Quote: Godot Taxis @ September 4 2012, 5:07 PM BSTThe Problem with Asylum and moffat's writing in general is what I was trying to allude to in my writing exercise post earlier. If you give Moffat a character who has one leg, he'll find some way of not using him or making the character bipedal again. He never works with what he's got and that's bad technique.
Given the character of the Daleks and their established convention of mind-controlling humanoids for slave labour, he introduces a new concept of 'nanoised' corpses with ridiculous head stalks. And seemingly mixing up the Daleks with the cybermen he introduces a ridiculous sequence of the new assistant being 'turned into a dalek' by shouting and neuro-linguistic programming and wearing Dalek hair curlers.
Asylum isn't really about the Daleks at all. You could easily replace them with the Cybermen. The point is a good writer doesn't just constantly invent things - even in SF - but uses what he has. The end result is more satisfying and powerful - and it it's not like the original Who material is limiting.
Now this I complete agree with. Daleks and Cybermen were utterly distinctive.