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BBC Revolution of the Daleks |
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| Story No. | 324 | 
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| Production Code | Series 12, New Year's special | |
| Dates | January 1, 2021 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Chris Chibnall Directed by Lee Haven Jones Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens |
| Synopsis: The British government unveils a new security drone. |
"It's The Security Equivalent of the iPhone" by Jason A. Miller 26/4/21
[The Doctor explains the events of The Timeless Children to Ryan]
Ryan: Seriously? And how do you feel about that?
The Doctor: Mostly... angry.
Yeah. You 'n' me both, kiddo.
At the end of Series 12, the Doctor was taken into custody by the Judoon, and imprisoned. Twenty minutes into the very next episode, Revolution of the Daleks, she escapes. Cleverly and thanks to a beloved returning character, she escapes.
What was the point of all that, then?
At 71 minutes, Revolution of the Daleks is the length of a three-part Classic Series episode. The Doctor's return to "the fam" occurs roughly 25 minutes in, at about where the Part One cliffhanger would have been. Did the Doctor's imprisonment - which is implied to have taken up a couple of decades of her life, in between The Timeless Children, and this, the very next episode, impact the plot in any way? Or was the imprisonment merely a flimsy excuse to keep her out of the action for the first third of Revolution?
Certainly Chris Chibnall has set himself a "nightmare brief" in this New Year's Day special. The return of the Daleks. The introduction of another sinister new Prime Minister. The return of Captain Jack. The return of the Daleks. A Power of the Daleks/Victory of the Daleks-type setup, where the Daleks are introduced to humanity in a subservient capacity -- via the return of Jack Robertson, a less-than-beloved character from Arachnids in the UK, but beloved to those of us in the US, because he's played by Chris Noth, who's played square-jawed leading men on American TV screens for literally 30 years. So the prison subplot didn't serve a storytelling purpose in that it shifted the ongoing arc of the series, but did buy Chibnall 20 to 25 minutes of screen time to set up all these returning pieces.
That's a lot of time spent watching Chris Chibnall clearing his throat.
Of course, throat-clearing is forgivable, if the individual scenes are good and the eventual climax is impressive and/or surprising. You know else has a lot of throat-clearing? City of Death Part One. Once all the disparate components come together and are explained, Part One of City leads into two great cliffhangers at the end of Parts Two and Three, with tons of witty dialogue along the way, and a lyrical Part Four finale. Revolution of the Daleks is not City of Death, but once it gets going, it does so reasonably well.
The Daleks open this episode as robotic security drones, a collaboration between Robertson, his tech guy, and the new PM. But at what would be the Part Two (of three) cliffhanger, the Daleks' secret plans come together, and the slaughter begins. Hey, it took Power of the Daleks five of its six episodes to reach that point, and for the year 2021, the look of the new Daleks and their upgraded extermination technique looks great to the eye that it is watching it on its premiere date (of course, I leave it to the children of the year 2051 to decide if those effects have aged well).
"Can we stop there, and pretend there's no bad news?" -- the Doctor
The plot ends, cleverly and excitingly, with ten minutes still left to go in the broadcast. The Dalek forces --- Robertson's security drones, and then a fleet of traditional Daleks brought in to wipe out Robertson's impure race -- are dispatched in interesting and visually clever ways, but there are still ten minutes left to fill before the end credits.
"Two hearts -- one happy, one sad." -- the Doctor
It was no surprise going into this episode that we were losing two of the three companions, the BBC itself having leaked the news prior to airdate. The last ten minutes are given over to those departures. And the departure scenes are good. The New Series has historically had problems letting its companions go. In order to separate the companion from the TARDIS, the first two showrunners, Davies and Moffat, came up with increasingly tortured and emotionally manipulatives ways to write out main characters. Rose got separated out into another universe. Donna had to have her memories wiped or she'd die (or something). Two later companions were killed, only to come back to life via bizarro immortality, and Amy and Rory were banished to the past in a ridiculous and illogical way. Only Martha got to leave on her own terms, but otherwise, companion departures are generally overly dramatic and overly sentimental in the New Series.
Revolution of the Daleks, on the other hand, gets it right. Ryan simply decides to just... leave, and Graham, his grandfather by marriage, elects to stay behind with him. Jodie Whittaker plays this remarkably well, with quiet heartbreak. Each departing companion gets a parting gift suggesting new adventures, and the episode ends with a high shot of Ryan, whose dyspraxia always came and went as the needs of the plot demanded (um, yeah, I have dyspraxia, and that's not how this works, that's not how any of this works), still utterly failing to learn how to ride a bicycle. That's a throwback Classic Series way to write out a companion, quietly and with a dash of sentiment but never too much. Death doesn't have to be cheated, alternate universes don't have to be involved. Sometimes, a companion can just... leave.
Oh, and a new companion was introduced via post-credits teaser, in a cleverly-written scene that at first appears to be a teaser for a different show entirely (but listen to the horoscope and it's all there), but I'm not from the UK, have literally never heard of the performer in question, and for a second thought that I was watching the return of Eric Roberts as the Master, but, no, it isn't -- it's a surprise new companion, and a reason for us to keep watching into Season 13.
Count me in, Doctor.
That Word, It Has No Meaning by Hugh Sturgess 28/4/25
Something that is hard to get a grip on in the Chibnall era is the way that the showrunner's own scripts mean nothing. They're not simply hackneyed and filled with dreadful dialogue, they're completely vacant of themes or points. RTD (positively, but still significantly) described Power of the Doctor as "a ten year old's fantasy version of Doctor Who", which really makes a lot of sense: this is Doctor Who made by someone with no understanding of how things like character or theme work, so it ends up assembled out of bits of other television and other Doctor Who into something shaped like a Doctor Who story but lacking any spark or purpose.
Revolution of the Daleks is a great illustration of that. At the time, it was another "phew!" episode, when the dominant fan reaction was relief that at least it was entertaining, wasn't a complete production clusterfuck and didn't do anything like endorse the Daleks or something (the fallout from Kerblam!'s ending paying dividends here for expectations). As I said about Spyfall, Chibnall's late style of "everything, everywhere, all at once" generally keeps the audience from getting bored and distracts us from realising how it never goes anywhere or means anything.
But on rewatch, what really comes through is how much of a near-miss this is. There's an incredible density of juicy premises here. We have the Doctor beaten down and devoid of hope in prison. We have the companions alone on Earth forced to put what they learnt aboard the TARDIS to use to save the world. We have a Trump-analogue doing a corrupt deal with a (presumably Tory) politician to deploy Daleks as automated drones to police the streets --- an idea with incredibly felicitous timing at the end of 2020, after months of protests against over-militarised policing in the US. We also have the return of Captain Jack, the first companion from the pre-Chibnall show to star alongside the thirteenth Doctor, potentially casting her in a new light.
But this is not an episode about the Doctor losing hope and then regaining it, because she goes from being hopeless and resigned to her fate in prison to back to her old self once released like a switch has been thrown. Being lost and hopeless in prison is just a contentless excuse Chibnall came up with to justify Jack rescuing her. It's not an episode about the companions saving the day without the Doctor, because they're patently useless: apparently their only plan to find out what Robertson is doing with the Daleks is to... go up and ask him and get immediately stopped by security. It's not an episode about the use of military technology by domestic police forces, because by the time the drones have been rolled out we've switched to the plot of the cloned Dalek creatures turning the drones back into regular Daleks. And it's not an episode about Captain Jack, who's just... here. It's a not-an-episode!
Jack is dreadful here. It doesn't help that the supposedly ageless Jack looks so haggard, but the character serves no purpose. It's an excuse for a lump of RTD-era nostalgia to be dumped on us: the painfully over-detailed reference to Rose, or the verbatim retread of the Doctor/Jack "have you had work done" exchange in Utopia, or the use of the squareness gun. There's a deep lack of any reason for this to be Jack rather than (say) River or Martha, summed up in the repeated references to the character's immortality that never amount to anything. "I'm Captain Jack Harkness, and I'm immortal!" is delivered like a triumphant fist-pump or even a catch-phrase, when we never see Jack's immortality at work, and I have no idea why he'd think that was an apposite thing to tell the Daleks.
That said, I did enjoy the scene between Yaz and Jack. There are inklings of an interesting point in Yaz's line that she'd rather have never met the Doctor if she was just going to have that life ripped away from her. It's an interesting prefiguring of Yaz's eventual departure, wherein the Doctor just decides that she'd rather not have Yaz aboard the TARDIS when she regenerates, so gently and politely fires her from the position of being her friend. It's certainly of a piece with Chibnall's broader theme across his era of companions as the selfless servants of a capricious, opaque Doctor who doesn't give a shit about them.
Likewise, the barest effort to concoct some point or theme is evident in the Doctor's three lines about not being sure who she is. (As the thirteenth Doctor might say, gold star for effort, but pointing to a drama that used to win BAFTAs and saying "two scenes have a theme in them!" isn't so much damning with faint praise as insulting your own intelligence.) Unfortunately, the scene between the Doctor and Ryan during the "four minutes to Osaka" (shot long after the rest of the episode, hence why Ryan suddenly slips on a beanie to cover Tosin Cole's longer hair) is weak even by Chibnall's standards, and Cole and Whittaker fail to sell it.
The dialogue is a sludge of pure cliche uttered so unironically as to be hilarious --- Ryan's deadpan reply "And how do you feel about that?" --- and lines that sound like the lyrics to an uninspired pop song: "Confront the new, or the old, and then everything will be all right." It feels like a hasty draft Chibnall dashed off and never got back to --- and it probably is. The characters don't even qualify as ciphers; they're blank spaces where someone has scribbled "cipher to be inserted later". Cole and Whittaker aren't dreadful here (a controversial opinion perhaps, but I don't think Cole gave a bad performance as Ryan, just a disengaged one), but how would one imbue this Hallmark-card-level tripe with humanity?
That this scene is about the Doctor's identity crisis after The Timeless Children makes the failure to be drama even starker, because didn't the whole Timeless Child thing stem from Chibnall's feelings about his own adoption? This is something he has personal experience of, and his insight into that amounts to the Doctor feeling "mostly... angry [...] All I kept thinking was, if I'm not who I thought I was, then who am I?" and Ryan's advice that "Things change all the time, and they should, cos they have to. Same with people. Sometimes we get a bit scared, cos new can be a bit scary." I have no insight into the experience of finding out you're adopted, and I think I could still have written these lines when I was 12. (Also just check out that line "they should, cos they have to". Change is good because it's inevitable? Or perhaps "have to" means "morally necessary", in which case the line means "change is good because it's good". To quote Steven Moffat's recent show Douglas is Cancelled, Chibnall is aiming here for "net zero cognitive content".)
Something that does feel like it comes from Chibnall personally is the Doctor's remark, of the Daleks, "for a race born out of mutation, they're really obsessed with purity". To me, this is like X-ray vision of Chibnall's politics. It's an implication of hypocrisy, that by their own logic the Daleks are inherently impure, but the argument makes zero sense and relies on accepting the Daleks' own premise that there is such a thing as a "pure" genome. It's the Doctor Who equivalent of "Drumpf", the lazy, conceited brain-fart of someone so thoroughly uninterested in understanding how the world works that his only argument against fascism is that it's LOGICALLY CONTRADICTORY. It feels like a true insight into Chibnall's mind because it's the work of someone with no opinions on the world at all beyond cliches he's stolen from the noise of pop culture. No wonder the thirteenth Doctor is so blithe about leaving Robertson in place to cause more harm.
Which brings me to the end of Robertson's story. The abruptness of the smash cut from the Doctor glaring at him, demanding he explain his betrayal of humanity, to him on national TV getting the credit for stopping the Daleks, is clearly intentional. It's meant to be blackly comic. But what the fuck is it supposed to be saying about the Doctor? That she's a craven and hapless ignoramus who bought his blatant lie about acting as a decoy, or that she saw through it but wasn't able to do anything about it?
It's not as though there wasn't an earthly, legal recourse for her. Robertson had a government employee murdered so he could steal dangerous technology, then did a corrupt deal to get a government contract, which produced machines that promptly murdered dozens of people including the prime minister. And that's not counting all the workers in Osaka who have disappeared into the Daleks' farm. The Doctor could simply expose all this to the world. But it appears she did... nothing. I say "appears" because of course the scene cuts and we have no idea what she went on to do, except that it wasn't anything that stopped him taking all the credit.
This takes on an even more perverse air when you realise that this is the second time the Doctor has glared impotently at Robertson despite there being easy ways to bring him down to size. In Arachnids in the UK, the Doctor is clearly livid with him (as conveyed by Jodie Whittaker's default scowl to indicate annoyance/anger) but does nothing. Yet he is brandishing a handgun (a weapon civilians cannot legally own in the UK) to threaten people, including a police officer! Despite the Doctor being friends with that very same police officer, neither she nor Yaz ever thinks of using this against him (and think of the better world we'd be living in if Chibnall thought to give Yaz a moment like that in Series 11). Just as in Revolution of the Daleks, the only commentary on this is Graham expressing horror.
That Jack Robertson is a crude Trump parody makes it seem like this means something massive. This feels like an absolutely savage statement about the Doctor. It's made all the more savage, both by the sense of humour the episode has about it, and also by the fact that this is the sort of problem the Doctor should be able to easily solve. This isn't the Doctor failing to stop Trump from tearing up the nuclear deal with Iran or some equivalent prosaic thing. The episode is twisting the knife in the Doctor's heart by saying even if Trump came right into the centre of the Doctor's world and allied with as iconic a Doctor Who symbol as the Daleks themselves, she'd still be useless against him, that's how pathetic the Doctor is.
Rather like this era's attitude to companions --- which I discussed in my review of Power of the Doctor --- this is a message with breathtakingly bleak implications for the show. And for a second it looks like it actually means it. As Ryan and Graham sit watching the news that Robertson is being hailed as the saviour of humanity, Ryan has no difficulty believing that Robertson is getting away with it again. It seems like the bitter fruit of experience, that watching the Doctor utterly fail to stop Robertson time and again has imbued him with cynicism. So when he says he wants to leave the TARDIS because "my planet needs me", it feels like a deliberate, intentional point on Chibnall's part: the Doctor can't save us from Trump, Brexit or any of the real-world things the audience might be worried about, only we can save ourselves.
But in the very next scene it turns out that Ryan thinks the planet needs him to investigate trolls in Finland and "gravel creatures" in South Korea. (How exactly Ryan can do this without abandoning the very mates he said also needed him and why exactly he needs to leave the TARDIS to do this when these are exactly the sorts of generic Doctor Who stories the Chibnall era produces anyway aren't clear.) The spectre of a point apparently raised isn't merely lowered again but detonated in front of us. It's an even bleaker, more savage bit of black comedy than Robertson's triumph, but at the audience's expense. The episode is laughing at us for expecting this to mean something, for thinking that the Doctor being completely unable to stop Donald Trump was anything more than a joke Chibnall found funny. What comes through is breathtaking contempt for the show itself. It didn't even occur to Chibnall that viewers might want the Doctor to do more than blow up Daleks and hang out with Captain Jack, or that they might want the characters to make decisions as significant as leaving the show forever for reasons that mean something.
Revolution of the Daleks, sitting awkwardly suspended at the end of 2020 with ten months since the last episode and another ten months until the next, isn't the worst episode of the Chibnall era by a mile. But does another episode show better that this is Doctor Who by a writer who has zero interest in saying anything at all? Not just zero interest, but actively hostile to it! The episode makes a joke out of the idea of saying something!
Do I want the show to directly instruct us to become political activists? No. Do I want the Doctor to bring down Donald Trump or any other real-life political figure? Also no. I understand that Doctor Who is primarily escapism and we should be mature enough to know that our media consumption habits don't need grandiose political justifications. But what I want is for the show and the characters to be taken seriously. If the show introduces a Trump-analogue and has the Doctor prove utterly, pathetically incapable of stopping him, I want that to be treated seriously enough to mean something, not as a gag that's instantly forgotten about. Doctor Who doesn't have to take itself seriously, but I want the show's creators to take it seriously, as a drama, not as a janky assembly of set pieces, Pavlovian nostalgia-bait and failed comedy stitched together by the sheer fact that this is Doctor Who and thus supposedly inherently worthwhile.