Tag: Clara Oswald

Timestamp #241: The Bells of Saint John

Michael Falkner7 Comments

Doctor Who: The Bells of Saint John
(1 episode, s07e06, 2013)

Timestamp 241 The Bells of Saint John

The clever boy rides.

Prequel

A little girl finds the Doctor sitting on a swing in a playground. The Doctor is sad because he can’t find his “friend”, but the girl is friendly despite her mother’s warning not to talk to strange men. The little girl offers some advice about finding lost items before returning to her mother.

The girl’s mother scolds her for talking to a stranger. It turns out that the little girl is none other than Clara Oswald.

The Bells of Saint John

A man warns the world against attaching to strange public wifi networks. Which, you know, is wise advice under any circumstance. But this warning also adds a little bit of The Ring to the story: Within 24 hours of connecting to the strange network, a user’s soul is extracted into the internet where it screams in the cybernetic void.

The man knows what he speaks. He is one of the lost souls.

Shifting to Cumbria in 1207, a monk sends warning that the bells of Saint John are ringing. The Abbot informs the “mad monk”, the man known as the Doctor who asks for a horse. As the Doctor prepares, the Abbot looks upon a painting of “the woman twice dead”, remarking that if the Doctor is mad, the mystery around the woman is his madness.

In London, circa 2013, Clara Oswald has trouble connecting to the internet. George is leaving with a boy named Artie while Clara keeps track of Angie. She also remarks on Artie’s choice of reading material – Summer Falls by Amelia Williams – noting that Chapter Eleven is the best because it makes the reader cry.

Back in Cumbria, the Doctor and the monks arrive in a cave where the TARDIS is parked. The exterior phone is ringing, which isn’t supposed to happen, and it connects the Doctor to Clara through the help line that a “woman in the shop” gave her. The help line is supposed to be the best in the universe, after all. When Clara tries to connect to the Maitland family wifi, she asks Angie for the password. It is “RYCBAR123”, remembered by the mnemonic “Run you clever boy and remember.”

Of course, the Doctor remembers the phrase and startles Clara. Clara inadvertently connects to the strange network, starting her twenty-four hour clock before running to answer the door. There she finds the Doctor, dressed in monk robes, pounding on the door and excited to meet her.

On the other side of the strange network, an analyst named Alexei remarks that Clara is “borderline,” being clever without much computer skill. His boss, Rosemary Kizlet, his superior, orders him to upload Clara anyway and supplement her with a computer skills package. With the promise that Alexei will activate the “Spoonheads”, Kizlet returns to her office and discusses Alexei with a man named Mahler. They agree to kill the analyst after he returns from holiday, then discuss Mahler’s worry that they’re uploading too many people too quickly. Kizlet tries to comfort him while manipulating his senses of conscience, paranoia, obedience, and IQ. After Mahler leaves to carry out Kizlet’s orders, she raises his obedience level to the maxmum.

At the house, Clara is unconvinced to let the robe-clad stranger in. As she turns to go back upstairs, a little girl comes down to meet her. This strange girl is the same girl from the Summer Falls book cover, and she also has a spoon-shaded indent in the back of her head. Clara backs away in fear.

The Doctor returns to the TARDIS for a change of clothes, donning a purple cashmere coat and matching bow tie. He rushes back to the house to find Clara unconscious with her screaming voice trapped in the Spoonhead. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to analyze the robotic base station before using Clara’s laptop to reverse the connection and restore Clara’s consciousness.

He also leaves a message for Alexei, Mahler, and Kizlet: “UNDER MY PROTECTION – The Doctor”. Kizlet immediately contacts her client with news that the Doctor has arrived.

The Doctor tidies up while Clara rests, even adding a plate of Jammie Dodgers nearby. He flips through a book of hers and finds a dried red maple leaf, then steps outside to guard her while she sleeps. Clara joins him some time later and the Doctor recounts everything that she missed: Angie is staying with her friend Nina, Clara’s father called to complain about the government, he fixed the washing machine, optimized the photosynthesises of the plants, organized the food pantry, and reassembled a broken Quadricycle. Okay, that last one? He invented the Quadricycle.

He also promises to stand watch while Clara sleeps, but she decides to come downstairs to him. While she gathers a cup of tea and a folding chair, Kizlet’s team watches them and plots. The Doctor explains the internet eating souls to Clara, which she equates to Twitter – she’s not wrong – and the pair realize that Clara has gained a greater knowledge of computers from being partially uploaded. The Doctor spots a Spoonhead and the lights around the neighborhood switching on. There’s also an airplane plummeting down on their position. Kizlet is intent on removing the Doctor and Clara from the equation.

Against her wishes, the Doctor rushes Clara into the TARDIS. She’s amazed as the Doctor makes a short hop through space into the falling airplane. The passengers and crew are switched off through the wifi, so the Doctor manages to pull the plane out of the nosedive and revive the people onboard. As the Doctor and Clara return to the TARDIS, Kizlet demands that her team locate the blue box.

The Doctor promises to explain everything over breakfast, dropping the TARDIS into a group of people who cheer the materialization as performance art while the Doctor retrieves his motorcycle from the garage. The pair ride to a café for breakfast as Kizlet’s team processes cell phone photos for the TARDIS, the Doctor, and Clara.

The Doctor and Clara use the laptop to hack the webcams at Kizlet’s office and cross-reference the imagery through various social networks to find their adversary’s location: They work at the Shard.

The Doctor leaves to get more coffee, talking to several people who are being controlled remotely along the way. Kizlet explains that her client feeds of the neural energy of humanity, similar to a farmer slaughtering cattle for harvest. She notes that Clara is not as safe as he thinks, and he soon discovers that Clara has been uploaded by a Spoonhead duplicate of the Doctor.

Furious, the Doctor rides his motorcycle to the Shard, using an anti-gravity feature to ride up the side of the Shard and literally break into Kizlet’s office. He demands that Kizlet restore Clara and the entire data cloud into their bodies. For those who no longer have a body, their deaths would ensure release from the living virtual hell.

Oh, and the Doctor? He’s still at the café. He sent his Spoonhead duplicate which has now uploaded Kizlet as motivation to restore everyone to the living world. The Spoonhead uses Kizlet’s tablet to boost Mahler’s obedience and he follows her demand to be released by emptying the entire cloud.

Clara wakes up at the café, but the Doctor has gone. Meanwhile, as UNIT storms the Shard, Kizlet reports her failure to her client. As the Great Intelligence bids her farewell, it orders Kizlet to reset herself and every one of her co-workers to their “factory settings”. Everyone is restored to who they were before the Great Intelligence’s plot began, including Kizlet who is now a scared child.

This plot has been going on for some time.

Back at the Maitland residence, Clara sees the TARDIS outside and goes to see the Doctor. He invites her to travel with him. She declines, telling him to come back the next day and ask her again because she might say yes. After she leaves, the Doctor returns to the console, dialing up the next day as he declares that it’s time to find out who she is.

As mid-season returns go, this one is a great season premiere. It pushes a soft-reset while giving the new companion a bright spotlight in which to play. This version of Clara is a bit less flirty than her predecessors (wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey) but still definitely herself in the end. You know, despite the fact that she has no idea who Oswin or Clara Oswin are.

The return of the Great Intelligence was a neat trick, as was the allusion that this plot was long-reaching.  I especially liked the story and its connection to modern technology and our obsession with it. The plot itself is reminiscent of The Idiot’s Lantern. It’s also quite fun when real-life landmarks like the Shard are used in the plot.

The rapid-fire introduction of Clara to the TARDIS as they saved the nosediving airplane was a heart-pounding ride. Of course, I have to ignore the basic logisitics of that save since there is no place neither wide nor tall enough to park the TARDIS on a Boeing 737.

The switcheroo with the Doctor and the Spoonhead was a nice nod to The Android Invasion. The “short hop” discussion was a fun callback to the other times that such trips were difficult, such as The Seeds of Death, State of Decay, Army of Ghosts, and (most recently) Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. 

Overall, a good time and a fun start to the next run of adventures.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Rings of Akhaten

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #240: The Snowmen

Michael Falkner9 Comments

Doctor Who: The Snowmen
(1 episode, Christmas Special, 2012)

Timestamp 240 The Snowmen

The cold birth of a great intelligence.

Prequel: The Great Detective

In Victorian London, the Paternoster Gang – Madame Vastra, her maid Jenny Flint, and their Sontaran servant Strax – meet with the Doctor as they pursue strange happenings. The Doctor shows no interest in their cases as he has since retired from investigating such matters.

Prequel: Vastra Investigates

Since the Doctor is unwilling to help, the Paternoster Gang strike out on their own. After they solve a case, Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard talks with them about their adventures and membership. He’s confused about Vastra’s skin and Strax’s build, unable to grasp that they are both aliens. Vastra perpelexes him futher by talking freely about her love for Jenny.

As the carriage pulls away, Vastra and Jenny discuss the Doctor’s heartbreak, a deep emotion that has isolated the Time Lord in his TARDIS. They’re also confused about the continuing snowfall from a cloudless sky.

The Snowmen

Winter, 1842: Children are playing outside but one boy builds a snowman by himself. He laments how the other children are silly and the snowman repeats his words. As the boy starts to run away, the snowman offers to help him.

Fifty years later, the boy has grown up and oversees the sampling of snowmen. This man, Walter Simeon, deposits the samples into a giant snowglobe before sacrificing the men who gathered the samples to the snowmen.

At an inn called the Rose & Crown, a familiar looking barmaid walks outside with a tray and spots a creepy snowman. She asks a passing man, the Doctor, about the snowman. He inspects it and asks the woman’s name. He think’s Clara’s name is a nice one and that she should keep it. As he leaves with his somber attitude, Clara gives chase and jumps onto the back of his carriage.

The Doctor calls Vastra on his carriage phone. Vastra is amused that he’s back in an investigatory mood, but the Doctor denies it. He’s sure that Clara will not be able to find him again since she doesn’t even know the name “Doctor”. On cue, Clara drops down from the carriage roof and asks, “Doctor who?”

Dr. Simeon pays a visit to Captain Latimer to muse about the pond where the captain’s governess died. The pond has frozen and Simeon wants the ice, declaring himself to be part of the Great Intelligence Institute. As Simeon departs, he is confronted by Jenny and Vastra. The doctor doesn’t find them threatening, and even taunts the duo as the inspiration for Dr. Doyle’s detective stories. Simeon states that no one can stop his plan, but Vastra knows differently.

The Doctor and Strax investigate the snow, leading Strax to express his discontent over the Time Lord’s apathy. The Doctor believes that the universe doesn’t care, then turns his attention to Clara. He tries to use something called the memory worm to erase her memory, but Strax botches the whole thing. The Doctor is fascinated by the fact that Clara hasn’t run during the whole affair.

They then face a group of snowmen as Clara thinks about them, triggering the telepathic nature of the alien snow. The Doctor has Strax take Clara back to the inn as he heads to a local common area. Clara follows him and finds the ladder that he’s hidden behind a perception filter. She uses the ladder to ascend into the sky where she finds a sprial staircase and the TARDIS resting on a cloud.

She knocks on the door of the TARDIS and then hides, rushing back down the staircase. The Doctor finds a scrap of her dress and knows it was her, but remains determined to stay out of Earth’s affairs. The next morning, Christmas Eve, Clara heads to her second job as governess to Captain Latimer’s children. She operates here as Miss Montague under a more posh accent.

Clara attends to the children, Francesca and Digby, amusing them with her “secret voice” which is her real accent. The children prefer her over the previous governess, the woman who drown in the frozen pond. Clara understands that the children think about the former governess often, and making the link about the telepathic snow, she rushes to the park to find the Doctor. She finds the ladder disabled but also finds an ally in Jenny who takes her before Madame Vastra.

Vastra offers her an audience, but is restrained to single word responses to Vastra’s queries. After all, the truth can be said in one word while lies are said with a string of them. Vastra tells Clara that the Doctor once saved many lives, but when he suffered a great loss, he chose to reture. She also sees a chance to reawaken the Doctor’s former sense of adventure, so she offers Clara a test: She must give her a message to pass onto Doctor; warning him of the danger, but she must do it in one word.

The word she chooses is “pond”.

The Doctor visits Simeon’s institute, an act that causes some discomfort to the Intelligence in the snowglobe. The Doctor recognizes the Intelligence and the danger it poses by inhabiting the former governess, but is forced to flee when Simeon calls for help. The Doctor investigates the frozen pond while denying such to Strax, but finds himself enthralled by Clara as she watches from a window.

Clara later tucks the children in with a story about the Doctor, but they are interrupted by the reanimated ice form of the dead governess. The ice governess chases Clara and the children to the nearby play room where the Doctor appears and shatters her with the sonic screwdriver.

Meanwhile, Simeon activates a snow machine in the front yard as the Doctor admires his bow tie, unaware that he had even put it on. As the ice governess reincorporates, the group rushes downstairs to find Captain Latimer and the Paternoster Gang. Jenny restrains the ice governess with a force field while the team works out the problem, realizing that the Intelligence needs the governess to create an army of unstoppable ice creatures.

The Doctor orders everyone to stay in the study but Clara disobeys, giving the Doctor a kiss before Simeon arrives with an ultimatum. The Doctor arms Clara with an umbrella, disables the force field, and rushes the pair upstairs. Clara pulls the Doctor along as the pair end up on the roof, using the umbrella to snag the ladder and lead them (and the governess) to the TARDIS.

It is here that Clara is introduced to the TARDIS – “It’s smaller on the outside!” – and its beautiful new console room. The Doctor is reminded of another woman, Oswin, when Clara talks about her love of soufflés. He gives Clara a key to the TARDIS, effectively accepting her as his companion.

Unfortunately, the governess has ascended the staircase and drags Clara out of the TARDIS. The pair fall to Earth. The Doctor moves the TARDIS to the courtyard, but he’s too late to save Clara. Even though Strax can revive her for a little while, she will succumb to her injuries.

Unfortunately, the Doctor thinks that she’s going to live, believing that the universe owes him for all the times he has saved it. He sincerely believes that if he saves the world, the universe will allow Clara to live.

The Doctor confrons Simeon, presenting a piece of the shattered governess in a 1967 London Underground-themed lunchbox. Alongside Vastra, he discovers that the snowglobe contains Simeon’s darkest thoughts and feelings, a reflection of the man as a boy. Simeon is shocked by this revelation, but still grabs the box. However, it does not contain the governess.

It contains the memory worm.

The worm bites Simeon, erasing all of the memories from his adult life. Without the link, the Intelligence seems to die but surges back to life. The dream has outlived the dreamer. The Intelligence inserts itself into Simeon, defeats Vastra, and then attacks the Doctor.

At that moment, Clara begins to die with a single tear dropping from her eyes. The snow mirrors the emotions and transforms into salty rain, effectively disincorporating the Intelligence as the Latimer family mourns Clara. The Doctor rushes to her side, listening as she utters her final words: “Run you clever boy. And remember.”

The Doctor attends Clara’s funeral and discusses the Intelligence with Jenny and Vastra. He remembers the name, but can’t quite remember when he met the Great Intelligence. He is also shocked to learn Clara’s full name – Clara Oswin Oswald – and rushes off as he realizes that there is another version of her somewhere that he might meet again for the first time.

She is an impossible girl.

In the present day, the cemetery is overgrown with weeds. A woman and her friend walk through the neglected graveyard and observe the headstone. This woman is Clara.

The story overall is a good one, bringing the Doctor back from the depths of his mourning to a newly-restored sense of adventure and moral justice. There is an element of fridging involved with Clara’s death, but there’s also a great deal of heroism leading to it. Clara’s death was also anger-inducing since the Doctor let his guard down to wow her with his world.

To say that it’s complicated is an understatement.

What’s also complicated is the Doctor’s memory of the Great Intelligence. We’ve seen it twice on television – The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear – and the Doctor was definitely cognizant of what and who the Intelligence was. But here, the Doctor is far more cagey about the being, almost like he’s forgotten. That’s entirey possible, given that the altercations were nine or ten incarnations and several hundred years ago.

I do love the dynamic that Clara brings to the show: She’s flirty like Amy was, but she’s more inquisitive and takes more initiative than her predecessor. We saw this in Oswin’s appearance and in this Clara’s debut, and her personality will carry through the coming stories. I also like this idea of fragments as a unique approach to a new companion.

One more thing that I like that the Doctor is hiding in 1890s London, right under Queen Victoria’s nose. Despite the royal banishment initiated in Tooth and Claw, the recent change of face may be his saving grace.

The new title sequence and theme are my favorites of the Matt Smith era. The flash of the lead actor’s face is also a nice callback to the classic era, an element that we haven’t seen since 1989’s Survival.

Another neat callback is the Eleventh Doctor donning the Fourth Doctor’s Sherlock Holmes outfit – a fitting piece to the story’s theme – which we last saw in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Surprisingly, the amount of Sherlock Holmes references in the televised side of Doctor Who is sparse, but the audio and prose side more than makes up for it.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Bells of Saint John

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #235: Asylum of the Daleks

Michael Falkner8 Comments

Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks
(1 episode, s07e01, 2012)

Timestamp 235 Asylum of the Daleks

Eggs… Eggs… Eggs…

Prequel

The Doctor is enjoying an afternoon tea with scones, cream, and jam when he interrupted by a mysterious hooded figure staring at him. When he looks away, the figure is suddenly sitting at his table.

The hooded figure says that a woman wants to meet him, and when the Doctor tries to brush the figure off, he waves his hand and makes the tea room empty. Everyone is gone.

The Doctor is intrigued, but he can’t get much more from the mysterious figure than a name: Darla von Karlsen. The Doctor says he never heard of her and stands to leave, but he’s instantly in a dark room. The message is a psychic projection. The room is familiar, forcing the Doctor to try waking up. He ends up in a chair on a beach, but the figure tells him that it’s still a dream.

They end up in space. The figure gives him space-time coordinates and explains that Darla wants help saving her daughter. The Doctor is visibly shaken by the coordinates, but refuses to say the name associated with them. The figure pushes until the Doctor wakes up in the console room of the TARDIS. There he whispers the name…

Skaro.

Asylum of the Daleks

On Skaro, the Doctor meets with Darla von Karlsen in the eye of a giant Dalek statue. Darla doesn’t say who told her of the Doctor. She’s also cagey about how she escaped a Dalek prison camp because no one escapes from Dalek prison camps. She’s cold to the touch and the Doctor knows that this is a trap. Sure enough, an eyestalk emerges from Darla’s forehead and a gunstick from her palm. She blasts the Doctor and a Dalek saucer swoops into to take him prisoner.

We then see Amy Pond, supermodel, who refuses a call from her husband because she “no longer has one.” Rory has brought divorce papers to her dressing area and she signs them, only expressing regret when he leaves without a word.

In short order, both Amy and Rory are taken prisoner by the Daleks. They awaken in a cell with a view of Dalek saucers and are soon greeted by the Doctor and his Dalek escorts. Together, they are all taken to a vast circular auditorium filled with Daleks. This is the Parliament of the Daleks.

In view of the captured TARDIS, the Doctor spreads his arms wide, ready to be exterminated. It is Christmas for the Daleks… their greatest wish come true. Except they stun their prisoners with two simple words.

“Save us.”

After a new title sequence, we meet Oswin Oswald. It’s Day 363 of her confinement in a mysterious place besieged by Daleks and she’s having trouble with soufflés.

Back in the Parliament, the Doctor assesses the Daleks and the Ponds and Amy narrates his thought process. When they arrive at the destination, a Dalek in a transparent tube asks the Doctor about the Dalek Asylum. It is a place where outcast Daleks – the insane, the battle-scarred, and the uncontrollable – are exiled. They aren’t killed because the destruction of “Divine Hatred” is offensive to the Daleks, so the outcasts are sent to this automated planet surrounded by an impenetrable shield.

But the Daleks have detected a signal of unknown origin on the planet. Of course, they never considered tracing it to the source, but the signal is “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” – an aria from Carmen in which the Doctor played the triangle – and it is coming from Oswin’s tiny apartment. Which, in reality, is the remnants of the crashed starliner Alaska upon which she served.

The Daleks plan to send their predator, the Doctor, to the surface to deactivate the planetary shield (which, conveniently, can only be done from the surface) so they can destroy the Oswin’s signal at the source. They send him and his companions on a gravity beam where they are promptly separated.

Amy awakens on a snowy mountainside next to a man named Harvey. She runs off in search of the Doctor and Rory. The Doctor comes to next to a Dalek eye stalk which is linked to Oswin (“soufflé girl”) because she found it easy to hack. Amy and Harvey find the Doctor and search for Rory, leading them to a giant hole in the ground. Rory wakes up inside that hole surrounded by dormant Dalek shells.

Harvey leads the Doctor and Amy to one of the Alaska‘s escape pods. Harvey claims that he’s been on planet for days, but that doesn’t mesh with Oswin’s story. In fact, all of Harvey’s crewmates are long dead. Harvey then remembers that he died out in the snow and that the planet’s nano-cloud transformed him into one of the Dalek puppets like the ones that trapped the Doctor and the Ponds.

The only thing stopping the travelers from transforming is the bracelets that the Daleks provided them.

Unfortunately, the cloud also transforms the dead so now we have Dalek zombies. Joy.

The Doctor and Amy take refuge from the Dalek puppets in the escape pod’s cockpit. Oswin engineers an escape path for them while the Doctor starts working on Amy’s marital problems. Before they descend into the mountain, they realize that the zombies have stolen Amy’s wristband so she’s now vulnerable to the nano particles.

Underground, Rory inadvertantly awakens the dormant Daleks who immediately focus on exterminating the intruder. Oswin opens a door for him and, after he escapes, makes introductions by flirting.

As the Doctor and Amy descend, he explains that the nanocloud will slowly reprogram Amy’s mind. In fact, it’s already started since they’ve repeated the same discussion four times. He encourages her to embrace her fear of what’s happening because Daleks don’t feel fear. Oswin coordinates with the Doctor to reunite him with Rory, but that means leaving Amy for a moment. That presents a moment for Amy to interact with what she things are people but are really the Daleks that Rory faced. Thankfully, they’re decayed enough that they cannot give chase for long. Unfortunately, they can still activate self-destruct.

The Doctor is able to override a Dalek’s motivators and send it back into the chamber with the others. The self-destruct eliminates all of them and the travelers are reunited. The Doctor has a brief conversation with Oswin, musing about how she was able to survive a year alone and where she gets milk for her soufflés.

The Doctor lays out four goals: Neutralize all of the Daleks in the Asylum, rescue Oswin, escape from the planet, and fix the Pond marriage. Luckily they are standing on a teleport pad, so they need to lower the planetary shield and beam out very rapidly. Oswin sends a map of her location to the Doctor, so the Doctor tasks Amy and Rory with keeping Amy from becoming a Dalek while he’s gone.

Rory assumes that he can give Amy his wristband because the transformation will be slower for him. Since the nanocloud transforms love into hate, he would last longer because he always loved her more than she loved him. After all, he spent 2000 years protecting her inside the Pandorica as an Auton. They argue, uncovering that the focal point of their conflict is children. The conflict at Demons Run left Amy sterile: Rory thought Amy kicked him out after deciding she didn’t love him, but she knew that he had always wanted children so she “gave him up” to give him a chance with someone else.

They then realize the Doctor put his bracelet on Amy while she was sleeping. Amy muses that he probably doesn’t need it and he used it to trick them into working out their relationship problems.

The Doctor reaches the Intensive Care area, the home for Daleks defeated in particular battles, all of which occurred during the Doctor’s first, second, and third incarnations. Once he realizes this, the Daleks revive and corner him. Oswin hacks into the Dalek Pathweb and erases all data on him, effectively making them forget the Doctor. The deranged Daleks quietly go back to their cells.

Oswin opens the door and invites the Doctor in, but he hesitates when he sees Oswin’s true form. She dreamed up her situation because the reality was too terrible. She was in the cockpit of the escape pod and climbed down the same ladder that the Doctor and Amy used. The Daleks need her genius, so they converted her in full.

Oswin Oswald is now a full Dalek.

The truth is indeed too much to bear. She asks why the Daleks hate the Doctor. He tells her that he beats them everytime. She says that the Daleks grow stronger in spite of him… because of their fear of him. She tells him to run – “Run, you clever boy, and remember.” – and lowers the planetary shield, ready to die as a human at heart.

The Doctor reaches the Ponds and teleports them to the Dalek Parliament ship just as the Daleks destroy the Asylum. Unfortunately for the Daleks, the Doctor has really good aim with a teleporter. Fortunately, for the Doctor, the Daleks have no idea who he is, so he escapes in the TARDIS as the Daleks scream “Doctor WHO!?” over and over again.

The Doctor drops the Ponds at their doorstep, leaving Rory overjoyed that Amy has welcomed him home. The Doctor flies on, reveling in his new anonymity, as he looks forward to the next adventure.

This story presents a good payoff for the previous season’s shenanigans, offering the “what happens next” scenario for the traumas that our main characters faced with the Silence. It also pays off Pond Life to a degree, answering the question of the rift in the Pond household.

Of course, Amy’s relationship problems still center on a lack of communication and unilateral decision making. It’s been a common theme for her: Despite loving Rory, of which I have no doubt, she still treats him poorly and doesn’t communicate with him until she’s forced to.

I did enjoy the visuals on the Asylum, particularly how the construction was much like the city from The Daleks. The Intensive Care Unit also offers a few nods to history, including Spiridon, Kembel, Aridius, Vulcan, and Exxilon. The Daleks have asked for help before, leading us back to The Evil of the Daleks.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the Parliament of the Daleks, which offered a smorgasbord of Dalek history, including:

Really, all we’re missing are the Imperial Daleks from Revelation of the Daleks and/or Resurrection of the Daleks, the disc-backed units in silver-and-black-striped livery from The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the gold-ringed versions from The Chase, the gold units from Day of the Daleks and Frontier in Space, the Supreme Council Dalek from Planet of the Daleks, the “Skittles” units from Victory of the Daleks, the Supreme Red from The Stolen Earth, and (why not?) the variety of unofficial models from both Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.

That bit of fun aside, this story also ends on quite the question for the Daleks to ask. It’s a great place to leave everything as the Doctor’s biggest enemy can’t even remember their supreme rival’s name.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.