Quick Review: Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks

Doctor Who Series 7: Asylum of the Daleks

The new Doctor Who season has started here in the UK last Saturday (September 1, 2012, if you are far in the future and wondering). The Doctor returns with quite a bang. He, Amy, and Rory are kidnapped by the Daleks because they need the Doctor to do them a favor. Yeah, right, can you imagine it? The Daleks, the worst xenophobes in the universe and the worst enemies of the Doctor, need his help. They even reveal that their name for the Doctor is "The Predator." Nevertheless, they need him to do a little job for them. Turns out there is something so awful that no Dalek will volunteer to do it. The Daleks have a prison planet where they send the even more crazy and deranged Daleks so they won't cause trouble for the less crazy and deranged Daleks. This world is called the Asylum of the Daleks. The Doctor is forced to go there and the only way out is to do what the Daleks want.

There's an eye stalk on the left!

The story is very interesting and the action is quite good. As usual there are plenty of laughs and scares. The Daleks have even created their own zombies (which is why I'm blogging about it). They infect humans with some sort of nanocloud machines (this is silly sci fi, after all) that turn the person into a Dalek slave. They still look like humans, except when the little stalk eye pops out of their foreheads. This happens pretty early on, so it isn't much of a spoiler.

I enjoyed the episode very much. It's a good, rollicking adventure. It may not be appropriate for smaller children since there are a few tense scenes and we do see some dessicated corpses. Jacob has been asking about Doctor Who lately but I think at just under five he is not quite old enough. At least for the new Doctor Who. The old shows might be okay. My wife and I are in negotiations about when he can start watching.

Anyway, next up for the Doctor is Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, certainly a title full of lots of promise, though maybe not of zombies.

The episode is available from the BBC web site for a few more days or from iTunes or from Amazon Streaming.