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Some time has passed since the Doctor and the Ponds enjoyed Christmas together. Amy and Rory are in the middle of an icy divorce when people around them suddenly grow Dalek eyestalks and zap them onto a spaceship. The ship is the Parliament of the Daleks, and the Doctor has been similarly summoned before the Prime Minister Dalek. The Daleks explain that they need the Doctor to save them, which is kind of a twist. There's an asylum planet where they've sent all the craziest, most uncontrollable of their kind and they need the Doctor to get down there and deactivate the force field because they're too scared to do it themselves. They brought Amy and Rory along because "the Doctor needs Companions," but really, they probably just want those crazy kids to work things out.
Also down on the planet's surface is a crashed cruise ship. Its seemingly lone survivor is a chirpy, flirty young woman named Oswin Oswald. She's been holed up somewhere beneath the surface, hacking into Dalek systems, listening to Georges Bizet and making crummy soufflés. The extra dangerous thing about this planet is its "nanocloud," which turns any living or dead tissue into truly creepy Dalek puppets. How Oswin has survived this perplexes the Doctor. He and the Ponds have special bracelets to protect them against the cloud, but Amy's is ripped off during a scrape with the puppets. The cloud messes with her memory and perception. Part of the process involves stripping away love, so Rory volunteers to give her his protective bracelet. As he explains, he's always been the more invested of the two, so it will take longer to strip away his love. That's when Amy breaks down and finally admits the reason she filed for divorce is because she can't have babies and Rory wants babies so she decided to "set him free." So dumb and contrived. Bah!
Meanwhile, the Doctor is trying to track down and rescue Oswin. He's a bit suspicious of her, but she keeps saving him and proving she's kind of more awesome than her initial introduction would seem to suggest. When a group of super-duper crazy Daleks go after the Doctor, she erases him from their memories. Just when Oswin begins to pack for what she's sure will be a grand adventure, the Doctor discovers the awful truth: Oswin is herself a Dalek. When the cruise ship crashed, she was taken for her genius hacking skills. She's been clinging to the scraps of her humanity, creating fictions – like her soufflés – to keep her sane. The Doctor has to leave her behind, but they accomplish their mission and turn off the force field. She and the insane Daleks who imprisoned her are destroyed.
The Doctor and Ponds return to the Parliament ship to discover that the Daleks have no idea who the Doctor is. Oswin has erased him from all their memories so that they end up asking, again and again: "Doctor who?" Stay tuned for the full weecap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!On the Dalek home world of Skaro, a woman in a hooded cloak wears fabulously impractical high-heeled boots and narrates a letter to someone named Hannah. She looks out over the ruined planet and talks about the Daleks and the man who fought them. This man is supposedly dead, but she's heard rumors to the contrary. As she winds up the letter, this man walks up behind her in his skinny, too-short pants. "I got your message," says the Doctor. She turns to look at him. With her hair color and profile, she looks like she could be Amy and Rory's offspring. She says her daughter Hannah is in a Dalek prison camp. They need his help. The Doctor is suspicious, and even more so when the woman claims she escaped the camp herself. "Nobody escapes the Dalek camps," he says with a menacing chuckle. He holds her hand and notes that she's very cold. "It's a trap," he says, "and you don't even know it." She looks scared, and then there's a clicky sound and a Dalek eyestalk pushes out of her forehead. A Dalek gun emerges from her palm. She zaps him and he goes down. "The Doctor is acquired!" shrieks a Dalek voice as one of their ships descends.
Amy Pond is in the middle of being a model when an assistant interrupts her photo shoot. "Your husband is here," he says. "I don't have a husband," she says back. Except, yes, she still does, because she hasn't signed the divorce papers yet. Say what? She finds Rory and the papers in her dressing room. She signs "Amy Williams," so at some point she must have officially taken his name. They snark at each other a bit and then he storms off. Amy's makeup lady comes in to touch her up. There's a crunching sound and then an eyestalk appears in the makeup lady's forehead. "Amelia Pond is acquired!" At the same time, Rory is boarding a bus. The driver looks at him, pops out an eyestalk and just like that, Rory, too, is acquired.
Amy and Rory wake up on a ship in the middle of many other Dalek ships. "So... how much trouble are we in?" Rory asks. The Doctor enters the room with a Dalek escort. "How much trouble are we in, Mr. Pond? Out of ten?" he asks. "Eleven," he answers himself. Because he's 11, get it? Har har! The walls around them suddenly withdraw and they find themselves standing in the center of a sort of arena, surrounded on all sides by Daleks of every flavor. This, the Doctor tells us, is the Parliament of the Daleks. Daleks are political? I can't decide if that's terrifying or dull. "What do we do?" Amy asks. "Make them remember you," the Doctor says. This doesn't seem to have any significance in the rest of the episode, but it sounds cool. The Doctor turns to face his captors. He closes his eyes, opens his arms and waits for oblivion. Instead of shooting him in the hearts, a creaky Dalek voice pleads with him. "Save... us. You... will save us?" All the Daleks repeat the request/demand. "Well!" the Doctor chirps. "This is new!" Opening credits. No voice-over from Amy. Yay.