Doctor Who Season Recap

After what seems like an age, the drought of good sci-fi on TV is over: Doctor Who is finally back.

At first, I was intrigued at how the Daleks could now take on a human form in ‘Asylum of the Daleks’, but I soon became somewhat bored. It didn’t capture me the way the last series had, and the Dalek plot felt overused. Even more off-putting was the cheesy photo shoot of Amy, and the accompanying hints at Amy and Rory’s separation (a sub-story which doesn’t even last the length of the episode.)

Despite my initial boredom, there were some satisfying moments of comedy and action (in true Doctor Who fashion.) One moment in particular—when Rory awoke the Daleks in the asylum—made me properly ‘LOL’. Overall, barring the issues I had with the storyline, it was still a fairly good Doctor Who episode with plenty of action, drama and comedy.

Episode two restored my hope in Doctor Who. Just the title of the episode alone made me optimistic: ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’. Who couldn’t get excited about that?

In short, ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ is about an unidentified ship hurtling towards earth. The Doctor and his pals (including Rory’s Dad), get on the spaceship in order to change its course and save whatever life forms are on board. To their glee, they discover various dinosaur species running free, seemingly unsupervised. As it turns out, the aliens that first created this ‘ark’ full of dinosaurs had been chucked out for their valuable prehistoric cargo.

The new series improved even more at the weekend with the release of ‘A Town Called Mercy’. This episode of Doctor Who is set in a western town that has electricity years before it should. At first I thought that this would be an episode about a Time Lord hunter, as there is a mention of ‘the Doctor being left’ at the start. Gladly, the Doctor was not being hunted down again, but someone else was being hunted instead.

Once again, as I often am while watching Doctor Who, I was tickled by the subtle moral messages that arose. The Doctor never condones the use of weapons or violence, so whenever he is even slightly pro-violence (as in this episode), it comes as a real shock.‘There has to be another way’ is a common refrain throughout Doctor Who when a difficult situation arises, and it has been fascinating to watch The Doctor and his companions find their ‘other way’ each week thus far.

My hope in Doctor Who has been restored since the first episode, and I have seen an improvement in the storylines each episode since. What I am interested to find out is when Amy and Rory will be replaced as the Doctor’s assistants, and by whom? Can he ever give them up? We’ll be finding out soon enough.