Doctor Who - Eve Of The Daleks

Exterminating Eve

Doctor Who
Eve Of The Daleks
Airdate: 1st January 2022
BBC 1

Warning: Spoilers looping back into spoilers.

Now this is more like it. Doctor Who - Eve Of The Daleks is the best Doctor Who New Years Special ever... with one or two caveats. And also, I mean, yeah there have only been three New Years specials to date, this one being the third but, even so, this was a hugely entertaining one and I loved it. It’s also the first time in a while that Doctor Who has properly aired on a Saturday evening again (which is exactly where it belongs).

Okay, so we have, once again and for the record... Jodie Whitaker, Mandip Gill and John Bishop returning as The Doctor, Yas and Dan. The plot is simple... The Doctor performs a reset on the TARDIS and, while they wander around in a storage facility in Manchester, our heroes get sucked into a time loop, which is presumably caused by the TARDIS, as they try to stop customer Nick (played by Adjani Salmon) and Sarah (played by some woman I’d never heard of called Aisling Bea who, honestly, knocked this out the park and should be in everything from now on) from being killed by rogue Daleks. Trouble is, when they and also The Doctor and her companions get killed each time, it resets the time loop but leaves their memories of their last encounter intact... and they have a slowly diminishing amount of time to try and formulate a plan before the time loop closes at midnight on New Years Eve 2021, defeat the Daleks and remain outside the area of said time loop.

Now, I will be the first to admit many faults with this episode...

Yes, it’s such an old plot it’s unreal that anyone would try and package this idea up yet again. I mean, I don’t remember if they’ve ever bothered doing this one in Doctor Who before but the old ‘attempt to survive each successive time loop’ idea has been done in many sci-fi shows over the years.

Additionally, a lot of it didn’t make sense... such as why the characters assumed the time-loop would be closing at midnight or why their interaction with Sarah’s mum via phone wasn’t affecting the rest of the world and dragging it into a time loop also. And I could probably go on with a whole laundry list of things which shoot holes through this particular plot device.

However, the execution of this... well, asides from the science and technical stuff... was absolutely brilliant. Sarah and Nick were drawn as great characters who managed to shift tone and get together romantically by the end of their time loop experience and the actors had some great lines to deliver. Ditto for The Doctor and her companions. Dan has finally made clear to the characters (if not the audience... I was slowly beginning to suspect, I think) that there’s a probable lesbian romantic entanglement to come between The Doctor and Yas. Which could be interesting but, you know, probably not in any way that the show could get away with and stay a family show (back to the old Dalek porn if you want to go that route, I’m afraid).

And yeah, I was suitably impressed with the whole shenanigans. Also the music was great again too. Segun Akinola provides a score which, amazingly, doesn’t suffer from not including the leitmotif set up for the Daleks by Murray Gold and the driven, bass rhythms used here work really well to help establish them as something of a threat again. That being said, they seem fine at point blank range with their new ‘gatling gun’ style, revolving extermination attachments but... well... just a few metres off with a moving target and, once more, their skills at shooting resemble the stormtroopers in the Star Wars franchise. As in... they can’t hit a thing.

There were some nice references to old Doctor Who history too. For instance, Nick does the old ‘duck down between two shooting Daleks’ trick to take two of them out, which harks back to the William Hartnell and Peter Cushing days if memory serves. And also, at one point in the episode, Sarah exclaims “Oh my giddy Aunt!”... which was, of course, one of Patrick Troughton’s catchphrases as The Doctor at the tail end of the 1960s. That being said, no matter how many times the Daleks have come to Earth now and tried to invade it... how in heck do people still not remember them? It’s a little less than credible that, after everything they’ve put the human race through time and time again, that nobody seems to remember them (unless they work in UNIT, maybe).

And, yeah, that’s that... things are set up for what I think, if I got this right, are Jodie Whittaker’s last three special episodes over the year in the title role. I’m assuming that Yas will also either die or carry on assuming The Doctor has died by the end of Jodie’s last show. I guess we’ll find out by the end of the year. One thing we do have to look forward to though, via the post credits trailer for the next special, is the return of the old Jon Pertwee monster from the 70s (reviewed here and with a brief but memorably bad return in Peter Davison’s reign in the 1980s, reviewed here), the Sea Devils. They always frightened me as a kid and, hopefully, they can be frightening enough again for me to take away the memory of their second appearance in the show. So hopefully... third time’s a charm.

Either way, Doctor Who - Eve Of The Daleks... old plot, technically questionable but, hey, great acting, great music, entertaining presentation... a generally brilliant episode, for sure. This one has, temporarily, restored my faith in the good Doctor, I have to say.