YMMV / Doctor Who S33 E1 "Asylum of the Daleks"

• Critical Dissonance: The episode was received positively by critics at the time & was even nominated for a Hugo award. The opinion among the fanbase however is a bit more divided.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The following exchange:
  Oswin: ... doesn't she seem a bit too angry to you?
  Amy: Someone's obviously never been to Scotland.
• Narm:
  • The Asylum's primary defence mechanism involves transforming visitors into new guards. Not a terrible idea. Unfortunately the result is people with Dalek eyestalks popping out of their heads. Furthermore, it effectively turns them into 'Dalek Zombies'.
  • The Slow-motion slide Rory does to get through the door.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: There are a few moments in this episode where the action is brought to a standstill so Amy and Rory can discuss their divorce.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • They went to extreme lengths to obtain old Dalek props, going all the way back to the 1960s, promising a focus on the threat of Daleks from throughout history... and then use them as generic background characters in such dark conditions that it isn't clear unless you know what you're looking for that they aren't just using the new props. Especially Egregious is the return of the Special Weapons Dalek, who doesn't even move.
  • For a story titled Asylum of the Daleks, which promised us a planet's worth of insane out-of-control Daleks, it doesn't have anything even remotely close to the insane Daleks you might expect, in the mould of Dalek Caan. They're mostly just catatonic.
  • And not that Oswin's story isn't heartbreaking and all, but converting people is the Cybermen's gig, and has nothing much to do with the premise of a planet of crazy Daleks. How much more strange and arresting would it be if Oswin had never been human at all — if she really was a Dalek, whose insanity was that it thought it was a human?
  • Amy and Rory's divorce lasts for just this episode and is never mentioned again. Considering Steven Moffat has been divorced and handled it much better in both Press Gang and Joking Apart, you'd think he'd handle it a bit more sensitively than this.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Amy, for throwing Rory out without even telling him why, then acting as though her giving him up (which, as the end of the episode shows, wasn't even necessary) is more noble than his guarding her Only Mostly Dead body for 2,000 years. The whole thing left many fans crying foul and some critics scratching their heads over what came off as idiotic because of it. There was also a sketch from The Pop Arena where Rory incredulously asks if Amy seriously thought his lifelong love for her, and spending millennia guarding her, was just because he wanted a baby-making machine.
• Villain Decay: Believe it or not, this is the very first Dalek story where they don't kill a single person onscreen. There's even a scene where Rory is surrounded by Daleks in the Asylum and is able to dodge all their shots, though these ones had been catatonic for who knows how long, so their aim can be considered as rusty as their casings.
• The Woobie: Oswin just wanted to see the stars, and then she crash lands on her first trip out. She's this even moreso when we find out she's a Dalek.

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