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BBC Resolution |
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| Story No. | 313 | 
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| Production Code | 2019 New Year's Special | |
| Dates | January 1, 2019 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Chris Chibnall Directed by Wayne Yip Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens |
| Synopsis: A Dalek is building itself out of Sheffield steel and a human. |
Reconstructing Yourself from Memories and Remnants and Spare Parts by Hugh Sturgess 14/1/25
Resolution is about the best you can expect of a script penned by Chris Chibnall. It doesn't make any truly spectacular fuck-ups, and it's passably exciting. This is Doctor Who operating exclusively in the register of an ultra-low-budget wannabe blockbuster. But it serves to expose just how utterly devoid of any trace of humanity or inspiration Chibnall's vision of the show is. It's Doctor Who drained of anything that makes it worthwhile.
The Dalek at the centre of the story is a worthy metaphor for the episode itself. The basic premise of telling a Dalek story as a gothic horror about a long-dead evil arising from the grave for one final attack is genuinely inspired. The idea of essentially inverting the iconography of the Dalek so the story starts with all the iconography stripped away and then slowly reassembles it across the first 40 or so minutes... this is also a really clever, arresting thing to do with the Daleks, after a long period of them being the "I guess we have to do a Dalek story now" monster. Instead of a Dalek casing that can be piloted by a human, here we have a Dalek mutant that can pilot a human, a wonderfully creepy idea that sends the Dalek into the realm of Weird Fiction, almost a cosmic horror that sees humans as nothing more than machinery. These ideas aren't particularly profound, and they're not really about anything other than Doctor Who conventions, but they find new angles on the most over-exposed menace in the show's history.
There's also a clear and (surely) deliberate parallel going on between the Doctor and the Dalek. The season opened with the Doctor stripped of all her accessories and then assembled them again. Most obviously, the Dalek (controlling Lin) assembles a casing out of scrap metal in exactly the way the Doctor built a new sonic screwdriver. They are both made of "Sheffield steel". After so many episodes comparing the Doctor to the Daleks, comparing a Dalek to the Doctor is new territory for the series.
But there is something missing about this Dalek and not just the casing. Even in stories where there's no particular ideological content to them --- Planet of the Daleks, say --- there remains a feeling of a coherent Dalek worldview centred in hierarchy and racial superiority. This Dalek is just... empty. It's a signifier of just its own mythic weight. It's twice described as a psychopath, the archetypal lone-wolf villain who needs no motive for carnage because they're just an irredeemable bad seed. No Dalek worldview is evident here. The very idea that the Daleks see humans as inferior and in need of extermination doesn't come up; the closest we get is that humanity is "weak". It's ironic that the episode holds back the appearance of the iconic Dalek design so long, because if this was a different alien altogether would anyone think it particularly Dalek-like? It's as though the actual content of the Daleks has been consciously removed, like there's been an active effort to ensure it doesn't remind the audience of anything other than itself as an icon.
The same goes for the parallel between the Doctor and the Dalek. It's there, visual and obvious, yet that's all it ends up being: an obvious visual parallel. It resolutely refuses to mean anything. The Doctor draws attention to the improvised nature of its shell, mocking it as "junkyard chic" and describing it as assembled from "memories and remnants and spare parts". By the logic of the parallel, we should take this to describe her as well (consider how similar this is to the Doctor/Half-Faced Man parallel in Deep Breath). Yet what are we supposed to take from the comparison? That the thirteenth Doctor herself is a hollow shell of superficial Doctorness, assembled from half-remembered scraps and remnants of her past selves? This indeed feels like an insightful point but unlikely to be one the show is intending.
For what it's worth, I do think there is a purpose to the parallel between the Doctor and the Dalek, but it's one that can only be seen in retrospect, reading backwards from Resolution to The Woman Who Fell to Earth. The central pleasure of Resolution is the anticipation and realisation of the spectacle of the Dalek back in its iconic casing. It's been broken down into unrecognisable parts so it can be put back together, in the way the Doctor entered the season without the sonic screwdriver, the TARDIS or even her own title sequence --- just for the empty pleasure of seeing the icons reassembled again. Resolution is the culmination of Series 11: finally the last piece of inseparable Doctor Who iconography is back; finally Doctor Who is about Doctor Who again. This is exactly the same intent behind this episode's decision to take UNIT out of commission: Chibnall subsequently said that he got rid of UNIT so it could triumphantly come back. That's all this is: empty pleasures at the appearance of icons.
But the main effect is to show that the Chibnall era is as crap as being Doctor Who about Doctor Who as it is being Doctor Who about anything else. This is the return of the Daleks, after a season absent all past Doctor Who lore, in an episode where the chief pleasure is waiting to see the Dalek in its iconic form... and yet it feels like a watered-down, contentless, aimless imitation of a Dalek. "Me and a Dalek, it's personal," the Doctor says, yet does this for a second feel remotely personal? The Dalek doesn't even recognise her until she introduces herself! In Power of the Daleks, the Dalek recognised the new Doctor to demonstrate to the audience that Patrick Troughton was still the Doctor --- a beat RTD stole in Doomsday (Dalek Jast instinctively recognises the Doctor as an enemy without knowing who he is), as did Moffat in Into the Dalek (in which Rusty recognises the Doctor as "a doctor") --- so what does it say that this Dalek can't recognise the character Jodie Whittaker is playing? Wasn't this a stunning missed opportunity to definitively state that Whittaker is the Doctor?
It's also here that the episode does manage to spectacularly fuck up, albeit briefly. The Doctor describes the Dalek as "a refugee from the planet Skaro". When I first watched the episode and got to this line, I felt nauseatingly vulnerable on its behalf, like watching an actor forget their lines on stage. As with Kerblam!'s "systems aren't the problem" line, it seems hard to believe that this is just a stupid accident, that Chris Chibnall is unaware of the definition of a refugee, that the straight line from this to the Doctor warning Yaz in Survivors of the Flux that there are "displaced creatures who need a home, somewhere to take over" is just a weirdly consistent bit of bad luck. Chibnall appears to be a standard-issue centre-left liberal who presumably would be horrified by the idea of saying something xenophobic, but how, HOW, does this get all the way through to the finished product?
Once again Chibnall has managed to snag two up-and-coming stars --- Charlotte Ritchie and Nikesh Patel --- just before their careers took a huge upswing of visibility. While RTD got Andrew Garfield and Moffat got Letitia Wright, Chibnall really seems to have a genuinely impressive knack for identifying emerging talent. But even Ritchie and Patel can't escape from under the weight of bland, uninspired Chibnall dialogue. Lin and Mitch are more like second-tier guest characters than (bizarrely) temporary companions, they're well-acted ciphers who barely have any role in the story despite their ubiquitous presence. Lin is essentially the primary antagonist for most of the episode, but once the Dalek releases her, she's wallpaper. Mitch keeps on bringing up "the Order of the Custodians" (though it's spectacularly unclear to me what this is or why they simply disappear from the story once the Dalek bits teleport back together) and referring to ancient documents to provide them answers, yet this amounts to a suggestion they copy the ancient armies and... destroy the Dalek. No details as to how, just the general concept (and somehow I doubt ninth-century Anglo-Saxons, Siberians and Polynesians(???) destroyed the Dalek with a microwave). Great advice!
Christmas specials have always been (mostly) frothy romps; it's not like The Runaway Bride or The Return of Doctor Mysterio are really about anything terribly profound. But even once you tire of (say) the TARDIS chasing a taxi down a motorway, there are still other things in those episodes. For starters, humour and emotion. The motorway chase in The Runaway Bride comes between a lot of comedy around Donna and is followed by the intimate discussion between her and the Doctor on the rooftop. It's not just constant blockbuster action on a BBC budget, it's targeting multiple emotional responses. Whereas Resolution is almost devoid of humour (aside from the notorious "we'll have to have a conversation" scene, of course) and the subplot around Ryan's dad Aaron is like the rest of the episode: the appearance of a thing with none of the substance.
Look, I actually feel a bit bad putting the boot in too hard here. Because Resolution is the last time Chibnall gives a shit about character development at all. From Spyfall on, Chibnall drops tedious extraneous nonsense like character and theme and goes all-in on the blockbuster mode. So to have a nearly five-minute scene right in the middle of the episode devoted entirely to Ryan trying to get his dad to apologise to him is an extraordinary thing. Chibnall is never good with his dialogue, but he's functional enough that talented actors can elevate it. Tosin Cole demonstrates here that of all the problems with Ryan as a character, the actor wasn't one of them (I've just seen Cole in Supacell, and he's excellent). This is why you get a gold-plated cast in the first place, to polish weak material like this.
But I described the scene in the cafe as "Ryan tries to get his dad to apologise", yet that isn't really what happens. That's way too purposeful. The scene goes nowhere. Aaron asks Ryan what he needs him to say "because I want to say it", launching Ryan into a long monologue to the effect that Aaron should apologise for abandoning him, for fundamentally failing as a father and for making Ryan feel like he didn't deserve Aaron's love. Aaron responds with a long monologue of his own. What he doesn't do, in a scene stuffed full of declarative, over-explanatory dialogue, is... actually say anything even remotely like the things Ryan has told him he should say.
I get it, Aaron is trying to avoid apologising to Ryan. And it's true that, as RTD loves to say, the opposite of talking is waiting to talk and frequently conversations are composed of people talking past each other. But at this point the scene just... ends. That's the last interaction Aaron and Ryan have that isn't related to microwave ovens or the desirability of not being sucked into a supernova. "Aaron wants Ryan's forgiveness but doesn't want to ask for it" is a good, solid hook for a scene. But it ends before anything actually comes from that. The scene is basically two lines: Ryan says A and Aaron says B, fin. That's the start of a scene, not its entirety.
Ryan goes from being (rightly) angry at Aaron for abandoning him his entire life to forgiving him with zero intervening scenes together except for a mostly offscreen one dismantling a microwave. Aaron gets another one with Graham which ends with the trite advice that it's not too late for him to get better at being a father. Yet what does he do to be better at being a father? That the big emotional catharsis of the episode is Ryan risking his life to save Aaron, replete with lines like "he's mine" and "dad, I'm here for you", when it is Aaron who wasn't there for Ryan and made Ryan feel like he wasn't "his", is so utterly in defiance of any moral or emotional sense it's fucking perverse. In Aaron's first scene, Graham tells him family is more than a name or DNA (this, incidentally, would be a useful way to tie this plot to the Dalek plot); it's about what Aaron has done, "and you haven't done enough". But the episode ends with Aaron still having done nothing for Ryan and Ryan accepting and forgiving him anyway, presumably because Aaron is his biological father.
The only moral message one could draw from this is that children owe love and acceptance to their parents no matter how shitty their behaviour. This is of a piece with the moral of Series 11, which begins with Graham having a crack at Ryan over his dyspraxia and ends with Ryan deciding (offscreen) to accept Graham as his granddad. But it also feels weirdly of a piece with the message of Power of the Doctor, which is that the Doctor is a manipulative, opaque, secretive, frequently absent authority figure to whom their companions still owe total loyalty and devotion. It's a direct, straight line between each of these points, and it makes me glad that Tecteun got killed off after a single episode and we never had to watch the Doctor concede that she still owed her love.
It's hard to think this isn't tied up in Chibnall's feelings about his adoption, given what he's said about the origin of the Timeless Child story. I don't like to psychoanalyse writers, but one assumes that there's something very personal in this for him. But, as with the complete lack of anything profound Chibnall manages to say about adoption, this personal experience makes the shallow and generic treatment of this subplot all the more perverse. Chibnall is a parent himself. Yet the super-profound quote from Grace that Graham tells Aaron is that she "gave someone life and watched him grow and [...] was proud". That's Chibnall's insight on the experience of being a parent. Kids grow up and parents are proud of them.
What is going on with a writer with this little to say? The very things that he claims come from his heart are the sorts of things a chatbot could come up with, and he seems eager to cut away from them so the audience doesn't have to see them. Perhaps the explanation is the standard one, that he ran out of time so had to finish a promising draft in a hurry and ruined it. But seriously, you've got nothing, Chris? There isn't the tiniest little inspired thought or observation that could be put to paper? Even the most rushed RTD or Moffat script has a sparkling insight about SOMETHING. Chibnall's work is so devoid of that it's as though he's deliberately excised it.
When Series 11 aired, I was very hostile to complaints that it didn't "feel like Doctor Who" because the Doctor didn't give enough badass speeches or there weren't any Daleks or Cybermen or Murray Gold wasn't composing the score anymore. But looking at something like Resolution, is there anything here that genuinely feels like Doctor Who? This is Doctor Who aspiring to be Marvel, a corporate juggernaut churning out interchangeable instalments just different enough to justify watching them all, or (to pick an example that comes too late to be a direct inspiration for Chibnall) Star Trek: Picard Season 3, a soulless piece of sci-fi detritus with no reason for existing except to remind you of the existence of its IP. Except the saddest thing is that the Chibnall era isn't even as good as the generic hack-work it aspires to imitate. Agents of SHIELD is probably better than this.
Forget the other eras Chibnall's tenure is compared to --- Hartnell, Davison or RTD1 --- the era of the show Resolution most reminds me of is the TV movie: Doctor Who carefully wiped of anything that made it distinctive, flattened into slick generic cult TV and sold out for a quick buck. What's left is a shell, composed from memories and remnants and spare parts.