Revolution Of The Daleks: Ranking - 267

    Revolution Of The Daleks

(New Year's Day Special, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 1/1/2021, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Lee Haven Jones)  

Rank: 267

'Extermination! Extermination! Extermination! This is the challenge and we intend to meet it' This has been a political speech on behalf of the Skaro Socialist Party. Those on the right vote 'aye'. Those on the left will be exterminated... 

Before you can say ‘Jack Robertson’ it’s another new year and another new year’s special. Only due to circumstances beyond everyone’s control this one hit a little different and the ten months since series twelve felt like an eternity. Chris Chibnall didn’t know it when he was writing it, nor did they know it when they were making it (across October 2019), but covid hit when this story was entering post-production, making it the first of many hundreds of BBC TV productions temporarily shelved by a virus that felt like something out of Dr Who (and making this story with the longest gap ever between filming and broadcast dates). This wasn’t like the bad old days of the 1980s when Dr Who was bottom of the pile: ‘Resolution’ was one of the first stories allowed back into TV centre following distancing protocols. It must have been an eerie experience editing this story in a near-empty studio in a building usually so expansive and full of life. Not just the usual Dr Who threat of the world ending and life never being the same again (which happens in most stories) but the story theme of loneliness and isolation, of getting back together with your friends after a long time apart. It starts with our heroes separated, The Doctor having been taken to a space prison (Shada?) for defying the Judoon at the end of ‘The Timeless Children’, the revelations about her past leaving her unsure of who she really is. Her ‘fam’ at home haven’t seen her for ten months and assume she isn’t coming back. She’s in solitary for the most part, her only friends the monsters she has brief snatches of conversation with when she walks past. Ryan has got used to life going back to normal and picked up where he left off, his time with the Doctor a mad gap year that’s enabled him to rediscover his old life through new eyes, while Graham’s sort of limping on behind him. Only Yaz refuses to let go of her old life and is still searching for The Doctor. Then there’s the government in change of our safety who are throwing us to the lions, selling our souls out with backstage shenanigans and making a bad situation worse. The Dr Who story most about waiting, of having your life put on hold, of holding strong against an implacable foe, by chance more than design, ‘Revolution Of The Daleks’ was exactly the right story for the times.

The story clearly wasn’t meant to be about that, though. On the one hand it is, at a very basic level, a continuation of ‘Resolution’, a new year’s special with yet more Daleks. We even get a thirty second montage of it (one that made it look much more exciting than the real thing). That story had been a relative success, both within fandom and in the ratings, with a general audience pleased to have a monster they recognised and a fanbase cockahoop that Chibnall hadn’t messed our favourite baddies up too much. In many ways ‘Revolution’ is the same tale in reverse. Rather than blobby Daleks who can walk out of their cases and possess people, this story is about the reverse engineering of a lone survivor The Doctor somehow missed last time, with empty casings being built by 3D printers en masse in a scene that looks the way the one in ‘Power Of the Daleks’ probably looked if only we could see it, with an update for a real world invention that feels Dr Whoy (3D printers just have to be reversed engineered alien tech, they’re too useful to be Human made). Rather than seeing how dangerous one Dalek is, now we see how dangerous a whole army is, though it isn’t long before we get the old ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ plot (recycled in ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ and ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’) about how Dalek xenophobia even stretches to impure Daleks, as an invading Dalek knock off the new lot. It’s the sort of safe tried and trusted Dalek plot a lot of writers fall back on when they get stumped, connecting to the original Dalek idea and easy to put on paper with lots of fight scenes. After the sheer weirdness and controversy of the ‘timeless child’ arc rewriting Who folklore, it’ arguably the most sensible move Chibnall could make, giving the fandom something on the short and narrow.

Over and above that, though, it’s Chibnall at his most political, borrowing from Russell T Davies in its potshots at the direction Britain was heading in. We’d already had Trump clone Jack Robertson as a Trump caricature in ‘Arachnids In The UK’, a story that, in part at least, is about the dangers of British politics following the ‘shortcut’ capitalism of our American cousins and outing ourselves in danger through our neglect. Here though he’s less of a cardboard cutout and more of an actual threat, treating politics as a series of blackmail attempts rather than blackmail and making Jo Patterson, the Theresa May clone in charge, his patsy (though it’s a side effect of how long this story took to be finished that she was long gone and replaced by Trump copycat Boris Johnson by the time this story went out on air). I don’t think it’s really about either of them, though. I think it’s about David Cameron, the half-man half-Dalek all-grifter pig hybrid who invented the need for ‘austerity’ to ‘balance Britain’s budget’ and then used all that money to spend on all his mates. The succession of absolute failures who came after him has made history kinder to his reputation, but make no bones about it: this was a man so hated by the end of his time in office that he and his chancellor George Osbourne were booed everywhere they went and half the country voted for the self-sabotage of Brexit rather than see the smug grin on his face when his ‘leave’ campaign won. We see a Britain divided, desperate, struggling. There are riots in the streets which, as far as we can tell are caused by poverty, just like the ‘London Riots’ of 2011, when the youth had no jobs and no money spent on them, but saw an expensive Olympic stadium being built down the road.Cameron’s solution wasn’t to reign back austerity measures or find a common consensus, or negotiate Britain back to stability. It was to come down hard on the rioters who got extortionate sentences for minor crimes of shoplifting and to spend an eye-watering amount of money on a water cannon from America to repel any further crowds, which didn’t even work properly. Which naturally only made things worse. In ‘Revolution’ Robertson is playing with fire just as much by suggesting Daleks as crowd control, exterminating exterminators with extermination that quickly gets out of control. The notion of the Dalek being used this way is a novel idea and the death-ray and plunger being used to emit smoke and water is a new thing we’ve not seen The Daleks do before. This scene works well in contrast to The Doctor in prison too, locked up for defying the Judoon, the Dr Who equivalents of the person who follows the ‘spirit’ of the law, locked up by the people who most follow the ‘letter’ of the law. What with Robertson somehow escaping justice at the end of ‘Arachnids’ (clearly some money changed hands somewhere) it’s a neat comment about how justice isn’t always fair and equal.

It’s a great beginning, one of Chibnall’s best ideas for the series and one that makes you think you’re in for a morale-boosting story of the good turning tables on evil. Except that never quite happens. Sure The Daleks are defeated, but only because of a ‘trick’ where The Doctor sets the ‘old’ guys on the ‘new and then explodes them in the ‘spare’ Tardis that came to Earth at the end of the last story. They’re outwitted, not through their ignorance or racism, but because things have to be re-set by the end of the episode. Similarly Robertson escapes justice again (were they keeping him for a third appearance that never came?) – I’d have laid money on him being exterminated by the end of the story, especially when he has the choice to side with The Doctor and still goes with the xenophobic rightwing killer Daleks because he’s taken in by their ‘power’. Instead this story gives him an award for bravery (compare to ‘Kerblam!’, a diatribe on sweat shops where the capitalists win and we’re meant to be happy about it. What on Gallifrey was going on in the writer’s room?) By the end of the story the Daleks might be removed but the underlying injustice is still there. We’ve seen The Doctor overthrow regimes for being a hundredth as corrupt and unfair as this one. Similarly the old problems with Chibnall scripts resurfaces its head: the scene with the Daleks on Clifton Suspension Bridge is the whole point of the story but it’s fleeting, replaced by endless scenes of talky exposition between politicians we either don’t know or don’t care for. Most of the Dalek battles happen off-screen, told to us rather than shown (something I assumed at the time was a covid restriction until I checked the filming dates and realised it couldn’t have been). The Doctor’s incarceration – a big cliffhanger that’s kept us waiting for ten whole months to see how she gets out of this one – is resolved really easily. Like really really easily.

It shows up, too, how little faith Chibnall has in his characters. Admittedly we’re in a series about time travel so it’s hard to know how long The Doctor is locked up for, but the scratches on her cell wall suggest that, whatever the mistakes with the coordinates, it’s easily the ten months she’s been away from her friends. This is, even for a person with lots of regenerations, a colossal chunk of time. Most people watching this still remembered the three weeks of official full-on lockdown in 2020 well and shuddered. In all that time there’s no evidence The Doctor even tried to escape, even though that’s such a part and parcel of Dr Who. Maybe she couldn’t, maybe this prison is too hard to escape from, but any other showrunner would have shown all the ways The Doctor tried: that would have been the story. The Doctor just cools her heels till Captain Jack lets her out using a macguffin we’ve never heard of before called a ‘temporal freezing gateway disinhibitor bubble’. This is Captain Jack we’re talking about here, not the universe’s smartest renegade. Her ‘fam’ meanwhile have just sat around moping. Only Yaz alone has even tried to work out how to rescue The Doctor but her theories don’t do anything to help in the end and the trio’s attempts to look into Robertsons’ Dalek are a miserable abject failure. There’s a moment when Jack says of Yaz ‘oh she’s good’ and Ryan adds ‘we all are’, a remark met with absolute silence from The Doctor that speaks volumes. This is my biggest problem with the Chibnall era: everyone’s a passenger and no one’s driving the car. Just think how younger Doctors and their companions would have handled this: by the end of her time even Jo was picking cells to rescue The Doctor, while Rose used a car to open the heart of the Tardis to get back to her Doctor and Clara was so sure she was The Doctor she ended up sacrificing her life in error. That’s what companions usually do in Who, not sit around waiting. They aren’t new anymore either: these characters have had two full seasons to learn from The Doctor but other than moaning don’t seem to have done much at all.

 Then again, this Doctor isn’t someone to learn from either.
The reunion scene ought to be the big heart of this episode. It’s the first time our friends have been reunited in ten months. They assumed The Doctor was dead. What happens? Yaz punched The Doctor on the arm for worrying her while Ryan and Graham look awkward. There’s no big gesture, no relief, no emotional release anywhere throughout this episode, with some of the most stilted dialogue yet between the trio who don’t seem to know how to talk to one another. Now, I like the idea of Dr 13 being more antisocial and awkward than the others, that she doesn’t have all the answers to comfort companions in need, but there comes a point such as here where this characterisation shoots Chibnall in the foot. The scene of The Doctor talking to Ryan in mixed metaphors, like two blokes who haven’t seen in each other while one’s been in hospital, is one of the most cringe-inducing in the entire canon. Why don’t this pair even begin to say what they mean? Why is saying ‘I missed you’ harder to say than all this pussy-footing around? If these characters don’t care for each other then why should we? That’s a particular problem here because this is where Ryan and Graham up sticks and leave and while their closing group huddle (‘borrowed’ from what the actors used to do before each take) is sweet and moving considering I couldn’t wait for this pair to leave, the dialogue doesn’t suggest they’re anything more than strangers with one of the most underwhelming exist from the series. ‘Nah, I’m good’ Ryan says when The Doctor asks whether they’re ready to go, as if he’s replying to a request to go down the shops, not see the wonders of the universe and while it’s in character it’s frustrating that even now he hasn’t learned to show his emotions. Ryan also leaves because he’s grown used to being back in his own life, something which would help if there was any evidence at all for this onscreen (at least when Tegan said ‘it’s stopped being fun Doctor’ at the end of ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ you knew where it was coming from, but what exactly does Ryan want to do with his life? We don’t know). Usually when a companion in Who leaves (well, not Dodo or Mel, maybe, but most of them) they’ve been on an arc, they’ve discovered themselves, grown in confidence, learned at the feet of The Master (no not that Master, The Doctor I mean) and taken in board lessons they can apply in their real life. Graham even refers to the fact that The Doctor said travelling would change them and it has. But how exactly? What is the last we see of Ryan? He’s not changed one iota. He’s still trying to ride a bike, even though his dyspraxia means that even if he masters it one day there’s no reason his body with its co-ordination problems will remember it another time  (it’s not like, well, learning to ride a bike – not the way it is for ‘normal’ people anyway, an expression that always  annoyed the hell out of me because it doesn’t work like that). To show that Ryan’s learned from his time in the Tardis he should be doing his own thing and riding a Segway or a scooter or something and said hell to the bike, he doesn’t need one anyway. Go and change the universe, don't waste time trying to defy a physical ailment that can't be cured by balancing on a piece of metal with wheels! Graham, who’s path on the Tardis had seemed to be about learning to be independent without seeing himself through the eyes of his step-son or his dead wife, meekly leaves because he doesn’t want to miss Ryan growing up. Despite hints across series twelve that they’ve been growing marginally closer, Ryan doesn’t seem too pleased about this. What a waste. 

It’s left to flipping Captain Jack to provide the emotional warmth this episode and when your walking innuendo emitter is your emotional moral compass you know you’ve got a problem. This is his last ever appearance in the show, even though they’re clearly setting Jack up for a semi-regular returning slot and we don’t even see his face in his leaving scene (which is clearly added by John Barrowman in post-production when someone asked where his character was: he’s going to see family and visit Gwen). This was right before the stories of John Barrowman’s nude antics backstage during filming of series one-four, long hinted at, became common knowledge and he became a hot potato; to be fair to him they weren’t illegal the way a lot of fandom have been re-acting and were done more for shock value than anything else, but they were worrying enough to make him something of a hot potato. Together with The Doctor reading Harry Potter to herself from memory in her prison cell right before J K Rowling became a full-on Transphobe it’s meant that ‘revolution’ is one of those stories that has dated rather badly. To be fair to Chibnall, though, he’s not a fortune-teller and he actually writes better for Jack than even his creator Steven Moffat did. There are the usual innuendo driven jokes and banter, but there’s a hidden melancholy behind them, the sense that this is a man who’s lived too long and is merely filling in time the best way he can before boredom and guilt set in again (something missing from his first appearances, probably because he wasn’t planned that way from the first). Yaz, usually utterly oblivious about the people around her (a worrying but common trait in a policewoman), sees through him on second meeting, pointing out that somebody who needs that must praise must be really insecure (note that, while he blusters his way out of it, nor does he deny it). To be fair to him, too, a lot of actors might have missed this hint but Barrowman picks up on the hint. These are some of Jack’s best scenes, seeing through Yaz’s pain to become the second person to see how much she loves The Doctor and offering up advice to them all about how life will never be the same once they leave their side. In plot terms though Jack’s there to get The Doctor out of trouble and nothing else.

I wonder, too, if there’s another ‘hidden’ meaning at the back of all this. By now Chibnall has been in the showrunner seat for two years and chances are ‘Revolution’ is the first story he’s had to write from scratch since his first episodes went out on air. Officially they received a ‘mixed reception’ – unofficially they received a total pasting from a majority of the fanbase. While there are some fans, especially those for whom Jodie was their first Doctor and who don’t know the show any other way, who like this era most were at best disappointed and at worst ashamed at how bad it had become. For all the official face-keeping in interviews about how things were going swimmingly and he never paid attention to a ‘small minority’ on line, you’d have to have the hide of a Judoon not be affected by this amount of criticism somewhere. It takes a lot of guts to keep writing when most of the people sitting at home think they can do a better job than you and, like his predecessors, Chibnall uses The Doctor as his mouthpiece to address some of these concerns. She’s as unsure as he feels, not sure if he’s up to the job and whether he still wants it, but not yet ready to simply give it up. They’ve lost their confidence (not that it seems to make any actual difference to how The Doctor behaves). The scene of The Doctor walking through prison amongst monsters, which looks exactly like the Dr Who prop room in Cardiff, waiting to do his porridge and be released, feels like a comment especially as so many of these monsters are ones from his own era (admittedly they’d be near at the top of the costume box but still: it’s interesting the more obvious prisoners like Ice warriors, Silurians, Sontarons and Cybermen aren’t here). Even the first post-montage shot, cutting from all that noise and mayhem to a burger van just like the catering trucks making Who, feels like a man resigned to having to start from scratch again and not sure if he can go through all this again. In this context Ryan’s speech at the end about wanting to go home get back to his old life like a wish fulfilment. He tries to give Yaz some lines about the importance of needing to go on and it being the best ‘job’ in the universe (‘I’m not ready to let you go yet!’) but you can tell his heart’s no longer in this job the way it once was. As for Captain Jack there’s a really telling line about the Doctor that works just as well for Dr Who as a series: ‘You don’t get to choose when it stops, whether you leave her or she leaves you’, followed by the thought that they should ‘enjoy the journey while you’re on it, because the joy is worth the pain’. I can’t decide if Chibnall stayed under duress because there was another season to go on his contract or because he genuinely wanted to; the story hints at both. The ‘Flux’ season and the specials to come feel like Chibnall still making his mind up with plots about being stuck in timeloops, of having history rewritten so that something safe turns evil and vainly searching for hidden treasure to uncover: arguably only in the true finale ‘Power Of the Doctor’ does he start to have unfiltered love for this series again. For now, though, a prison sentence seems like the perfect metaphor. For the life of me I don’t understand why Chibnall didn’t find a co-writer he trusted, someone to help tell him when he had good ideas, when to develop them and when to leave well enough alone. He has what it takes to write some great Who stories (‘The Power Of Three’ would be perfect had the ending not been changed for reasons beyond his control) but I always had the sense he didn’t have the same ‘fam’ around him that Davies and Moffat did, to back him up and/or challenge him (maybe that’s why The Doctor has such a lot of companions?) For, whether intended or not, that was the message most of us took from watching this in the Christmas holidays post covid: we’re better together than we are alone.

‘Revolution’ is an odd story then, part inspired, part tired. It’s sort of half a new year’s resolution to do things better that then falls on old times (out of the three specials it’s also the one that uses the new year’s metaphor the least, with just one mention when Yaz doesn’t know what day it is). When it’s being genuinely revolutionary and playing around with Daleks and politics it’s Chibs at his best: it packs a punch this story and he follows on the good work of ‘Resolution’ in knowing how to write for The Daleks actually better than Russell or Moffat did, returning them to their racist scheming hating ways and making them a real viable threat again. The idea of this as a global threat too, not just a British one, comes into play with the scenes set in Japan (the single best thing about the Chibnall era is showing how interconnected the countries of Earth are and how injustice in one place affects us all, eventually, such a change after years of Dr Who being about London as a metaphor for the world). The plot device of writing out the spare Tardis from ‘Timeless Children’ is very cleverly done. There are some nice little jokes in there too (‘You never forget your first death’ is Captain Jack’s best line in any story, closely followed by his banter with The Doctor ‘Have you had work done? You look different’ ‘You can talk!’).

But Chibnall doesn’t know how to develop things, plots and characters both, so what we end up with is a story that doesn’t so much go through the motions so much as emphasise the boring parts, the waiting rather than the doing and the awkward silences rather than the meaningful conversation. There are plotholes galore (why doesn’t The Doctor do what she talks about, going back in time, first – before offering at the end of the story so her friends don’t have to leave?) Even something as clumsy as having so many similarly named characters is a big author’s no-no: old timers know their Jack Harknesses from their Jack Robertsons, but newbies maybe wouldn’t and there are a lot of newbies who only watch the specials. Even I got confused between ‘Robertson’ and ‘Paterson’ given both are politicians in this story. It’s worse than that though: the ideas are there, but this story just doesn’t anything with them, so they sit there like the cardboard Daleks we used to get at the back of shot in the olden days. We ought to feel so much watching this episode, with two long running characters leaving, but we don’t. We ought to get the moral that the real monsters aren’t The Daleks (who are at least honest about their intentions) but the politicians working the puppet strings, but they get rewarded for it instead, the point unmade. We ought to be right behind The Doctor in her desperate search for who she is, but that whole character arc is ignored (by fan request?) and we never really get to see how this affects The Doctor, it’s just that by the end – after hours of moping - she comes up with an idea the way she always does. Which is a shame because actually Jodie Whittaker’s a lot more comfortable with this unsure Doctor than she is as a chatterbox; sadly it will all be back to normal next time out. We ought to be thrilled at seeing the true monsters in the real world get their comeuppance, but instead they manage to squeeze out of trouble again (very true to life I’m sure, but this is a TV series at least partly about karma; we need our justice). We ought to be excited watching a still-rare full on Dalek battle sequence, when either side winning would mean destruction for humanity, never mind the potential threat of a clone farm full of Daleks waiting to be unleashed, but it’s all so boring – we hear about this threat rather than see it, two quick scenes aside, If Daleks beating up other Daleks is the heart of a story that’s  boring something has gone painfully wrong somewhere. Though ‘Revolution’ lasts maybe 25 minutes longer than usual it doesn’t do anything with those extra minutes  except go round in circles (maybe that’s why it’s called ‘Revolution’?...Because we don’t get that political revolt) and this story still feels undeveloped somehow. This is the sort of revolution where the new guys set out a whole bunch of pledges that sound daring and brilliant and fair, then ends up doing the same thing as before. Like a lot of the Chibnall era but even more so than usual there’s a great story here that got away. It could have been more –  so much more! 

POSITIVES + The Doctor being trapped in an un-named prison makes for a great opening, even if it has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the plot. It’s great to see so many monsters in there with her and The Doctor befriending them. We need a spin-off series of how the Sycorax and Ood came to team up as ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (how did a naturally gentle being like the Ood end up in prison? Was it taken over again?!) while there’s also a shackled Weeping Angel, a hungry p’Ting chewing it’s cell bars, a Skithra (‘Nikolai Tesla’s Night Of Terrors’), a gathering Coil (‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’), a Thilurian (‘Demons Of the Punjab’), a Gold Dalek (who we naturally assumed was going to be part of the main plot but was never mentioned again) and in the best joke of the episode a Silence (‘Oh yeah, I forgot you were here!’) It's a very clever run of scenes that manages to be both dark and funny and tells us more about the 13th Dr’s inner journey following her discovery of her origins than any story that tries to tackle the ‘Timeless Child’ arc head on. One question though. Why don't the Judoon just re-arrest her at a later date? They don't seem at all fussed she's absconded. I expected this pot point to come up later in her run, but it never does. 

NEGATIVES - The actual leaving scene of Graham and Ryan and the leaving hug is quite sweet and I was surprised how moved I was. The bit before that, though, didn't half lay on the treacle, the Hallmarks. Talk about 'let's lay off resolving the urgent main plot we've been running around trying to solve while we stop and talk about our feelings, so you'll feel something when these two twits finally leave'. The scene before this, when The Doctor says to Ryan ‘thankyou for being my friend’ even though he’s done nothing helpful at all, with Ryan replying ‘thankyou for being mine’ might just be the most sick bucket-inducing line of the whole show. Some companion leaving scenes feel like whole books, but this one is a Hallmarks Greetings card despite going on for at least the last hour and just as sincere. It might just be the single worst leaving scene since Dodo was brainwashed in ‘The War Machines’. Because I feel as I’ve been brainwashed, into caring for two people I couldn’t care about less. I do love the line about The Doctor’s mixed feelings though (‘I have two hearts, one happy, one sad’).

BEST QUOTE:  Robertson: ‘We live in uncertain times. Do you want to win? Embrace the uncertainty. Live in the worry’.