Doctor Who, "Victory of the Daleks"

Amy: “Ever fancied someone you knew you shouldn’t? Hurts, doesn’t it? But kind of a good hurt.”

This was by far my least favorite of the three new episodes we’ve seen so far this season. I’ll skip going into detail about the plot this week because basically it revolves around the Daleks coming back (yet again) and the Doctor being forced to choose between saving humans or destroying his oldest enemies. Was there really any doubt about what he would do? More discussion after the jump.

I continue to find the relationship between Amy and the Doctor extremely interesting. When he had to chase the Daleks onto their spaceship, he forced Amy to stay behind on Earth, where he thought she would be safer from danger. This comes after he tries to stop Amy from approaching a Dalek with a pointed, “Amy! AMELIA!” He comes across as a father or a brother, which makes sense considering he’s known her for such a short amount of time, and she was a little girl when he first met her. This seems like it could be something much more than that, though. Either the Eleventh Doctor is carrying around a lot of angst and paranoia due to what Nine & Ten experienced (which I would love – I always enjoy some good continuity) or he really does know something about Amy that the audience has yet to learn, and he’s trying very hard to keep her safe.

The scene on the Dalek spaceship gave us another enjoyable performance from Matt Smith. As soon as he pulled out that “TARDIS self-destruct key,” I thought to myself, as I’m sure many of you did, That looks like a cookie. Still, I felt strangely satisfied when it turned out I was right.

The final few minutes of the episode were the most engaging. The Doctor must stop the human/android scientist, Bracewell, from self-destructing. He knows that some part of the scientist is human, and he tries to bring that part out in order to overpower the Dalek technology. The Doctor is on the right track, getting Bracewell to talk about his childhood and the parents he lost. The plan doesn’t quite work until Amy steps in, however. She talks to Bracewell about love, and he when he talks about a woman named Dorabella, the Dalek bomb is defused. I don’t really believe that the Doctor couldn’t have come up with that solution on his own, but it was another nice moment for Amy.

There’s sort of a running joke throughout this episode that the Doctor and Winston Churchill are old friends, and that Churchill keeps trying to steal a TARDIS key from the Doctor. Churchill says goodbye with a big hug for the Doctor and gets a kiss on the cheek from Amy. He’s almost out the door when Amy calls him back, demanding that he return the key he pilfered from the Doctor’s pocket. The Doctor then gives Amy a stern look and she reluctantly hands over the key, so we know she hasn’t gotten her own copy yet. I don’t remember when previous companions received a key from the Doctor, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t this early into the relationship. Amy seems to be disappointed by it, though, and combined with her obvious crush on the Doctor (she was clearly talking about him during the Bracewell scene) and his overprotective attitude towards her, I see this becoming a bit of an issue soon.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of “Victory of the Daleks” is the discovery that Amy has no recollection of the events of “The Stolen Earth.” She had never heard of the Daleks and could not remember seeing a bunch of planets in the sky, which was of great concern to the Doctor. Where was she during all of that? Is Amy really from some other universe, or did she have her memory wiped at some point?

MAY 8: The Weeping Angels are back! Also, River Song! If those things mean nothing to you, watch “Blink” and “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead,” and then come back next weekend to chat about “The Time of Angels.”

Screencap from Sonic Biro.