Doctor Who First Impressions: New Year's Day 2022 Special (Eve Of The Daleks)

2022! We have made it to the new frontier! A brave new year and brave new world of infinite possibility, untold promise, and some incredible things on the horizon for me and the blog. Pity, then, that we have to deal with Chris Chibnall today instead of any of that. This, at least, is the beginning of the end for Chibnall's Who. The raw scar tissue of Flux has yet to heal, and I remain pretty well checked out of Chibnall's nonsense. At the very least, this episode's fine. I say fine, even though I have issues with it, but it clears certain low bars for me that the man tripped right over during the latter half of Flux. There is a certain sense of... adequacy here. A little depressing that not majorly fucking up is the best bar Chibnall can clear (and, again, believe you and me he fucked up one or two things here as I'll get to) but let's discuss the Perfectly Fine-Ish Romp of Eve Of The Daleks.

Well, that premise is an interesting one, isn't it? We haven't really done a proper Time Loop story like this before in Doctor Who, as far as I can recall. Sure, we have Heaven Sent, but that is its own beast and even I'm not going to be so unfair to Chibnall as to compare his holiday fluff to fucking Heaven Sent. I'll be nice for a moment. The idea is a good one. A desperate escape attempt against the Daleks which keeps ending in failure, extermination, and a near-reset with all memories retained of your previous loops. The clock advancing by a minute with each near-reset also makes things finite and adds extra stakes. We can't fuck up too many times, or else we'll skip ahead too far and some or all of us will be Dead For Good. In many ways, the concept was spoiled by me knowing about it. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for an unspoiled viewer who doesn't know the premise of the episode. Getting 9 minutes in and then the Doctor and pals get exterminated, then we get the title card drop. Holy hot goddamn. If they had extra time it might have been funnier to keep dropping the title card, but that trolling would get a bit old. Maybe if the story had less resets, but that's wishful thinking at this point. Either way, what I'm saying is that on paper it is a very good idea with a lot of potential. Where does Chibnall place that potential? Hoo boy. This is where it gets messy.

A particular skill I've developed over my media analysis years is being able to see the good bits of media trapped within the terrible shell. The biggest example of this would be with Star Wars movies, namely the prequels and Episode IX. They are not very good movies, but I can see the good movies hiding within them. (The caveat here is that the movies the prequels are trying to be are much better than the movie Episode IX is trying to be, but that's a tangent we can't go down today.) To get at what I think Chibnall's good bit is in Eve Of The Daleks, we need to talk about the time loop subgenre in slightly broader strokes. I'll use two time loop movies I know as example: 1993's Groundhog Day, and 2017's Happy Death Day (the latter of which I wrote about here, if you're so inclined.). These two movies are from wildly different genres, one being a comedy and the other a horror movie, but they both tell the same story in broad strokes: an asshole is caught in a time loop, suffers, gains a greater perspective on life, and learns not to be such an asshole any more once they are freed of the time loop. It's a good story! It works very effectively in both Groundhog Day and Happy Death Day, for different reasons and nuances specific to each movie. This approach does not at all work in Eve Of The Daleks, but I can still see what Chibnall is aiming for. Let's dig into that.

Aisling Bea is very much the Bill Murray/Jessica Roth of Eve Of The Daleks. Her character is not quite as much of a jerk as either of those actors' characters in those other two movies, but the story between her and Adjani Salmon is one I can see on paper hitting those same beats. Sarah starts off as a sarcastic uncaring woman stuck working on New Year's Eve, unafraid to speak her mind and give someone a good tongue-lashing if she thinks they deserve it. Repeatedly dying and having to interact with Nick, learning his backstory and feelings and secrets makes her realize that hey, maybe she shouldn't be such an asshole to this guy. All the dying over and over gives both characters perspective on how fleeting life can be, and once they're out and alive they end up together, Sarah living her dream of travelling the world and requiting Nick's longstanding crush on her. A nice heartwarming romantic comedy sort of situation, juxtaposed with the genre crash into Doctor Who as a blonde lady and her two friends smash into their story with fascist pepperpot aliens who kill them over and over. On paper, that sounds like something that could work, especially for Doctor Who! Steven Moffat could nail it in his sleep, and even Chibnall doesn't make that bad a stab at it. 

However.

Nick is just... well, when have we minced words here before? He's creepy. This is not just a me thing, either. I watched the episode and my takeaway was "well that guy's a little awkward and it made all the sappy romantic bits a little uncomfortable for me". As it turns out, this is me being incredibly kind to the episode. At least two people I know, one of them being my podcast cohost Kat who is Very Frequently Right About Things, didn't just find Nick an uncomfy socially awkward dork. They thought he was a total creepazoid bordering on serial killer vibes. The man's had a crush on Sarah for three years, but didn't have the courage to tell her, so he just comes by every New Year's Eve when he knows she's working alone as an excuse to guarantee awkward small talk with her. He also has, in his storage unit at the place Sarah works, multiple labelled items owned by ex-girlfriends kept there just in case they ever ask for them back. There's even a joke or two going "oh no no no they're still alive". Jesus Christ. Chibnall went just a little too far and slipped on a banana peel and landed in the creepazoid realm with this dude. Whoops. I could get mad at him for that, but oh no. No, there's another big thing to get mad at him for here.

In between the episode airing early in the US/UK and it airing at its usual nighttime slot in Canada, Friend Of The Blog Christa Mactire (Buy Back To The Eleventh Hour) asked me the rhetorical "you know what's gonna be great, Frez?" before answering "writing about good new Doctor Who!". Two possibilities were open there. The first being that Christa was talking about November 2023. The second was that Eve Of The Daleks was a miracle beyond miracles, a stellar episode of the show well above Chibnall's usual aim. Christa was talking about November 2023, but the possibility of the second made me remark, and I quote myself: "I still would have managed to be mad if he managed a banger of an episode tonight. 3 from the end and then he decides to be good.". Chibnall did not quite do that, but he did do something else. Something which could have been good if he'd done it sooner, something which should be good but only pisses me off at this point because of how done I am with Chibnall. Late into Eve Of The Daleks, with 2 episodes and change left in his era and with these characters, Chris Chibnall decides to plant the seeds of making Thasmin canon. Thasmin, for those of you keeping score at home, is the 13/Yaz ship. There have been little teases and dangles here and there, but they've been few and far between in the past four years in my eyes. Nevertheless, there have been shippers chomping at the lure for this who are living their best with the canonization of these feelings. If you're one of them, for the love of God don't let my cynicism detract from your pure joy. Live your best life and write your best fic in celebration. 

I have just a few things rattling in my head about this which sour me on this, and I'm going to outline them. The major one being too little, too late, of course. "Yaz Is There" has been a meme on our podcast for four years for a reason. The woman's been given table scraps of characterization for all that time, and now at the end you drop some actual good scraps of food? When you're leaving? When you have barely any time to slow burn this before you, Jodie Whittaker, and Mandip Gill head out the door? Of course, that leads me to the other jaded reaction to it all. My acrimonious destruction of any sort of fucks I gave for Doctor Who in the light of Flux are still fresh. Everything I said on the blog barely a month ago about Chibnall is still relevant. Specifically all that shit I said about Chibnall dangling plot threads like a fishing hook in front of us, with the implication that if you keep watching something will happen, only for it to be a cop-out amounting to fucking nothing and Chibnall laughing all the way to the bank because he got what he wanted, eyes on his show, so who the fuck cares about anything else. Dangling the resolution to canon-shattering lore like a big shining lure before fucking off with it is one thing. Dangling the implied promise of exploring a lesbian romance between Doctor and companion, knowing full well that in 10 months all parties involved are fucking off, is something else entirely. This is literal queerbaiting. This is Chibnall the master baiter sticking fucking queer representation on the hook to keep people curious and invested in his show.

In that light, every little thing about it just feels worse. Like how Yaz and the Doctor don't communicate it to each other, Yaz just confessing it to Dan and then Dan straight up telling the Doctor the next time it's just the two of them. "Oh by the way, Yaz likes you.". Again, a charitable read can see what Chibnall's going for, but the uncharitable claim would be that Dan is fucking outing Yaz to the Doctor. That's where I have to bail with this mess. Eve Of The Daleks is not a bad episode for Chibnall, and I do mean that. It could be the best of his New Year's Dalek episodes, and it is certainly a step above Flux. I can see that it is trying to be about something relevant in the real world, about unrequited love and living your life to the fullest with no regrets. Certainly, the Doctor spells that out in her Standard Chibnall-Written Hopepunk Speech. Chibnall is trying to write a story about something real in the real world, about human connection and the shared experience. In many ways, of course, he fucked that up, but I can see the intent here. That's where we leave Chibnall, for at least a few months. Absence may make my heart grow fonder to him when we return in April, but hey, chin up. We're free of Chibnall Who for a little while! I mean, he seems to have learned how to try and write something about something that matters to real-world concerns rather than a bunch of made-up sci-fi bullshit featuring legacy monsters invented in the 70's. What's he got cooking for Easter?

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKES THE FUCKING SEA DEVILS? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??? AND THE DOCTOR HERSELF IS CALLING THEM SEA DEVILS? That's it. I'm dead. I'm fucking dead. The only thing left to do, then, while we wait for this shuffling horror, is to become one myself.

While we wait for that nightmare, we're going to talk about zombies.

Frezno's Raving Rants will return with... Night Of The Loving Dead.