Into the Dalek reaction post
Well, I didn't like it. To be fair, I had a lot of trouble understanding the dialogue, so perhaps I would like it better if I were to re-watch it . . . but I don't want to re-watch it. It wasn't as bad as "End of Time," but I don't have much else good to say about it.
First, the plot. It was clunky, disjointed, and didn't make much sense. The Doctor encounters Daleks, and his reaction is, well, nothing really. He has no particular reaction to their presence, no particular reaction to the fact that these people are fighting them, and he doesn't seem to care about finding out what the Daleks are doing there, let alone trying to get them to go away again. It was like the Doctor's entire attitude was "yeah, Daleks, what are you gonna do? Anyway, what's for lunch?"
Then these people are fighting the Daleks, and they've found an injured Dalek that wants to kill other Daleks. And they want to fix it. Um, why? Shouldn't they want to destroy the Dalek? Or perhaps let it go back and destroy other Daleks for them? Then the Doctor appears, and they're all "kill him!" until they learn that he might be able to fix their Dalek for them. So they decide to let the Doctor take off in his TARDIS and go and fetch Clara, and then when he comes back, they're all "we don't trust you! Make a wrong move and we'll kill you!" Um, yeah, right. Because it makes total sense to let the person you don't trust, whom you're forcing to fix your pet Dalek during your war against the Daleks, fly off in their own spacecraft and bring back an ally, because then there's two people for you to yell at about how much you don't trust them.
So then the Dalek has to be fixed from the inside, and we have an "Invisible Enemy" homage, which wasn't an episode I would have thought deserved an homage, but never mind that. So now they're inside the Dalek, except the inside of the Dalek is a lot more like the inside of the Tesselecta, right down to the homicidal antibodies that are inexplicably wandering around the Dalek's metal casing as opposed to being part of the Dalek's organic body. Oh, and they never do get around to actually going inside the Dalek itself, which means they really could have done their repair job from the outside without getting shrunken down, because surely they could have opened up the casing and done a little spot welding or whatever, and it's not like we haven't seen those casings opened up since about, oh, 1963 or so? But anyway, never mind again, because now we get some gratuitous scenes to show off what a jerk the Twelfth Doctor is now. And a gratuitous death scene so the woman can end up in "heaven" with psycho-twirling-woman. Then the Doctor fixes the Dalek, and ho-hum, it goes on a rampage, who didn't see that coming? Then he tries to teach it about the miracle of life, and ends up teaching it about his own hatred of the Daleks, which would have been a nice moment if it hadn't already had hatred of the Daleks when the Doctor first met it. In other words, the Doctor didn't do a damn thing except re-set it back to the way it was. Imagine how much more powerful that would have been if the Doctor had managed to change it from being a pacifist to being a Dalek-killer? But no, instead it went from Dalek-killer to people-killer to Dalek-killer again. And this time, the people get the bright idea of letting it go and kill Daleks. And the Doctor leaves without really caring about where the whole Dalek fleet went off to, with nothing more than a "yeah, whatever, see you later." Apparently the Doctor is getting as tired of dealing with the Daleks as we in the audience are.
Oh, and then there was that whole sequence with Clara in the school with that guy, which just seemed incredibly pasted-on. I mean she's dating someone, so let's stop the whole episode dead for a really long time to explore it! If you're going to introduce a new character, maybe you want to have his scenes relate to the plot of the episode in some way? Even a little bit? Just a thought.
I'm not going to go into my impressions of Twelve because it's still early, and I'm still hoping that I will end up liking him better than I do at the moment. Instead, I'd like to talk about Clara. What happened to her? Think back to how she was in "Day of the Doctor," and compare that to how she was in "Deep Breath" and in this episode. It's like she's the one who regenerated, because her personality has completely changed. In "Day of the Doctor," she is completely comfortable with Ten and the War Doctor, and now she's uncomfortable with Twelve. Then the Doctor asks her if he's a good man, and she says she doesn't know. Um, what about that whole speech where she convinced Eleven to save Gallifrey because he's a doctor? Has she changed her mind? Or is this more of the "you're not really the Doctor" stuff, despite the fact that she above all companions ought to know that he is?
TLDR: really disappointed. Hoping that I will like the next one more.