Moffat's Milky Way: a critical reading of “Asylum of the Daleks”

This article is based on repeated viewing of the series 7 opener and thus contains, in the common idiom of our time and the usual refrain of Doctor River Song, spoilers.  As is best with Doctor Who, watch it now and read about it later.

At its core, “Asylum of the Daleks” is an exercise in prophecy, in the two senses of that word.  Most clearly, in the pagan ‘visions of the future’ sense, we are introduced to Jenna-Louise Coleman playing Oswin Oswald, already announced as the Doctor’s incipient new companion.  But in the Old Testament sense of yelling at the status quo, the story also has some business to do with regard to quiet, motionless and child-safe universe of “The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe.”

That episode and the short “Pond Life” soothe us into forgetting that all is not well.  “Asylum” keeps that tension high.  We have been getting happy endings—a whole family reunited for Christmas.  Amy and Rory, safely delivered home twice.  Most of “Pond Life” is a sitcom.  All the while, we have Dorium Maldovar’s mysterious prophecy ringing in our ears.  We know there is a “penny in the air,” but as “Asylum” fades to credits, the world seems safe for another week.

At the end of “Asylum of the Daleks,” the Daleks raise a chant that is undoubtedly meant to remind us of Dorium.  The prophecy has begun rolling its way toward fulfillment.  But the short scene outside the Pond home should be every bit as disturbing to us, although it will take a bit of explaining why.

The Eleventh Doctor dances—in top hat and cane—through a multiverse of wonders.  In the past two series we have seen empires, galaxies and whole continua of reality raise up and crash harmlessly against the TARDIS like breakers on the beach of Bad Wolf Bay.  While the Tenth Doctor ultimately left Rose Tyler to her fate, pounding her fists against the walls of an alternate universe, thus far our Eleven will happily change (or destroy) any reality that does not meet his expectations of coolness.  To wit:

Rule 27:  Never knowingly be serious.

Rule 408:  Time is not the boss of you.

The Tenth Doctor very sincerely expressed his pride in everything and everyone—the Brilliant, the Beautiful—and always in an unqualified declarative across the entire swath of humanity and history.  (This is why an episode where humans are very, very ugly, e.g. “Midnight,” could be so compelling.)  Both the Ninth and Tenth Doctors both remind us that living an ordinary human life is an extraordinary adventure in itself:  an ordinary life is an unwitting participant in the grand unfolding of an infinite story across a limitless canvas of greatness.

Eleven’s stage is always much, much smaller.  In visual terms, Moffat likes to show us the Doctor with seconds to live, holding on by almost nothing—escaping the firefalls of Florinall 9 with only a surfboard (“Pond Life”); falling out of orbit with nothing more than a spacesuit barely out of reach (“The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe”); and most clearly at Eleven’s very first crisis, crashing-landing on Earth holding on to nothing more than a few inches of TARDIS floor (“The Eleventh Hour”).

In just the same way, the Eleventh Doctor always relates to humanity in miniature.  As a matter of personality, he has very brief but very intense relationships—among many others, Kazran Sardick, Edwin Bracewell, Lorna Bucket, Craig Owens and Vincent Van Gogh are all deeply affected by his meteoric (brilliant, fiery, brief) passage through their lives.  In some of these cases, altering the very fabric of reality is a casual act; the Doctor’s true greatness is his unalterable emotional commitment.  In “A Good Man Goes to War” and “The Wedding of River Song,” the Doctor has hundreds, possibly thousands or millions of allies, each of whom like him and know him personally.

This has a visual metaphor.  In “The Beast Below,” the very next episode after “Eleventh Hour,” the Doctor stands right inside the TARDIS doorway, his toes hanging over the edge, holding Amelia Pond by one hand, letting her float with glorious freedom in distant space.  Just for a moment.  When you meet the Doctor—and it is strongly hinted that eventually everyone in the Universe will, sooner or later—he will show you something amazing, just for a moment, and when you look back at him with stunned exhilaration, all he will have to say is:  “I know.”

By this same token, the most tragic or horrifying questions in Eleven’s world are the most ordinary.  He asks Amelia Pond:  “Where have your parents gone?  What’s this crack on the wall?  How many rooms are in your house?”  He asks George, the boy in “Night Terrors,” “What’s in your closet?”—and worse yet, he asks Alex, George’s father, “How old is he?”  To Craig Owens, father of Stormageddon:  “Who lives upstairs?”

So enter Oswin Oswald, to whom the Doctor’s first question is:  “Where did you get the milk?”  This little hint should be obvious; a crash survivor imprisoned on a hostile world cannot possibly have milk to waste on burnt soufflé.  That it is impossible and she does it anyway must endear her to the Doctor, but the fact of its impossibility is an explicit clue to the viewer.

So is Oswin’s introductory song, the Habanera aria from Carmen.  Its essential point is that Love—or people, or anything—is often quite the opposite of what we wish it to be.  What Oswin loves is precisely the opposite of what she is, as she is what she fears.  Moffat plays with this repeatedly in her character.  She is not human, but Dalek.  She didn’t survive, she was killed.  She flirts with Rory, then claims to be a lesbian, then says that was just a phase.  She gives us the axiom that to make a Dalek, you subtract love and add hate—but she listens to opera, makes soufflé for her mother, cheers up Rory, and banters playfully with the Doctor—except she keeps calling him chin boy, a really unkind remark.

Oswin’s real danger turns out not to be the Daleks outside her barricaded door—that is the reality of her situation trying to be seen.  Her danger is the domestic fantasy she is living in; in Moffat’s world, domesticity is the danger.  An ordinary human lifestyle is the cruelest trap there is:  a girl alone in a house.  Craig Owens isolated from a woman he can’t muster the courage to tell his feelings to.  Alex, alone in his house with George, a boy he can’t understand.

“Pond Life” and “Asylum” share the story of Amy and Rory’s divorce—left alone in a house, their marriage ends.  In the first, they keep failing to connect with the wild and exotic universe around them and we see them fall apart.  In the next, they are alienated and in pain in the ordinary world, but reunited through an excursion into that wilderness.  In the whole universe, they can only speak about their true feelings, and the reality of their relationship, trapped in an insane asylum.  This is somehow reminiscent of a character in a Douglas Adams book, who called his house Outside the Asylum—because everywhere else in the world was in it.  It seems to me, in Moffat’s unreal world of perception filters and secret histories, the destruction of an asylum should be taken as a notice that the whole universe has gone insane.

I think it should be clear now why the Doctor leaving Amy and Rory at home means that he has safely deposited them into incalculable danger.  Amy was never safer than when she was floating in her nightgown in the raw vacuum of space.

As a final note, let’s take a look at the direction I think Moffat may be pointing.  The Eleventh Doctor does not praise the ordinary life lived in contentment:  he praises ordinary people taking a flying leap outward into an exciting world.  He praises the Geronimo moment.  The Silence lurks everywhere, unseen by all, casting a perception filter over the Earth, in a world where someone sitting at home drinking a beer with his dog can be sucked into the carped and devoured.  The best human life, says Moffat, is not just something you have by accident.

No, the best kind of life is one where you become a living paradox, refusing to succumb to the inevitable—where you yourself, by your own courage, transform the inevitable into the impossible.  You are an automaton man who refuses to be a Dalek bomb (minus love, plus hate) by remembering your very first love.  You are a bumbling, scared and unathletic young father, who by sheer force of will refuses to be assimilated as a Cyberman—so saving your son’s life.  The scene where Craig tears the Cyberman helmet off of himself is paralleled by Oswin’s scene of being converted into a Dalek at the end of “Asylum.”  It is one of Moffat’s classic examples of the real Ordinary Extraordinary.

Oswin has failed.  By the end of “Asylum,” we realize her human spirit is trapped in an insane Dalek body, in chains, in the deepest part of an asylum-prison-fortress, surrounded by the most violent Daleks, on an ice world trapped behind a force field.  For good measure, the planet is completely obliterated.  And we know she is going to win.