Revolution of the Daleks

[purplecat]

It was fine.

Like Resolution - the holiday special from 2018 - there were definite moments in this where things seemed to be going slow despite everything that was going on. In Resolution it was mostly the segment where the Doctor follows what the lone Dalek is doing from the Tardis and seemed to reflect some of the issues with series 11 where the Doctor often felt curiously passive. Here, at least, the Doctor was taking a more active role but somehow the story didn't quite fit its length.

I'd been very much looking forward to the return of Captain Jack and while bits of it were a lot of fun - particularly his interactions with Yaz - his interactions with the Doctor herself were strangely muted and not as fun as I'd hoped. A whole load of questions are left untouched like whether he would wish to rejoin her on her travels and whether she would have him and while the episode probably had enough going on with Ryan and Graham's departure and Yaz's obsession it felt odd to bring him back and not actually address his relationship with the Doctor herself.

This did feel a bit like the middle of a long arc, and hopefully it is. Jack Robertson remains unresolved as a protagonist not quite nasty enough for the Doctor to take direct steps against, but liable to cause trouble. The Doctor's imprisonment by the Judoon must surely also be unresolved since she escaped rather than being released and of course there is the whole "who am I really?" question still hanging. I thought that the Doctor's interactions with Ryan on that topic were particularly well done.

Bits were clever: I liked the resolution with the second Tardis. Bits were odd: It wasn't clear to me what Robertson was actually doing once he was on the Dalek ship - had he miscalculated? was he just improvising? I thought the companion departure was well-handled. All in all, I thought this continued what I felt were the positive steps taken in series 12 to give the Doctor more agency and to try to do more with Yaz but, as sir_guinglain has pointed out, there is a tendency with a lot of these stories to have more characters than necessary wandering around in a big group and Resolution definitely suffered from that in places.


In general I think Resolution of the Daleks continued the improvements from series 12, but I nevertheless don't think we've had a really excellent episode since series 11's Demons of the Punjab. I'll be interested to see if the changes in the Tardis crew can help resolve some of the issues that I feel have dogged the series since the arrival of the Thirteeth Doctor.

Comments

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I didn't dislike it. I didn't particularly enjoy it either. I'm not sure why. I think Chris Chibnall's understanding of what makes good Doctor Who and my understanding of it are so different that I just can't engage with it. I don't even hate it the way I hated some of Russell T Davies' episodes. It's just there.

I think Rosa is the only Chibnall-era story I would term "excellent" although a couple of other episodes from that first season were good.

[purplecat]

Agreed. I had a distinct "it passes the time well enough" feel about it without feeling any real enthusiasm for it.

[sir_guinglain]

I have no great enthusiasm for writing up my review notes for much the same reason.

[a_cubed]

Weve gone into a rewatch of Eleven (having watched the Christmas Specials in December) and I noted that The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is a Chris Chibnall-written episode. It's just about my least favourite 11 story. The bloodthirsty Silurian warriors are annoying and over the top. The humans are also somewhat over the top. The only bits I like are the Amy-Rory parts of the episode, but as those are mostly over-arching plotline I suspects that's Moff's input rather than Chibnall's.

[purplecat]

Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is definitely one of those stories that seems to be driven mostly by a combination of stupidity and unreasonableness from all the characters involved.

I liked both Chibnall's contributions to the final Amy/Rory season but up until that moment I'd been largely unimpressed by his work and assumed he mostly kept getting jobs because he could at least deliver something workable on time and within budget (which, I understand, is not as easy as one might think). I can't say I've changed this opinion much since - he's clearly capable of competently running a show of the complexity of Doctor Who (a non-trivial skill), but I don't see much sign of excellence.

[a_cubed]

In some ways I think the older BBC rule about showrunner (split into producer and scripts editor roles, then) not being eligible to write scripts might have been a good one. OK, for some shows which are one person's vision (Sherlock) that might have been a poor approach, but for a show like DW having one person focus on the ongoing story while others write individual scripts seems like a better approach. Davis always seemed a good show runner but a mediocre scripter-writer to me. Moffatt seemed the reverse. So far, Chibnall is more like Davis.

[purplecat]

Davies' writing style definitely didn't particularly mesh with my taste, but I think it's hard to argue that his individual scripts weren't often hugely successful on their own terms, and on the more general terms of appealing strongly to a wide audience. Chibnall... hard to gauge, but viewing figures don't suggest the general audience is particularly hooked.

I suspect the problem is more that Dr Who is a sufficiently complex show that there are genuinely very few people capable of running it really well (as opposed to competently) and that kind of person doesn't actually crop up every five or so years which is what is needed. I'd be cautious about drawing generalities (division of responsibility, who writes the scripts etc) beyond that just because *gestures vaguely in the direction of low N and the changing TV landscape*

It's mildly heretical but I don't think it would necessarily hurt Dr Who, as an ongoing property, to exist in a 10 years on, 5 years off kind of cycle, but TV doesn't work like that.

[fredbassett]

I enjoyed it more than I susually do, but then I tend to like eps with the daleks.

It does always feel like the inhabitants of the earth ought to recognise daleks immediately, though, as they have invaded quite a lot, or is there some sort of explanation for that which I've forgotten.

One of the problems I'm finding with the current doctor is that she feels very much like a woman scripted by men, and it's hard to put my finger on what draws me to that conclusion, but it's something I've noticed a lot in crime novels. I'd like to see what afemale script writer would do with her. I also agree that there was a wasted opportunity in her interactions with Jack. Again, almost as though the writers didn't know how to handle the dynamic of female/male rather than Jack's previously obvious homoerotic flirting.

[purplecat]

We had a bit of a discussion about whether people should know about Daleks or not. During the 11th Doctor's run there was at least one and arguably several "universe gets reset" bits which I thought were very much Moffat doing a hand wave in order to allow him to set stories on modern day Earth without everyone going "Oh! Aliens again!" - at any rate it was a kind of "some things have changed and some things haven't and we're not going to specify which but stop writing to us about continuity problems with episodes shown 40 years ago and if we want people not to know what Daleks are then we can do that too."

We're couldn't remember if the Daleks had invaded since then but we eventually thought not, or at least not in conspicuously large numbers.

I agree about the writing of the Thirteenth Doctor. I mean she and Jack should have been flirting like crazy and yet... it was like the writers couldn't work out how to hit the same note of fondness combined with physical attraction without going down a romance road I suspect they wanted to avoid.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

Re: flirting, I wondered if things were toned down because this was Jack's first appearance post-#MeToo and they were worried how it would look nowadays. It did seem weirdly out of character though.

[purplecat]

It's certainly possible they were worried about the optics - though I think that goes back to Fred's point about a lack of women in the writing team.