First broadcast 1 September 2012.

When originally broadcast, Doctor Who‘s seventh season was split into two, with five episodes airing in 2012 and the remaining eight held back until 2013. As a result it really felt like two shortened seasons rather than just the one. I remember fans at the time were particularly unhappy with the scheduling decision; coming back after years of shortened seasons and off-years, it is a little hard to see what the fuss was all about. At any rate, on 1 September 2012 Matt Smith’s third and final season as the Doctor kicked off with “Asylum of the Daleks”.

The Doctor (Smith), Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) are plucked out of time and space by the Daleks and press-ganged into a special mission to the fabled Dalek Asylum – the planet where all of the broken, insane and uncontrollable Daleks are left to rot and decay.

“Asylum of the Daleks” is for the most part a great season opener, bringing back the Daleks in their most effective appearance in many years. It’s an episode that within the first 10 minutes advances the depth and character of the Daleks more than the previous 49 years of the series combined. They have a Parliament and a Prime Minister now. They can make humanoid stealth Daleks. They have an aesthetic sense of beauty. They find hatred beautiful. They erected a massive Dalek statue on their home planet of Skaro.

Yes, Skaro, now not as destroyed as 1988’s “Remembrance of the Daleks” may have led you to believe. Perhaps it’s a continuity error. Perhaps they’re treating John Peel’s Dalek novels as canon. Perhaps the Time War brought it back. Or perhaps this is Doctor Who, which sniffs at continuity and laughs in its face – we’re discussing, let us remember, a television series which has destroyed Atlantis three times.

I adore the concept of a Dalek asylum, and it gives the episode the excuse to drop in dusty, decaying versions of different Dalek designs from 1963 to the present. I gave a little cheer at seeing the Special Weapons Dalek, one of my personal favourites. This is the sort of pleasing little touch that only series as old as Doctor Who get to make. That said, there is a slightly jarring inconsistency in the asylum existing: as recently as “Victory of the Daleks” in 2010 older Dalek models were getting exterminated by newer ones, and it does fly in the face of decades of supposed racial purity values.

Matt Smith returns as the Doctor, playing the part in the same vein as he did last year: slightly less manic and energetic than his original portrayal, and with some nice layers of depth and mood. The Ponds are back, a little worse for wear – they’re filing for divorce, which gives the Doctor another problem to fix while negotiating a planet full of insane Daleks and talking to the mysterious Oswin who’s trapped somewhere in the middle of them.

Oswin: a mysterious genius computer hacker trapped in the centre of the Dalek asylum, played by Jenna Coleman. At the time of this episode’s original broadcast Coleman had already been announced as playing the Doctor’s new companion, so seeing her here was at the time something of a surprise. It’s nice to be surprised now and then, and I was certainly surprised at the time regarding her unexpected early debut.

It’s not a debut without problems, however; the first is that Oswin’s secret is blatantly obvious from about five minutes into the episode. The second is that she seems from the outset to be such a poorly developed character. She is a walking cliché: the overly clever “manic pixie girl” who cannot hold a conversation without flirting, drops it lines about experimenting with bisexuality, and who lounges around in a tight red minidress delivering not so much dialogue as an unending series of quips and one-liners. This is ultimately indicative of a broader problem in Steven Moffat’s writing: looking at Oswin, River and Amy in Doctor Who, Lynda Day in Press Gang, Susan, Sally and Jane in Coupling – one has to ask if Moffat ever written a sensible, well-adjusted female protagonist in any of his television work? The only one I can come up with is Sally Sparrow in his Doctor Who episode “Blink”, and she only appeared for the one episode.

I was never a fan of Jenna Coleman in Doctor Who, where she seemed saddled with a poor character and delivered a rushed, sort of breathless performance all the time with a poor cadence. Looking back now I wonder how much of my dislike stems from this specific episode; I do not recall her being quite as egregiously awful in later seasons.

This episode also seems a little rushed. There is an entire plot thread about nano-machines turning people into Daleks that is simply dropped and ignored during the climax. Amy and Rory go from hating one another to passionately loving each other a little too conveniently, and the Doctor’s final discovery about Oswin leads a very sudden and callous choice on his part that I never entirely bought.

Broadly speaking “Asylum of the Daleks” wobbles at the edges, but still manages to deliver a big-screen style extravaganza to grab the audience’s attention. With only five episodes in 2012 to succeed, there was an unprecedented amount of pressure here for the series to succeed. This seems a solid beginning.