New Year’s special! A mixed bag, but at this point, I’m definitely in the frame of mind of being grateful for anything new in the way of TV and movies right now. So, I can appreciate the great moments while being only moderately annoyed at the not-so-great ones (spoilers for the previous episode. Casting spoilers as well, but it’s nothing that wasn’t already revealed in the episode trailer.)
On Earth, it’s been 10 months since the Doctor sent Yaz, Ryan, and Graham back home in a spare TARDIS while she faced an uncertain fate against the Cybermen and the Master. Meanwhile, the Doctor has spent decades locked up in Stormcage after getting captured by the Judoon. However, her old pal Captain Jack Harkness breaks her out and heads back to Earth with her just in time for a looming crisis. Jack Robertson, everyone’s least-favorite self-serving entrepreneur, is on the cusp of releasing his latest revelation in public security: robotic drones that just so happen to be modeled on Daleks.
I’ll freely admit, the alien plot? It’s meh. We borrow some of the same Dalek gimmicks from last year’s “Resolution,” which isn’t a favorite of mine, and I wasn’t clamoring for a return of Robertson after “Arachnids in the U.K.” Also, I realize that this special was filmed before 2020, but this storyline is set up with some incredibly-bad optics involving a young Black scientist helping Robertson create the Dalek drones as a “tool” for “our poor police” to use in quelling “civil unrest.” I mean, what the everloving hell? Now, I 100% buy Robertson as the sort of clueless capitalist who would think he could use the Daleks to his advantage (see also, Mr. Diagoras in “Daleks in Manhattan,” Maxtible in “The Evil of the Daleks,” and others,) but that set-up is just so bad. Side note: another guest character appearing in this story is an opportunistic politician played by Harriet Walter, a.k.a. the quintessential Fanny Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility. She’s underused but effective in the part.
Fortunately, the character stuff is a lot better. After Jack’s surprise appearance in “Fugitive of the Judoon,” which is oodles of fun but such a cruel tease, we finally get to see him meet Thirteen, and it’s predictably a delight. He has a few nice scenes with the Doctor as well as good bits with the companions, who in turn each get at least one good scene with the Doctor. In particular, I’ll highlight a discussion between Jack and Yaz about what it’s like trying to go back to “normal” life after being separated from the Doctor, as well as a lovely scene of the Doctor and Ryan catching up with each other. After two full seasons with Ryan, Graham, and Yaz, I still feel like a lot of what we know about them and their relationships with the Doctor are things we’ve had to infer between the lines, but the scenes we get here are wonderful, the sort that I wish we’d been getting all along.
My only major complaint with the character stuff is that, in relation to the Dalek plot, the characters are almost constantly split up. I realize that’s a hallmark of any crowded TARDIS and it’s certainly been true for this crew, but it doesn’t make as much sense to me here. First of all, it’s been 10 months since the companions have seen the Doctor and decades since she’s seen them, so it’s odd that they wouldn’t spend more time together. Second, they tend to split into a Doctor-led group and a Jack-led group, meaning that, after the initial prison break, Jack and the Doctor spend most of the episode apart. Given that this is the first time in goodness-knows-how-long that Jack has seen the Doctor, 1) it doesn’t jive all that well, and 2) selfishly, I personally wanted to see a lot more of them together.
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