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yeonchi · 4 years ago

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Doctor Who 2021 New Year’s Special Review: Revolution of the Daleks

Air date: 1 January 2021

New Year’s Day is the new Christmas Day for Doctor Who. Two years ago, I was writing the review for the 2019 New Year’s Special, Resolution. One year ago, I was writing the review for the first episode of Series 12, Spyfall Part One (which essentially served as the 2020 New Year’s Special). Today, I'm writing this review for the 2021 New Year’s Special. Whether the change was because of political correctness, low ratings or just to change up the status quo, I think we should be glad that we even have a festive special, unlike the English dubs on Koei Tecmo’s Warriors games.

Amazingly, this special was filmed alongside Series 12 last year and kept on hold to today, meaning that production was largely unaffected by the coronavirus. Even with the anticipation and uncertainty for Series 13, which has already been reduced to eight episodes (with festive special status unknown), this episode serves as a good icebreaker given everything that’s happened in 2020 and the Timeless Child arc of Series 12.

Here is my spoiler-free thought for this episode: “It’s epic, heartbreaking and ridiculous at the same time.”

Spoilers continue after the break. Also, please don’t forget to check out my look at Doctor Who: Lockdown and the hiatusbreaker update for some post-Series 12 review thoughts.

Introduction

Chibnall mentioned that the recon scout Dalek from Resolution give birth to the new Dalek variant that was seen in this episode, thus making this episode a sequel to said episode. As such, this was the case.

367 minutes (about 6 hours) after the Doctor and her extended fam fought the recon scout Dalek at GCHQ, its shell was recovered. Jo Patterson, then Technology Secretary, tipped Jack Robertson (he will be referred to by his surname hereafter to differentiate him from Jack Harkness) off about it and managed to acquire it. After acquiring the plants of car firms that had abandoned Patterson and Rugazzi Technologies, Leo’s company, Robertson had defence drones developed (and 3D printed) based on the design of the Dalek’s shell.

The production of this episode was concluded by April 2020, with Chibnall stating that post-production work was continuing during the lockdown. This was before the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, meaning that the scene showing the testing of the defence drones was likely inspired from the Hong Kong protests. We see people throwing bricks and molotov cocktails, and the Dalek is shown to be fitted with a water cannon, CS gas sprayer and a sonic deterrent. That’s about all the allusion we get - if we had any more then we would have had a serious problem.

Doctor and companions separated

At the end of The Timeless Children, the Doctor was sentenced to life imprisonment in a maximum-security prison, while Graham, Ryan and Yaz were brought back to Earth along with Ravio, Yedlarmi and Ethan. We don’t get to see those three in the episode, sadly.

Over the next ten months, Graham and Ryan had moved on with their lives while Yaz became obsessed with finding the Doctor (yeah, just forget that you have a family and a job as a policewoman lol). Graham shows Yaz some leaked footage of Robertson at the defence drone testing. They go to confront Robertson, but are turned away by his security guards.

Meanwhile, the Doctor had been in prison for decades, accompanied by a Weeping Angel, an Ood, a Sycorax, a Silent and even a Pting. Unbeknownst to her, Captain Jack Harkness had managed to get into the same prison as her, spending 19 years just to get the cell next to her, before making himself known and breaking out of the prison together. The Doctor and Jack head to Graham’s house, where they catch up and set out to find Jack Robertson.

There are a couple of one-to-one scenes that really got me thinking. When Jack and Yaz investigate traces of Dalek DNA in Osaka, they talk about their separation from the Doctor and what their time with the Doctor has changed them into. Jack tells Yaz, “Being with the Doctor, you don’t get to choose when it stops. Whether you leave her, or she leaves you.”

Let’s break that line down with information from the TARDIS Wiki page on companions. There are several ways that a companion can join the Doctor - they stow away on the TARDIS, they were “kidnapped”, or were assigned by higher powers, like UNIT, the Time Lords or the White Guardian. Just like that, there are several ways that companions leave the Doctor - they might choose to leave, the Doctor decides or is forced to leave them behind, or they die.

The interesting thing is that Jack says that they don’t get to choose when they leave. In the case of companions who decided to leave of their own will, you might think it was an easy decision for them, but in truth, there is context behind their motivation to leave. In Series 2, Mickey Smith stayed on Pete’s World to help defeat the Cybermen after that world’s counterpart of himself (Ricky) died and he became increasingly disillusioned with Rose favouring the Doctor over himself. In Series 3, Martha Jones decided to leave the Doctor after seeing her family enslaved by the Master for a year, travelling around the world to get people to think of the Doctor, and realising that her feelings for him would never be reciprocated. In the classic series, Tegan Jovanka left the Fifth Doctor after being sickened by the death and destruction she witnessed. From this, I can deduce that what Jack meant to say isn’t that the companions don’t get to choose when they leave, but that they don’t get to choose the circumstances that lead to them leaving. In some cases, that also applies to the companions who get left behind by the Doctor or killed.

The other one-to-one is between Ryan and the Doctor in the TARDIS. The Doctor apologises to Ryan for leaving him, Graham and Yaz behind for ten months and Ryan tells him that during this time his relationship with his father has improved and that he got to catch up with friends. Ryan asks the Doctor what has changed with her since they last met and the Doctor tells her that she isn’t who she thought she was (that storyline’s never going to go away, isn’t it? Hope to learn about the full story of the Timeless Child in Series 13). This scene really highlights how the companions can be a source of support for the Doctor, just as the Doctor is a source of support for them.

Ryan tells the Doctor that she is the same as she has always been. The Doctor comforts herself by saying that nothing’s changed, but Ryan says that it wasn’t what he meant; things change all the time and we might be scared of the new, but in the end, we have to confront the new, or the old. This bit was definitely made with the Timeless Child twist in mind. Yes, things change (particularly when it comes to Doctor Who), but some changes can be good or bad; just as there are people who saw the Timeless Child twist as good, there are people who saw it as bad (including myself). It’s like what I said in the hiatusbreaker update about The Timeless Children pulling an Ultraman Orb and trying to lessen the impact of the twist when it didn’t make sense and caused more damage than expected.

Human-created Daleks (sort of)

When the recon Dalek’s shell was salvaged, some traces of its DNA remained in it. Since, according to Missy in The Witch’s Familiar, every cell of a Dalek is genetically hardwired to survive, their consciousness can live within the tiniest fragment of their DNA. Leo managed to clone the recon scout Dalek out of those traces and hooked it into the neural network. Disgusted after being shown the creature, Robertson tells Leo to incinerate it, but when he tries to do so, it escapes and takes possession of him. In a way, the recon scout Dalek was resurrected in this episode, but it didn’t feel like the same character.

While hooked into the neural network, the Dalek managed to make more clones of itself using Robertson’s resources, feeding them with the liquefied remains of the people who worked on them. After being confronted by the Doctor and the others, the Dalek uses the UV light to activate the Daleks, transport themselves into the shells that it augmented, then kills Rob and begins subjugating Earth.

Just as Jo Patterson introduces the defence drones in her first speech as Prime Minister, she gets exterminated by them quickly after they are activated. If Jack Robertson is an expy of Donald Trump, then Jo Patterson is an expy of Theresa May - a forgettable Prime Minister whose claim to fame (defence drones for the former, Brexit for the latter) backfired on them. To be honest, when I heard that they would be in this special, I almost thought that they got married or something.

There was a similar situation like this in the Series 3 two-parter, Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, only this time, the Daleks were more involved. In that story, the Cult of Skaro were attempting to find a way to survive beyond the Dalek shell, to the point of creating Dalek-human hybrids, a new race with the intelligence of Daleks but with the emotions of humans. In both cases, the new Dalek variants were considered impure due to the human elements within them.

I’ve compared this episode to Victory of the Daleks when the trailer came out. With the addition of the conflict between the two Daleks (as I will outline below), there are additional contrasts to the Seventh Doctor story Remembrance of the Daleks and the Big Finish Eighth Doctor audio story Blood of the Daleks.

The nuclear option

With thousands of defence drone Daleks on the move and no weapons to deal with them, the Doctor seems to do the only thing she can think of that doesn’t involve destroying the Earth ala the Moment (which was what I was thinking) - signal a ship of Death Squad Daleks (SAS Daleks, but more brutal) to Earth to deal with the impure defence drones.

The two groups of Daleks confront each other on a bridge (specifically the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol). After seeing his Daleks get exterminated, Robertson takes his nuclear option - part with the Doctor and side with the Daleks. That’s right, Jack Robertson does an Utsumi (Nariaki Utsumi from Build, if you didn’t know) and sides with a race that would kill him the first chance they got. Give him a cane to break and we would have gotten the first tokusatsu meme in Doctor Who.

For someone who seems to be so obsessed with protecting himself (normally by using other people), I must say that this was a strange step for Robertson to take. Given that Robertson is an expy of Trump, one can only wonder what Chibnall and people like him think of Trump. Would Trump sell himself or humanity out to invading aliens? Personally, I don’t think he’d be stupid enough to do so. I think he’d bomb them with everything he has.

Robertson convinces the Daleks to take them aboard their ship and meet their commander. Meanwhile, Jack, Graham and Ryan board the ship and plant explosives on it. Graham tries to get Ryan to fistbump him, but he just tells him to “stop talking weird”. We’re back, fellow kids. Missed us?

Robertson tells the Daleks that the Doctor summoned them. The original Dalek returns and offers to be purified, only to be exterminated. Graham, Ryan and Jack find Robertson and they get off the ship together just as it is destroyed.

The Doctor floats her TARDIS in the sky among the Daleks and lures them inside, which would normally be an impossible feat if it weren’t for the fact that it isn’t actually the Doctor’s TARDIS, but the other TARDIS from earlier. She sets it to fold in on itself and send itself to the heart of the Void, thereby destroying them.

Soon after that, Robertson claims that he was acting as a decoy and so, he is lauded as the saviour of humanity. A honorary knighthood and a revived presidential run is mentioned after the toxic waste scandal (Arachnids in the UK) ruined his previous attempt. This is where my comparison to Utsumi weakens - Utsumi pledged himself to Evolto so that he could find a way to bring him down, but there doesn’t seem to be any ulterior motive in Robertson’s actions. Frankly, I’m surprised that he wasn’t exterminated at all.

Parting ways (for now)

By the time Graham and Ryan return to the TARDIS, Jack has left and is on his way to see Gwen Cooper, who has apparently had another child, a son. Honestly, his departure feels quite lackluster.

The Doctor offers to take the fam to a restaurant apparently named the Meringue Galaxy, but Ryan decides to leave the Doctor since he believes that his friends and planet need him. Graham struggles to decide, but in the end, he decides to leave with Ryan, leaving the Doctor and Yaz on the TARDIS. The Doctor gives them some psychic paper as a parting gift.

The final scene is a throwback to the beginning of The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Graham is helping Ryan ride his bike when they bring up some strange incidents around the world, like a troll invasion in Finland or gravel creatures in Korea. Ryan begins riding his bike one more time when they see Grace looking back at them in the distance. This is the last episode where Ryan’s dyspraxia is explored. Shame Chibnall never managed to do a lot with it.

We’ve known that Graham and Ryan would be leaving the series for months now, and we’ve also known that there would be opportunities for them to return. Let’s hope we see them again in Series 13.

Going back to my discussion about companions leaving, the major factor in Ryan and Graham’s decision to leave was that they had spent ten months away from the Doctor and unlike Yaz, they had already moved on with their lives. Additionally, for Graham, he doesn’t want to leave Ryan given the relationship they built up during their time with Doctor and possibly also for fear of abandoning Ryan, given how his father wasn’t there for him previously. This doesn’t feel as deep compared to other companions’ motives for leaving the Doctor, but it’s still quite deep.

At the end of Can You Hear Me?, we see Ryan talking to Yaz about spending their lives with the Doctor and forgetting everyone back home. I’d always thought that the human element of being a companion was annoying, but we have to remember that companions are people too and they had their own lives before they met the Doctor.

Other general thoughts

I know this is kind of irrelevant given that this episode was produced at the end of 2019, but could Leo be considered an Uncle Tom for inventing something designed to suppress protesters? By the way, don’t let China know about this or we’re all screwed, even in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Jack gets a gold star for rescuing the Doctor. That puts Jack and Graham at 10 points and Yaz and Ryan at 20.

Jack also has his sonic blaster back as well. Will Jack also be back for Series 13? We’ll just have to see it to believe it.

The title cards are jarring again. Can the production team not be inconsistent with their fonts?

I swear, all the Yaz favouritism in the last two series must have given her Stockholm syndrome. Who’s to say that Mandip Gill wanted to leave, but Chibnall asked her to stay?

Taking a look at the designs for the Daleks, the defence drones are alright. They glow a bluish-white colour normally, but they glow red and shoot red beams when the Dalek creatures took control of them. You could probably mistake them for being red in the dark, which is highlighted when they are shown shooting people in the streets. As for the Death Squad Daleks, they’re basically just the basic bronze Daleks, including their leader. They should’ve brought back the multicoloured New Paradigm Daleks just so the Death Squad Daleks could be differentiated from ordinary Daleks.

Following the premiere of this episode, a new companion was announced for Series 13, with John Bishop playing the role of Dan. Honestly, with the Timeless Child mystery still looming and the lack of character development for Yaz, a new companion is the last thing this series needs, particularly since Series 13 would be Jodie Whittaker’s third series and possibly, her final one (if we’re going by previous Doctors). At the moment, Bishop is currently isolating after being tested positive for the coronavirus. I wish him well and look forward to seeing him in Series 13.

The reduced number of episodes in Series 11 or 12 may have contributed to the lack of focus on Ryan’s dyspraxia or character development on Yaz, but that’s no excuse. Chibnall had plenty of opportunities to factor them in, but he was too focused on not having a story arc in Series 11 and destroying canon in Series 12 to even think about it (Graham and Ryan got more character development in those two series than Yaz did). Now that Series 13 has been reduced to eight episodes (not counting the possibility of a split series or another New Year’s Special out of the eight), I fear that Chibnall won’t have enough opportunity to factor in Dan’s character development with Yaz’s character development, the Timeless Child, Ruth and/or the Master, particularly when he delegates half of the series to other writers and does very few good things in the remaining episodes he writes (or co-writes). Honestly, Series 11 and 12 felt like a waste of time in some aspects.

Summary and verdict

Like I said at the start, this episode acted as a good icebreaker in the long break between series. However, ever since my red-pilling in The Timeless Children, I’ve started to see this series in a new light, particularly with the help of YouTubers like Bowlestrek or Nerdrotic. Despite this, I’m reluctant to hop on the #RIPDoctorWho bandwagon because we still don’t have the full details for the Timeless Child arc, so I’m reserving most of my judgement until we get it.

Most of the episode was good, but the ridiculous part for me was when Robertson Utsumi’d himself and somehow managed to survive. Jack’s departure felt lackluster, Ryan and Graham’s departure felt lackluster to other companions’ departures and Jo Patterson was just... ehh. Let’s not forget that we didn’t see or hear a mention of the surviving humans from the previous episode because Chibnall just forgot about them.

Rating: 6/10 Series 12 total: 77/100 (77%) Series 12 total with Revolution of the Daleks: 83/110 (75%)

Overall, this special brought down my total score for Series 12, but it still did slightly better compared to Series 11. If it weren’t for Jack Harkness, my score for the episode would have been lower. Robertson, being a Trump expy, essentially represented all the SJW red flags in this episode; pointing them out is unnecessary at this point given my red-pilling.

That’s it for my review of the New Year’s Special. There is a certainty that Series 13 will premiere this year, so the next time I return with another review will presumably be in late 2021. As long as Jodie Whittaker is the Doctor, my mission to review her episodes will continue. Follow me on Facebook and/or Tumblr and keep an eye out for my future posts, Doctor Who-related or otherwise, such as the Kisekae Insights series where I give insights on my personal project, which was heavily influenced by Doctor Who.

Stay safe and I’ll see you then.

#doctor who #doctor who series 12 #thirteenth doctor #doctor who series 12 review #thirteenth doctor review

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