In 2005, psychologist Barry Schwartz gave a TED Talk in which he posited that perhaps the best way to avoid disappointment is to lower your expectations. It’s a life lesson I’ve found very helpful through the years. Over the course of the Chris Chibnall era, it’s become the only way to watch Doctor Who. Every time I get excited, I end up feeling burned. My zen has come in the form of expecting nothing and being pleasantly surprised when it turns out well. The concept of another New Years Day special with Daleks was not one I met with much anticipation. There were even moments when I forgot about the upcoming episode. Because let’s be real, there wasn’t a lot to get excited over. Another Dalek story for New Years Day? Not exactly breaking new ground. So was I pleasantly surprised? No, not really. But I did have a good time.
If there is any hope I have left in the remainder of Chibnall’s Doctor Who is that he shoots for mediocrity. It’s practically the man’s wheelhouse at this point. That isn’t to say, however, that Chris Chibnall is not an ideas man. He has loads of ideas. The thing is, being an ideas man is the easy part. It’s exploring these concepts deeper than the initial premise that makes something truly thoughtful. So when I heard that the holiday episode would be a love story with a time loop and Daleks, it played out in my head pretty much exactly as we saw onscreen. It’s hard then to temper expectations when the premise is about as deep as it gets. With ideas left this unexplored, premises count as spoilers.
This is why I always go back to my number one litmus- was it fun? And the answer is- “Kinda, yeah.” I kind of had fun watching last night’s Doctor Who, and I am going to chalk that up as a win. It’s been a particularly depressing winter with the omicron variant, and a new Doctor Who episode was very welcome. Ultimately. “Eve of the Daleks,” had very little it needed to do other than be more Doctor Who, and with that, it succeeded. You cannot say that it did not begin and end. The cherry on top is that there were also moments of pure entertainment in this disjointed, but ultimately satisfying episode.
Setting the story within a multi-floored storage facility works for Doctor Who. They did it in the Twelfth Doctor comic “Space Invaders!” and it was about as exciting a location as it was then. But Doctor Who has always been about the mundane meeting the absurd, so I like it. It’s also a rather cheap way to do an episode, which is not at all a criticism. With Sony owning Bad Wolf, our days of quaint low budget Doctor Who may be behind us. We should take a moment to appreciate the fact that Doctor Who comes from a long line of people trying their best on a shoestring budget. We may make fun of it, but if Doctor Who is going into the territory of competing with Disney+, it’s worth appreciating its underdog status.
Our two new leads, Aisling Bea’s “Sarah,” and Adjani Salmon’s “Nick,” aren’t your typical run of the mill side characters, and I appreciate that about them. Their initial “meet cute,” is still rife with cringey hamfisted dialogue, especially at the beginning. The desire to have the characters simultaneously espouse exposition while developing their awkward chemistry was a bad start that left me with a feeling of unease. Aisling Bea does a good job of lending depth to the apathetic Sarah, who inherited the storage facility as more of a burden than a boon, but even she can’t make exposition sound natural.
The Doctor, Yaz, and Dan, have finally decided to address the dying TARDIS. Once again, the premise of a dying TARDIS goes left unexplored. Was it to do with the Flux? Did Swarm and Azure sneeze on the console? The answer remains a big fat “Who the hell knows?” What we do know is that evidently resetting the TARDIS back to factory settings is enough to expel the black gunk and white spider-web infecting the TARDIS out from its system. It’s a rather underwhelming solution to what was one of the better mysteries during “Flux.” All this really does is allow for the time loop to exist, which is about as deep as the concept goes. They may yet still address this in Jodie’s final episode, but after Dan confirmed that they weren’t going to explain how the Doctor saved the universe after the Flux destroyed most of it, I very much doubt it. Underwhelming solutions aside, the scene of them leaving the TARDIS as it begins to pull apart was one of the best visual moments in the show’s recent history.
Having sensed the Doctor’s presence, the Daleks have arrived to dish out a bit of revenge for the Doctor’s attempted genocide of the Daleks. Leave it to Chris Chibnall’s Doctor to not only address genocide, but the brag about it. That tracks with the rest of his morality which is mostly all over the place. The Daleks have trapped the Doctor and everyone else in the storage facility with a sort of force field. But as it would turn out, the Daleks are also trapped in the time loop, and thus, also forced to repeat the events of stalking the humans within the building, and lighting them up with their new fancy guns. Though these Daleks died, they died living the Dalek dream of killing the Doctor over and over. Had they survived, they’d have been legends among their kind. Every Dalek wants to plug the Doctor, but getting to do it over and over? Priceless.
Truth be told, I found a lot of the time loop confusing. It took piecing it together with friends for me to even realise it wasn’t the Daleks making the loop happen. We came to the conclusion that we’re pretty sure it was the TARDIS repairing itself that was creating the time loop. Though it doesn’t seem to play by it’s own rules. At one point, the worry is that Nick won’t survive another loop if he dies before the next revolution. They keep losing a minute per revolution. But they’re not losing minutes from the future, but minutes from the past. It’s always one minute ahead. So how exactly would dying within the first minute not be more catastrophic than dying within the last minute? Even more, why do the Doctor and the TARDIS crew always appear right outside the TARDIS and not where they were a minute or two minutes from the TARDIS? How are the Daleks able to teleport into the facility to whatever location they choose, and not their initial location? If a Dalek is able to teleport into the building, how come they can’t teleport past a storage unit’s shutter? I take it this has something to do with the fact that the Daleks were reacting to the position of the Doctor and thus teleporting in after the fact, but if they’re losing a minute every time, it would catch up to their position.
These questions are as useless as any with Chibnall’s writing. We’re just supposed to be impressed because time loop. Which in some ways I am impressed. I like when anyone tries to do neat things with time in Doctor Who. One of my favourite First Doctor stories is “The Space Museum,” simply because it’s one of the few early stories to play with time as a concept. Never mind that the last half of the story is a bit of a snoozefest, it’s still cool to see them experimenting. Doing a time loop/Groundhog Day/Russian Doll storyline is exactly the sort of thing I like to see them do in Doctor Who. It’s still a bit of a Dr Strange meets Dormamu moment, which is in keeping with Chibnall’s penchant to copy the MCU’s homework. That man just really cannot catch a break.
You have to hand it to Chris Chibnall, though. He said no more Christmas episodes, and he really meant it. The decision to move the holiday special from Christmas Day to New Years Day has not gone without controversy. I myself have always sided more with Chibnall, which is weird to say. I find the idea of seeing the Doctor regenerate on Christmas, acting their ass off while a robot Little Drummer Boy terrorises Cardiff or wherever, a bit distracting. But I also see the reasoning behind it being nice to watch a little Doctor Who after all of the presents have been opened. A bit of daft entertainment is appreciated. The day after New Year’s Eve doesn’t feel as special. A bit of the Doctor while you nurse a hangover feels more like a bank holiday. What’s even weirder are the Christmas elements such as the belaboured “elf storage,” joke on the signage.
Speaking of jokes, it was reported that this episode was meant to be a sort of comedy. Other than the “elf storage,” gag, I can’t remember much comedy. No more than usual, at least. In the words of Homer J Simpson- “I didn’t hear anyone laughing, did you?” If Aisling Bea’s dialogue was meant to be funny, I think I now understand Chibnall’s morality, because for the most part, she was awful. It’s all well and good that she’s multi-faceted, but I found her extremely unlikable. Nick is presented as a guy who’s supposed to be weird in a quirky way, but it comes off as creepy. This isn’t becuase he clearly turns his exes into lamps, but because he is able to form a crush on a woman he sees once a year. I can buy that he is too nervous to talk to Sarah, but if I went into ASDA once a year, I’m not going to form an intense crush on the girl at the customer service counter. I feel like Chibnall is the kind of guy who thinks “Love, Actually,” is this really wholesome classic. Nick and Sarah behave like people from a romantic comedy, and I hate that for them.
Not to be left out, the Doctor gets one badass moment to counterbalance her genocide brag. I loved her delivery of the line when she says “Daleks answer to me.” I’ve said it before that Jodie Whittaker has finally found her groove as the Doctor. It’s sad then that they give her the same lame-ass faux inspirational speech at the end of the story. Something about Chibnall’s speeches always feel forced and unearned. He lacks the ability to write a solid monologue that doesn’t leave Jodie sounding like she’s speaking to school children on Blue Peter. There’s a sort of sappy earnestness that rings hollow in those moments. I much prefer the Thirteenth Doctor when she’s a little snarky, if not also a little angry. Luckily, she’s managed to find that within the character, even when Chibnall cannot.
We’re still getting moments where the action stops dead in its place for the characters to say exactly how they feel before moving on. I had begun to think Chibnall had gotten better at these moments, but Dan pulling Yaz aside for a very special Doctor Who moment that gets real about issues and junk, was Chibnall back at his worst proclivities. I do, however, appreciate the line where Yaz says “I’ve never told anyone, not even myself,” simply because it’s real to a lot of LGBTQ+ experiences. We don’t always know our feelings until they creep up on us. That was a better bit of representation than “I’m gay and now I’m dead,” which has permeated Chibnall’s run. Though Yaz’s story remains the same old tired trope of gays cannot be happy. The Doctor will never return her advances because the Doctor never does. I hope Bill and Puddle girl show up last minute and form a triad with Yaz. That’s my headcanon.
Dan easily has one of my favourite arcs throughout the story. The Daleks write him off as a bit of a dullard compared to the Doctor and Yaz. I liked seeing Dan fool a Dalek while avoiding its gun by running around it in circles. I mean, sure, a Dalek would have figured out turning the opposite direction, but I’m gonna give our man this victory. Dan continues to remind me of Jamie McCrimmon in his “simple but not stupid,” approach to life. He adds much-needed levity to the story. He’s the Graham of this iteration of the TARDIS- practical and elevating what is on the page with a charming performance. Dan is by far my favourite thing of this era, and also this episode. John Bishop gives a gem of a performance.
The Daleks continue to hunt down the Doctor and her friends loop after loop. Though they do get in their licks, like when Nick destroys both Daleks with their own crossfire. I guess they learned nothing from “The Day of the Doctor,” when they shot eachother after Gallifrey disappeared. After dying enough times for it to lose all weight, the Doctor begins to piece together a plan. After discovering a part of the building not blocked in by a forcefield, they manage to lure the Daleks toward some explosives left by some mad lad only known as “Jeff.” By the look of things, Jeff works for the storage facility and uses it to store what I can only assume are the components of his highly explosive meth lab. They set up early on that Sarah’s phone can’t be put on silent, which never really makes any sense to the rest of the story. It does, however, remain consistent with Chibnall’s understanding of technology. The phone is used as a means to fool the Daleks into believing there is a human worth shooting behind loads of explosives. Evidently the Daleks can scan for signs of the Doctor within a storage facility, but not the presence of butane in a canister. Sarah’s mum calls just as the clock begins to count down to midnight, causing the Daleks to destroy themselves and the building.
As the smoke and debris dissipates, we see the TARDIS once again in her blue glory. No longer are her surfaces covered in glowing pink cracks. As our heroes open the door, we wonder what we will see inside. Will there be a new console room perhaps? Maybe it has reverted to the original TARDIS console room from the First Doctor era. Well, as it would turn out, nothing has changed. They even kept the obnoxiously obtrusive quartz time rotor. What a total letdown. I didn’t fully expect the TARDIS to get a new console room, considering just how close we are to the Fourteenth Doctor and RTD2. But nothing? I really gotta say, that was a major flop of a reveal. Even using the First Doctor console would have been something. We’re given no new information, and nothing has changed.
This has been a major issue of the Chibnall era. Most of the intrigue derives from the unresolved as opposed to the unexplained. These aren’t mysteries we’re left with to ponder, but issues left unexplored. And it’s true, despite this review, I did enjoy the episode, but I needed to illustrate to what degree. When the bar is as low as “The Timeless Children,” anything above that is enjoyable. Chibnall’s greatest successes are among the mediocrity of other, better writers. To be honest, the part of last night’s episode that left me most excited was the revelation of the Sea Devil for the next story. I’m excited for the next episode, but not because of what came before it, but because I love the Sea Devils. I enjoyed last night’s episode for possibly the worst reason- it was fine.
Doctor Who: The Doctor Dances / Eve of the Daleks | “Resonating Concrete” Foreshadowing
“She likes you.” “I like her too.” “No, I mean, she likes you.” “I have no idea what you’re saying Dan.” “I think you do. But for some reason, you pretend to me and to her you don’t.”
(Can’t make gifs rn as I’m with family, so take this I guess?)
my only job in this world is to give the doctor and yaz the happy ending they’re certainly not going to get
[I.D.: a digital drawing of the thirteenth doctor and yasmin khan from doctor who. the doctor is sitting on a light purple plaid blanket, leaning against a large tree, and reading a book. yaz is lying with her head in the doctor’s lap, fiddling with a piece of her hair. the doctor is a white woman with blonde hair that’s dark brown at the roots. she’s wearing a maroon t-shirt with colored stripes across the chest, yellow and navy suspenders, blue flared pants, and a straw hat. yaz is a pakistani woman with dark brown hair french braided into two ponytails. she’s wearing a light grey sweater and blue jeans. there’s a straw hat by yaz on the blanket. /END I.D.]
sorry, not functioning at normal capacity at the moment, favourite tv show had the leading two women acknowledge some feeling towards the other. i’m sure you understand :)
Am I… like… missing something? Eve of the Daleks just aired (in both the UK and North America) and I don’t see any posts on Tumblr discussing it after it aired?? Is something wrong with Tumblr (again)?
