Revolution of the Daleks by Chris Chibnall

A main plot bolted together from a whole load of better Dalek stories, overshadowing what could have been a very effective departure for Ryan and Graham.

Doctor Who left us at the end of Series 12 with possibly the most controversial episode in its history. It made some sense therefore to go for a more traditional festive special to follow up with. The major problem with Revolution of the Daleks is that in this case traditional just means painfully unoriginal. There are a lot of ideas flying around, and the story does a decent job of keeping the pace up through its extended runtime, but they're pretty much all ideas that we've seen before. 

It's worth listing all the other stories that this plot borrows from just to reiterate the point that there is almost nothing new here. The idea that the Daleks are serving humanity is straight from Power of the Daleks and that had already been repackaged before in Victory of the Daleks. Daleks fighting each other based on the impurity of different factions is Remembrance of the Daleks material, and features pretty heavily in Big Finish's Blood of the Daleks as well. Throwing the Daleks into the void is of course what happens at the end of Doomsday. You get the idea. The Daleks occupy a difficult spot in Doctor Who history at this point: everyone loves to see them, but unless you've got a really decent original idea for them, it's probably best not to hang an entire story on their presence. The one new idea there is here, the episode does absolutely nothing with, namely the use of the Daleks as some kind of paramilitary police force. I know that this was all written and filmed in 2019, so there was no way to respond to recent events, but even with that, it feels like a massively missed opportunity.

So instead of driving show forward with new ideas, Chibnall instead chooses to spend a lot of time looking backwards. Revolution of the Daleks is absolutely drowning in nostalgia, specifically for the RTD era (a couple of nods to the Moffat era in the form of a Weeping Angel and a Silent are there too). Jack Harkness' presence is obviously the big one, and he's there to deliver a lot of 2005-10 continuity references, even repackaging a whole load of jokes from that era for one thing. His presence is pretty superfluous to the story, apart from to break the Doctor out of jail (heaven forbid she might have actually tried that for herself). We get no sense of where Jack as a character is at this point in his life and he disappears just as quickly as he arrived. I get that to a certain section of the fandom, an episode littered with RTD era references is going to go down pretty well, but it doesn't exactly suggest that this is a show with much confidence in its present that it has to constantly hark back to a different, more popular, time in its history. It desperately wants to be the RTD era, but ends up falling far short.

An ineffective Dalek story also drowns out a decent departure for the two companions the episode has to write out. All the ingredients are there for a very effective ending for Ryan. After ten months back on Earth, he's realised that he's more use where he is. But the episode is too distracted with other things to show us this, so it just tells us it instead. It's much more a theoretically satisfying payoff of Ryan's story, rather than one we actually get, and that's incredibly frustrating. The idea of a companion asserting their agency and choosing to leave the TARDIS is good, but the story hasn't bothered doing any of the work of convincing us that this is where Ryan has got to. It's a box ticking approach to writing and it doesn't work. In many ways, Graham's departure is more effective, even though he gets barely anything to do. He doesn't want to give up travelling, but will go against his own wishes to support Ryan. It's neat, tidy, and very Graham.

Despite all this, there are elements of this episode that work. Jack Robertson is a much better villain here than he was in Arachnids in the UK, especially as they toned down the tedious Trump comparisons for most of the runtime. Of all the characters, he gets the most to do in this. Yaz gets a good conversation with Jack, and it will be interesting to see if this is developed in the next season. I didn't find the political allegory, with the obvious Theresa May stand-in as Prime Minister, as cringingly awkward as it might have been. The political element of the episode is underdeveloped for sure, but at least it doesn't end with the Doctor suggesting that Nazi police drones are actually good or anything like that, which is something that hasn't always been guaranteed in the Chibnall era.

At the very least, Revolution of the Daleks sets up something of a reset for Series 13, with fewer companions and a chance to focus on the relationship between the Doctor and Yaz (the revelation that John Bishop's character will most likely be joining the TARDIS team notwithstanding). But I'm still left feeling uneasy. The reality is that there's not a single original idea in Revolution. The franchise feels desperately tired, just recycling past hits in the hope of recapturing the old magic. Series 13 has a hell of a job to breath some fresh life into the show. I'm not optimistic, but hope to be proved wrong.

• The John Bishop reveal at the end is done perfectly well. I'll withhold judgement on the wisdom of the casting choice until we've seen some of his episodes, but it does frustrate that the show doesn't have the confidence to go with an all-female regular cast.

• There is nothing interesting about the Doctor's scenes in prison. She mopes around for a bit and then is rescued. This era is so steadfastly refusing to give its female Doctor any agency and this is just another example of that. We don't see her even attempt to break out, and we're given the fallout of The Timeless Children as a pretty lame excuse for her inaction.

• While ultimately inoffensive, it's pretty obvious that the episode has nothing to say in its political allegory, other than that to create recognisable hate figures for the audience. Again, for an era that is so often criticised by idiots as being "too woke", it ends up being as small-c conservative as you can imagine.

• Having Ryan and Graham's final scene be almost exactly the same as their first seems like a mistake to me, particularly when we're supposed to believe that these are characters who have been profoundly changed by their experiences with the Doctor. It's just another box ticked, this time one that reads "symmetry."

Rating: 5/10