Revolution of the Daleks

[0:00]

Hello, dear listen, and welcome back to Jody and Terra, the only Doctor Who flash cast that serves as a statement on modern society.

Ooh, isn't modern society awful.

I'm Nathan.

I'm Brendan.

I'm Todd.

And I'm Johnny.

So we are just over 24 hours away from our 1st viewing of the festive special for 2021, which is called something, Revolution of the Daleks.

And I thought we'd begin by just sort of going around the table and getting everyone sort of 1st impressions.

Actually, I've got no idea what Johnny thinks of this.

So let's start with him.

Oh, I really enjoyed it.

And partly because I always enjoy festive specials because I'm usually watching them with friends and wine and so they nearly always.

They are nearly always come off very, very well indeed.

Um, but this was, this was good and it left me with the feeling that Chipnell knows how to do those those big festive specials pretty well.

[01:06]

He's done 3 of them now, and I think they've all come off.

Um, relatively, relatively nicely.

And I think just scanning over it briefly before I jumped on air.

I think the thing it has to do is be fast and slow all the time, you know, it has to move from action piece to slow sort of character moments and has to sort of juggle that throughout the entire thing.

And, um, no, I thought it, I thought it did pretty well.

Brilliant.

Todd, how about you?

It was fine.

And uh, Chris Chibnol episode that doesn't annoy me with dialogue or plot points or uh, any Jody episode that where she doesn't annoy me is actually a good episode and she was good and I really loved her pet talk to the Daleks and some of her quieter moments.

So I actually thought, yeah, this was, um, yeah, I liked it.

Um, I don't know what else to say.

[02:07]

Nope, that's good.

We'll get back to more things in a minute, Brendan.

Um, it's funny.

Sort of after it finished, I felt like I didn't really enjoy it all that much.

And then when I watched it again, I'm like, no, I actually really quite enjoyed this.

I did have problems with it, which I'm sure we'll discuss later on here.

But overall, I did quite enjoy it.

I thought it used most of the characters really well, and I thought it was another cracking performance from Jody, who in The Timeless Children, which I've got, you know, big problems with the structure of, I couldn't fault her performance in that, and she's still bringing that same level.

I have to say that I was initially pretty bored with it.

And particularly, I still think that it takes far, far too long to get to the point.

But I think there's some fun to be had.

Um, And yeah, some things actively annoyed me, but generally speaking, like it looked good and the end of it was certainly kind of exciting enough and the resolution was particularly good.

[03:12]

So uh, that's kind of how I'm feeling about it.

How do we feel the Daleks came off?

Well, I thought it was fun that we have a kind of kind of faux daleks in these ones, which have been put together, these these were robotic daleks, which are, which are 3D printed here in, in, in Wales somewhere.

And that was fun because as I understand it, the new Dalek design doesn't have operators in it, does it?

Like it, it, they don't have exes in it.

So in a way, it was sort of playing with itself a little bit there.

It's sort of metafiction a bit saying, oh, look, we can, you know, where we're pushing this into new and interesting places.

And I think it had that touch of remembrance about it too, didn't it?

where we've got this kind of question about purity and then 2 Dalek factions going to war.

I think, you know, one thing after seeing 1000s of Daleks on a production line and 1000s of other Daleks fly out of a spaceship.

[04:17]

It was perhaps a little underwhelming that we got kind of one sequence with them battling on the bridge, and then it was all, it all seemed to be wrapped up relatively quickly after that.

Um, so you would be, you could kind of be hoping for a little bit more from those big set pieces than we actually got.

Yeah, I mean, I found that because they'd spent so long just kind of following Christnoff's business dealings.

And, you know, like, I don't think the Daleks were introduced until, like, about 35 minutes in and the whole thing doesn't really go to hell until about 45 minutes in, that everything was a little bit perfunctory.

Like the Daleks go mad and kind of shoot a bunch of people in maybe 2 scenes lasting a minute or 2 each.

And then you've got that confrontation on the bridge.

I think perhaps there just weren't quite enough dialects in it.

What do you think, Todd?

Yeah, perhaps, I mean, for me, I guess the, the, The thing was that it was always going to be the write out of Graham and Ryan.

[05:19]

And so I was really focussed on that and the Daleks were just sort of more window dressing to keep everybody happy and, you know, um, so, I didn't mind their use at all.

I quite liked.

I mean, it was actually obvious that they were going to bring the regular Daleks in to get rid of the new Daleks.

Um, And I liked that and I liked them having conversations with themselves and other people.

So, yeah.

Um, I think this could have been a Christmas special and a New Year's special.

I think this could have been 2 episodes and give more time to those battle scenes, but at the same time, they would have been per we've padding battle scenes.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

It would have been the sea devils storming the base, which look, you know, looks great, but you don't, in a way, you don't lose anything without them.

But it's also a fact that we do get some massive scale set pieces, which Chris Chipnell hasn't really done before in a way that Russell T. Davies and sometimes Stephen Moffatt did.

[06:26]

And they really succeed here.

But those scenes like of the Daleks exterminating people at an airport are shot in such tight shots that it's obvious that Lee Haven Jones, who does a spectacular job with this episode, only has about 20 people.

And so that shoots it very tight.

But the trade-off for that is you do get them flying through the sky and you get that shot.

Everyone online is loving of the doctor hanging out of the Tartar, surrounded by Dalek, swirling around her.

Such a great shot.

It's a reverse genesis arc shot, isn't it, really?

So instead of coming out of a thing.

They go into the thing.

But given that the technology is so much better now, it did look really quite spectacular, I think.

I mean, the whole episode looked spectacular.

I mean, I think that's one thing is that visually, the shows looks as good as it's ever looked.

The other daleks we get are the Dalek Mutants, they're the kind of other variant in Gymnals, Dalek stories, and he features them really heavily in in resolution and this one.

[07:32]

And I like, I like this idea that you have to get rid of every single scrap of a Dalek, otherwise it's going to be able to reform and and and come back.

And, and the scenes, the scenes in allegedly Osaka, with with Yaz and Jack, where, where it attacks them.

I mean, that was a real, that's a real moment of tension and really shot very nicely and perform nicely, I think.

I actually think that, um, it's it's the slithean problem, though.

Like you've got these sort of fairly lamentable puppets, like practical kind of puppets.

And then you've got the CG ones, which are actually really spectacular, but look very little like the actual puppets.

That's a real question for Doctor Who about whether it needs prosthetics anymore.

And whether it should all be CG now.

I, you know, it was a question we were talking about over wine over the 1st viewing was um, this, this, it's never been an easy mix between the prosthetics and the CG and maybe it's time for them to back one particular horse.

[08:34]

I do reckon, though, that the, um, the puppet that's on Leo's back is pretty good.

Like I think that that is actually pretty good.

Yeah.

And and I really like his performance.

Nathan Stuart Jarrett as Leo.

He creates a really good distinction between Leo and the Dalek.

And, um, The actress playing Lynn last year, Hannah Ritchie, I want to say, or Charlotte Ritchie.

Um, she did a good job as well.

But I actually feel he's a bit more vulnerable.

His character is a bit more vulnerable than her.

I was reading Andrew Ellard's script notes and he sort of said that it was a lost opportunity not to actually save him just to sort of give him the sort of say with execution so that we didn't have to deal with him for the rest of the episode.

But he was lovely.

I thought he was really terrific and early on too.

Like he was, look, I think Chris North was pretty fun, but I thought he was more fun than Chris North.

[09:36]

I think you need a big presence like Chris North in one of these festive specials anyway.

Like, and I think he's a really charismatic kind of actor and, and they had lightened his character a little bit to be a bit more fun throughout this whole thing.

And, um, I think, I think he was kind of, I was half, I, I half wanted to see him killed and then I didn't want to really see him running around with Jody's mob of people, but she always seems to run around with in the, in the 3rd act.

Um, but, but actually on reflection, I'm glad he stuck around and, you know, there's the hint that he may not be in, it might not be a final goodbye from him either yet.

Yeah, I think there'll be a 3rd one.

For sure.

There just has to be because this is, you know, the criticism of Arachnids in the UK, which, of course, that he just wanders off and, you know, you had the opportunity to get your Donald Trump analogue eaten by a giant spider, and I don't know how you resist that.

You know, like, why would you forego that opportunity?

But there's dialogue in this that says, um, that the spider's episode did put an end to his presidential bid and he did face consequences.

[10:43]

But then we have the great reversal at the end of this story where Graham's like, can you believe he gets off scot free?

And Ryan's like, yes.

Yeah, yeah And for Chris Chipnall, who sometimes bludgeons us over the head with what the meaning of the episode is, I actually found that a really nice piece of writing and performance from Towson as well.

Um, should we talk about the politics of it?

I think you're going to.

Well, I think I'm going to.

I have to say that I thought that it was weird.

And obviously it was shot in, what, late 2019 or something before, you know, we broke the world and everything went to hell.

Um, And it just comes, it does come across as slightly weird.

So it sort of seems to be saying, you know, the Daleks are policemen.

Um, but it doesn't go anywhere with that or examine it in any sort of particular way.

It just sort of says, oh, you know, the police are a bit like Daleks, but we don't, you know, it's not, It's certainly not the sort of sophisticated political satire that we get in aliens of London or or, you know, like some stories in the Moffat era as well.

[11:59]

I found it just a bit thin.

He doesn't tend to say anything about anything.

Yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of early on seems to be making the point that, um, uh, that, Power will resort to technology and to force, uh, in order to maintain that power, but it did very quickly gets um, left behind.

Yeah, yeah, there's almost a, there's almost a sort of technocratic fascist state being set up in Joe's speech, a initial speech, but like, I don't know what it's saying.

Do you know what I mean?

Like is, I don't know what it's saying.

It's almost like it's almost something that you could say in America with its sort of massive police budgets and the militarisation of the police and stuff like that, but it doesn't seem to go there.

Yeah.

And that's the thing.

You have Yaz, who's a policeman.

You have Yaz, who's a police officer, I should say.

Um, And that isn't even mentioned here.

[13:03]

Like, if she's been in the Tartars for months, maybe mentioned that she's lost her job.

At which point she can say, well, you know, the police aren't what I thought they were.

And that and...

This is the thing I find frustrating in these, is that I think Chris Chipnell writes good stories, but someone else needs to take a pass at the dialogue, and it's, it's not like, you know, when episodes under Stephen Moffatt's tenure didn't work.

You look at them and you go, okay, I can see what they're going for, but this would need major changes in order to work properly.

With Chris Chipnell episodes, it's like, oh, this would just need like 2 or 3 lines and it would be excellent as opposed to just good or decent.

Yeah.

And it's it's frustrating because you see Chris Chipnell interviewed and he doesn't seem to have a huge chip on his shoulder.

Like he seems to be a very nice person.

All the other writers talk about how collaborative the environment is, but it just seems like there's no one occasionally saying, actually, I think this is good but could just be a little bit better.

[14:09]

I think the dialogue where I notice it is in the emotional moments, in the slower character moments.

Uh, that's where I think it, uh, that's where I think it clunks along a bit.

Oh, I think it's shockingly poor, actually.

I have to say that I think that those scenes.

And Mandeep manages to hide it a little bit by being so incredibly good in that scene with Jack.

But I do think that scene with Jack is complete nonsense from beginning to end.

And while it's trying to become, like, you don't choose when to leave the doctor, except you will in about like half an hour's time at the end of the episode where 2 people choose to leave the doctor.

Like, it's nonsense.

It's nonsense.

And the one, yeah.

No, no, no, Jack, the doctor just constantly dumps you.

Yeah that's right.

That's just you.

It's the difference, not that...

That's actually a really good point.

I just think the difference might be that Jack and Yaz are kind of in love with the doctor. in a way that Ryan and Graham are not.

[15:10]

So they can't ever leave the doctor because in fact, they have a much greater emotional attachment to her. than Ryan and Graham doing the same way that Jack is kind of like, well, I'll never be free of the doctor because I've always sort of, um, I've always, always sort of linked to him slash her in that way.

I think the other scene too, the bookends that, which is, is the doctor and Ryan, is equally terrible, and you can see both actors struggling to kind of work out how to play it.

Um, uh, you know, I, I do think that, that, it's a shame that we haven't got really very well drawn relationships among all those characters and we tend to just be told, you know, we don't tend to see it.

It's it's never subtextual.

It's just the text.

It's a little bit like, was it Ascension of the Cybermen, where Graham said how impressive he thought Yaz was, and it's kind of like, well, where did that come from?

[16:12]

You know, like she is impressive, but, you know, um, Todd, how did you feel we handled the departure of the companions?

I'm quite liked that, I mean, it was I quite liked Ryan's departure.

I thought.

Um, it was Being signposted for a while.

I guess.

Um, and I actually didn't mind his scene with um, Jody.

Um, I felt that that you could tell they were both on the same page, knowing that he was headed for the door at some point.

Yeah.

I guess with Graham.

I thought Graham was really underused in this episode and for him then just to sort of stay behind because Ryan's not coming.

I don't know whether that was necessary.

Completely true to the character.

You may disagree.

I felt.

Okay, that he's made that decision.

Um, He could have easily, quite easily have stayed as well and said, yeah, it's down on your own 2 feet, um, for a bit and I'll see you when you get back.

[17:19]

I don't know.

I, But I do like the fact that they weren't killed off or made into some sort of travel with the mortals around the universe.

It's actually the 1st normal companion departure, isn't it?

Martha maybe, but she's sort of traumatised.

But it's the 1st time people say actually we're kind of done here.

Thanks. it's been fun.

And it is, I think it is sort of well signposted at the beginning.

Like you can tell because Ryan and Graham have got on with their lives for the last 10 months that they've actually started to see how the world works without the doctor and you can see Yaz, who's got her madness wall of, she just needed some red thread.

Yeah.

You know, she's got her paranoia wall on the, in the, in, uh, Ruth.

Is it Ruth Darnus?

No, no, it's just a spare.

It's the spare.

It's the spare tartars that we killed.

That we kill.

Yeah, I mean, the doctor kills one of...

Possibly the only 4 Tartuses in the universe. in order to stop the Daleks in, like a, oh, what is it, a Peter Rabbit sort of moment?

[18:26]

Like, oh, I bet you can't come in here and kill me.

She just doesn't even have any bedrooms, right?

Oh, where's Nissa and Tegan's room?

That's the other thing about that conversation between Ryan and the doctor.

It takes 4 minutes to get to Osaka and presumably Chris North and Graham are in Jack's suites at the cocktail bar.

That is right.

I thought when I watched, like, where the hell are they?

I like to think that Graham is off showing him that newspaper machine where he got the coupons to go to Orphan 55.

I hope it'll happen again.

Go there now.

We talked a bit about the Chris North character.

I didn't like how stupid he was when he was in the TARDIS and couldn't really understand.

Like, at some points he was quite funny and and and used well.

Other points, I just thought, oh.

Really, that's what we're going for.

[19:27]

Oh, no, it's a complaint, but I think he has 2 really brilliant lines, and the one is when we learn that all of the people operating the factory have been sort of liquidised and fed to the Daleks, and he goes, you know, this is a PR disaster, I think, spectacular.

And then, and then it, it's like one of the uh, doctor's companion says, oh, give us a reason why we should save you.

And he just goes, money.

Like, I actually think part of the problem with the with the cibnolia is that it doesn't, everyone is playing it too, particularly Tosen, but everyone is sort of playing it, isn't playing it quite big enough.

Um, and he, he, he is actually doing that a bit.

And so I sort of quite liked him.

I wasn't a big fan of just watching his business dealings for half an hour at the beginning of the episode.

I did like the line where he was talking about, they've got stunt Dalek weapons in at that very beginning to test on the stunt protesters and he says, you know, she says we, they're not, it's not real gas and he goes, yeah, but I still think that could have been fun.

[20:37]

Trumpy in line.

That's kind of interesting too, because it's clear that Chibnall can write some fun engaging dialogue.

And I think in the fast moving scenes, in, in the, in the sort of um, lots of people around, lots of things happening, those scenes, the dialogue is not so awful as it is when he's just doing those 2 people having a DNM moment together.

Yeah.

I think is, I'm, I'm, I'm going to dissent and say, I actually quite like the 2 DNM conversations.

I, I, the problem I have with the, the Ryan and the doctor one is it covers some of the same ground as the Ruth doctor and doctor conversation in the Matrix last episode, but it also brings home to me that, because I was thinking, hold on, why is the doctor still thinking about this after 19 years?

And it's, it goes back to the doctor needs companions and needs humans.

And, you know, Matt Smith needed Amy and Rory, like with the doctor, the widow in the wardrobe, he's pretending like he's functional and Claire's skin is like, no, you're not.

[21:46]

You are like, just go find your friends and have Christmas dinner, you tool.

Um And I think that's kind of what it is here in that.

The doctor is doing that thing that some fans, hello, me, do, and it's like, I must come up with a theory that fits all these facts and Ryan cuts through it and says, no, you just run around saving people in a blue box.

Yeah.

You know, that, what, nothing takes anything away from that.

And I think that's a really, I think that's a really sweet moment.

The dialogue I had a big problem with is um, is Prime Minister Joe, who's Joe Patterson.

It's an easy name to remember, but I keep forgetting it.

Um, Her line of dialogue of something like if anyone finds out that I'm the one who helped you steal the dialect after killing the driver in a layby and stuffing him in a in stuffing him in a van and the tea truck had comic sands on the outside.

I noticed that.

But, you know, that kind of fits because it's a fake tea truck.

[22:47]

Um, the other, and the other line I really hated in that, um, in that the workers have been fed and popped.

It's like, one, the Dalek's like, the workers were made.

And I'm like, redundant?

Unnecessary.

Okay, plane thieves, got it?

Um, but then Jack's like, you popped the workers and fed them to, it's like, yes, we get that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Who pulled them?

Do you think?

Got some contractors in?

Yeah.

Well, and, you know, that's a metaphor for the episode because you get the contractors in to pulp the old workers, but then you got to pulp the contractors.

So it's a thing.

Now, one thing that we haven't talked about is prison.

And I think that Jody's in prison longer than 19 years.

So Jack says that it takes, it took him 19 years to get to be in the cell next to her.

And when she says it's been a rough few decades, I think she's been there for a long time.

So why doesn't she try to escape?

[23:50]

Because she's having a, she's having a good time ruminating and feeling sorry for herself, which look, Tom Baker does in Brain of Morbius, Colin Baker does, threatens to do with the twin dilemma.

It's like without any, without any humans around, she's like, oh, well, why shouldn't I just sit here for 500 years and think about it?

At least I'm not on an annoying planet called Christmas.

How did you find the prison scenes, Todd?

They were fine to quote myself.

What I actually really enjoyed was seeing other creatures from the past.

And although, you know, the doctors, like, the doctor for her crimes and then, but then we've got like a weeping angel and I did burst out laughing when I saw the pating.

I just thought that was wonderful.

What about, at the very end, so she's calling it tiny, but Ryan refers to it as the mighty patini.

Go on, Todd.

Yeah, so I didn't mind that, but I just thought, and I guess it comes back to this.

[24:54]

They needed her to be away from Ryan and and Graham for 10 months.

So it's almost like he reverse engineers, like we're going to write him out.

So let's have the doctor be in prison, and then how do we get her out of prison?

Oh, well, let's bring in this character, like, there's all these.

I don't know, utterly predictable or easy solutions to the problems, that sort of just, if I can put it that way, that I kind of think in Stephen Moffat's time or um, Russell's time, it would be, uh, you'd be surprised, whereas I'm never quite, Surprised, were like, oh, oh, that makes logical sense.

I mean, he, He answered virtually all of my questions in the episode about how things work.

So I was quite satisfied with that.

Um, And, you know, having Jack there to give us references to companions and other people passed is always a nice little sprinkling of nostalgia.

Um, But why stay in there for that long?

[25:54]

I mean, a doctor break out, like, doesn't she?

What how did it change her?

Like, what is the ordeal in prison that means that she's a different person when she comes out of it than when she went into it?

In fact, there's there's none of that at all.

It's just she's exactly the same sort of person.

So it does really seem like it was just marking time and and um, uh, it would have been nice if we could have, if for the 3 companions' sake, they could have looked at this person who has, you know, spent decades away and noticed that she has changed in some way.

Yeah, that she hasn't.

No, and they, and he, she never says anything and maybe that's nice.

It's nice to have her not be self-pitying about it afterwards.

But I think it's a mistake to have the doctor turn up and have everyone cross at her.

You know, like we should be excited that she's entered the story and we're kind of not.

And I do think that the prison break had, there was no nothing clever to it.

Like, one of the things that I miss is when the doctor does something super clever.

[26:58]

And in this story, she gets rescued by someone else who brings the, you know, escaping from prison device with him.

So there's nothing.

There's no heist, there's no distract the guards.

There's really nothing.

It is a fun sequence, like the ball thing.

Um, and in in a sort of 45 minute stretch where we're pretty starved of action, that is quite welcome, I think.

Um, And again, you know, like we spend a lot of time just going around finding out what happens and then there's a clever thing that we don't see her come up with at the end.

Do you know what I mean?

There is a kind of, there's a straightforwardness to it, which I actually think is, you know, a bit unambitious, I guess.

I agree with you.

I think there's some narrative cleverness in the fact that the 2nd TARDIS has been sitting there unnoticed throughout most of the episode, it's there and then she uses it at the end and she disguises it.

And I think that's got an element of cleverness in it.

But overall, you do get the sense after watching the episode of Jody spending a lot of time in the Tartist pressing buttons.

[28:05]

Yeah.

And where she doesn't get a big moment towards the end where she gets to confront it, confront the villains and kind of bring everything to a close, except she's a hologram when she's talking to the SAS Starlex in the old TARDIS.

So there's a real sense of her being distanced from all the action.

Yeah.

I mean, I agree with you.

That moment, using that TARDIS is the clever moment.

But I just want more clever moments rather than what I can see has been obvious.

And um, straightforwardness to plotting because it all works in this perfunctory to get us to the end so that 2 companions will leap.

I mean, I guess that's my one criticism.

Don't get me wrong.

I did enjoy it.

It was fine.

Um, But I'm not in love with the episode, but I thought there were some good moments.

Hmm.

Um, I will say that knowing that Graham and Ryan were leaving, now, of course, I put out a mad theory on YouTube, Graham was going to be the doctor and his personality was hidden inside his West Ham badge because it said West Ham of Duro and he was going to travel around the universe with his grandson.

[29:19]

Might still happen, Brendan.

It might still happen.

As my friends and friends of the podcast, Scott and Anson pointed out, little bit death of personality for Graham, though.

It's like, yep, fair enough.

Um, But because that announcement was made, a lot of people were like, oh, they're going to be exterminated by Daleks because it's a Dalek story.

And when they're running around on the ship, I was, I had, like, been saying for months, they're not going to, Chris Chibnall is not going to kill his companions.

That's Moffat's thing. kind of thing.

Um, But when they're running around on the ship, I'm like, actually, like this, it created genuine suspense in me in a way that doesn't often happen with Doctor Who because you know everyone's going to get out okay.

It's like, well, actually, no, I know this is their departure story.

And yeah, if Graham was killed, I think that would be enough for Ryan to say, uh no.

In fact, I think Yaz's advice to them, which is make sure that you, you have to detonate the bombs after you're on your way back. you know, like he's deliberately setting that up to be a bit of peril for those 2 in particular.

[30:25]

Yeah.

All right.

Well, look, I'm super aware of the need to keep this episode shorter than the eventual 2025 flight through entirety episode that we're going to do once we've had time to actually come up with considered opinions.

So we might wind it up there.

I want to plug flights through entirety.

We have just finished the 2009 specials, and if you're listening to this today, There will be a big retrospective, thanks in very large part to Todd, coming out, I think, probably this Friday, and then, of course, we'll do season 5 later in the year.

Um, Brendan, I think you have things to plug.

I do.

My YouTube channel is back, so you can check out Brandy Bongos, and from the end of this month, I will be uploading new videos in my say something nice series where I say something nice about every episode.

And thankfully, the ratings for this one look very healthy.

[31:27]

So I'm not going to have to go back and slot it in between 2 episodes I've already done.

Thank you, the timeless children.

No one wants that.

All right, Johnny, you've got nothing to plug.

Is that in?

Uh, nothing new to plug, but you can see, you can read everything I've ever thought and written about Doctor Who on Randomhooness.com.

Brilliant. that's awesome All right, so I guess all that remains is for me to say, until next time, remember you can't eat the cage, believe me, I've tried, and I spent the next week flossing with an angle grinder.

Thank you very much for listening and good night.

You can eat the harness though.

Good night.

Good night.

6.7 out of 10.

Good night.