Revolution of the Daleks Review
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The nice thing about the festering debacle that was The Timeless Children immediately followed by the *entire rest of 2020* is that it finally lowers your standards enough to appreciate Chibnall. Was this good? Absolutely not. Did I care anymore? Also no. So, you know. Detente. It was, at the very least, not actively, malignantly bad. It was instead just sort of inoffensively there. An entirely adequate piece of Doctor Who. Given that even Davies and Moffat failed to achieve that about half the time on their Christmas specials, this has to be taken as some sort of result.
For the most part, what we have here is Chibnall’s worst instincts being overcome by sheer volume. At the end of the day a double companion departure, two returning villains, and Captain Jack is simply enough stuff that as long as you don’t do something like have the Doctor stand still for half an episode while the villain explains the plot to her you can probably just about make it work. Things explode at a basically reasonable frequency with emotional beats in the middle. One of the many problems with the Chibnall era has been that it’s never been entirely clear who it’s for. This is for hung over people who watched the show in 2008. There’s a reasonable number of those on New Year’s. So, you know. Job done. This is fine, as the kids say.
The problem with banal adequacy is that it’s easier to note the things that went wrong than the virtues. The directing was flat and unimaginative. (What on Earth was that “Yaz and the Doctor face the camera to deliver their final lines” bit? Why did we pan up the Dalek clone farm over a dramatic chord twice?) The emotional beats as ever suggest that Chibnall thinks they’re called that because you’re supposed tol club the viewer over the head with them, having characters simply assert the growth and characterization that Chibnall had forgotten to write for them previously. John Barrowman and Chris North spend much of the episode in a perverse duel to see who can offer the flattest line reading. (North ultimately runs away with it, as Barrowman’s efforts are undermined by his narcissistic desperation to be a fan favorite.) The Doctor apparently can’t be assed to even try escaping from prison for decades because she’s too sad over The Timeless Children. Which, I mean, that’s also kind of how I feel about it, but for fuck’s sake, even Eight tried to escape from prison regularly and he spent most of his era with amnesia about his amnesia.
The most egregious part of it, and the thing I’ll no doubt pick up most on if I ever hate myself enough to do an Eruditorum of this era, is the bizarre squandering of Daleks as cops.…
There isn’t any promised land. This is just… it’s a superstition that you have picked up from all the humanity you’ve stuffed inside yourself.
After quite a lot of delay, Eruditorum Press is proud to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy. Adapted from a blog about Doctor Who I imagine you’ve heard of, this is the revised version of my essays on the final years of the original television show and the first phase of the Wilderness Years, the Virgin New Adventures. Over 600 pages it covers every televised Sylvester McCoy episode and the highlights of the Virgin line. It’s also got a huge bevy of book-exclusive essays, including new ones on Nightshade and The Pit, an essay on Lloyd Rose’s The Algebra of Ice, an essay on the recent Seventh Doctor comics by Andrew Cartmel, and a bunch of essays on arcane points of Doctor Who continuity like “When Was the Time War?” and “Was He Half-Woven on His Mother’s Side?” 
Just wanted to remind everyone that we’re now in the final day of the 
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A quick 
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