Resolution

[purplecat]

I'm in two minds about Resolution. I thought it was an excellent Dalek story - strongly evoking Dalek from series 1, but to be honest I didn't think it was such a great Doctor Who story.

I'm in the camp of fans who think that Dalek stories generally work better the fewer Daleks you have. When you have an army of Daleks (given the Doctor has to defeat them), they often end up looking both weak and a bit stupid. Individually, you can emphasise their power, ruthlessness and cunning without making them impossible to contain. Lin's possession was excellently done, scary and a logical progression of what we've seen previously from the Daleks. The scene where the Dalek builds its own casing was great, and a nice echo of the Doctor building her own sonic screwdriver. The confrontation with the army was a great (if somewhat unnecessary) set piece. All in all it was a story that show-cased the Dalek nicely and even managed to do something a little different with it.

The rest of the story though I wasn't so keen on. There was a moment when the Doctor first started tracking the Dalek in the Tardis, that I was worried that we were in for 40 minutes of the Doctor watching events unfold on a Tardis monitor while the Dalek ran amok. Fortunately that isn't quite what happened, but after the strong opening the structure of the story is essentially an extended chase in which the Doctor mostly fails to find the Dalek in time and when she does find it, fails to effectively contain it.

The interplay between Graham and Ryan has been one of the strengths of the season but, to be honest, I felt it had reached its natural conclusion at the end of The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos and what we got here felt rather tacked on, seeming to stop the story instead of fitting naturally into the story. Other weaknesses were inherited from series 11: Yaz was underused (again) despite the fact that the Dalek steals a police car and murders two police officers which, you would have thought, would have provided an excellent route to showcase her and her background a bit more. Cute as Mitch and Lin were, and nice as it was that they weren't simply killed off once the script had no more use for them, the Tardis became even more crowded than usual. It was nice that Ryan's Dad and Chekov's microwave oven got to feature in the defeat of the Dalek but I was a little disappointed that it was Ryan's Dad's idea - once again we missed the chance for the Doctor to do something brilliant (apart from slide across the floor obviously - it depresses me that the most brilliant thing she did in Resolution was slide across the floor).

I was interested by the moment the Doctor asks for affirmation from the others that she has offered the Dalek a chance. It was a odd moment of anxiety. Previous Doctors, of course, have often offered their enemies false choices, effectively goading them into self-destruction. I wasn't quite sure if this was an implied criticism of that previous behaviour, or the first real sign we've had that this Doctor has a weakness - some anxiety about whether she is fair enough or kind enough or something.*

I thought Resolution was one of the better Chibnall scripts for this series. It was fast paced, exciting, with some nice bits in it. But I still fundamentally feel that the Doctor isn't getting enough to do in these stories, and it was the same here.

* While it would be nice for her to have a bit more character depth, I'll be disappointed we get some kind of storyline about a flaw so female coded as lack of self-confidence.

Comments

[a_cubed]

The affirmation from the companions I though was quite an interesting comparison with Capaldi's Doctor asking "Am I a good man?". The Doctor in general, just after regeneration particularly, in recent years has been trying to answer the question of who they are and what their purpose is. We've seen other long-lived characters who lose all empathy, become tyrants. The Master, Rassilon, Lady Me (so some extent).
I'm also reminded of Davison's Doctor when Tegan left "it appears I must do better".

[purplecat]

I'd forgotten about Capaldi's "Am I a good man?"

I do keep wondering if some of my dissatisfaction with the thirteenth Doctor is the problem that we tend to hold women to higher standards - on the other hand I was dissatisfied with the ninth for very similar reasons so I suspect it is that I just prefer my Doctor Who to have the Doctor as a more clearly central character.

[vivdunstan]

I've been really disappointed with Chris Chibnall's scripts this year, though I went in with very low expectations, based on his past Doctor Who and Torchwood writing. I think he's a better showrunner than scriptwriter. But I liked much about this one. I definitely like a lone Dalek origin story, and there was much that I liked, including the Quatermass and the Pit vibes.

Where I struggled was with the Ryan and his Dad bits. I'd been watching and enjoying exciting Dalek stuff, and then they'd appear, and have a prolonged angsty discussion, and it would totally kill the atmosphere and pacing for me. I do wonder if this sort of scene is what Chris Chibnall was happier writing. As it was it was a story of two parts for me, one very good, surprisingly so on his earlier form, and the other not good at all.

I also thought this was a far better finale to the series than the final episode we had before. And I quite liked that it was seasonal but without the forced seasonality of many prior episodes. So yes, general thumbs up, with some reservations.

[purplecat]

It's odd because up until Resolution I would have said that Chibnall had mostly done pretty well integrating Graham and Ryan stuff with the ongoing stories. It's at its clunkiest in Arachnids when they postpone discussing Ryan's father's letter because they are being attacked by spiders, but it never seemed to slow stuff down until Resolution where it suddenly felt very out of place.

I've not, in general, been a big fan of the NuWho season finales, so I didn't mind Ranskoor av Kolos being lower key and while I'm fonder of the Christmas specials in general, I definitely felt that the Christmas theme was overdone, so it was, as you say, nice to see a new year theme instead.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I think I thought it was OK-but-not-great at the time, but it's telling that less than a month on, I can hardly remember anything about it.

[purplecat]

I'm struggling with a few of the details from the middle. I think it has a strong open and a fairly strong close but if you watched it with a critical eye, you'd probably find there wasn't much happening for 10-15 minutes in the middle there somewhere.