Chris Chibnall's tenure as Doctor Who showrunner has been a mixed bag at best, reaching its nadir when last season's finale saw fit to saddle the series' history and main character with entirely detrimental 'Chosen One' clichés. Mercifully, Chibnall's last new year's special was one of his better efforts and this year's, 'Revolution Of The Daleks', looked set to be a standalone free from the canon-defiling nonsense which tanked last season. The return of John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, absent for all but a short cameo since Russell T. Davies was at the helm, heightened expectations further.
On the plus side, 'Revolution Of The Daleks' was indeed largely standalone, despite featuring a large number of oddly specific callbacks: did anyone remember the second TARDIS stuck on Earth in the shape of a house? On the downside, while the canon revisionism from 'The Timeless Children' was for the most part eschewed, all Chibnall's worst writing habits were present in their most frustrating form.
The cliffhanger which ended 'The Timeless Children', where the Doctor was thrown in prison by the Judoon, featured heavily in the episode's marketing but was concluded without consequence within fifteen minutes. The suggestion that the three companions would have to deal with a Dalek invasion by themselves turned out to be a frustrating misdirect, with the Doctor reappearing before any of them were tested in any meaningful way. Much like the season ten episode, 'The Lie Of The Land', albeit not quite as egregious, the episode set up a potentially fascinating scenario before chickening out as soon as any semblance of a challenge arose.
The return of Captain Jack was similarly underwhelming. Barrowman remains a charismatic performer and his more tortured, soulful incarnation from Torchwood slotted reasonably smoothly into Chibnall's kitchen sink drama interpretation of Who, but his involvement in the plot was superficial at best. Beyond breaking the Doctor out of prison in one of many sequences short on meaningful conflict and detail, Jack settled into following the Doctor and her companions around while achieving nothing which couldn't have been handled by a generic guest star. Much was made of the character's ability to return from the dead, yet this was a Chekhov's Gun left unfired. Apart from a brief flirtation with Yaz, and her enjoyable Yorkshire lass rejoinder that he seemed to need a lot of praise, even his insatiable sexuality was noticeably suppressed.
On the whole, the episode followed a familiar pattern of Chibnall stories promising much and delivering little, filling the space where compelling narrative developments ought to have been with overexplanation of unimportant details, underexplanation of the important ones - what exactly was the threat serious enough to necessitate the British PM sending armed security robots to the streets and airports? - and exposition delivered through static staging and wooden dialogue. The main plot quickly and unsurprisingly revealed itself as a by-the-book Dalek invasion, following to a tee the format of many Chibnall-era episodes (and rehashing several elements from last year's special) where the bulk of the running time is spent setting up uninteresting minutiae rather than developing a premise into an actual story, before rushing the conclusion. The use of the second TARDIS as a means of trapping and defeating the Daleks was semi-successful as a twist, but an abject failure as a plot development: while it wasn't immediately obvious what was happening, the outcome fell apart under any logical scrutiny and somehow managed to feel anticlimactic despite Chibnall's failure to build up any prior stakes.
The threadbare plot might have been justifiable had the character drama for which it served as a backdrop offered any substance. No such luck. Tosin Cole is a poor actor at the best of times, but even he deserves sympathy for being asked to find an interesting way of delivering a line as leaden as "Seriously? And how do you feel about that?" in reaction to the Doctor recapping her (incredibly shallow) crisis of confidence from the preceding season. In the end, her decades-long prison sojourn reminded her that her job was to stop the Daleks, and that was that. If only I were joking.
Other characters fared no better. Tosin Cole's Ryan and Bradley Walsh's Graham had been announced as leaving prior to the episode airing, yet they remained on the margins of the story and the justification for their departures - that Ryan had discovered a sense of independence while the Doctor was imprisoned, and Graham (who scarcely said a word throughout) couldn't bear travelling in the TARDIS without him - were sketched in at best. Ryan declared that he now knew what he wanted to do with his life, yet this crucial information was once again withheld from viewers. The episode's final shot - following an aggressively cheesy heavenly apparition, no less - was of Ryan continuing to fall off his bicycle, which was both unintentionally funny and suggested the character hadn't progressed in the slightest since his introduction. It was also a reminder of how Ryan's disability was another much-vaunted detail Chibnall had quietly shelved once it became inconvenient.
The return of Jack Robertson, the Trump analogue who definitely isn't Donald Trump (who exists in the Whoniverse, as now does Mike Ashley, as if things couldn't get any worse or more confusing) from the almost entirely forgotten episode 'Arachnids In The UK', was a further misstep. Trump references were creatively bankrupt even when he was still President (technically true for a few more weeks, but yesterday's news in any meaningful sense) but Chibnall laid the schoolboy jibes on thick and fast, from Robertson confusing Ryan for a violent mugger, to his willingness to betray the entire human race for unclear motives. Actor Chris Noth channelled Trump more blatantly than in his previous outing and the implication that the character was reviving his Presidential ambitions not only exasperatingly threatened another return for a character who was one-note and outdated first time around, but reminded how much those who profess to loathe Trump have come to depend on ragging on him, justifiably or not, for their own sense of validation.
'Revolution Of The Daleks' was not as obnoxiously misguided as 'The Timeless Children', in that at least its failings were limited to one episode rather than contaminating the rest of the series by proxy. Nevertheless, in everything from its meaningless title - what 'Revolution'? - to non-event of a plot, reliance on narrative shortcuts and tiresome character work, it encapsulated the worst moment-to-moment failings of Chris Chibnall's writing style. What promise the episode might have had was abandoned the moment fulfilling any of its possibilities required imagination beyond the established format.
The reduction of Team TARDIS to two members (possibly three, if John Bishop is a like-for-like swap for Graham and not just a guest star) should make it easier to keep the storytelling more focused, but not even that will offer much salvation if the quality of the underlying writing continues to be this weak. The problem with Chibnall's Who is not that it's too political, or 'woke', as certain corners of the internet would suggest. It's just badly written, pure and simple.
