#flyingbluebox11

The entire episode of “Asylum of the Daleks” is about love, not about falling in love, but about defining love and how love defines and motivates us, as human beings, as Time Lords, as Daleks. After all, how does one create a Dalek? “By subtracting love and adding anger.” And anger, as an emotion, fundamentally stems from a feeling of lost control. We become angry when situations and events do not occur or unfold the way we want them to; we become angry when people do not act or think or feel the way we want them to. Love, then, is the antithesis of anger - by loving someone or something, we care about what they care about, we wish to see them live full, satisfying lives that are satisfying to them. (Is this a Carmen theme I hear playing right now? Why yes I think it is)

Moffat and Hurran make essentially no effort to conceal the parallels they want viewers to draw between Oswin and Carmen. When we see Oswin in her human form, she is a lovely brunette in a red dress wearing a red flower in her hair - the classic depiction of Carmen. The story of Carmen and Jose, however, is not reflected in the interactions between Oswin and the Doctor, but rather between the interactions between Oswin and the Daleks. This is important because the story of Carmen and Jose is not a love story, but rather a not-love story - Jose at the end of the narrative has become a Dalek, acting not out of love, but out of anger. 

Like Jose, the Daleks make an exception to their “orders” for Oswin - they desire her brilliant mind and conduct a full conversion, effectively keeping her “alive,” instead of turning her into a puppet. And like Jose, the Daleks are doomed to discover their inability to control Oswin, who ruins the Asylum in a parallel to how Carmen “ruins” Jose’s life. The discovery of this loss of control through the transmission of the Habanera, a song describing Carmen’s definition of love as a bird that cannot be tamed or controlled, frightens and angers the Daleks, pushing them to destroy the Asylum and leading to the events of the episode - just as Carmen’s final refusal of his proposal pushes Jose to murder her. 

The truly compelling heart of the episode, however, is in how Oswin is not a Dalek. And, for me, that twist doesn’t occur when she chooses to perish with the Asylum, but much earlier, when she removes the Doctor from the collective memories of the Daleks. If we extend the themes of Carmen to the conclusion that love is about freedom and about setting other people free - from institutions of oppression, from expectations, from limitations - then Oswin’s action can be interpreted as this ultimate expression of love for the Doctor, someone who’s greatest burden and limitation is his own past. Which isn’t, of course, to say that Oswin was in love with the Doctor - if anything, “Asylum of the Daleks” explores the idea of a more pervasive, more honest form of love that stems from empathy and compassion for other people rather than the dangerous romantic love that almost always teeters on a tightrope of desire between love and control.