“Doctor Who” returned for its seventh series on Saturday, Sept. 1.
“Asylum of the Daleks” begins with the Doctor walking into a trap on Skaro, the home planet of the Daleks. The newly-separated Amy and Rory are also transported with him (the script says “because the Doctor requires companions” but I find that too sloppy and cheese-tastic to accept, so I don’t).
The Daleks want the Doctor to help disarm the force field around their own asylum/prison for crazy Daleks so they can destroy it, but again, we don’t really care about that because Moffat doesn’t seem to care about it enough to flesh it out.
The real rage-trigger issue with this episode for many Who fans — the canon-obsessed, psychotic bunch they are — is that Skaro, the Dalek home planet, is supposed to have been devastated by the Time War, leaving it time-locked and inaccessible to the timeline.
While a video game plotline roughly explains that the Daleks were able to rebuild their planet using a lost Gallifreyan artifact, it’s just the sort of “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” trick that’s become the trend in the reboot.
I’m also a bit irked by the nature of a Dalek asylum. These are the same genocidal monsters that took no prisoners and “exterminate[d]” anything that stood in their way. For me, the whole idea does not follow.
The knee-jerk reaction to these canonical oversights is that this is another example of show-runner Steven Moffat confusing science fiction with magic and ignoring logic for the sake of shock factor. Knee-jerk or not, I still consider that the case.