdered the Mitchell-and-Webb-bots almost in passing. Honestly, does no one watch "The Measure of a Man" any more? They clearly pass the Turing Test, so they're alive. It's as bad his dismal treatment of Drathro – never mind the monkey-racism; the Doctor never seems to give a fig for synthetic lifeforms!)

I did quite like what we saw of David Bradley's Solomon, his scenes with Mat Smith crackling with energy. Alex particularly liked the first time we saw him standing, weirdly gaunt between the two hulking robots – he looked (appropriately enough) like a drawing of an evil old wizard come to life. But I don't think he was given enough time to develop into a truly memorable villain. You kind of need a reason to secretly root for a really good baddy, but all Solomon's moments were unlovely, whether shooting the Trike or threatening Nefertiti with his bladed crutch, and it rendered him rather shallow, which in turn made the Doctor's despatching him seem somewhat over the top.

A deal of the speculation has suggested that there'll be a Moffat "everyone lives" moment later in the series when it is revealed that the Doctor got Solomon off the ship before the missiles hit. In just that way that he couldn't when it was Adric.

I've also wondered if the Doctor's rather heavy emphasis on the missiles locking on to the Silurians' signalling device wasn't supposed to be giving him a chance of the "Just chuck this out the window, mate" variety.

But mostly, it seems, the Doctor just murders him.

What happened to "The Man Who Never Would?" Regeneration aside, this is the guy who wanted to take the Master off for cuddles and counselling after slaughtering half the Earth. This is the guy who couldn't bring himself to execute Davros, or to destroy the Daleks at their creation.

The case that seems to keep being brought up is the Graff Vynda-K, who is exploded by his own bomb after the Doctor slips it into his pocket at the climax of "The Ribos Operation". Well, the thing is, that's poetic justice there – the Graff left the Doctor with the bomb because of a prophecy that "All but one would die", so giving the bomb back to him is in-story apt. It's fairy-tale logic – do as you would be done by, or be exploded as you would explode. There's no such aptness to Solomon's execution. The Doctor could, quite easily, have offered him the choice to get off his ship and face the consequences or stay on it and try to avoid the missiles – and that would have been very Doctorish.

Nor does he seem exceptionally wrathful. The Doctor's not beyond meting out punishment when he's really pissed off.

The massacre of the Silurians (about whom the Doctor has deep-seated and on-going guilt issues) and the slaughter of an innocent Triceratops right in front of him, added to the objectification and abuse of his friend Nefertiti, might all combine to put him into one of his "good men don't need rules" moods, much as the Family of Blood push him too far in, well, "The Family of Blood".

But we need to see that on screen. We know that Matt is as capable as Davy T of delivering the towering rage of the Time Lord, so someone between the script writer and the director forgot to tell him to turn it on.

And nobody calls him on it either. Ever since he contemplated a wounded caveman and a rock back in "The Forest of Fear", it's been implied that the Doctor, as a Time Lord, needs human companionship to help him with "human-scale" morality. Tom Baker's Doctor contrasted walking in eternity with Sarah's human (read "mortal") concerns. When the fifth Doctor used the Movellans' virus to destroy a force of Daleks, it took Tegan's departure to show him the error of his ways. It featured strongly in the seventh Doctor's era, particularly once they got into the New Adventures. And even more recently, when he destroyed the Racnoss and again when he was going to leave Pompeii to its fate, Donna was there to remind him that that's a bit off. This week: nothing.

So the episode appears to say that it's okay to kill people just for being "bad". And I accept that some people, many people, do think that that is true. It's just that the Doctor is unequivocally not one of them.

Given who is writing this, and added to all the inappropriate humour, it reminds me all too much of the morality of Torchwood. Particularly (ironically) its humourless first season, which equated "adult" with sex, violence and swearing.

If this were a one-off (yes, I know what Moffat says), then I'd put it down to Chibnall having all the moral sensitivity of Eric Saward on a bad day. But given the events on the Asylum last week and given that I know that next week's episode is called "A Town Called Mercy", I wonder, I speculate, is Moffat trying to do a character-based arc – possibly to demonstrate that he can - where the Doctor is shown to be lacking and needs to go find himself a companion. (Again.)

Next Time...The Doctor's brain has crashed and he's dreaming he's in the Wild West with Farscape's Ben Browder. Sigh, Ben Browder. Or possibly Mr Pritchard from Upstairs Downstairs. Can Kryten compile a dove virus in time to cure him in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse"... hang on, I think I'm getting confused...

Day 4262: DOCTOR WHO: Daleks versus Predator

Saturday:


After watching Dr Woo in my luxury London flat – the "Asylum of the Daddies", I call it. "It's a Madhouse! A Madhouse!" – we put AVP in the DVD.

Under the icy surface, our heroes penetrate the alien ziggurat, with its diagonal walls and secret doors and, surrounded by the skeletal remains of the last people who got in there, they soon discover the shocking secret of the alien life form and its "eggs". But worse is to come when they realise that the Predator has been locked in there with them. And he's wearing a bow tie...

More spoilers follow...

What makes a "good Dalek story"? There are good stories that have Daleks in them, and there are stories that good for the Daleks.

"Dalek", for example, I would – controversially – suggest is not that good a story. With even a Cyberman or a Sontaran marching up through that base, it's just not that interesting. But it is a really good story for the Daleks.

"Day of the Daleks", on the other hand, it would possibly be less contentious to say is considered quite a good story about time travel that happens to have Daleks in it for no good reason, and would, arguably, be just as good with "ordinary" fascists in the twenty-second century.

Stories like "Genesis of the Daleks" and "Remembrance of the Daleks" manage to be both; they are good stories themselves and manage to be about the Daleks.

So what about "Asylum of the Daleks", the first time Steven Moffat has written just for them (as opposed to their presence in the mixed bag of the Pandorica)?

On the face of it, there are a lot of Daleks in it. Not quite the every Dalek ever – unless you're playing with the freeze-frame and the Dalek bingo card – but substantial numbers of the blighters, and most especially in the Russell T Dalek model that appears to have substantially outdone the New Paradigm in the popularity stakes. (The revised paint jobs on the Drone and Strategist – i.e. Red and Blue Daleks – plus what looks like a remodelling of their unfortunate rear-ends has also gone some way towards assuaging the hate that the "Victory" brand Daleks picked up.)

We did manage to spot the old Special Weapons Dalek from "Remembrance of..." and the spinning Dalek perceived by Amy as a ballerina (referencing the ballerina in Oswin's music box) looked to be a black-domed Imperial Guard/Supreme from "Evil of...". We also noticed a black Dalek Sec casing, making us wonder just how many Dalek Secs there have been, each leader of the Cult of Skaro in turn being deemed potty and sent to the Asylum.

There was also a rather sad-looking Paradigm model hanging about at the back, making us think of this page from Mechmaster's highly-recommended and totally unofficial Dalek comic strip.

But do those Daleks actually do anything? Or are they, as Alex points out, a McGuffin to get the Doctor into this week's haunted funhouse? (Andrew correctly identifies one of Moffat's tropes is his habit of establishing a memorable setting and then just using it as "spooky backdrop" rather than a meaningful part of his story-telling. But I'll come back to some thoughts about the "Asylum" in a bit.)

The true horror moments of the episode fall to the Dalek Puppets, particularly the sight of eyestalks bursting from people's foreheads: reminiscent of the Alien Chestburster; though also, I thought, a callback to the "door in the forehead" technology seen in "The Long Game", which turned out to be of Dalek origin in the end too. The Puppets seem to be the latest iteration in the Roboman/Dalek Duplicate series, though with added Auton in the Dalek gun sticking through the palm.

Meanwhile the emotional beats of the story focus, on the one hand, on the mysterious girl-from-the-future in her virtual-reality bubble (that's another Moffat trope, of course), and, on the other hand, on some "serious" stuff about the Pond's abrupt marriage breakdown and repair.

The situation with the Ponds is Moffat playing emotional "Duck Amok"; he can repaint the characters and their landscape any way he likes, so what does it matter if they're suddenly totally out of character? Amy seems to have thrown out all of the positive developments of last season that saw her evolve into an actually likeable person, and is behaving selfishly and manipulatively. She punishes Rory for a blow to her own self-image and how she assumes he'll react without even telling him why or giving him the opportunity to prove her wrong. (And of course the blow had to be gynaecological or it wouldn't be Moffat playing; in the Moffat-verse woman = womb + sarcasm.) Rory (except when pouting sarcastically into mirrors) has turned into the victim of an abusive relationship, complete with "comedy" violence (because actually it's not funny to repeatedly have one person slap another person).

(You would have thought that, given a five-part mini-episode mini-series leading up to "Asylum of the Daleks" aka "Pond Life" – geddit! – that they could have established in a series of increasingly painful vignettes the growing estrangement as Rory senses something is wrong and Amy won't or can't open up to him. But no, we get Ood-on-the-loo hilarity and Mata Hari hijinks – assuming you find lobotomising and brainwashing an alien to be a slave hilarious and reducing a complex historical figure to a sexual stereotype and a willy gag hijinksy – and everything is fine around the breakfast table until a sudden swerve in the final minute. Maybe Chibnall didn't get the memo. If only there were someone to take the lead role in the writing, some writer who could lead the others, someone... oh, you get the picture...)

And yet this all feels contrived, bolted on, an excuse to tug at the heart-strings and arrive at a reconciliation. Surely it would make more sense that, as the nanogenes "deduct love and add hate", that this story should actually cause the Pond's relationship difficulties, not resolve them. Rory's clumsy suggestion that he loves Amy more than she loves him could – given her past – hit her in a vulnerable point that precipitates a rift. Of course that runs entirely counter to what I suppose we must call the "sit-com" side of Moffat's (multifaceted) writing, which starts from misunderstanding but seeks to resolve it, often through the medium of embarrassment. Although a big snog will do. (And witness the Doctor's embarrassment at Amy and Rory's big snog.)

So if the "emotional core" of the story is actually surplus to requirements, then what is really really going on underneath? Well, aside from the usual Moffat ponderings on memory and reality and how the former informs, even creates, the latter, what we have is an exploration of Dalek culture. Starting with the revelation that they have one.

We see the Parliament of the Daleks. We hear of the Daleks' idea of beauty. And their idea of madness. And the things that scare them.

All in all it treats them seriously as an alien culture, admittedly one that represents everything the Doctor and by extension ourselves would be disgusted by.

It addresses the Daleks' response to the Doctor; how they keep running up against him and how, like germs becoming anti-biotic resistant, they're becoming stronger as a result – a better consideration of their "evolution" than "Evolution of the Daleks" (and with better "human-Daleks" too, albeit ones in fetish-wear for some reason No wait, she's a women, it’s the Moffat-verse, so…). And it addresses his response to them: "I've tried to stop".

The Parliament of the Daleks is not, as far too many people have leapt to assume, a sign that they are democratic now, any more than the Roman Senate or the English Parliament under King Charles the First made Rome or pre-Commonwealth England democracies. Nor does the presence of a Dalek Prime Minister imply the absence of a Dalek Emperor. Rather the contrary, actually, as ministers serve monarchs, usually. Both "City of the Daleks" and "The Eternity Clock" assert that the New Paradigm Empire does have an Emperor, if you'll take computer games as evidence. And it's a nice retcon of John Peel's use of "Dalek Prime", if we absolutely have to hold our noses and take the existence of Skaro as acceptance of "War of the Daleks".

(Nice-looking Skaro, in passing. The Dalek City was not quite as good as the Citadel on CGI Gallifrey, trying slightly too hard to look like the 'Sixties models from "The Dead Planet" and "The Evil of the Daleks", and all the red dust made ruined Skaro look like ruined Gallifrey which was ironic. And possibly the point. Nice giant Dalek statue, though.)

The Daleks are shown to be clever in this story. Not just setting traps for the Doctor, but also manipulating and deceiving him, arriving at a lateral-thinking solution to their problem of the Asylum and also getting the Doctor to solve their real problem by fooling him into thinking he's solving a shared (and completely different) threat.

Because the idea that this Empire, the thousands of Daleks that we see and that's just the Parliament, and there are a dozen other ships in just this fleet, the idea that they are threatened by the dusty, damaged, deranged dustbins that we see when we get inside the Asylum is simply not credible. So there must be something else. The most obvious candidate for that something else – there is another which I will come back to – is of course Oswin: a Dalek that thinks it's a human being. And/or a Dalek that thinks it's a human being that is close to taking complete control over the Asylum's systems.

The so-called twist with Oswin – that is to say the in-episode "twist", that reveals she's a Dalek (as opposed to the "But isn't she Jenna-Louise Coleman?" meta-twist) – seemed pretty obvious to me. And to the Doctor too. He's already homing in on the key question – where do you get the milk – while still on the Daleks' Parliamentary Saucer. (I like that the Supreme comes rushing in to cut off that line of questioning before the Doctor gets too close to the truth; another sign that the Daleks are double-dealing here, and another pointer to their cunning.) It does make you wonder how much of this is seventh-Doctor-style plans within plans. In fact, going back to Skaro – which, of course, the Seventh Doctor did reduce to a vaporised cinder, no matter what "War of the Daleks" might think; though since both Daleks and Doctor have time travel, they can still visit it in its post-"The Evil of the Daleks" ruined state – but if it was that easy to catch the Doctor in a trap then they'd have got him long, long ago. Which means he knew it was a trap and sprang it anyway to find out what they were after this time.

But the Daleks win. More even than "Victory of the Daleks" (which was more "Scraping an Escape of the Daleks"), here they absolutely, definitely win. The Dalek Empire survives and prospers. Even if you take their statements at face value, they get exactly what they wanted, an end to the threat of the Asylum, however it threatened them. And if you are convinced that they are lying, then the Doctor – apparently – does not see through them and gives them what they really wanted too.

Possibly.

Because if what they wanted was the death of Oswin, all, even more than I've already suggested, may not be as it seems.

Now, of course, not recognising Jenna-Louise Coleman from Eve, but having read all the press announcements a few months back, it wasn't until the closing credits that I "got" the "surprise". And I must confess it left me feeling perplexed, derailing the episode. This is backwards story-telling, where we are presented with an ending before we can understand it, breaking the fourth wall not just with a sly shy glance to camera, but by foregrounding the serial nature of the series and putting the emphasis on the fact that we won't get an explanation until Christmas.

I guess we need to add a new line to the Lawrence Miles' "Moffat Times Table":

"The Girl Who Waited"





X

"My Reality is Just a Dream"





=

"The Girl Who Waited in a Virtual Reality Dream!"







I suppose the most obvious unanswered question must be: after the Doctor gave his protection from the nanoswarm to Amy, did Oswin use the nanogenes, with their ability to alter remembrance and perception, permanently to graft herself onto his memory?

Because, for all his other faults, Steven Moffat is not the kind of writer who sets up a peril of that kind and then forgets the pay-off. (A proper explanation in series five of who exploded the TARDIS and why seems to have eluded him, but normally he can be relied upon to tie off his plot points. If not necessarily in the right order.) If the Daleks, who really aren't stupid, thought that the Doctor needed protection, then he needed protection. If he could have avoided the nanoswarm with a Time Lord handwave, then he would have given Amy the wrist device straight away as soon as she lost hers, not slipped it to her later, so he thinks he needs it too.

So is this how Jenna-Louise will, in the future, become his companion? Will he perceive her presence like a techno-ghost? That would be awkward for splitting up the team, a staple of all Doctor Who adventures. Perhaps she'll alter his perception of someone already present, a kind of cross between a "Faction Paradox"-type Shift and "Quantum Leap".

Probably not; that would all be far too interesting.

Alex was cultivating the happy illusion that it was all a massive bluff, launching the "perfect" companion for the Doctor as yet another perky "spunky" white girl-of-a-certain-age and then pulling a "but she's a Dalek" switch on us.

Alas, I fear that that would be too bold too, and that, by the pricking of my thumbs, something timey-wimey this way comes. The commonest suggestions being (a) the "Charley Pollard" option: the Doctor rescues Oswin from inevitable destiny resulting in cosmic temporal shenanigans; (b) the "River Song" option: this is Oswin's end but the Doctor's beginning (the fact that she says "we've never met" being got over by a "River Song lies" gambit); (c) the "Martha Jones" option; they're identical cousins; (d) the "reverse Gwen Cooper" option: Oswin comes from an "old Cardiff family" or equivalent and the Doctor travels with an ancestor (also works for "Scottish descendent of Pompeian soothsayer").


A lot of the contradictions about the Asylum can be resolved if we assume the Daleks are lying. Yes, unreliable narrator tropes in a Steven Moffat story, what will he think of next? In fact, the Daleks don't even need to lie that much; they just let the Doctor supply the exposition and don't correct him.

"What do you know of the Dalek Asylum?" he's asked.

"Legend speaks of..." he starts. Of course, "legend" also described the Doctor as a goblin trickster who a good wizard trapped in the Pandorica. For that matter, "legend" says that the Doctor died at Lake Silencio. So "legend" is up there with Moffat when it comes to "Rule 1".

An "asylum" was a place of safety before it was a mental institution. What if it still is? What if the Asylum is not where Daleks are sent, but the place to which they escape? The Asylum is where Daleks go when they want to escape from the War. The Dalek War of Daleks versus everything. The idea of a protective forcefield controlled from the planet, one that the Dalek fleet can neither penetrate nor shut off, then makes rather more sense. It's not there to keep the inmates in; it's there to keep the Dalek Empire out!

You could even explain how these Daleks survived the Time War and the Bad Wolf: they survived because they'd opted out. Rose ended the Time War, but these guys weren't in the Time War anymore.

If we take Amy's altered perceptions in the Asylum as being representative then the Daleks in there think of themselves as people.

Of course, they're still Daleks. They react to the presence of other lifeforms by panicking and trying to shoot them. But they've withdrawn from war.

Notice how the most extreme examples – in what Oswin describes as "intensive care" – have all had their gunsticks removed. But there aren't any warders in this Asylum, so the only people who could have removed the weapons are themselves. These are the Daleks who've met the Doctor... and become pacifists. That's about as mad as you can go if you're a Dalek. They press about the Doctor reaching out with their sucker arms, and he thinks that they're trying to squish him "Dalek"-style, but does it not strike you that they're not so much making half-hearted efforts to kill him as trying to "touch his robe"?

That would make the Asylum the most dangerous thing to the Dalek Empire ever. It would make it Peace.

Of course, it would also make the whole story a great deal more tragic if that were the case. It would mean that the Doctor provoked one Dalek into self-destruction so he could murder ten to twenty more Daleks and eventually allow the really evil Daleks to blow up a whole planet-full of not-quite-so-evil-verging-on-the-might-stand-a-chance-of-redemption Daleks.

So, really, who "suckered" who?

It would seem that the power of the Daleks is that, as icons, they are able to harness Moffat's strengths as a writer and rise above his shortcomings.

The devious plots-within-plots style that is the Grand Moff's signature serves them well, giving them a depth of deviousness not seen since the Whittaker serials of the 'Sixties.

That need to throw in idea after idea after idea that makes Moffat such a creative goldmine but so unfocussed sometimes, here sketches in a broader more vivid Empire without getting bogged down in unnecessary detail. It's not quite Robert Holmes, but its closer to having a big picture view of them than anyone else has.

And you can't undermine the Daleks with sit-com characterisation that demands everyone be constantly barbed and witty because the Daleks don't have characterisation. (Kudos again to Nick Briggs for what he can do with inflection and a ring modulator, though.)

So this is a good story for the Daleks. It may even be a good Dalek story.

Next Time...News that the Doctor's new companions are actually an Egyptian Queen and Allan Quatermain has both Big Finish Productions and Alan Moore going "But...!" News that Mitchell and Webb are voicing the Robots has viewers assuming one is a PC and the other is a Peach. And Samuel L Jackson was distinctly heard to say: "Get these Mother****ing Chibnalls off this Mother****ing Series!" Or something like that.

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