Here’s the thing that makes this special so frustrating: it’s proof the team could do it all along.
“Resolution” holds back the Daleks for an entire season, brings back exactly one, gives it no fleet and no empire, and produces the most frightening hour of the Whittaker era by a distance. Everything the run had been missing turns up at once. A monster with genuine menace. Escalating threat. A location used properly. Jeopardy that isn’t resolved by a speech.
One Dalek. That’s all it took.
Buried Under Sheffield
The cold open is the best in the era. Ninth century, a Dalek defeated by a coalition of every army on Earth, cut into three pieces, and each piece carried to a separate corner of the world by a custodian sworn to guard it forever.
Two of those pieces are still buried. One is under Sheffield, and two archaeologists in a basement have just found it.
What crawls out of the casing is the thing this show almost never shows you. A Dalek mutant, out of its shell, on the floor of a dig site: tentacled, wet, and moving with real purpose. It’s a genuinely horrible practical effect and the episode lets you look at it.
Then it climbs up a woman’s spine and takes control of her, and “Resolution” becomes a possession thriller for the next twenty minutes.
The Best Dalek in Fifteen Years
Charlotte Ritchie is exceptional as Lin. The performance is all wrongness. Her head snapping to angles a neck shouldn’t manage, her arm moving without her, the terror underneath the flat delivery when she’s forced to speak with the Dalek’s voice. She plays a woman trapped inside her own body watching it commit murders.
And the Dalek has a plan that’s actually clever. It’s a reconnaissance scout, not a warrior. Its job was to survey a planet and call in an invasion fleet. So it uses Lin to steal what it needs, breaks into GCHQ for a transmitter, and starts building itself a new casing in a workshop out of scrap metal, welding torches and salvaged parts.
The junkyard Dalek is a superb image. Riveted, uneven, obviously improvised, with a rocket launcher bolted to it. It looks wrong and it looks lethal, and when it finally rolls out and starts exterminating a police cordon, the sequence has weight because the episode spent forty minutes earning it.
The Doctor’s line, that this is a Dalek and it doesn’t need an army, is finally backed up by what’s on screen.
Aaron
The family material is the one wobble, though it does its job.
Ryan’s father Aaron turns up, having missed Grace’s funeral, and the episode has to carry a reconciliation arc alongside a Dalek invasion. It’s a lot for one hour, and the seams show. Aaron is written a little thin, and the resolution comes fast.
But the payoff works, because it’s built on what the season actually established. Graham is the one who confronts him, and Graham has standing to do it. The scene where he tells Aaron exactly what he missed is Bradley Walsh doing what he’s done all season, which is quietly out-acting the material.
And the climax uses it properly. Aaron holds a microwave oven against the Dalek to cook it, at real risk to himself, and Ryan pulls him free. The estranged father earns his way back by nearly dying for his son. That’s a clean piece of construction.
Why It Works and the Season Didn’t
The difference is not budget. It’s discipline.
There’s one monster. It has clear rules and clear goals. It escalates: first a mutant, then a possession, then a machine, then a killing spree. Each stage is worse than the last. The location is specific, the stakes are personal before they’re global, and nobody stops the story to explain what any of it means.
There’s a theme in here about family and abandonment, and it arrives entirely through Aaron’s actions rather than through anyone announcing it. That’s the whole trick, and the season managed it maybe twice in eleven attempts.
The UNIT gag is the era’s sharpest joke and its most pointed one. The Doctor calls for help and is told UNIT operations are suspended pending funding review, due to disputes over international funding contributions. A show that spent a season delivering its politics in speeches lands its best political line as a throwaway.
Restraint as a Strategy
Holding the Daleks back for a full season was the single best decision of the Chibnall era, and it’s worth understanding why it worked.
By 2018 the Daleks had been devalued by overuse. They turned up most years, usually in fleets, usually announcing an empire, and were usually beaten inside forty minutes. Familiarity had turned the most frightening thing in British television into a reliable seasonal fixture. You cannot be scared of something that loses every December.
Taking them off the board for eleven episodes resets that. When one finally appears it arrives with weight, and the episode compounds the effect by scaling down rather than up. No fleet. No Davros. No Skaro. One scout, buried, improvising.
It’s the same logic that made the Weeping Angels work in Blink and then wore them out over the following decade. Scarcity does most of the heavy lifting. The show knows this and keeps forgetting it.
Where It Leaves the Era
This is the high point of the Whittaker run for me, and it comes as a standalone special rather than as part of a season, which feels about right.
Everything I wanted from Series 11 is in this hour. The fam are excellent, and this time they’re in a story worthy of them. The Doctor is frightened, and being frightened makes her interesting. There’s a monster you’d actually cross the road to avoid. Set it beside The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos three weeks earlier and the gap is embarrassing.
Whether the show learned anything from it is a separate question, and the answer involves a Timeless Child, so let’s leave that where it is.
The Custodians
One more thing I liked, because it’s the sort of detail this season almost never bothered with.
The three custodians who carried the pieces of the Dalek to separate corners of the world took an oath binding their descendants forever. The episode confirms that the order held for over a thousand years, across generations of people who never saw the thing they were guarding and had only a story to go on.
That’s a lovely bit of implied history. It costs one line of dialogue and it makes the world feel older than the episode. It also raises the obvious question of what happened to the third piece and the line that was guarding it, which the show leaves hanging.
Small worldbuilding like this is what separates a monster story from a monster appearance. It suggests events continuing outside the frame. Series 11 spent eleven weeks in places that felt built for a single episode and then dismantled.
What Resolution Leaves Us With
The era’s best hour, and its clearest lesson. Here’s what it plants:
- The mutant, out of its shell. A wet, tentacled thing crawling across a dig site floor. The show finally shows you what’s inside.
- Lin. Charlotte Ritchie playing a woman piloted from within, all wrong angles and trapped terror. The best guest performance of the era.
- A Dalek built from scrap. Riveted, improvised, lethal. The most memorable design of the Whittaker run.
- Aaron and the microwave. An absent father earning his way back by nearly dying. Theme delivered through action, not dialogue.
- One monster, escalating. Mutant, then possession, then machine, then massacre. Proof the team could do this whenever they chose to.
Rating: 3.5/5 — Tense, nasty and properly frightening, with the best monster work of the era and a cast finally given something worth doing. The family subplot is crowded and Aaron is thin, but this is the hour that shows what Series 11 should have been every week. Restraint with the Daleks paid off completely.
A thousand years in the ground, three pieces, and one of them woke up in Sheffield. No fleet, no empire, no saucers. Just one of them, and it was nearly enough.
