Dalek Asylum

The Dalek Asylum is a fictional planet featured in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It appeared in the first episode of series seven, "Asylum of the Daleks". This bleak and frozen world was one of many such planets dominated by the Daleks. It was used as an asylum to house Daleks who were no longer of use to the collective race, including old and infirm, the battle-scarred, and the insane. Because the Daleks find beauty in hatred, they could not bring themselves to destroy their own, so they used this planet as a dumping ground.

Normally, the planet was secured by way of a global force field, but a ship known as the Starliner Alaska crash-landed on the planet, rupturing the field. The Daleks feared what might happen should the insane Daleks of the asylum ever escape, and decided that they needed to eradicate them all for the greater good. However, the planet's force field and security defenses were operated from the planet itself, and even they could not penetrate it with a vast armada.

The Parliament of Daleks abducted the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond, and Rory Williams, and forced them to help prevent the insane Daleks from escaping the asylum. They could teleport small objects, such as people, through the force field, at which point, the Doctor would have to find a way to shut down the field, so that the Daleks could destroy the planet from space. Naturally, this left the Doctor and his companions a very small window of time with which to escape, but the Doctor decided to worry about that when the time came.

The three of them teleported to the planet's surface, which involved penetrating a nanocloud, which contained millions of micro-machines that converted all biological material - living or dead - into Dalek puppets. The three of them were outfitted with special wrist gauntlets that protected them from the nanotechnology infection.

On the planet's surface, they came upon one survivor of the Alaska - a man named Harvey. Harvey told them that the ship had broken up two days ago, and several of the escape pods had been jettisoned. They found the main body of the ship, which contained the corpses of its flight crew. However, their bodies were desiccated husks, indicating that the crash took place some time prior than just two days ago. The bodies reanimated as Dalek puppets and attacked the Doctor, Amy, and Rory. At this point, Harvey realized that he was a Dalek puppet as well.

The three of them escaped the attacking undead puppets, but during the fray, Amy lost her protective wristlet. The group retreated underground where Rory was separated from them. The Doctor tried to keep Amy safe and secure, while explaining how the nanocloud infection would remove all sense of love and compassion before the body underwent cybernetic conversion.

One person of note from the Starliner Alaska crash was a woman named Oswin Oswald. She had actually undergone full cybernetic conversion into a Dalek, but her mind compensated for the trauma, by making her believe that she was actually trapped inside a part of her ship and had been living there for the past year. A great computer hacker, Oswin found a way to tap into all of the planet's security systems, and could even hack into the central cortex of many of the Dalek cast-offs as well. When she learned about the Doctor and his companions, she began communicating to them via the planet's speaker systems. She helped Rory escape from a horde of awakening Daleks who had begun to attack him. Oswin also helped the Doctor navigate his way to where she was located. She told him that if he helped her get off planet, then she would deactivate the force field for him. When the Doctor finally found her however, he realized that she was now a Dalek, and had to break the news to Oswin herself. Knowing that she could now never leave, she still agreed to shut down the force field, but the Doctor only had moments to get back to the Dalek's parliament ship. Oswin's last gift to the Doctor before they left was to hack into the Parliament of Daleks, removing all knowledge of the Doctor from their data banks. With the force field down, the Daleks used their ship's weaponry to destroy the asylum world.