Eve Of The Daleks: Ranking - 70

 

 Eve Of The Daleks

(New Year's Day Special, Dr 13 with Yaz and Dan, 1/1/2022, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Annetta Laufer)

Rank: 70

   'Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Not if you exterminate and get to the Doctor in time!'

 

Happy Who Year! Or possibly, given the plot, ‘Happy Groundalekhogday’. And at last, I got the best possible start to 2022 with what I’d been asking for across the past few years: a Chibnall story that’s genuinely brilliant in every way from beginning to end, that finally makes the most of all the actually really pretty nifty things this era does like no other, being quirky and funny and celebrating life’s misfits but in a story that also works as being properly dark and threatening without the usual wobble trying to staple the two ends of the viewing spectrum together. Not brilliant in a ‘clumsy but well meaning attempt to do something different’ way like ‘Rosa’ or a ‘brilliant but it all goes wrong in the second half’ way like ‘Spyfall’ or a ‘brilliant till the clunking great timeless child arc comes in’ like ‘Villa Diodati’ or an ‘it would have been brilliant if it wasn’t in the middle of an incomprehensible story arc’ like ‘Village Of The Angels’ or even a ‘what a brilliant idea if only they’d seen it through to the end properly’ way like ‘Fugitive Of the Judoon’ but a genuinely funny, imaginative, dramatic bit of scifi that’s the equal of any era which tells a great story with great characters and is the sort of story no other series except Dr Who could tell as well. Against all odds, by going small and setting this story in a tiny storage warehouse (a lucky side effect of covid precautions – though ‘Flux’ was made under the same conditions this is the only story written to have a small cast from the offset to make things easier to film) rather than an epic spanning alien worlds, this story somehow also feels like it has bigger scope than anything in the series for years: these aren’t the easily defeated Skaro foes the way that they are in the era’s other Dalek stories, the Doctor and companions aren’t just speaking their lines then going home but feel like living breathing people again and the stakes really feel high, not least because the Daleks keep winning over and over (until – spoilers- they don’t). After years of watching Who more as a case of loyalty than love and from a teacher haranguing us wayward pupils it felt as if the series was being made for us again, from one good hearted weirdo to another.

Even more against the odds than that a repetitive Dr Who plot about time-loops that has the characters going back over old ground and repeating themselves every few minutes is the one script in the Chibnall era that breaks new ground that’s worth exploring. For the first time in a long time the Tardis is the main protagonist, of a sort, by going wrong at the start of the story when the Doctor tries to reset the timelines post-Flux (oh to hear the cloister bell again!) Instead of recovering, the Tardis makes time run back in on itself and a bunch of Daleks spot it and come in to investigate only they get caught up in the timeloop too. What feels as if it started off as a simple moan from the writer (‘What do you mean I have to write a new year’s day special again? And its become traditional to put Daleks in it. But how do I write it so I’m not just repeating myself again?’) becomes a story about something much bigger than the old Doctor-Dalek feud, as the Tardis crew and the two people they meet in the warehouse come to realise how precious and short life is and how you can’t waste it doing the same things over and over (perhaps the key message of the Chibnall era, but usually delivered in a smirking sermon at the end, not an integrated part of the plot like this). It seems strange that a series so steeped in time travel had never done a story about the feeling of déjà vu before, the sense that we’re somehow repeating our lives all over again and might not have quite got it right last time. Suddenly all those times I walked into a room and remembered being in it before made sense – although there weren’t any Daleks around, I checked. Who is usually a series where second chances are usually impossible, but Chibnall takes the very Moffat idea of a threat that’s on the verge of killing you and runs with it, having the Daleks actually win for a few minutes at a time before time gets re-set and we all go through it all over again. It’s a plot that allows Chibnall the chance to do one of his favourite things as a writer, deliver morals about how we should live every moment as if it might be our last and how team work makes the dream work, but they feel more earned in this story than some of his others and don’t come with the same sense of preaching to the converted as his stories on the environment and racism: we all get lackadaisical about our lives sometimes, sleepwalking through our days and living each one the same way we did last time. A lot daily life feels a lot like get up, go to work, get home, go to sleep, be exterminated as it is: for once in this era ‘Eve Of the Daleks’ feels like the sort of life we recognise, but with the very Dr Whoy message that there’s more to life than work and chips and a warehouse full of out of date food. 

 Chibnall’s clearly been thinking about the new year’s day slot he requested (having never liked the Christmas Day one) and at the third time of asking found a way to make it work: and not even simply because the plot involves blowing everything you up with fireworks at the end. This is a time of year when we’re most full of resolutions about how we’re going to break out of the ruts our lives have fallen into and make some changes in our lives, to be better versions of ourselves. Usually characters in Dr Who become better by being around the Doctor, but never more than here – though here it’s not being around the Dr so much as facing death that makes people change. That idea is most obviously there with our new characters of course, ably played by warehouse employee Aisling Bea’s Sarah and Adjani Salmon as her customer Nick. He’s secretly had the hots for her for three years and only comes in to store things as often he does so he can see her, while she comes to appreciate him across the episode. She feels as if she’s been wasting her life but can’t break herself out of the long and winding rut she’s been living in that always leads her back to the family business year after year (something brought home by all the messages that keep pinging on her phone from all her friends and family out having a good time for new year’s and trying to interfere with her life). He’s one of life’s losers, people who don’t usually get to be in Dr Who as anything other than comedy reliefs, but he’s properly brave, defeating two Daleks by having them take each other out. He’s a collector too: the two together makes him a natural Whovian (it is true that we have a tendency to become hoarders. Well what else can we be when Big Finish keep releasing new stories every other week?! Usually in Who people who catalogue things are baddies, like Van Stratten in ‘Dalek’ – it’s good to be a goodie for a change). Their slow move together, sacrificing themselves for each other as if suddenly realising the other is the most important thing in the world, is gradual but sweet. It’s in your last minutes that you say the things that matter and Nick and Sarah both gets a lot of last minutes, over and over. It’s a neat twist on the age old theme of making the most of every minute – only in Dr Who would that every minute be your very last ones, repeated. 

 The setting is particularly key: the idea of a warehouse was chosen deliberately because it was the sort of place that would be conveniently empty for a covid lockdown-made episode and yet the set dressers could cram the walls full of props so it didn’t look empty. But it’s perfect for the situation and the new year’s day slot, full of people hanging on to things from yesteryear that they need to let go of. Nick, for instance, has been hoarding items from his ex-girlfriends, people he once cared for who aren’t in his life anymore, in case they ever call one day and want anything back, instead of moving on with his life. Other people we never get to see are hoarders too: there’s a whole floor full of out of date beans with beef tins that can’t possibly be of any use to anybody and fireworks left over from bonfire night (which, as it turns out, are useful but only for blowing up the warehouse and stopping the Daleks getting to anything). The ending is particularly interesting in that the family business is blown up to smitheroons and yet everyone is pleased; the family aren’t that fussed about it because it wasn’t making any money (it only appears to have like five customers) and Sarah hated her job anyway. They could have closed down the business years ago and yet everyone was going through the motions until being faced with death over and over. We are all filling our lives full of junk so we don’t feel empty, like the warehouse, but none of it is really doing us any good until we learn to use it as literal fuel to push ourselves forward and make our lives better, even if it means doing something scary like saying ‘I love you’ to someone who needs to hear it or facing monsters in the eye. 

 That oppressive feeling of being trapped feels like a more believable situation than most modern Dr Whos too, well give or take the mutant alien blobs from Skaro in indestructible tanks and the time machine in the shape of a police box that’s gone wrong I guess, but even these are such familiar things for DW fans by now that we’ve rather taken them for granted; this is an episode about why we should never ever do that if we want to keep moving forward. You actually see the Dr ‘fail’ the first few times before she works out what to do and you actually feel as if this Dr knows she’s in danger; Jodie Whittaker even stops quipping, pretty much the only time she does so you know she’s serious. Dan and Yaz’s grim acceptance of their fate also says far more about their characters than any amount of monologues from stories past. At last, after a succession of ciphers or clichés, we get believable rounded people in Dr Who again who are flawed but likeable rather than pure heroes or villains. 

 The best part is that this theme is a lot more subtle than usual in a Chibnall story. Usually what’s going on is depressingly obvious, leaving reviewers like me who like to ruminate on our Who between episodes nothing to go on, but this one is clever. Sarah’s mammy constantly ringing her up at midnight is an inspired bit of writing, perhaps the cleverest bit Chibnall wrote for Who (at least since ‘The Power Of Three’), serving the triple purpose of being there for comedy purposes, filling us in on Sarah’s character and her increasing frustration at everyone around her trying to control her life and as part of the plot, increasing the tension as the timeloops get shorter and shorter so that we know we only have a few more minutes before our heroes die. That’s a clever metaphor too for what this story is really about: each time we live our lives over again, repeating ourselves each year and ending up in the exact same place we don’t want to be, we’re also edging closer to the point of death, of our ‘extermination’. That phonecall is notable too for Sarah’s changing response to it. The first few times it happens Sarah finds her mammy an interfering irritant whose always getting in the way of her fun; by the end she’s a lifeline to the outer world and a symbol of all the things that will be lost if the Daleks get their way and she regrets all the times she didn’t pick up the phone now she might not have another chance. This was an era of a statistically high number of terrorist attacks and sieges and every other news bulletin of the day seemed to contain footage of some poor sobbing because they’d heard their precious loved one’s last moments via phone. It might sound strange to some of our younger readers but this is a relatively new 21st century thing. Traditionally, when the ‘classic’ series was on the air, big news events were a removal apart from us, things that to statistical numbers of people. You could re-create what happened afterwards, maybe hear from eye-witnesses, but you never got the true full sense of what it was like to really be somewhere. This is different on the modern ay when the vast majority of people have access to a recording device and there are no end of examples of people caught in tragedies using their youtube channel or their facebook or their twitter accounts to live-stream danger to get the word out to other people. Our phones often feel like weapons when we’re in the wrong headspace, when we see other people living the sort of full busy happy lives we want, just as Sarah feels here (and goodness knows I’ve spent enough new year’s with nothing to keep me company except my DVD player and Who collection while everyone else around me seem to be leading the sort of exciting adventures only the Doctor’s companions gets to have), but equally sometimes they can make us grateful for what we have, that our loved ones are safe and are all in reach, that you and your contacts have survived another year despite a real world that seems to be increasingly full of danger and horror. 

 It’s not just the newer characters who feel this pressure to break out of a routine and take a chance because time is precious too: it’s there when Yaz finally admits to having feelings for the Doctor, a secret she’s been keeping from everyone up to and including herself. The ‘Thasmin’ romance is a bit weird it has to be said. You could see the chemistry between Dr 9 and Rose from space, but until ‘Flux’ D 13 and Yaz hadn’t swapped more than two lines that weren’t plot exposition and they didn’t seem to have any more romantic overtones than, say, the Doctor and Graham (now there’s an image for you!) This one really wasn’t Chibnall’s fault though – it was fans who started referring to them as ‘Thasmin’ and longed to see the Dr’s first lesbian kiss. Rather than adding something neither actor had even vaguely considered while performing their first two series together, however, why not add the love interest in the form of an incidental character? It really messes with Yaz’s most defining (only defining?) character trait, which was doing the right thing no matter how hard it was – if she steals away with the Doctor and risks her life because she’s secretly in love rather than because she’s an idealistic policewoman who wants to change the world it negates everything else we learned about her, particularly in her first series. Come to think of it, there aren’t any believable romances in the whole of Chibnall’s run even though we had lots – the closest we get is the banter between Dan and Karvanista bickering like an old married couple! There just isn’t time to write that romance in fully before both actresses left and Chibnall, like Moffat, is allergic to killing off his characters so didn’t want one to sacrifice themselves for the other (talking of which, watch out for the weird seconds-long cameo by Karl at the end, the first person to die in the Chibnall era at the hands of Tzi-Sha in ‘The Woman Who fell To Earth’ who pops up at the end to watch the fireworks, his life apparently ‘saved’ by the events in ‘Flux’, which fits the theme of second chances but seems weird in context given he last appeared four full years and twenty-nine full episodes ago and even I’d forgotten who he was and had to look him up later).However a lesbian romance is exactly the sort of modern progressive thing Dr Who should have been doing and if here that romance is at its best: admittedly Dan chooses a super weird time to confront Yaz about her feelings, while they’re hiding from Daleks in a warehouse with time ticking relentlessly down, but aesthetically it makes sense that it happens in a story about how you don’t always get second chances and life passes you by too quickly. While we don’t dwell on it (and we only really get the denouement, such as it is, in ‘Power Of The Doctor’ in two stories’ time) here you really do get a sense of just how hard it is for Yaz to admit to herself that she’s a lesbian, her sudden gasp that her friend is right and she’s been oblivious and in denial (something as a police officer she’s trained never to be) is easily the best character development poor Yaz ever gets. So far her feelings have been expressed through ambiguous remarks and puppy-eyed glances when she thinks the Doctor’s not looking but here is the moment Yaz makes her mind up she has to do something about it or regret it the rest of her life. Honestly it’s the sort of powerful character moment I wish this series did more (even if, unlike Dan, I really didn’t see it coming onscreen and would have been oblivious to it myself had I not been keeping up with the fan discussion online). It fits here too: you and I know that time is relative, dear reader, but nothing changes your perception more than doing something you love with the person you’re with, it being part of the human condition that time seems to slow down when you hate your job and speed up when you find the thing you’ve spent your life searching for. 

 It’s not just Yaz either. That feeling of time passing you by and second chances is there when Dan admits that he wished he’d done more to be with Diane, the girl we see him split up with in his first episode ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’, instead of letting her slip out of his hands. It’s there when the Doctor realises just how much effort it took to overcome the Flux and the sense that her time is running short when she still has so much more she needs to do (Could it be too that Chibnall was teasing us the way Moffat did with Clara and the way Davies did with ‘The Next Doctor’? ‘Eve’ was the first story broadcast after the announcement that Jodie Whittaker would be leaving the following year and speculation was rife about when and how she’s die – for a moment it looked as if they’d killed her early. Not least to the star herself, as the story goes that Jodie Whittaker, who’d asked to be written out soon but didn’t have full dates yet, skim-read the first few pages of this script and genuinely thought this was how her Doctor was going to regenerate until she turned the page and went ‘oh’). It’s even there for the Daleks a little bit – this isn’t a battle fleet convinced of their own victory but a small fleet who are secretly a little bit scared of the Doctor and blame her (not the Sontarons) for what happened in ‘Flux’. They know, after so many past chances, that they can’t miss this chance to exterminate her once and for all, unlike all those other attempts that have gone wrong in the past. They manage it too, repeatedly, even if time keeps being reset: this is the closest the Daleks have come to actually winning since as long ago as ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ in 1965 and too it’s the only time we see the Dr exterminated, beyond the regeneration-that-wasn’t in ‘Journey’s End’. However that leads to another aspect of the timey wimey plot too: the Daleks really are stuck in place, doomed to repeat the same plan over and over because that’s who they are; they don’t know how to do anything differently – their only passion in life is to exterminate so when they are given the gift of a second chance that’s what they do all over again. By contrast humans (and timelords) can learn and grow, creating a plan through trial and error and making sure to avoid the mistakes of last time. The Daleks get cocky, certain that their way is the only way after their success, but to quote The Five Doctors ‘he that shall win shall lose and he that shall lose shall win’ because even mistakes are an opportunity to start all over again and do things better. To err is to be human, but to get carried away with your own brilliance is to Dalek.

 This isn’t just some high-falluting episode that only works as metaphors though – it’s both the grittiest and funniest Who story in years and unlike certain other Chibnall stories (and indeed Donald Cotton’s twin Hartnell adventures), that veer wildly from one extreme to another, they both belong together. The humour here is darkly funny, the panicked defiance of characters who have no other weapons against their incoming death and recognise the absurdity of dying not in some heroic gesture but in an empty warehouse they didn’t want to be in. Aisling Bea steals the show with one of the most bravura and memorable Dr Who guest appearances for decades, totally believable as the most sarcastic Who character since Tegan and she gets all the best lines, spitting them out in an Irish quickfire rage. Chibnall was a big fan (as am I) and had wanted to get her in the series for ages – he gave her more leeway than a lot of guest stars too, allowing her to improvise her way round the dialogue to make it feel more ‘her’ (interestingly Aisling pretty much writes it the way the 13th Doctor should always have been written, as someone mouthing off at speed, partly because that’s how her brain works abut also because it fills the echoing silence in her head). In other Chibnall stories the comedy detracts rather than adds to the drama, taking you out of the tension (because if the characters aren’t scared why should you be?) This story is different though – the comedy is obviously a cover-up for how scared Sarah is and her black humour only accentuates how desperate and grim things are. There are lots of great lines in this story, with ‘give that man an inch and he’ll take a whole corridor’ my favourite, followed by Sarah finding it harder to believe that the council would send three people out on New year’s day than that her warehouse has been invaded by shooty aliens. It’s not just the silly lines that work well this episode either: Chibnall’s always handled the Daleks in his episodes better than he’s given credit for (it’s everyone else in those episodes that tend to fall apart) and there are lots more signs in this episode that he really gets their relentless, paranoid souls well. ‘Daleks are not fair’ is a line that sums them up so well (I can’t believe nobody came up with that before) while the in-joke of Nicholas Briggs, in full method Dalek acting, replying ‘I am not Nick!’ when Sarah goes looking for her customer, is good fun too. 

 The nature of the plot also means we avoid the usual problems of the Chibnall era: there are no bland supporting cast aliens getting in the way, no cul-de sacs to fall down and then be forgotten and no time taken out for a five minute lecture to those of us at home. Chibnall episodes tend to sag in the middle or have the Doctor stand around while the baddies do something to her, but this one is all action, the gaps between that action getting shorter and shorter with each revival so that the tension increases too. The warehouse set, too, is a whole new place for a DW runaround, designed for lots of legging it round corners and random props while being close enough to the junkyard that was DW’s original home to bring back happy memories and a reminder of how much the series has come since the days when it, too, was stuck in a time-loop and repeating itself, re-setting to the location (near enough) where it all started and once seemed as if it could go anywhere. Most of all it’s that extra quarter hour or in the script (compared to standard length episodes) that makes all the difference: though stories like ‘Resolution’ and ‘Revolution’ wasted it and ‘legend Of te Sea Devils’ to come will feel like wading through treacle ‘Eve’ uses those extra minutes for valuable characterisation, so that there’s barely a line wasted (the only part that maybe goes on a little long is the set-up, the pre-credits sequence taking a full nine minutes and is to date the longest we’ve ever had in Who, but even that helps set up the situation slowly without the usual panicky rush of fitting everything in of a Chibnall tal). The resulting story is a triumph that sits up there comfortably even with past greats of Dr Who, finding new ways to tell new stories about old themes that makes it feel like a ‘proper’ Dr Who again, in the spirit of the original show, rather than one that insists on re-writing it over and over (ironically enough). 

Any era would be proud to have this show in its run in fact; the fact that it comes juxtaposed between two of the all-time worst Who stories that couldn’t even get the basics of storytelling right makes its brilliance all the more remarkable. But even then it makes sense: this is a story all about how you aren’t condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and how your mistakes can set you free if you learn from them. Sadly a lot of fans had given up on the series by this point with ratings that would make even the 7th Doctor era in the 1980s blush – if you’re one of them then you missed out on a real treat with this one and a story that might seem as basic as it gets (the Daleks running round shooting at the Doctor) but is really about a whole lot more than that and the human condition that drives us onwards, even in the middle of a worldwide plague. The best thing to ever come out of covid, seriously: everyone worked their socks off to make this episode happen when it looked as if the 13th Doctor series might be exterminated before its time (another reason, perhaps, why we get a story about second chances) and if the era had finished without one strong story like this one, after all those nearly greats, it would have been an awful shame. Everyone involved in this one deserves a pat on the back for getting it out at all and on time, given the huge obstacles in their path, never mind making it the best story in maybe six years, at least for my tastes (since ‘Husbands Of River Song’ to be exact). Thank goodness Chibnall had to think outside the box and deliver something other than the big epic he was planning. Chibnall isn’t the sort of writer like Davies who gets better with each draft: usually his first instinctive ideas are his best ones and his re-writes make things worse through over-thinking and taking out the parts where his scripts need room to breathe. This time around though his two-week deadline is the shortest he ever had and it’s maybe the best thing that ever happened to him as showrunner. After all, that planned epic sounds as if it would have been the same thing over and over again and ‘Eve Of The Daleks’ is proof of just why we haven’t got time for that when there are new so many thrilling new adventures to have. 

 POSITIVES + The line ‘golden-hearted weirdoes are keepers’ is one of my favourite Dr Who quotes. Not just because it happens to be true but because it sums up this series so well and the themes of never being afraid of the strange or the peculiar when exploring the universe. Though its Sarah who says it, note how Yaz and Dan subtly look over at the Doctor immediately afterwards. For who is more of a golden-hearted weirdo than her? And she’s both in this story, one of the two or three strongest ones for Jodie’s Doctor where she actually feels like a real regeneration with her own quirks and traits rather than someone doing an impressionist of one of the other Doctors. 

 NEGATIVES - Though the ending, when Sarah and Nick run off together to travel the world, is aesthetically the perfect ending for a story that’s all about making the most of missed opportunities and how precious time is, this is one of the craziest love stories in all of Dr Who and these two don’t feel right for one another at all. They barely know one another for a start (though they’ve known each other three years their conversations with each other have appeared to be very repetitive) and their trauma bond of fleeing Daleks isn’t going to last long enough conversationally to get them to the airport, never mind around the world. While Sarah’s a good match for Nick, giving him a sense of confidence and excitement, his obsessional nature doesn’t seem a really good fit for her and risks making Sarah look like a passenger in her own life again, living her life through other people, the situation that led her to be working in her uncle’s warehouse against her will anyway. 

 BEST QUOTE: Sarah: ‘If our lives depend on my mother ringing me at a time I actually ask her to, honestly, we're all dead’. 

One last point before you go as its not strictly a prequel or sequel but sort of fits here where that column would normally be: out of nowhere The Doctor mentions in her last scene wanting to search for the lost treasure of the Flor Do Mar, something we never actually see on screen (a story that’s inevitably going to be a story one day in some format). This is a real life mystery that sounds very Dr Who, a Portuguese carrack that was sunk in the early 1500s off the coast of Sumatra and might be the single biggest cache of treasure lost at sea (eat your heart out ‘The Smugglers’ and ‘Curse Of The Black Spot’!) It’s spookily similar to ‘Legends Of the Sea Devils’ as it happens, but not quite (that story is set in 19th century China for starters). Was this the original plan for the New Year’s Day special that instead got changed at the last minute when covid made it impossible to make? Stories have come out since that we weren’t meant to get an Easter special at all but Chibnall pushed to make on because he didn’t want to just lead from the New year’s special into ‘Power Of the Doctor’, a gap that would have lost all momentum and didn’t give him sufficient time to write his characters. Was it realised, somewhere between writing and filming, that mocking up a China jun and writing in a pirate was better than searching for buried treasure? As of now we don’t know, but it seems a strange bit ofg symmetry to simply be a coincidence. 

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