A New Year special has a low bar to clear. Give the audience a monster they recognise, a bit of spectacle, and a reason to feel something at the end. “Revolution of the Daleks” clears it, mostly, and it does so by being much better at saying goodbye to two people than at anything involving the Daleks themselves. It also does something the era has been reluctant to do, which is deal with consequences: the Doctor has been in prison for decades, her friends have been waiting ten months, and the episode is honest about what that did to them.
Daleks as a government contract
The premise is a good one and the show has used a version of it before, which is not a criticism.
The Dalek casing salvaged from Resolution has fallen into the hands of Jack Robertson, last seen walking away from the giant spiders in Arachnids in the UK with no consequences whatsoever. He has partnered with a government keen on a new kind of security drone, and the two of them are mass-producing empty Dalek shells to be deployed on British streets for crowd control. Nobody involved has stopped to ask what happens when something decides to sit in one.
That is a properly sardonic idea, and Chris Noth is better used here than he was first time. Robertson is not a genius or a fanatic. He is a man who saw a procurement opportunity, and his total unflappability when everything goes wrong is the joke that keeps landing. He survives again, of course, and takes credit for the rescue, which is exactly right for the character and exactly the sort of ending this era usually flinches from.
Where it wobbles is the middle. Once the real Daleks arrive to purge the impure drone versions, the episode becomes a fairly ordinary runaround: Daleks in a warehouse, Daleks in Downing Street, Daleks shouting about purity. The solution, luring the fleet into a spare TARDIS and detonating it, is clever enough but arrives without much difficulty. There is a lot of corridor here, and the political satire that made the first half interesting quietly evaporates once the shooting starts.
Captain Jack is the pleasant surprise. John Barrowman is having an enormous time, the prison break that opens the episode is brisk and funny, and his scene with Yaz, telling her what it feels like when the Doctor leaves and that the answer is to have a life of your own, is one of the more emotionally intelligent things in the run.
Two kinds of Dalek
The Daleks themselves are worth a word, because the design work is the best part of the middle act. The drone shells are deliberately wrong: sleek, matte, security-grey, built by a contractor to a specification rather than grown by a species that hates everything. When the real Daleks arrive to exterminate the imitations, the contrast between the two designs does more work than any of the dialogue. A Dalek looking at a cheap copy of itself and deciding it is an abomination is a good joke and a good scare at the same time.
What the episode never quite manages is a sense of scale. We are told the drones are being deployed across the country and shown perhaps a dozen, mostly in the same warehouse and the same stretch of Downing Street corridor. An invasion of Britain by its own police drones ought to feel like something happening everywhere at once, and instead it feels like something happening in two rooms. The show has had this problem for three years now and it comes down to the same thing every time: the writing keeps promising a scope the production cannot deliver, when a tighter promise would have been more frightening.
Ten months of waiting
The best material is the part with no Daleks in it at all.
The Doctor was arrested at the end of The Timeless Children and has been in a Judoon prison for what she describes as decades. Her friends have had ten months of not knowing whether she was alive. Ryan has gone back to work and started building something. Graham has been sitting in the house. Yaz has been living in the spare TARDIS, staring at maps, refusing to accept it.
That is a genuinely uncomfortable thing to put in front of the audience, and to the show’s credit it does not smooth it over. Mandip Gill plays Yaz’s anger properly, and the Doctor’s inability to explain herself, or to apologise in a way that means anything, is the most honest character work Whittaker has been handed. This is a person who disappears and expects everyone to pick up where they left off, and the episode says so.
The goodbye earns its length. Ryan has realised that his life is in Sheffield, that his friends need him and his father needs him, and that he has stopped wanting to run. Graham goes because Ryan does. The scene where the two of them turn the Doctor down is played quietly, without a big speech, and Tosin Cole is better in it than he has been all era.
And then the bicycle. Ryan tries again on the bike he failed to ride in his first episode, falls off, and Graham stands there and tells him he will get it. Two and a half years of a relationship that was the only real arc this era built, closed with a small joke and a hand on a shoulder. Bradley Walsh has been the best thing about the Whittaker years from beginning to end, and the era loses something it never replaces when he walks off. The official site made a fuss of the departure at the time, and for once it was warranted.
There is one more thing worth saying, about what the era loses here rather than what the episode does. Graham and Ryan were the only two characters in three years given a relationship that visibly changed, and taking them out at the same time leaves Yaz alone with a Doctor who has just been established as someone who vanishes without explanation. The show is aware of the problem and does not solve it, and the following run spends a great deal of time trying to build something out of what is left. Watching this now, it plays less like a departure and more like the moment the era quietly ran out of story.
What it leaves behind is a very good idea about Daleks manufactured under government contract as crowd control, which the middle of the episode gradually abandons. It leaves Jack Robertson, walking away clean for the second time and taking the credit, the one villain this era was ever willing to let win. It leaves ten months of waiting, and a companion who is genuinely angry about it, and a Doctor with no adequate answer. It leaves Captain Jack telling Yaz to build a life that does not depend on someone else’s timetable. And it leaves a bicycle on a Sheffield street, and a grandfather saying you will get it, which is where this era’s only real story quietly ends.
Rating: 2.5/5. A sharp premise that softens into a standard runaround, redeemed by a genuinely well-handled departure and the most honest look this era took at what the Doctor costs the people who wait for her. The Daleks are functional. Graham and Ryan are not, and the last ten minutes are worth the rest of it.