Doctor Who new year special recap – Revolution of the Daleks

“I’d rather not have met her. Because having met her, and then being without her, that’s worse”

Let’s get the Judoon in the room out of the way. That episode was no Robot of Sherwood, Jo Patterson was no Harriet Jones, and I’m no Dan Martin. All of us at the Guardian were devastated to lose Dan in 2020, but we didn’t want the festive special of Doctor Who to pass without giving you a chance to pay a tribute to him, or to discuss a New Year’s Day special that was … well … uneven at best.

The episode followed far more directly from Resolution than anticipated, but it was an extremely long slow burn of a setup before it got going. Harriet Walter played Prime Minister Patterson as cold and calculating, but nevertheless ended up the second British PM exterminated by the Daleks in recent years. It’s becoming quite the occupational hazard if you’ve been in No 10.

As Leo Rugazzi, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett played the latest in a long line of misguided scientists and geniuses in Doctor Who who end up duped and controlled by the alien technology they are messing with.

I think we all expected it would be Captain Jack who rescued the Doctor from space prison. I’m not sure anybody had “and then they zorb their way out” on their bingo card, though. John Barrowman was charming and good value as ever, with precious little explanation of what he’d been up to in the years since we last saw him, but some lovely throwback gadgets. Someone should give him his own series, eh?

“If you’re dealing with Daleks, you are way out of your depth”

Having said that, while the pre-publicity may have focused on the return of Barrowman, for me it was Chris Noth’s business monster, Jack Robertson, who stole the show.

Criticised as being a too-thinly concealed Donald Trump cipher in his first appearance, here he got more depth – even if still a cynical manipulator of events happy to sell the human race out to the Daleks.

His timely deadpan of “This is why people don’t like experts” raised a genuine laugh, and the episode’s conclusion, where despite everything he managed to position himself as a saviour of the planet heading back for the political big time, seemed frustratingly familiar to the consequence-free behaviour of certain real-world politicians.

Life aboard the Tardis

I worry slightly about Chibnall-era Who without Graham in the Tardis. Bradley Walsh has been, for me, consistently one of the most watchable elements, not just his little faces and asides adding some humour, but his character seemed to carry most of the emotional heft over the last couple of years.

Ryan, you suspect though, will not be making it into the pantheon of all-time great Who companions. He’s had some fun moments – making shadow puppets in the lab in Arachnids in the UK, that basketball bomb slam-dunk at the Cybermen, his gun-blazing dash at the robots in The Ghost Monument – but his character development has always been slight. His voluntary exit follows up on the theme established in Can You Hear Me?, that his mates are missing him and he’s missing them.

Mandip Gill’s Yasmin was clearly the most affected by the Doctor’s absence, sleeping in the abandoned Tardis, and angry when the Time Lord suddenly returned with a huge grin on her face as if nothing had happened. Her talk with Jack about how the Doctor disappearing seemed “cruel” was the most heartfelt of the special, and that anxiety she showed harked back to the insecure and unsettled younger version of her we met in flashbacks in Can You Hear Me?

Fear factor

Yaz and Jack being attacked by the Dalek squid creatures in Japan was perhaps the only real moment of jeopardy for the main cast in an episode that was pretty low-key in terms of direct threats. Yes, Daleks were massacring people on the streets of Britain, but we hadn’t met any of them. Chibnall’s scripts just don’t seem to have Russell T Davies’ knack of connecting the big set-pieces with people you care about, even if you’ve only met them briefly.

It also says something about the brilliant job the 2005 Doctor Who team did redesigning the Daleks that the sudden appearance of the bronze ones was a highlight in 2020. At last, some proper Daleks.

Mysteries and questions

This year’s obligatory long dialogue scene saw Tosin Cole trying to get Jodie Whittaker to address what happened in the Timeless Children, in a conversation that seemed as much addressed from the production team to disgruntled fans as it was between Ryan and the Doctor. By the episode’s conclusion, Whittaker had very much regained her sense of purpose – “I’m the Doctor. I’m the one who stops the Daleks. All of you, to the Tardis, now!” – but you get the sense that Chibnall is not done with this story thread of the Doctor’s true origins yet.

Deeper into the vortex

• Is psychic paper the best parting gift in recent years from a Doctor to a companion? It certainly seems the most useful since Tom Baker’s Doctor got out of the habit of gifting replica K-9 robots to departing co-stars.

• Emily Maitlis follows in the footsteps of Kirsty Wark, Sian Williams, Bill Turnbull and Andrew Marr by appearing as herself – a BBC news presenter. Kenneth Kendall was the first newsreader to portray himself like this in Doctor Who – way back in 1966 during William Hartnell story the War Machines.

• Jack Robertson’s bafflement at how Rugazzi could have got the purchase orders raised to build the Dalek clone factory was surely a W1A-style joke about the internal workings of the BBC.

• It’s a shame that “Sheffield House” Tardis got destroyed as part of the Doctor’s trap – that really was a lovely retro set design.

• It was nice to get an all-too-brief glimpse of Sharon D Clarke, bringing the end of season 12 full circle with the opening scenes of season 11.

Next time

We know, at least until further Covid restrictions were placed on Wales just before Christmas, that the next season of Doctor Who was not only in production but filming. There will be eight episodes, and location pictures suggest that at least one – if not two – old monsters will be coming back. And, from the trailer at the end, we now know that John Bishop will be in it. They are still aiming to air it later this year. We’ll see you then.