“I am not a Dalek. I am human.” Ambiguous identities and the rejection of the abject in Steven Moffat’s “The Asylum of the Daleks.”
“The Asylum of the Daleks” by Steven Moffat, an episode of the long-standing British science TV fiction show, Doctor Who, is a complex story of dualities, repression, and identification, encased in a mystery plot with a horrifying climax. The episode circles around the character of Oswin Oswald, a young genius astronaut shipwrecked in the bowels of a Dalek asylum - a planet housing the most insane and battle-scarred members of the most fearsome species in Doctor Who universe - and trapped in an illusion created within her own mind to escape the traumatizing reality of having been forcibly transformed into a monstrous alien. While on the surface the episode can be accused of multiple continuity errors and disregard for in-universe logic when it comes to Dalek lore, Oswin’s story is nevertheless a structurally sound metaphor for the collapse of the self/other dichotomy as described in the theory of the abject proposed in The Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva. In my essay, I will explore the issues of boundaries, fluidity, selfhood, and cyborgianism present in the narrative, arguing that the underlying message of the episode is the inevitable rejection and destruction of the abject.
