Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
This episode was a thing as I review the Doctor Who 2022 New Year's Special, Eve of the Daleks.
https://yeonchi.tumblr.com/post/672263064280760320/doctor-who-2022-new-years-special-review-eve-of
YeonchiDoctor Who 2022 New Year’s Special Review: Eve of the DaleksAir date: 1 January 2022
This is the first Doctor Who episode to premiere on a Saturday in four years. Savour the moment guys. I bet it’ll be a while until the show goes back to a Saturday night timeslot again.
So yeah, another New Year’s special featuring the Daleks as the main villains. Given how Series 13 was produced during the coronavirus pandemic, the production team had to find a way to make things work by giving us an epic story under the restrictions, which caused some aspects to feel minimalistic… and I’m sorry, but this just isn’t a very good episode.
My spoiler-free thought for this episode: “Where are we going? Where am I going? Are we going anywhere? What is the point of anything? Is anything worth it anymore?”
Spoilers continue after the break, but don’t expect much in the way of spoilers. The breaks in all my posts are really there to shorten the length of them when they appear on Tumblr.
Episode background
This is the first time I can do a review of a Doctor Who episode without having to recap the whole episode. I think the only reason why I’ve been doing that for this series is because of the way it is presented (as a six-part story).
Following the events of Flux, the Doctor decides to reset the TARDIS to get rid of all the weirdness caused by it, such as the black tar-like substance (we never knew what that was) and the multiple doors. The Doctor had planned to land on the sentient beaches of San Monrova, but the TARDIS ends up under ELF Storage (apparently there was an S but it fell off) in Manchester under 10 minutes before New Year’s Day as Sarah comes in to meet Nick, who is dropping off something that belonged to one of his ex-girlfriends, something which he does every year, apparently.
For some reason, Daleks appear in the building and exterminate everyone, one-by-one. Soon after, they find themselves looped back to where they were before with the memories of what happened intact, but each time this happens, the loop is shortened by a minute. On top of that, they are unable to leave the building (through the front door at least). We find out that the time loops were caused by the TARDIS as a result of the reset and that the Daleks came to exterminate the Doctor in the loops after millions of Daleks were killed in the Flux thanks to the Sontaran stratagem she hijacked.
After some time loops, the Doctor and the others manage to escape, ELF Storage collapses, the Daleks are destroyed and the TARDIS is reset again. Sarah and Nick go on a holiday together and the Doctor, Yaz and Dan are back in the TARDIS again. End of story. Let’s break down some of the elements.
Other general thoughts
Yes, I’m literally skipping to this section because there’s barely anything major in this episode to talk about.
So the Daleks in this episode are a new variant known as a Dalek Executioner, which is essentially the same as the normal bronze Daleks, but with a gatling gunstick which is kind of useless when we’ve seen that normal Dalek gunsticks are capable of rapid-firing. Couldn’t we have used a different colour Dalek for them and the Death Squad Daleks in Revolution of the Daleks?
The Doctor tries to use her sonic screwdriver to jam the Dalek’s gunstick, but it doesn’t work. Well, of course it wouldn’t work because it’s never happened before the Chibnall era, so why would it work now? The only time it worked was in Resolution and it was because the reconnaissance scout Dalek wasn’t fully synced up to its gunstick upon reconstructing its shell.
The front door was shielded but Sarah notices a door in the basement that wasn’t shielded before she gets exterminated. If the Daleks have been adapting to the time loops and they know that there is a door there, couldn’t they have just put a shield on it?
When the Doctor and the others were hiding in Nick’s storage unit (minus Nick after he went out and got exterminated after being chewed out by Sarah), the Dalek continuously shoots at the door in an effort to get in, but it only burns a hole in it instead of destroying the door, particularly given that it has a gatling gunstick and it’s just an ordinary roller door. It’s so painfully obvious that Chibnall was trying to reenact Lynda Moss’ death scene from The Parting of the Ways with a Dalek using a blowtorch to cut a hole in it.
Near the end of the episode, Dan notices the tension between Yaz and the Doctor and talks to them about it in an attempt to get them to realise their feelings for each other. Yaz is seemingly less dense about it compared to the Doctor, but the way that Dan recalls Yaz looking at the hologram of the Doctor during the three years they travelled together (Dan says four, but it’s actually three) shows that Dan has learnt more about Yaz than Yaz has of Dan, proving my point about Yaz’s character regressing during Flux. And naturally, nothing much comes of it after that.
Sarah’s character sounded annoying to me when I first watched the episode, and that’s saying something given how I’m usually not that good at judging character. She reminds me of Tubarina from Sea Princesses, and that’s also saying something when I’m comparing a one-time character on a mainstream science-fiction/fantasy drama to a main character (a bitchy one, no less) on a forgotten niche children’s show that was probably written better than Flux or the Timeless Child arc. In fact, the fact that I’m comparing the writing quality in the Chibnall era to Sea Princesses at all is really saying something about the state of Doctor Who in current year.
I don’t know why this episode went out of its way to make Nick weird and “stalkery” with him keeping stuff from his ex-girlfriends in the hope that they might want them back, then having the payoff from having all that stuff destroyed be Nick getting together with Sarah. I’m starting to see what people mean when they say that Chibnall focuses too much on side characters in his stories.
Jeff had beans in one of the storage units. That gives me an excuse to share this joke. Also, if it was implied that Jeff is living at ELF Storage, why is that unit full of expired beans? If he wasn’t going to eat them all, he should have just given it to a food bank. (Evil) Dan could really have used some.
The scene where Dan distracts the Dalek could have been better if he said “Correct” instead of “Took you long enough”. Also, shouldn’t Dan already know what a Dalek is by now, given how they were involved in the Sontarans’ Flux offensive? Oh, but he never really got a proper look at them, so I suppose it can be partially excused.
Nick managed to avoid being killed by two Daleks aiming at him by ducking so that they end up firing at each other, so why didn’t Yaz and Dan do that when two Daleks were aiming at them? Later, in the final loop, all the Daleks were missing their targets as everyone managed to evade them. That’s typical Doctor Who logic for you.
At the end, we see some guy looking at the fireworks coming from the building after it was destroyed and capturing it on his phone. I thought that was Jeff seeing how Sarah was slagging him off for ghosting her when she had plans for New Year’s Eve, but no, that’s actually Karl Wright, who appeared in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. So yeah, that was a thing. Not like we could actually have had Jeff in this episode, but meh.
Were you waiting for a tokusatsu reference in this review? Well, I couldn’t find one, though the main parallel I could draw from this is the Kamen Rider Yongou web series, which also covers time loops. Speaking of time loops, I’ve found that time loop stories never work unless characters remember what happened in the previous loop even though logic dictates that it shouldn’t happen.
Not relevant to this episode but relevant to the upcoming second RTD era - apparently, Russell T Davies has already written some episodes and has stated that the first of them will come out in November 2023 for the 60th Anniversary, essentially killing off the prospect for another series earlier in that year. So after Series 13 ended last month, we essentially have another two-year wait for a new series (or longer if that first episode is only a special) after waiting two years for Series 13 to even happen. GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. What is wrong with you all? Ever since Doctor Who took a gap year (with only a Christmas Special) in 2016, this series has been slowly falling into the shit and all these gap years, delays and varying schedules are only exasperating the problem. Look, I’m sorry for getting angry here, but the return of Russell T Davies is a big opportunity to partially (not fully) redeem the series in the eyes of fans and I think that introducing a new Doctor before the 60th Anniversary Special is a great opportunity to do it. Whatever, I’ll be a casual fan when this is over anyway so I’ll just wait for it to come out when it does.
Also, Jodie Whittaker has stated that she would like to see Lydia West (who was in Years and Years and It’s a Sin) as the Fourteenth Doctor and Russell T Davies commented “noted” on the post that shared it. I hope that RTD doesn’t listen to her and casts someone else because it would be honestly sad if it happens (not because Lydia West is a woman, mind you, that’s no longer that big of an issue for me).
Summary and verdict
This episode was boring. It’s honestly just a bottle episode, but bottle episodes have been done before in Doctor Who and they were better than this. I woke up at 7:00 AM to watch this on ABC iView (when it dropped) and I barely felt anything from it at the end. I could have given this episode some credit after a few rewatches, but this is coming out of the dumpster fire that was Flux and I’ve given the Chibnall era more than enough chances to prove itself. I’d say that this episode was better than Flux, but that’s not saying much. But hey, I actually managed to get a review out the day after the UK premiere (same day in Australia), which I haven’t managed to do in a long time.
Rating: 0/10 Series 13 final total: 3/60 (5%) Series 13 cumulative total (with Eve of the Daleks): 3/70 (4%)
God, this New Year’s Special review is shorter than the other two New Year’s Special reviews I’ve done. Can we go back to having yearly Christmas Specials when the second RTD era starts?
At the end of the episode, we got a next time trailer for the next special, three months before it’s scheduled to premiere at Easter. Compared to The Next Doctor, the title for Planet of the Dead was revealed in the credits while the trailer came out at the start of April 2009 (unless I’m reading this wrong).
Anyway, I’ll see you all in a few months when I review the 2022 Easter Special, Legend of the Sea Devils.