I have spare time on my hands, so here are thoughts on the Doctor Who NYD special, Resolution. I liked this one. The plot basically made sense, as did the emotional stakes; the Dalek scout was suitably creepy, Lin did a good job acting out "possessed by a Dalek", The Doctor's stance was coherent and reasonably appropriate. Some nice touches too. The Dalek creature was more menacing than past designs. Junkyard Dalek is a great idea. You could even work a parallel between the Dalek making its casing and the Doctor making her sonic. This felt like perfectly serviceable Doctor Who.
I wouldn't say it was great DW. Compare, for instance, to the Ninth doctor adventure, Dalek. In both cases you have a single Dalek, sufficient to be a threat to all humanity. IN both cases, to me at least, the stakes felt real and the Dalek felt scary. But I think you'd have to say that Dalek was much the better story. Both the Doctor and the Dalek had an inner conflict to deal with. It had something to say about the nature of Daleks. There was a well-realised secondary threat (Van Statten), who works as an allegory for a number of real-world groups (including a certain flavour of Doctor Who fan). In its own way, it threatens the very premise of Doctor Who (it turns the Doctor from compassionate trickster to another testosterone-poisoned action hero toting a big gun - and the resolution involves rejecting this future). Rose gets a lot to do, including providing moral grounding for the Doctor when he becomes unmoored.
There's not such depth in Resolution. Everyone's goals and motivations are clear and unconflicted. There's the B plot about Ryan's dad, but it doesn't much connect with the main plot. It certainly doesn't go flat-out weird or experimental. It's a good story, but not overly ambitious.
I was particularly interested in this ep in the context of the season. This current incarnation of the Doctor is perhaps the most pacifist of all; only the Fifth Doctor really comes close. I've had a real problem with it, because it's largely been quite incoherent - see, for instance, Arachnids in the UK (where she leaves the spiders to die cruel deaths and Trump Florrick to go free), Kerblam! (where she upbraids someone for treating robots as just tools and then destroys thousands of them for no apparent reason, and where she seems fine with a world where the best most people can hope for is a soul-sucking, pointless job with no prospects on survival wages) or The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (where she learns that her previous refusal to kill Tim Shaw led to the destruction of entire planets yet sees no challenge whatsoever to her moral position, and where she regards killing as immoral but eternal imprisonment is fine).
If there's any limit case to this approach it's the Daleks. There's no quarter to be given, no common ground to be found. Especially if you script it as a straight-line A-to-B traditionalist Dalek adventure. Chibnall seems to be aware of this. The Doctor makes an overture, but when it's rejected, she has no qualms about simply trying to kill it. The Doctor clearly accepts that the Daleks have to be opposed by all possible means.
That's a position not really different from the Tenth or Eleventh Doctor. (One interesting touch: she checks in with her companions first. But still.) In this sense I liked this ep; it was morally coherent in a way that the season wasn't. Not that it addressed the difference directly. We have a wait of over a year before finding out whether this actually constitutes a lasting course correction.
One of my favourite internet corners for Doctor Who was pretty scathing about Resolution. They have their reasons; I feel rather more forgiving. Still, here are some of my favourite criticisms:
I always thought mediocrity would be childsplay to achieve but they've made it look like really hard work.
(Well that one's a bit harsh.)
On Ryan's dad: His oven is given almost exactly as much characterization as he is.
Yyyeah I can't disagree. I still have little idea of why Ryan's dad was so neglectful, if he's really learned something or just wants to avoid the consequences of his actions, and (perhaps most importantly) whether Ryan is best served trying to re-establish a relationship or learning how to set firm boundaries instead. (I mean, don't throw him to the Daleks, but there are other options.) I do think that it would better serve kids to teach them that they don't have to assume responsibility for their parents' inability to parent than to give them another "it's not too late" message. Those are hardly in short supply on TV already. (I also think it would've made a better story for Ryan's dad to sacrifice himself to defeat the Dalek. However, it would've had wider implications for the series, possibly even making it hard for Ryan to keep travelling with the Doctor. Or it may have made for more texture in the TARDIS relationships and the Doctor's own self-image, who knows.)
Finally, I agree with both of these comments SO HARD:
In a way, Chibnall's failings for me are best represented by him having a Dalek controlling someone driving a car, yelling at them wanting them to go faster, and utterly passing on the opportunity to have it yell "ACCELERATE! ACCELERATE!"
Look, if you're going to do an episode where the Dalek has to rebuild (it? his? her?)self out of spare parts and not have a gag where the Dalek uses an actual plunger, you're just failing at being Doctor Who.
The serious point behind this: I think Chibnall's Doctor Who takes itself a bit too seriously. Which is to say, I think it's too worried that someone's going to laugh at it. It's a family show promising all of time and space. If it can't get silly sometimes, who can?
(Plus, I would've loved if they'd really leaned into the junkyard Dalek idea. Actual plunger! Corrugated iron skirt! Helmet made from a hubcap! And still taking out an entire platoon of soldiers. I'd have been right into that.)
Another analysis of this season which I found quite compelling: [link] It suggests that the key difference between this Doctor and previous ones isn't that she is more morally opposed to killing. It's that she doesn't have any inner conflict; and the world in which she operates doesn't challenge that. (I would say more that the Doctor and writers don't really notice when the world challenges that.) That marks her out from every Doctor since at least the Ninth. I must admit, this surprises me. Broadchurch was chock-full of inner, and outer, conflict. We have the biggest TARDIS crew, with the greatest number of possible interactions, in 35 years. I really was expecting to see more.
Yeah, it would have been a chuckle to see a Dalek going Junkyard Wars and rebuilding its main beam weapon out of an old TV picture tube, or having the base of its outer casing be a tractor tire.
I finally got caught up on The Magicians.
Me too. Except for maybe The Good Place, The Magicians is the show that made me laugh the most this past year. Only The Magicians isn't really a comedy, it's kind of bleak...
But they know how to balance the funny and the bleak .
So ... MacGyver Dalek?
Yes! And now I'm thinking I'd like to see a Dalek put itself together in an abandoned amusement park. It can ride around on an old, sparking dodgem car. The eyestalk protrudes from the mouth of one of those clown heads. The torso can have the Dalek inside a claw game, perched on a mound of creepy dilapidated dolls. Creepy dolls! It plays merry-go-round music whenever it builds up speed! I bet Russell T. Davies would've done it if he'd thought of it.
Possibly the 2019 Christmas special?
I watched the first episode of Roswell, NM ... not terribly excited by it.
I did, however, get a good deal on the DVDs for the first season of Dracula (the Jonathan Rhys-Meyers version). It made my snowbound weekend better.
I've been burning through Wynona Earp S3 on Amazon (S1 and 2 are on Netflix) and is it just me or did this show cross an invisible line from Buffy-esque to Buffy-okay-now-we're-just-wholesale-lifting-entire-plotlines-but-with-swearing-and-snow? Not that I'm complaining! S3 is awesomely bonkers so far! But, I mean,
Wishverse ep where the hero is erased and everything goes to shit? Vampires that turn to dust when staked? Love interest of main character is now a vampire but, you know, not a bad one?
