Just More Suffering (Revolution of the Daleks)
It’s January 1st, 2021. Wham is at number one with “Last Christmas.” Mariah Carey, Band Aid, Elton John, and the Pogues featuring Kirsty Maccoll also chart. In news… well, there’s been a bit. Obviously we’ve already talked about the pandemic. But we haven’t talked about the 350,000 confirmed COVID deaths in the US, or the 72,000 in the UK—a full 1% of the population in each country. Nor have we talked about the appalling response in each country, from bleach injections to Eat Out to Help Out. There’s Keir Starmer becoming leader of the Labour Party. There’s Ruth Bader Ginsberg dying and being replaced by Amy Comey Barrett. There’s the Arecibo Telescope collapsing.
And then, of course, there’s the election. The agonizingly slow motion battle between the ongoing collapse into fascism under Trump and the bland inadequacy of centrist liberalism. With passport issuance fucked by the pandemic, the situation is alarming enough that our family decides to become gun owners. Ultimately the not as evil guys win, and it feels like more relief than it should. I remember when the last couple of states were properly called—it was an unseasonably warm day for November, and I was downtown on the Ithaca Commons, which felt effervescent in a way it hadn’t all pandemic. But, of course, that still rolled into the unsettling two month period of Trump’s attempted coup. By the new year it was largely clear that Biden would successfully take office, but the uncertainty remained, hanging over everything, as would become especially clear just five days after this aired.
Mostly, life lumbered on. We decided to officially adopt Christine. I finally dusted off Last War in Albion and tore through writing the rest of Volume 2. Vaccines came out; I think by New Year’s my wife, who was in the first wave as a nurse, had her first dose but not her second. To the extent that there was an end—and that’s a complicated notion to be sure—it was in sight.
And then there was Doctor Who. Much like the music charts, Revolution of the Daleks felt out of time. It’s not just the absurd return to 80s-style naming, turning to the title that literally everyone had thought of in spite of the complete lack of actual revolution in the story. (To be fair, previous stories contained at best dubious quantities of resurrection, revelation, or remembrance.) Nor is it the presence of a Theresa May stand-in a year and a half after Boris Johnson took office—a fact that’s even more puzzling when you consider that this was shot in November 2019, four months after May’s resignation. No, at the end of the day it’s more fundamental than that—the fact that this is picking up on a nearly year-old cliffhanger in which the year in question was 2020.
Three years on it seems even more dated, what with both actors involved in its puzzling decision to feature two separate returning characters named Jack becoming uncastable over the course of the next year. The less interesting of these is Chris Noth, straightforwardly outed as a sex pest at year’s end. But by that point the Whittaker era was in the can and it was already clear they would not be bringing Jack Robertson back for a third engagement, to the presumable disappointment of someone, somewhere. Noth, after all, scarcely casts a long shadow over Doctor Who.
The same cannot be said of John Barrowman, who a few months later would find himself collateral damage of the accusations against Noel Clarke. What’s notable here is that the behavior in question—a repeated tendency to whip his dick out—was well documented. The clip that went around in the aftermath was of Camille Coduri talking at a con about Barrowman placing it on her shoulder, but he’d been reprimanded for it all the way back in 2008 when he did it on a BBC Radio 1 show, and Tennant and Tate joked about it in the “Ballad of Russell and Julie” sketch the next year. There’s a lot to discuss about the fact that over a decade passed before fandom widely embraced the position that this was massively fucked up, but it seems more pertinent to just make up for lost time and think about exactly who John Barrowman has been all this time.
I don’t just mean a sex pest, nor am I terribly interested in wallowing in the differences between his conduct and the outright violence that both Noth and Clarke have been accused of. Nevertheless, it is notable that Barrowman’s phallic antics have always been part and parcel of a larger picture that had seemed distasteful long before 2021. I talked back in Fugitive of the Judoon about Barrowman’s blatantly false accusations about Moffat squashing further Torchwood seasons, but it’s worth highlighting the real single biggest reason there wasn’t more Torchwood—or second biggest, after the reality that Miracle Day was a flop. The main issue was that Davies abandoned his plans to base himself in Los Angeles and continue making big US/UK coproductions to move back to Wales and care for his dying husband. Much like Barrowman’s behavior, this was widely known at the time. And yet Barrowman decided to wage a disingenuous PR campaign against Moffat (who, recall, had wanted to put him in A Good Man Goes to War, but couldn’t get the scheduling to work) that lasted all the way until Chibnall cast him and he crowed about being glad to “finally have a showrunner who appreciates Jack.” This is, to say the least, fucking gross.
It’s also worth casting the mind back to the Doctors Revisited posts I made whilst winding down the first run of TARDIS Eruditorum, in which I remark in bemused passing at Barrowman’s blatantly false story of watching The Highlanders and being excited at Jamie’s arrival, a story that aired before Barrowman was even born. And sure, it’s only two data points, but it sure is two data points of Barrowman blatantly lying. More to the point, it’s two data points of Barrowman blatantly lying to manipulate fandom. And it’s worth further delving into Barrowman’s relationship with fandom. For instance, here’s a fun trivia fact—at the time of writing this, Barrowman was the most expensive Doctor Who actor on Cameo, running $200, fully $75 more than Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy, and, somehow more comically, $30 more than Miriam Margolyes.
This isn’t a portrait of someone who’s predatory in the same way as Noth or Clarke, but it’s still plainly a picture of a predator. Barrowman is preying upon fandom. And sure, he’s hardly the only one—it’s an accusation I’ve leveled at by now countless spinoff mediocrities. It’s an accusation you can make about the entire convention circuit, of which Barrowman remains a fixture. Certainly it’s one you can make about Cameo, which is little more than a techbro attempt to disrupt the parasocial connections industry. But for all that fandom has systemic problems, there’s something tangibly and nauseatingly narcissistic about Barrowman’s particular flavor of grift. Maybe that’s a homophobic reaction to Barrowman’s specifically flamboyant approach to his public persona; maybe it’s just the fact that he went around thwacking people with his fucking cock. Either way, it leaves you wanting to come back for less.
The reason I bring this up isn’t to piss on the reputational grave of John Barrowman so much as to say point out that it all feels of a part for Doctor Who’s content era. Barrowman fits oddly perfectly nestled between the pro-Amazon rhetoric and the handing of the Master over to the Nazis, just like that awkward and pointless recap of Parting of the Ways Jack gives to Yaz fits snugly next to the Morbius Doctors. (And note that Davies excised the equivalent Mel line about Time and the Rani from The Giggle.) That the show is leaning bizarrely upon glories that you can’t even call faded—consider the fact that at best one and a half of the R-Word of the Daleks stories are actually good—is par for the course.
Here, however, this approach leads to the jaw-dropping spectacle of the show managing to waste the concept “Daleks as cops” in 2021. Sure, the weight of that concept had been turned up dramatically beyond what Chibnall could have intended following the resurgence of Black Lives Matter in 2020—another way this story dates itself—but it’s hard to imagine that would have helped anything in the face of the fact that Chris Chibnall seems to genuinely believe that the worst thing about Robertson’s plan is the fact that it’s making use of stolen alien technology as opposed to the basic fact of Dalek cops. The story manages to avoid going full Kerblam! and actually having the Doctor give a moralizing speech about this, but the theft is still where all the moral focus is, and it’s part and parcel of the era’s bizarre “fair play” notion of morality.
Or, I mean, I say jaw-dropping. But really, who cared? Consider Ryan’s departure, which is explained with… nothing. We don’t get any scenes of Ryan’s life here. There’s no conversation setting up the departure. Chibnall goes out of his way to give the Doctor and Ryan a big scene together—one of the longest in the episode, in fact—but devotes it entirely to a conversation about the Timeless Child that says nothing that wasn’t already said in Fugitive of the Judoon and The Timeless Children itself. Then, at the end of the episode, Ryan just leaves. And the thing is, it doesn’t even feel weird. It’s not just that having a reason to leave the TARDIS would be the first piece of actual characterization Ryan got since he fell off his bike for the first time. It’s that it genuinely doesn’t feel mysterious for a companion to just up and leave in this era. In many ways it’s the most directly that the companion has ever served as an audience identification figure.
Because the real takeaway from Revolution of the Daleks is simply that this is a show that isn’t merely out of step with the cultural conversation. It’s not even part of it. Indeed, when I posted the first version of this essay to Patreon, within the first hour three separate people commented that they’d forgotten the story existed. Even on GallifreyBase, it managed 891 comments in the rate/review thread within the first three weeks, versus 1,074 for The Church on Ruby Road (three weeks in the rearview mirror at the time of writing) and 1,116 for Resolution. The entire forum section for it only has 4,809 lifetime posts; Ruby Road already has 6,032, Resolution 7,306. If even the Doctor Who fans had stopped caring, you can just imagine what the general public thought. After eight months away and with eleven months before it’s back again, this episode disappeared like the stray fart it was. Doctor Who may have made the top ten for the week, but it’s got less cultural impact than it did when it was dying opposite Coronation Street.
In that regard, then, the Daleks once again provide their traditional role of serving as microcosms of their eras. Back in Resolution they demonstrated that even they couldn’t rouse Chibnall into saying something, but their appearance was still an event. As much as Chibnall’s cack-handed spoilerphobia diminished it, the barely teased Daleks and the slow build to their reveal were a cool move. But in the wake of the series torching more or less the entirety of established Doctor Who lore to no visible or coherent end, that’s no longer on the table. Daleks, double departures, and dick-whippers don’t carry any cultural weight when the show is no longer in any shape to do so. For all the nostalgia and milestones, this is a non-event episode.
September 9, 2024 @ 6:06 am
My father saw John Barrowman at a convention once, and then while walking back to his hotel saw Barrowman walking with a couple of fans. He observed that the way Barrowman acted in front of them in real life, the way he carried himself and moved, was identical to the way he plays Jack – he is someone who wants, so desperately, to be Jack, in real life. I’d honestly have to respect it if it wasn’t for, uh, all that other stuff.
September 9, 2024 @ 7:22 am
The only thing more deadly than the coronavirus is the mysterious mathematicalerrorvirus which appears to have caused 90% of the USA to disappear entirely, such that 350,000 people accounts for 1%…
(the correct figure is, of course, 0.1%; 1% would be 3,500,00.. and the US government would never allow that many people to die from a largely preventable illness! /s)
September 9, 2024 @ 8:08 am
I interviewed Barrowman once. He undoubtedly “gave good value”—by focusing on different areas of his career and life (his Scottish connections, musical theatre, his charity work) I managed to get three different interviews out of our half-hour chat. Yet it’s fair to say that I did find him slightly… off-putting. I was getting a performance – for the most part a loud one – and he was clearly beginning to realise that he would need new ways of keeping Doctor Who/Torchwood fandom interested in him in the longer term.
Incidentally, at one point, Barrowman laid his hand on my knee. I think he realised from my expression that he’d gone over a line, and he quickly withdrew. Later on, I joked that I would never wash those jeans again—I’d burn them. But, actually, that WAS a joke on my part. I hadn’t been that bothered by that physical connection, though I accept other people might have been.
I also had an opportunity, several years later, to interview Noel Clarke while he was promoting a film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. I found him to be an altogether more acerbic interviewee—not so much to me, but to his PR team. At the time I’d put that down chiefly to him having spent an entire soul-destroying day in a nondescript hotel room, being interviewed by a seemingly unending succession of journalists, most of whom hadn’t bothered to see his new film and just wanted to talk to him about Kidulthood. Or Doctor Who. Or that tiny role in Star Trek Into Darkness.
In his favour, Clarke didn’t seem to be interested in cultivating fandom to the degree Barrowman could be said to; I sensed he wanted to use his previous work as the foundation for future projects as a producer, director and writer—that he was more intent on impressing his industry peers rather than simply milking the convention circuit. The accusations made against Clarke, of course, have scuppered his chances of either: whether or not they’re true (“innocent until proven guilty”, etc), no one in the industry has been willing to risk any involvement with him.
As for Barrowman, I genuinely wish him no ill, despite his tendency (disingenuously, “for the fans”) to campaign to get himself back in Doctor Who (Or, lord help us, Torchwood.) To be honest, the thing I found most satisfying about the episode “Rogue” was that it could be said that even Russell T Davies has decided it was time to replace Jack Harkness in his show.
September 9, 2024 @ 11:32 am
I think it may go further than replacing Jack with Rogue. I’ve thought ever since Russell came back that one reason he might have done so is that his first era of Doctor Who so heavily features Clarke and Barrowman that rewatching it would be an unpleasant experience for many people.
Consider what a repeat run of the RTD1 era excluding Mickey and Jack would be like. We wouldn’t see Rose meet the Doctor. We wouldn’t see Eccleston regenerate into Tennant. We wouldn’t see Sarah Jane Smith at all except in the news report of her death in “Turn Left”, unless “The End of Time” was included with Barrowman and Clarke’s scenes cut (which would also mean cutting Martha). Of the three main companions, only Donna would have any resolution to her story (once again assuming the inclusion of an edited “End of Time”), and even that would be messy and unsatisfying.
Perhaps saddest of all, two Hugo-winning stories, once regarded as timeless masterpieces to be handed down to future generations, would have to be dropped due to Barrowman and Clarke’s behavior. The RTD1 era, which at the beginning of 2010 stood complete as a vast narrative with a beginning, middle and end, one of the finest achievements in the history of television science fiction, would become a confusing, meaningless jumble of narrative non sequiturs and storylines that go nowhere.
It may have occurred to RTD that for him to get back the Doctor Who legacy he once had, he would have to do it all over again.
September 10, 2024 @ 1:40 am
I’m not sure about the veracity of this hypothetical world where “we edited out all the Bad People” actually exists and is watched by anyone ever.
September 10, 2024 @ 2:57 am
Thus far, the only casualty in this sense is Fear Her, taken off iPlayer because Huw Edwards, face of BBC news, is a nonce.
September 10, 2024 @ 7:31 am
Which is itself silly, but somewhat understandable since he is playing himself, thus advertising himself to the audience of the show, i.e. children.
But a hypothetical “RTD era cut down to only the Objectively Morally Good To Exist parts, and this is the only version anyone can or will ever watch” resembles a right-winger’s over-the-top bad-taste parody of cancel culture more than it resembles anything anyone in the world actually wants. I hope.
September 10, 2024 @ 10:58 am
I know my hypothetical repeat run would never happen, nor should it. It was merely a horrified fever dream that ran through my mind when I realized how serious the allegations against Clarke and Barrowman were, and a way of showing how tarnished the RTD1 era is for those unwilling to separate art from artists.
I was under the impression that “Fear Her” (an episode I consider severely underrated, although flawed) would be coming back to the iPlayer in a redubbed version without Edwards’ voice (and thus would still be shown in my absurd what-if scenario, along with edited versions of “New Earth” and “The End of Time, Part Two”). Is this correct?
September 10, 2024 @ 4:17 pm
I can live with that because…
…firstly, as mentioned it’s Huw presenting himself as Huw – it’s the same logic for editing Jimmy Savile out of A Fix With Sontarans…
…secondly, because if you wanted to nominate an episode you could delete entirely from Series 2 without doing the remotest bit of damage to the overall arc of the season – not just the plot structure but also the emotional development of the characters, the worldbuilding, the stories you can tell with Tennant and Piper in their respective roles – then Fear Her has got to be on the shortlist…
…and thirdly because Fear Her is rubbish and whilst we might wish to attempt redemptive readings around here, sometimes our limited number of time in this incarnation is better spent elsewhere.
In fact, I’d actually go so far as to say that Fear Her is less worthy of revisiting than any particular story of the Chibnall era. The Chibnall era is this big monumental failure, the ruin of a tower which was built on a foundation which was promising but flawed (Series 11) and so couldn’t sustain the weight its ambitions later placed on it in Series 12/13. It’s fractally bad, such that any particular chunk of it can become a framework from which you can explore the vaster vistas of its suckitude.
Fear Her, on the other hand, stands out only because it’s a Chibnall-tier episode in an RTD-tier era, a momentary brainfart. It tells us very little about the RTD era beyond that sometimes RTD and his collaborators had off days.
September 10, 2024 @ 8:14 am
It only just occurred to me now that if we ever see or hear of Martha again, there is definitely going to be a carefully oblique reference to something really unpleasant having happened to her husband.
September 11, 2024 @ 6:20 am
Part of me hopes that, should Martha ever return, she should just reference Tom Milligan. Don’t even bring up Mickey. Let fans bridge the gap themselves, and we can just brush the End of Time scene under the rug.
September 11, 2024 @ 8:38 am
I could see this exchange:
The Doctor: Martha Jones! It’s been forever! How’s your husband?
Martha: Tom’s great. He just made head of paediatrics.
The Doctor: (brief look of confusion, then wisely decides not to pursue it.)
September 11, 2024 @ 7:02 pm
The Doctor of End of Time doesn’t even know they’re married. He’s too far away to hear that dialogue exchange. All he knows is they work together as freelance fighters.
September 17, 2024 @ 1:02 am
I stand by my head canon that at some point Mickey became qualified as a wedding officiant and Martha was talking about the fact that he officiated her and Tom’s marriage.
September 9, 2024 @ 10:44 am
The only fun thing about this story is how it provides (yet another) beautiful synecdoche for Chibnall’s writing level in his era: Jack Harkness boldly announces that he’s immortal, and then goes the entire story without showing this off once. It’s a non-sequitur with no payoff both the hypothetical new viewer and the nostalgic fan!
That, and the opening of this story does present a really good argument to stop watching. The woman Doctor moping around over a loredump that another version of herself had to explain doesn’t matter, quoting Harry Potter while being so worthlessly passive she can’t even bother an escape attempt until she’s saved by the aging hero man from the showrunner’s decades old spin-off. Christ almighty.
September 11, 2024 @ 6:24 am
Incredible comment, and I fully agree. Opening with the quotation of Harry Potter – what were they thinking? Would it have been too difficult, even last minute, to go back in and ADR a new line with a neat cut if any shots showed Jodie speaking the words? Damn. But then, the HP reference is oddly fitting given how out of touch, culturally, this whole era was.
As for Jack announcing that he’s immortal but them never showing it on screen – it’s made 10x funnier by the fact he announces it as the Dalek ship explodes… the exact same scene, where they could’ve shown him caught up in the explosion… then he pops up again afterwards, shrugging it off. The opportunity was right there.
September 9, 2024 @ 11:45 am
Ultimately I find Barrowman a figure as puzzling as he is tragic – which is not entirely in either case, but an amount. It’s truly strange to see someone whose ambitions in sum total are so attainable, so humble in the scheme of things, so within their grasp… and yet watch them ruin all hope of anything but the pettiest and most compromised vision thereof. They strike me as clearly unwell, and I’m sympathetic to the notion that they are a victim of such wider cultural issues as to be pitiable in the face of the social sicknesses they have contracted – but at some point as COVID only too well demonstrated, you have to quarantine the ill.
September 10, 2024 @ 8:23 am
There are plenty of people in the world who would be perfectly happy to look at John Barrowman’s Little Captain Jack. It would be hardly any trouble at all for him to find them. Heck, if you posted “I am John Barrowman and I would like to show you my genitals” online, you’d get plenty of takers even if you were not actually John Barrowman.
But that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to show it to people who were not interested in seeing it. Even the trivial effort of finding a willing audience offended his sense of entitlement.
It’s just so… Pathetic. Cheap. Gross. And it is very much in the same pattern as the way he behaved with regard to selling his character: If he just wanted to be the beloved recurring Doctor Who Guest Star Famed For His Rogueish Space-Time-Playboy Character, it’d be SO EASY to do that. But instead he wanted to be a dick about it.
September 9, 2024 @ 2:19 pm
More than any other Chib Who script, except maybe Power of the Doctor, this feels like it has the most insane shopping list: ‘reunite prison Doctor with companions / do the separation angst’, ‘write out Graham & Ryan’, ‘deal with lingering Timeless Child fallout’, ‘sequelise Arachnids & Resolution at the same time’, ‘reintroduce Jack Harkness’, do a Theresa May satire’ and ‘establish Yaz’s increasing dependency on the Doctor’, all in the one episode of the year that is supposed to be a big welcoming special for casuals and new audience members.
September 10, 2024 @ 9:53 am
That really does seem to express the notion I’ve been thinking over through this whole Eruditorum era, that Chibnall is such a dedicated fan of Doctor Who (as such, as Doctor Who itself with no greater or broader meanings) that he can’t understand why anyone would watch the show who wasn’t themselves a superfan like him.
Part of this is the slowdown in Doctor Who production that the pandemic and institutionalized cuts at the BBC caused. If he’d had the opportunity to make more TV during 2020, he probably would have spread all these narrative events for the show over some more time. You could at least split the Tory Daleks / Resolution of the Arachnids storyline from the Doctor rescue and cast change storyline from each other. But then, maybe not. Chibnall’s incapacity to understand how non-superfans engage with Doctor Who is one of the major factors dragging down the quality of his era into the crash-and-burn of the entire series.
September 11, 2024 @ 6:29 am
Worth noting that Revolution of the Daleks was filmed in 2019, and was in post-production around the time that COVID triggered all the lockdowns. So even if Chibnall intended to spread stuff out, it’s interesting to note that he’d always envisaged this particular special with such a monumental shopping list, even before COVID was a thing. (I believe the bridge scene was filmed in October 2019, so most of the special was filmed even before the first rumblings of COVID in late 2019.)
September 9, 2024 @ 2:32 pm
“It’s that it genuinely doesn’t feel mysterious for a companion to just up and leave in this era. In many ways it’s the most directly that the companion has ever served as an audience identification figure.” lmao well said.
One thing that always rubbed me the wrong way about Barrowman, as long as we’re sharing experiences, was that “if you’re not a nerd, fuck you” quote he gave at least once at a convention. It used to be all over Tumblr and similar sites. It never really rang true for me – nerds should be accepted obviously, but the idea that you need to be a nerd to be a good person is ludicrous. In saying that, he always felt to me like someone who knew what he could say to rile up support from a base that he wasn’t really a part of.
September 9, 2024 @ 4:09 pm
I didn’t actually watch this for more than two years after broadcast, having largely given up on the show by this point, although divorcing it from its original context only demonstrates just how little the show really feels like its engaging with anything current or immediate. Why is Jack even here? He’s entirely surplus to requirements, adding a general feel of too much happening to an already overstuffed show, and Barrowman by this point has entirely descended into self-parody, simply performing a series of tics and catchphrases that were worn out the first time around. By this point that show had become a simulacra, a simulacra of drama, a simulacra of aboutness, and I suppose it makes sense to dig up a simulacra of Barrowman and push him in front of some cameras, until he gets written out offscreen at the very end. It was difficult to care, so I didn’t.
September 11, 2024 @ 6:32 am
“Why is Jack even here? He’s entirely surplus to requirements, adding a general feel of too much happening to an already overstuffed show, and Barrowman by this point has entirely descended into self-parody, simply performing a series of tics and catchphrases that were worn out the first time around.”
Sadly, the same can be said about most of Series 12. I do wonder, had COVID not hit, was Chibnall planning to have Jack back again for Series 13? Not quite sure what the point was if not.
September 11, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
Funny you say that: he was! Right in the middle of the PR shitstorm surrounding Barrowman, Titan Comics cancelled a big event staring Jack that was going to tie into Series 13. (SOURCE: https://tinyurl.com/49f9zc76 ). I have no idea when in production this was, given Flux’s production was clearly a shitstorm in it’s own right, but the general speculation is that he would’ve taken Vinder’s role as the dashing sci-fi male lead who assists the main cast.
Thank goodness because the Bel/Vinder subplot is the closest thing to anything in Flux, but I just find it funny how… well, clearly tired of a character Captain Jack is in Fugitive and Revolution, at least under Chibnall’s pen. The notion that the dried up guy here to remind us of RTD1, give boring exposition about “The Lone Cyberman”, and tell us he’s immortal for no reason was going to dominate even more the era is hilarious.
Even more hilarious is the fact the character’s final ever appearance in Doctor Who media (played by Barrowman at least) is to do nothing interesting in an particularly forgettable Chris Chibnall script acting opposite another canceled creep while being upstaged by Bradley Walsh and a bored Tamsin Cole, then exit the TARDIS off-screen in an awkwardly truncated bit of ADR meant to preface another boring appearance in Flux. Karma has a wicked sense of humour.
September 11, 2024 @ 7:29 pm
*Tosin Cole, oops. That’ll learn me for focusing on paragraph flow over spelling.
September 10, 2024 @ 5:02 am
A couple of things I thought while watching this episode. Firstly how exactly did Robertson people pull off stealing the Dalek tech. Did they do such extensive research into the Lorry driver’s habits that they new exactly which motorway cafe he would stop at and replaced the staff with their agents? Or did they have agents placed at every possible stop on the route? How long exactly had that agent been doing shifts at the cafe anyway? Was the whole scene in fact a slt send up of the absurdity of conspiracy dramas like The X Files
Secondly, slightly more seriously , are e supposed to seriously think that with the Doctor effectively launching a Dalek war on Earth that there would be no civilian casualties? I can’t think of a single other time in Doctor Who when the Doctor has decided to resolve a situation this way. It fits in very well though alongside the morality of Arachnids and The Battle of Thingy.
September 10, 2024 @ 12:50 pm
Exactly! Especially egregious when a key plot point of Remembrance was the Doctor desperately trying to avoid humans getting caught in the crossfire of the (already begun off-screen) Dalek civil war he was exploiting.
September 11, 2024 @ 2:57 pm
Until seeing this comment using the word “morality” in regards to this story, I completely forgot the fact that this is the one where the Doctor’s plan involves forcing a TARDIS to self-destruct, presumably against its will.
Also, I just remembered: didn’t Ascension of the Cybermen make a point about how the side cast were the last handful of humans left alive, and Timeless Children ends with the Doctor dropping the survivors off in 2020 to live normal lives? If I’m remembering correctly, it means we were given an extremely bleak ending to the human race as a pure accident because the writer was too busy thinking about the Morbius Doctors.
September 11, 2024 @ 6:38 pm
Not only that but most of the human race has been killed because of a choice that the Doctor knowingly made to save one person in the previous episode. I get that the Doctor standing aside and letting Percy Shelley die wasn’t really an option , but maybe the dilemma shouldn’t have been set up in the first place if this was the resolution.
Thinking about it extremely dubious moral choices that are then hand waved away or not even addressed is a bit of a running theme of the Chibnall years.
September 12, 2024 @ 9:49 am
I’m not sure “most of the human race got wiped out because of the Doctor” can be logically justified from the narrative that was set up – despite being, again, the vibe. God this era is a mess. When the Doctor catches up to Ashad, he’s still just one dude with a tiny remnant force mopping up survivors; he doesn’t acquire an actual army until halfway through the story. Rather, it appears that both humanity and the cybermen were almost entirely wiped out, and Ashad is using the cyberium to rebuild and crush the few remaining humans, but the near-extinction-event had already happened BEFORE the Cyberium was sent back to bother gothic poets.
September 15, 2024 @ 9:43 am
OK perhaps I didn’t remember it properly, or even pay attention properly in the first place.
September 12, 2024 @ 9:44 am
I know “these are the last humans anywhere” is the overwhelming vibe of it, but I think there’s like one line in one spot somewhere in the narrative that qualifies it as the last humans “in this (unspecified) galaxy”.
September 10, 2024 @ 5:06 am
Seems like a good point to make a partial defence of Ryan though, or at least the representation of dyspraxia. Like a lot of others I was critical about the way it just got a mention every so often but someone pointed out to me that this was actually quite an accurate representation. Depending of course on how severe it is I think for a lot of people dyspraxia is just there, it doesn’t define your every waking moment. Whether this was Chibnall’s intention is another matter.
September 11, 2024 @ 6:34 am
“for a lot of people dyspraxia is just there, it doesn’t define your every waking moment. Whether this was Chibnall’s intention is another matter.”
I am firmly of the belief that it wasn’t his intention, given that Tosin Cole himself has said words to the effect of he received scripts and nobody remembered the character had dyspraxia, until Cole himself brought it up for any relevant scenes that might be at odds with it.
September 11, 2024 @ 6:40 pm
Credit to Tosin Cole then for actually remembering an important part of his character that Chibnall forgot!
September 10, 2024 @ 10:56 am
I remember being gobsmacked that the Dalek rollout was a montage, followed a few minutes later by the ‘Daleks go on a rampage’ montage. The entire episode could have taken place in that gap!
I’m not the savviest media critic, but even I could see that the Doctor or her companions walking into Tescos and finding a Dalek was the security guard is a scene pregnant with dramatic and comedic potential that, like El says, just gets wasted.
September 11, 2024 @ 9:40 am
That really is a very good point. Why is the entry point into this story not Dalek security guards in Tescos? A Dalek on every corner? The audience and the TARDIS regulars encountering the weirdness and horror of that situation, understanding it and doing something about it.
And like you say, that idea is contained in the episode, just not dramatised or exploited in any way. Chibnall’s issue isn’t lacking for ideas or even having bad ideas, really. It’s apparently having genuinely no understanding of which bits of the ideas he has are dramatic and interesting and televisual.
September 11, 2024 @ 6:38 am
My favourite thing about this episode is that, after the madness of COVID and 2020, the grand return of Doctor Who was announced with a photograph of Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole and Mandip Gill looking bored, sat around a table in a warmish brown hue. Just about summed up the feeling around the show. (https://x.com/getFANDOM/status/1314272547131650048)
September 11, 2024 @ 10:03 am
I think this one does do a better job at being entertaining television than any of Chibnall’s previous episodes, though that still leaves some distance to “actually any good”.
Chris Noth’s character is sometimes effectively written as entertainingly awful and the idea of the Doctor being landed with someone who’s just an awful pill for an episode I remember finding quite funny.
Far, far away, long ago (Cheltenham, 2019) is quite a good puncturing of Star Wars portentousnes.
I quite like the colour palette of the episode. Faux-Theresa May’s well styled and her in her red coat on the bridge with the smoke rising up is quite a good image.
The Doctor going a bit despair-y in a prison they can’t escape is a solid enough idea that the orbiting structure of books and comics and audios keeps reinventing, though Chibnall forgets the ‘can’t escape’ bit that makes it actually work without undermining the character.
The actual idea for the episode is good, though as discussed above, Chibnall doesn’t seem to understand what exactly is good about it, and what makes it televisual and Doctor Who-y.
People have talked about the slightly ludicrous shopping list nature of the episode above, but actually…I think the most overpacked Chibnall episodes are the ones that work the best. The Flux series is probably the most basically entertaining one, and in my estimation that’s because Chibnall just keeps throwing more stuff at the screen, more characters, more locations, more implications, and it only falls apart towards the end where it has to slow down and mean something.
September 12, 2024 @ 10:27 am
I agree that the overpacked Chibnall episodes are, on the whole, the most entertaining moment-to-moment; I tend to refer of them as his maximalist / hedonistic mode, or the sugar rush mode if you like, in which – as you say – he is constantly chucking more and more at the screen: the first to really feel like this is Spyfall, but Revolution, the whole of Flux more or less, and Power of the Doctor are all very much in the same camp; Resolution is sort of halfway between the more maximalist Series 12 and the more dour vibes of Series 11’s “Broadchurch in Space”…
…but I don’t know if they’re really the ones that work the best, because they collapse into meaningless noise with all the more of a wet fart when even the plethora of things piling up and up on top of one another cannot possibly cohere into a single, unified whole and so nothing really ends up meaning anything. By contrast, Series 11 might be a bit dour and a bit washed-out, a bit sedate and a bit undercooked, but it does feel like there’s a genuine artistic vision behind it, rather than an eight-year-old playing with his action figures going “and then! AND THEN!” — and massively flawed though the implementation of that artistic vision is, I have more respect for it and when it does on occasion bear successful fruit it’s the closest the era gets to making good.
September 12, 2024 @ 10:28 am
*refer to them, obviously. Gah. The portmanteau of “refer to” and a last-minute amended “think of”…
September 11, 2024 @ 3:07 pm
It’s not just that Chibnall comes up with “Dalek cops” and fails to do anything with it. It’s that he comes up with “Dalek cops are the direct result of people listening to Not Donald Trump and Not Theresa May wanging on about Security” … and still fails to do anything with it.
Although the most narratively incoherent moment for me has got to be Robertson referencing Gove’s “people have had enough of experts” line that came to symbolise conservative anti-intellectualism, and was particularly derided in the Covid era … in the context of a scientist who is actually meddling in things better left alone. I mean, what??
September 11, 2024 @ 3:11 pm
Okay, I don’t like that I wrote “Covid era” like we’re not still in it. The era when Covid was something the news and politicans actually talked about, rather than being seen as something like a high pollen count that happens to kill people.
September 13, 2024 @ 11:58 am
I’m most bothered by how quickly the “promising bits” are dispensed with. We get maybe 10 seconds of “Dalek cops”. We get ONE shot of a dozen proper daleks shooting a dozen ersatz Daleks. The “original” clone Dalek beams itself aboard the Dalek ship to argue for its life, but it’s argument is just “Please don’t maybe?” and the Dalek response is “Nah”. So much more of the runtime is spent on the fam uncovering the “mystery” of what’s going on…. Except that the audience has been in on it from the beginning, so we’re just watching the Doctor be terribly slow at figuring it out (And honestly, she and everyone else seem to be deliberately counterproductive about it, just shouting “Daleks!” at Not-Donald-Trump, who legitimately doesn’t understand what they’re going on about rather than actually trying to explain anything to him – the show had already established that he was repulsed by the Dalek creature, and, yeah, he woudln’t scrap his plans knowing the truth, but “Wait, you’re telling me that my drones might have a vulnerability to alien influence that will wreck my plans and be a PR disaster that my company might not survive given our history?” would have at least prompted a more interesting third act.
(Also, there’s the weirdness that Jack Robertson is clearly meant to be inspired by Trump, except that he behaves nothing like Trump. Nor like Musk. He behaves very straightforwardly like Lex Luthor – to the point that I’m pretty sure when he tries to make a deal with the Daleks, some of his dialogue is lifted from Lex Luthor allying with General Zod in Superman 2. Maybe even stronger, he gives me vibes of Ronny Cox’s character in Robocop – everything around the drone rollout has strong ED-209 energy to me).
September 12, 2024 @ 9:12 am
Wow, the opening of this post really puts things into perspective how we used to think about Covid and how most people think about Covid now. 300,000 deaths and the complicated notion El mentions of “the end” and we’re close to a million deaths SINCE then. Post-vaccines, post-Trump, post-the majority of the public masking regularly. Just oof.
September 14, 2024 @ 4:47 am
I forgot this story existed.
September 17, 2024 @ 1:04 am
This is the first episode of Doctor Who since Colin Baker that I hate-watched. I described the beginning to friends on Facebook as “Donald Trump and Teresa May team up with the Daleks to exterminate the BLM protesters.” Then, I started drinking.