Revolution of the Daleks

Chris Chibnall isn’t going to win any awards for being particularly revolutionary with this New Year’s 70-minute special. All the ingredients are there for a classic story, full of Doctor Who staples: the Daleks out of their shells; the inevitable production line; their blinkered human allies hoist by their own hubris; Captain Jack doing the heavy duty action heroics; the departing scenes of not one but two companions. So what’s wrong with it? Why is it so unaffecting? Why doesn’t it make the heart pound and break by turns?

Workmanlike is a word I feel I’ve used a lot to describe Chibnall’s writing (as well as clunky) but by workmanlike I mean you can distinctly see the writing at work. You can see how the plotting has been spreadsheeted, the “character moments” positioned, the fates of characters foregrounded because his approach is so cliched and hackneyed. Goodness, he even uses the sentence, “You’re meddling in things you don’t understand.” At his worst, Russell T Davies’s writing could sometimes feel like a string of fantastic events and character beats held together by an often very thin thread. Chibnall’s fantastic events aren’t particularly fantastic, his character beats aren’t particularly hard hitting and his threads are bare.

We start with a flashback to the 2019 New Year’s Day episode. It’s odd. As if the production team are asking viewers to remember that staggeringly amazing special from a few years ago. But it’s badly gauged. It leads into a scene in which a dead Dalek is transported in the back of a van. Surely, the moment we’re waiting for is the twitch of an eyestalk or a blinking light? Instead, it stays dead and we have a clunking poisoning scene which relies on the killer knowing exactly which mobile tea unit the victim is destined to visit. Far better surely to have the reveal of the Daleks in the riot scene, where they can be spotlighted in all their newly armoured glory and open with an exciting prison break?

Unfortunately, the prison break is not in any way heroic or clever. We don’t see the Doctor even planning an escape. Instead, our heroine pines away in her cell mournfully reciting Harry Potter. Talk about a teenage fan girl. This is exactly what Jodie’s Doctor feels like generally: someone trying so hard to be the quirky, eccentric hero she worships and getting it so astronomically wrong. It’s as if even Chibnall has noticed. He keeps his leading lady away from the screen for very long sections of the programme and in last season’s finale had her fall asleep while the Master read her an audiobook. I honestly wonder how this casting came about. When The Woman Who Fell to Earth aired, I was delighted to be feeling positive about a female Doctor, the gender of our lead suddenly seemed surprisingly irrelevant but I have never been thrilled by any decisions made by Whittaker herself and here she reminds us in every single scene why she is such a poor choice for this role. Her dialogue, however off-beat it may be, never strikes me as real. She cannot handle the meter, the jargon or even the tone. I look at her and wonder if she has any idea at all as to what her dialogue actually means. “So it looks like a Dalek but it can’t be a Dalek unless it is a Dalek,” she garbles, trampling over all possible meaning that line could have had. She doesn’t know which words to stress, how the gag works, how to play that line. It’s incredibly infuriating to see one of the biggest leading roles on television handed to someone who does not understand dialogue which is in any way heightened.

Captain Jack is a welcome note of cheap campery. At least he would be if he were given anything to do that was cheap or camp. Honestly, he doesn’t even flirt with anyone except Graham and that’s a repeated gag from Fugitive of the Judoon. I can’t think of a character less suited to giving emotional advice to the current companions than Captain Jack but that’s what he seems to be here for. His big scene with Yaz is the best of the episode but it really isn’t what Jack is about. He gets to fire a gun once and look delighted to be immortal but he’s frankly wasted. And he doesn’t even get a goodbye scene! Instead, he leaves in a clearly dubbed phone-call, as if he were an afterthought. It’s as ham-fisted as Chibnall at his most typical.  

Even Chris Noth seems to be camping it up more than Barrowman. His performance here is far broader than the star-quality he delivered in Arachnids in the UK. Despite having the best lines, he overplays them and they occasionally fall flat. Harriet Walter is dignified, making the most of the little she has to do and is exterminated too soon.

By the time we reach Clifton Suspension Bridge, the tension is all but depleted and it’s a struggle to care. To use the spare TARDIS (which perhaps we should have been introduced to in the pre-titles sequence rather than the Dalek) to solve the problem like the Daleks seems over-simple given the episode’s runtime and the protracted goodbye scenes, whilst refreshingly free from the overwrought or the fantastic, don’t feel in any way earned.

Perhaps with a different TARDIS crew, the next series might feel breezier, fresher but the over-riding feeling that Revolution of the Daleks leaves us with is one of tiredness. For over two years, we’ve seen a badly cast quartet of actors tackling lines which more experienced, more talented, cleverer actors might have managed to deliver. They are routinely upstaged by guest stars and have seemed ill-formed and badly managed as characters. The problems with much of the Chibnall/Whittaker era are in evidence here and writ large: good ideas badly handled, tense scenes devoid of tension, a lack of finesse in plotting and dialogue and a leading cast who completely fail to engage. Luckily, we have the best one staying on: and it’s Mandip Gill.

3/10

JH