Doctor Who (2005) - New Year's Day 2021: Revolution of the Daleks

Episode:

862

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Writer:

Chris Chibnall

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Director:

Lee Haven Jones

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Air Date:

01-Jan-2021

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about Doctor Who again! I felt like I was probably done with the series after that last season, at least until Chris Chibnall stepped down as showrunner, but I needed to write about something new to break up all the Babylon 5 I've been reviewing and this one-off special aired at just the right time for me.

I mean I didn't hate series 12, but every now and then Doctor Who makes a real effort to sever my emotional investment in it and The Timeless Child did a better job than most episodes. Plus after two seasons of Chibnall Who I'm well aware of what to expect from it and I know it's not really my kind of thing.

Revolution of the Daleks is following in the tradition of classic 'R of the Daleks' stories like Resurrection of the Daleks (Davros tries to cure a Dalek virus), Revelation of the Daleks (Davros runs a funeral home) and Remembrance of the Daleks (Dalek vs Dalek in WW2 London). But not the last New Year's special, Resolution, as they forgot to include the 'of the Daleks' part for that one. Its title was announced before it aired, but it wasn't shown in-episode until the end credits so it seemed like they were going to reveal it was really Resolution of the Daleks... but it wasn't.

This time the title's up at the front of the episode, where it usually is, and... that's about all the trivia I can think of to write about here. Anyway, this I'm going to do the full recap and commentary thing with this one, so there'll be SPOILERS for the entire story, and perhaps other stories too.

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This is how the episode begins, with a screenful of orange text.

It'd be funny if a Star Wars movie did this; just gave up on being vague and gave us an exact year for when events were taking place. "A long time ago... okay fine it takes place in 1871".

I feel like this is a bit unfair to people who live in, or nearby, Cheltenham though. Usually when something is 'far, far away' there's no danger of the people watching the story actually being from that place. I don't know, maybe market research shows that no one in Cheltenham has ever watched Doctor Who.

One thing I appreciate about Doctor Who, is how much location shooting it does for a series without much of a budget. These opening scenes take place right after the destruction of the Recon Dalek in Resolution (on New Year's Day 2019), and once it's been established that this guy's driving the truck with the Dalek wreckage inside, the episode's happy to just follow him driving around for a bit. Plus they throw in a quick shot of the photos on his dashboard just to show that there's people who'll be sad if he dies.

Alas, he's sold a poisoned drink from a food truck and dies. We're dealing with absolute pros here: they knew what route he'd take, when he'd get thirsty, and exactly where he'd choose to stop. Anyway these people have got their hands on the Dalek shell now... and that's the end of the teaser. Still no sign of the Doctor.

I was sure that they changed the opening titles a bit for this episode, so I've compared a screencap with one from series 12 and yeah they've definitely made the swirly milkshake more colourful. It's a good change I reckon, I like it. I still had to lower the volume on the music though.

Act one begins a while after the cold open, but I don't think we've reached the present day yet. That means we get to see what Arachnids in the UK villain Jack Robertson was up to last season. He's the first of two returning Jacks this episode, but the characters he's chatting to are both new.

One of them is a genius engineer (Leo Rugazzi, CEO, Rugazzi Technologies), the other a politician (Jo Patterson, Technology Secretary), and the three of them are currently witnessing something... revolutionary: a demonstration of a new security drone in a simulated riot, with very realistic Molotov cocktails being thrown. It's fine, just a bit of role-playing.

Oh no it's a Police Dalek! Like a tiny ED-209.

I wasn't too enthusiastic when I heard that they were sticking with the skinny scrap Dalek redesign from Resolution for this story, but this thing has been reverse engineered from it so it makes perfect sense. Plus this actually looks a lot better than the scrap Dalek did.

They share the same basic design, but the proportions have been tweaked to widen the middle section and give it a classic Dalek silhouette. Turns out that's really all the thing needed to look right.

Leo shows off the Dalek's crowd control weapons, including a water cannon, (fake) CS gas, and an ear-splitting 'sonic deterrent' that gets the crowd of actors grabbing their ears in what appears to be very real pain.

It's a good thing the real Daleks don't have this ability, because I think they'd win a lot more often if they did.

Leo opens the thing up and we see it's being run by AI. There's no genocidal mutant inside pretending to be obedient, like in Power of the Daleks and Victory of the Daleks; this is a true RoboCop.

Robertson and Patterson go for a chat in private and we learn that she was the one who tipped him off that a scrap Dalek was being transported. The two of them have been engaged in a bit of role-playing themselves in front of Leo, that way it all looks perfectly legitimate when she acquires the drones from him for the government. You'd think that the fact that they look like Daleks would be a red flag to people, but it doesn't seem like the general public is even aware of what a Dalek is.

I suppose that makes sense, as I don't think there's been a proper Dalek invasion since the cracks in time messed with people's memory of continuity. Plus humanity developed a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like ability to forget weird world-changing events during Capaldi's run.

79 BILLION
LIGHT YEARS AWAY

Then the story jumps to the asteroid prison we saw the Doctor teleported to at the end of the last story, with some orange text telling us that it's 79 billion light-years away. That seems like a lot, but to be honest I've no idea how far you'd have to travel just to reach our nearest galaxy, so I did some research:

The furthest distance listed on the Tardis Wiki is from The Girl Who Waited, with the planet Apalapucia being located 2 billion light-years from Earth. I remembered that Stargate: Universe takes place a fair distance from the Milky Way as well, so I looked that up and the starship Destiny is apparently several billion light-years from home. In real life the most distant galaxy we've discovered in the known universe is GN-z11, which is 32 billion light-years away.

So this prison is over twice as distant as the most distant object we know about. This information is entirely irrelevant to the story.

Hey it's the Doctor, and it seems like she's been locked away here for a while now. Unless those tally marks on the wall are counting minutes. I like that they're not 4 lines and a slash like you'd usually see, because she's not human and that's not even a universal adopted system here on Earth.

I feel like other Doctors might have scribbled something more interesting on the walls, but none of them were ever captured for so long so we never got to find out. (12 was trapped in that confession dial for a while, but that was basically a time loop for him so he never found time to do more than paint a fantastic portrait of his dead companion).

She eats her food, ignores the holographic symbol instructing her to do some exercise, and is led down a corridor by holographic arrows. Or maybe the arrows are leading her to the exercise room? Its a bit vague.

I like how there's no guards here, just symbols, and it gives the place an impersonal sci-fi atmosphere. Someone else must have liked them too because they put them on the poster. Kind of made it seem like they're going to be relevant to the story in some way.

She arrives in a vast area covered in electrified fences and spotlights, with each cage containing another dangerous criminal. Like there's a Weeping Angel in there, and that gremlin thing from The Tsuranga Conundrum (man I can't believe I didn't have to look that title up, what's wrong with me?).

It's not entirely clear to me why they're all here in these cages though. I suppose it could be to give them a bit of social contact so they're not in solitary confinement, but it's hard to really strike up a conversation with a Weeping Angel.

The most unusual thing about these prison scenes is that there's no sign that the Doctor's been trying all kinds of crazy things to try to escape, but there's no sign that she's been passing up possible opportunities either. There's plenty of ways that Chibnall could've played this: maybe she's choosing to stay in prison for a reason, maybe she's given up in despair after the revelations from The Timeless Child, maybe it's a really secure prison and it's going to take a while to get out, maybe she's trying to find a new companion to help her. But all we get from these scenes is 'The Doctor has been in prison for a long time and isn't happy'. The person who once punched a diamond wall for 4.5 billion years because of their limitless determination hasn't got a punch left in her. The one thing that you should never ever put in a trap has been trapped.

It's not very satisfying.

Back on Earth we finally get to check in on what the companions have been up to in the months since The Timeless Child and it turns out that Yaz has been sleeping in that beautiful Tardis they acquired, as she's obsessed with trying to rescue the Doctor from whatever situation she's stuck in. In fact she's got a whole wall covered in the notes she's using to piece together the mystery. This doesn't really ring true to me though, as how the hell did she even end up with note #1? What's even written there? And does she still have a job to go to?

Did I mention how beautiful this Tardis is? I love this set. In fact the episode has some great looking sets in general.

Anyway Graham and Ryan have had better luck investigating weirdness as they've acquired footage of the Dalek drone being demonstrated, and the three of them decide while the Doctor's gone it's up to them to save the day.

Meanwhile... or maybe months ago? I don't even know how time works in this story.

Robertson and Patterson are having a meeting out here in this picturesque forest so she can discuss how much he's about to get screwed over. She's on her way to becoming Prime Minister and he's going to give her all the Dalek drones she wants for free, or else she'll shine some light on all the tax he's not paying. Seems like she's the Alpha villain in this arrangement!

Later that night (or maybe months later?) the companions confront Robertson on what he's up to, but they don't get any information before they're stopped by people with guns. By the way, guns haven't gotten any less illegal in Britain since the last time we saw his armed security back in Arachnids in the UK.

So I suppose this scene's just here to demonstrate how ineffective the companions are without psychic paper, a Tardis they can control, and an alien genius. Not that the Doctor's being particularly effective on her prison asteroid either. About the most proactive thing we see her do is recite the first couple of lines of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to herself from memory. It was bit weird to hear the first female Doctor quoting J.K. Rowling this year, but I guess this was filmed a long time ago... (2019).

Fortunately the episode's second returning Jack has gotten himself locked away here as well in order to save her! It's a bit like that series Prison Break, except instead of there being an actual prison break they basically just run through all the walls in their magic bubble and then teleport away.

If I had any emotional investment left in the series I might have called this whole prison non-plot bullshit, but I've given up on expecting the 13th Doctor to be anywhere near as impressive as previous modern-era Doctors.

Back on Earth, it turns out that Leo decided to clone the alien cells he found inside the alien war machine, just to see what it grew into! The guy must be incredibly smart to be equally skilled at replicating Dalek technology and Dalek biology, but he's also an incredible idiot. Even Robertson has enough sense to tell him to throw the thing into the incinerator.

I don't know why Leo decides to store the Dalek inside his modded PC case, but at the last moment he decides that he doesn't want it to get incinerated along with the tentacle alien, and opens it up. Leo is an incredible idiot.

Anyway he's been possessed now, like the woman from Resolution.

The Doctor and Jack teleport back to the safety of the Tardis... which isn't actually very safe at all really, seeing as the Judoon just teleported in and kidnapped her from this exact room at the end of the last story. In fact the two of them have escaped to the first place the Judoon would look for them, which is presumably still parked exactly where they found it last time.

We learn here that Jack was in prison for 19 years waiting for his chance to break her out, and he doesn't seem even slightly bothered by the ordeal. I know he's mostly immortal and 19 years is less than a billionth of his life span, but if you locked me in that prison for a day I'd be slightly bothered by it.

I don't think we learn how long the Doctor was there, but it was probably longer than that (unless Jack got himself arrested 19 years in advance). Fortunately she has a time machine, so she can arrive on Earth at the same moment her companions did, like nothing even happened.

The Tardis materialises inside the same room they're all sitting in, accompanied by inappropriately heroic music. She's done nothing in this episode to earn that music and I can't remember if she did anything in the last episode either! But it's only really here to make it more jarring when it turns out no one's all that overjoyed to see her.

Oops, turns out the Tardis decided to screw with her, like it does sometimes, and she's arrived 10 months late. Her disappearance was never anything to do with the prison, it was just a Tardis problem. In fact the whole prison sequence was fairly irrelevant, and was basically there to pay off the cliffhanger of the last story. The companions aren't even going to give her any sympathy for it.

Speaking of irrelevant, turns out the companions are still in the "planning to eventually do something" phase of their operation, and haven't actually achieved anything whatsoever without the Doctor. But now that she's here they can get on with investigating Robertson's Dalek master plan.

OSAKA
JAPAN

Turns out the Dalek clone on Leo's back has made his own plans though and we see he's got a tower of Dalek cloning pods built in Osaka. See, this is what happens when you let a Dalek access your company's network just to see what happens.

The Doctor and crew decide to just go ask Robertson what he's up to again, this time without the armed guards running to his rescue, and he shows them how they're just 3D printing new Daleks.

Apparently Robertson's tech is good enough to basically replicate things, no manufacturing process required. But he shows them that there's nothing inside and they're ran by AI.

I got a bit of déjà vu here, as this shot is just like the one from earlier where Leo showed Patterson there was nothing inside. There's definitely room in there to put something inside though...

Meanwhile Yaz and Captain Jack are on their own mission to investigate the Dalek DNA picked up on the Tardis' scanners at Robertson's facility in Osaka. They have a bit of a chat about how companions don't get to choose when they leave the Doctor, but she should enjoy it while it lasts.

Then he shows off his squareness gun! I could be wrong, but I don't think we've seen him use the gun since it was introduced back in The Doctor Dances.

Inside they soon find out why they picked up Dalek DNA here...

Wait, this is basically the same shot we saw a couple of minutes ago! I'm getting déjà vu again.

Yaz wants to investigate what they're feeding the clones with, as she thinks it might be the key to destroying them, but Jack is busy planting explosives. Unfortunately they're both interrupted by Daleks leaping onto them.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Patterson (who got elected at some point), is ready to reveal her Dalek drones. And they're all Tron'd up with neons! I'd probably hate this look if they were real Daleks, but they're human-made Dalek replicas so I think it's actually kind of fitting.

It's weirder somehow that Patterson doesn't share the screen with a single other human for the rest of her scenes in this episode. It's just her, that door, and the Dalek drones.

We get scenes of the Security Daleks already being accepted as a normal part of life, which is just messing with my perception of time even more. Is this weeks later?

This is intercut with Yaz and Jack fighting with a couple of cloned Daleks that had leapt out of the vats, with Yaz tearing one off Jack's face and Jack shooting one off Yaz's back. This is an important scene because this is the only thing that Yaz achieves in this entire episode.

Back on the Tardis, the Doctor and Ryan are racing to meet up with Yaz and Jack in Osaka, but the Tardis is going to take four minutes to get there. Uh, what? We've seen the Tardis hurtling around the time vortex so we know it takes subjective time to travel places, but my brain is not happy that it takes so long to travel just 5700 miles on the same day. Japan is 79 billion light-years closer than the prison asteroid!

It's a good scene though for the most part, with Ryan telling her that being stuck here these last 10 months has given him time to reconnect with his dad and his mates. Then he gets her to tell him about what she learned from the Master in The Timeless Child, and helps her deal with it. This feels like it would've been a Graham scene in an earlier episode, so it shows how Ryan's changed.

He also gives her a mission for series 13: she should find out about her old lives and what she did, all the memories the Gallifreyans took from her. Then everything will be alright!

The Doctor arrives in the Osaka Dalek cloning facility just in time for Leo's Dalek to spill the beans about everything. He used his connection to Robertson's company network to hire people to build all this. Then he presumably hired someone else to turn the construction workers into a nutritious fluid for the baby Daleks to eat, because I don't see them doing it to themselves.

Yaz does another really important thing here, pointing out that the lights are turning purple. It doesn't actually help them at all though. In fact it probably would've been better for everyone if they'd just ran back to the Tardis so Jack could've blown the building up with those explosives he planted.

But nope, what happens is that the Daleks use the ultra-violet light to teleport into all the empty Dalek drones 5700 miles away back in the UK, because it's Doctor Who and any bullshit can happen! Turns out that the Dalek drones were secretly altered to carry proper weapons (but no sonic deterrent thankfully), so the cloned Daleks are able to go on a bit of a slaughter, even killing off Patterson.

The Doctor realises that she'll need an army of highly advanced ruthless killers to stand a chance at stopping the Dalek clones. She remembers that the Recon Dalek in Resolution spent the episode trying to contact its fleet, until she finally stopped it, which means there's nothing stopping her from sending the signal to them herself!

Then we see the Daleks she's signalled and they're the RTD era design! Well, mostly. They seem to have each replaced their plunger with a mace.

I don't hate the Robertson Dalek design at all (they're definitely better than the Paradigm Daleks from Victory of the Daleks), but these guys just look better to me.

Speaking of the RTD era, we get shots of people being slaughtered in the streets. Lots of people showing off their skeletons as they're lit up by Dalek rays. Also the Dalek's lighting has turned from blue to red as they're evil now.

The two breeds of Daleks confront each other on a narrow misty bridge and it looks very pretty. It would've looked better if they'd brought the Special Weapons Dalek back from Remembrance of the Daleks to blow stuff up, this is a minor fight by comparison, but it's nice to see Dalek vs Dalek again anyway.

These old bronze Daleks aren't exactly our friends though; they just have a job to do exterminating impure Daleks before they can get around to exterminating humanity. Also Robertson decides to try to make a deal with them, because amoral businessmen are always trying to make deals with Doctor Who enemies.

Jack, Graham and Ryan use a vortex manipulator to teleport over to the Dalek ship to plant bombs, and find that Robertson and Leo's clone Dalek are both there as well. Leo's Dalek tells the bronze Daleks that he's the last of the Recon Dalek clones and he doesn't deserve to be exterminated, because he's a survivor. They can just fix his genetic code! They decide to fix him with Dalek rays and blow him up, so the Dalek clone problem is now completely solved.

Trouble is that the Tardis team have a whole lot of pure Daleks to deal with now. Plus Robertson's gone and sold them out, telling them that the Doctor was the one who called them here.

So the Doctor decides to invite the Daleks inside her Tardis for a chat. This is a fantastic effects shot I reckon. Not because it's doing anything impressive, I just like the look of it. It's got nice colours.

Meanwhile Jack's assault team grabs Robertson and runs around for a bit so that they're surrounded by Daleks when they finally beam out with the vortex manipulator. It's more dramatic that way. It's also dramatic to trigger the explosives on the way out.

Oh damn, that is a beautiful explosion.

Unfortunately the VFX shots can't all be winners as the shot of the Daleks getting crushed inside the Tardis console room doesn't look so good.

That's not a room collapsing around them, that's just bits of the image going wibbly.

I'm sure we're supposed to think of the Doctor's plan here as being ingenious and satisfying, as she sets Yaz's beautiful Tardis to crush itself and disappear into the void, but in the moment I was just sad that they were losing the nice Tardis.

Then a few moments later I realised that the Doctor just killed a Tardis, and story doesn't even seem to realise that this is a tragic sacrifice. This is her Tardis' sister!

6-04 - The Doctor's Wife

We've seen the Doctor's Tardis walking around in a human body, these things are actually sapient and alive! And it was also one of the last things that she had left from Gallifrey, which has been destroyed again. You can see why I'm struggling to have any emotional investment in this series lately.

Anyway, Jack makes his exit off screen for some reason, we're done with him now, so the Doctor's ready to go on a new adventure with her three companions.

Though Ryan's decided he's not going. He feels he should stay behind and look after his world, and that means Graham's leaving too, as he doesn't want to miss out on time with his grandson. They don't actually have anything definite to stay here for; they haven't achieved anything or built anything in the 10 months they've been stranded that they don't want to leave behind, but hey they might start doing it now that the Doctor's given them some psychic paper. Instant forged credentials was the only thing they needed to really move on with their lives.

But hang on, wasn't there a Jack and Yaz conversation earlier all about how companions never get to choose when it's over? I'm very confused! To be fair it's been a long time since it last happened. Maybe the end of the RTD era.

Then it cuts to Graham and Ryan back on the hill we met them on at the start of The Woman Who Fell to Earth. In fact they're both wearing the exact same clothes that they were wearing in that scene except for one thing: Ryan's wearing his yellow beanie. The Doctor mentioned it during their four minute trip to Osaka, saying how she remembered him wearing it the night they first met, and I guess they wanted viewers to think 'hey it's the hat!' But he didn't actually start wearing it until later in the story.

Not that it matters, as this is the present day, and we're getting a chance to see how the two of them have changed compared to how they were two seasons ago. Ryan's still falling off his bike, space-time adventures haven't miraculously cured his dyspraxia, but the two of them have a much closer relationship and they're making plans to go travelling around the world using their psychic paper to solve mysteries and save the day. So they're both going to get themselves killed then.

And then this happens:

For a moment they both see a vision of Grace, Graham's dead wife and Ryan's dead grandmother, standing in front of the sun like a ghost. And then she's gone. They dismiss it as being the sun getting in their eyes for a moment but, uh, the sun's clearly behind them.

It was nice that the show found a way to bring the actress back one last time but I'm sure they could've found a better way than this. Maybe it could've ended with a YouTube video that she had recorded, like how Woman Who Fell to Earth started with Ryan making a video about her. That way she could've even had lines, and it wouldn't have been bizarre and cheesy.

Anyway, the episode actually ends with an aerial shot of Ryan getting right back on that bike and giving it another try! Then he falls off. I know what the episode was going for here, but when someone falls off their bike right before the end credits, that's comedy. That's more likely to make an audience laugh than anything else.


CONCLUSION

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Revolution of the Daleks is about a number of things. First it's about drones, I guess. But it's not about the dangers of what a government can do with them, or what happens when the AI goes rogue, it's about what happens when tentacle creatures teleport inside them from Japan after being exposed to ultraviolet light. Also they have electricity powers now, or maybe that was just the recon Dalek. I did like that they can't regrow from a single cell on their own at least. I also liked how there was a damn good reason why the Dalek drones looked like the scrap Dalek from Resolution, and that we got the RTD era Daleks back as well! I wasn't expecting Dalek satisfaction here but I got it.

The episode is also about the companions' reactions to the Doctor leaving them for 10 months. Which wasn't because she was in prison, but because the Tardis decided to screw her around again. In fact the whole prison sequence was basically just there to annoy me show that the Doctor can't escape prisons when she's suffering an identity crisis I guess. Anyway, the companions all react differently to her absence, with Yaz obsessing over her and Ryan realising that he wants to stick around his home and make it better. Also Graham was there. The way Ryan finally made up his mind at the end to leave after seeing Robertson on the TV made me think he was getting into politics or something. Like he was going to do something to stop people like Robertson continually getting away with dumping toxic waste and gleefully selling out humanity to the Daleks. But no, he's going to continue doing the exact same things he was already doing with the Doctor, except without access to instant transportation to anywhere on the planet (Note: instant transportation to Japan now takes four minutes).

One of the most important things the episode's about is saying farewell to two of the companions, who actually manage to walk away here with minimal drama, without even getting their memories erased or dying. Graham was one of the most atypical and likeable companions the series has had, thanks in part to a great performance by Bradley Walsh, and he was nice to have around for a while, but I'm not really sad to see him go. The series has been too crowded these last two seasons to give its characters enough focus, and Yaz in particular has really suffered as a result. I never really clicked with Ryan and I don't think his acting style clicked with the show, but the guy had a proper arc and it's a good time for him to go. In fact his arc finished a whole season ago, but there's nothing wrong with sticking around for a victory lap.

Finally the episode's about the Doctor dealing with all that stuff she'd already dealt with in The Timeless Child. She's still angry that the Gallifreyans lied to her and stole several lifetimes of memories from her, and that makes her very relatable as a lot of fans feel the same way about this twist. This was mostly resolved by Ryan giving her some good advice for a change, showing how much he's changed. I thought that was a nice scene. In fact Ryan had a few nice scenes in this episode, which is good because it's his final story, though they kind of spoiled it at the end with Ghost Grace shining out of the sun. I mean what the hell Doctor Who? I don't know if the scene was supposed to come across as cheesy, baffling or laughable, but it kind of ticked all those boxes for me.

On the plus side, the episode did actually give the Doctor a chance to save the day herself with her own plan! Or I should say that Jack gave her the chance by not getting around to blowing up the cloning lab in Osaka (though I suppose that wouldn't have solved the 3D printed security drone problem). It feels like the Doctor might have overthought the solution, as the fake Tardis bait likely would've worked just as well on the Dalek drones, because they're Daleks and they hate her, but I guess they had to thin the numbers before that would work. It was kind of ridiculous seeing them all pile in through the door. Though my biggest issue with that sequence was the way the Doctor straight up murdered a Tardis! I immediately thought back to the scene in The Doctor's Wife where our Tardis talked about her murdered sisters and I'm a bit shocked the Doctor would do that to one of them and not even comment on it afterwards. Especially as it was such a beautiful Tardis!

Overall I thought the episode was okay, maybe even above average for the Chibnall era. In fact it seems like I liked it more than a lot of viewers, weirdly. I guess now that I've stopped caring about the show I'm able to enjoy it more. Like I should be annoyed that the prison scenes led nowhere and Doctor had to be rescued, but hey it's the Thirteenth Doctor, they've gone out of their way to establish that she kind of sucks, so whatever! Plus the episode is fantastic on a production level, but that's nothing out of the ordinary for modern Doctor Who.

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures: Babylon 5 season 4, episode 14: Moments of Transition.

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