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Last night brought the first and only appearance of new Doctor Who since early 2020. It wasn't much publicized outside of hardcore fandom channels, and the BBC, as usual, waited until near the end of the previous year to announce that it would be a New Year's rather than a Christmas special.
The traditional "Christmas special" episodes ON Christmas are Chiefly British in their significance, as US television has typically devoted the day to smarmy movies, series marathons and football bowls now mostly named for junk food. But Auntie Beeb has made the broadcast day a showcase, always including the Queen's Speech to her loyal subjects at its centre, with everything from Call the Midwife to Blackadder getting the Santa spotlight. When the Doctor returned in 2005, the Christmas episodes became major pieces of both storytelling and marketing, and the launch of BBC America tried to bring the tradition across the Pond.
Christmas 2009's special, a two-parter ending the following New Year's Day a week later, ended the Tennancy of the Tenth Doctor and introduced Matt Smith as Eleven. That special-ity continued with Peter Capaldi taking over as Twelve and asking his first immortal question at the end of the Christmas 2013 special-
- and again four years later when the current Doct-Her took over the role from Capaldi on Christmas of 2017. That would be the show's last on Christmas proper, as on the New Years Days of '19, '20 and yesterday, Thirteen led her Companions Three on adventures on the first day of the year rather than on Christmas.
Some of these years were essentially one-offs- 2014's "Last Christmas" with Nick Frost as Santa Claus was perhaps the best of the recent ones- but the ones including the handoffs of the sonic also served as major drivers of the overall series arcs. The New Year 2019 episode essentially ended Thirteen's first series as the Doctor, and 2020's led into a shorter than usual twelfth series of the revived program, ending with a cliffhanger broadcast back on March 1st, as in right at the end of our COVID Before time.
Because we'd been away from the TARDIS for ten months, and with no new series to pick up in its wake (nothing was planned for 2020 even pre-pandemic, and it has pushed the recent resumption of filming well into a late-21 release if we're lucky), this New Year's episode had a lot to do entirely on its own. Before straying into spoilers, I'll just say: it did it about as well as 2020 could be expected to give us, which is to say, not as much or as well as we would have liked.
We knew, going in, that besides the storylines themselves from the cliffhanger and forward, the episode would need to handle additional baggage: the signing of onetime spinoff star John Barrowman to appear in a featured role in it, and the farewells to two of Thirteen's three companions from the previous go-rounds. It had to do all of these, and more, in 71 filmed and videotaped minutes, stretched to almost two hours with commercials and promos on BBC America.
And it did. Just in a wibbly-wobbly kind of way.
----
There's always debate, in legendary series writing and development, over how much to cater to the real uberfans of the show who know every last detail from the canonical broadcasts to the comics and fan adaptations. The ideal balance plays on both levels, where knowing that X was in Y 23 years ago adds an Easter-eggy extra to it but the n00b, who doesn't get it, doesn't need it to enjoy it thoroughly. The recently concluded Mandalorian spinoff of the Star Wars universe was VERY good at achieving this balance in the Force, and the almost-finished third season of Star Trek Discovery has come close.
Revolution of the Daleks gets a Gentleman's C for this.
( Spoilers begin.... )
Right- the other nitpick: I want to talk about one mostly nonspoilery point of how the episode waded into real life world and UK politics, and a take on it I read in this UK-based review, the first one up on the IMDB after our airing was just done:
Prime Minister Jo Patterson (Harriet Walter) secure[s] a Robocop-style ‘security drone’ in the form of a controlled Dalek, so it’ll do their bidding and quell rioters in the street who are protesting against all sorts of things, presumably against wearing masks (even though it’s set six hours after the last episode was on), but certainly not a protest in the names of Black Lives Matter, because as everyone knows, those are completely peaceful and no-one can catch the virus whilst you’re all huddled up together, throwing statues into a canal in Bristol, or smashing up restaurants in Rochester, New York.
There's also a black-humourous reference to the Bristol statue bit in Death to 2000, which was my first exposure to it. We've had plenty of our own statue-topplings over here, and there's way more to our story, and I expect more over there, to dismiss it as random violence in a single phrase.
But the "smashing up" in our Rochester is your poster child for wild Antifa BLM? That is bullshit. Your Empire's Rupert Fucking Murdoch took that "incident" and made it into something it wasn't. If you lived there (and I don't but I did and am there way more often than you, Dom), you'd know that the "smashing" occurred at a couple of tables at a couple of schmancy East and Alexander joints; that the "frightened white people" customers were near unanimous in understanding and supporting the protest and the underlying anger in the days after learning of a Black man's death at the hands of police and its coverup; and that the owners of those restaurants themselves posted words of support and regret that they'd tried to take a "business as usual" approach in the face of such tragedy. (That piece is about a later twisting of a protest story into clickbaity right-wing fake news, but it references the "restaurant riot" incident.)
Speaking of foodservice: it's bad enough that BBC America has to pad the 71 minutes of Doctoractuality into a 98-minute stretch with endless adverts and promos- many of them for the "adaptation" of Sir Pterry Pratchett's The Watch premiering on one of their affiliate US networks tomorrow night, and which his family and most fans have panned. But the other leading advertiser throughout was for an uncooked meat delivery service called Butcher Box, during an episode featuring Daleks turning human beings into Soylent Green or worse, it got me wondering if their advertising executive told them what, exactly, was going to be shown before having them try to sell raw flesh on this thing?
Exterminating for a friend.
In all? It was a 2020 Doctor, and I'm not about to throw shade on an essential worker, or question the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. It was about the best they could do. But we'll get better.
The traditional "Christmas special" episodes ON Christmas are Chiefly British in their significance, as US television has typically devoted the day to smarmy movies, series marathons and football bowls now mostly named for junk food. But Auntie Beeb has made the broadcast day a showcase, always including the Queen's Speech to her loyal subjects at its centre, with everything from Call the Midwife to Blackadder getting the Santa spotlight. When the Doctor returned in 2005, the Christmas episodes became major pieces of both storytelling and marketing, and the launch of BBC America tried to bring the tradition across the Pond.
Christmas 2009's special, a two-parter ending the following New Year's Day a week later, ended the Tennancy of the Tenth Doctor and introduced Matt Smith as Eleven. That special-ity continued with Peter Capaldi taking over as Twelve and asking his first immortal question at the end of the Christmas 2013 special-
- and again four years later when the current Doct-Her took over the role from Capaldi on Christmas of 2017. That would be the show's last on Christmas proper, as on the New Years Days of '19, '20 and yesterday, Thirteen led her Companions Three on adventures on the first day of the year rather than on Christmas.
Some of these years were essentially one-offs- 2014's "Last Christmas" with Nick Frost as Santa Claus was perhaps the best of the recent ones- but the ones including the handoffs of the sonic also served as major drivers of the overall series arcs. The New Year 2019 episode essentially ended Thirteen's first series as the Doctor, and 2020's led into a shorter than usual twelfth series of the revived program, ending with a cliffhanger broadcast back on March 1st, as in right at the end of our COVID Before time.
Because we'd been away from the TARDIS for ten months, and with no new series to pick up in its wake (nothing was planned for 2020 even pre-pandemic, and it has pushed the recent resumption of filming well into a late-21 release if we're lucky), this New Year's episode had a lot to do entirely on its own. Before straying into spoilers, I'll just say: it did it about as well as 2020 could be expected to give us, which is to say, not as much or as well as we would have liked.
We knew, going in, that besides the storylines themselves from the cliffhanger and forward, the episode would need to handle additional baggage: the signing of onetime spinoff star John Barrowman to appear in a featured role in it, and the farewells to two of Thirteen's three companions from the previous go-rounds. It had to do all of these, and more, in 71 filmed and videotaped minutes, stretched to almost two hours with commercials and promos on BBC America.
And it did. Just in a wibbly-wobbly kind of way.
----
There's always debate, in legendary series writing and development, over how much to cater to the real uberfans of the show who know every last detail from the canonical broadcasts to the comics and fan adaptations. The ideal balance plays on both levels, where knowing that X was in Y 23 years ago adds an Easter-eggy extra to it but the n00b, who doesn't get it, doesn't need it to enjoy it thoroughly. The recently concluded Mandalorian spinoff of the Star Wars universe was VERY good at achieving this balance in the Force, and the almost-finished third season of Star Trek Discovery has come close.
Revolution of the Daleks gets a Gentleman's C for this.
( Spoilers begin.... )
Right- the other nitpick: I want to talk about one mostly nonspoilery point of how the episode waded into real life world and UK politics, and a take on it I read in this UK-based review, the first one up on the IMDB after our airing was just done:
Prime Minister Jo Patterson (Harriet Walter) secure[s] a Robocop-style ‘security drone’ in the form of a controlled Dalek, so it’ll do their bidding and quell rioters in the street who are protesting against all sorts of things, presumably against wearing masks (even though it’s set six hours after the last episode was on), but certainly not a protest in the names of Black Lives Matter, because as everyone knows, those are completely peaceful and no-one can catch the virus whilst you’re all huddled up together, throwing statues into a canal in Bristol, or smashing up restaurants in Rochester, New York.
There's also a black-humourous reference to the Bristol statue bit in Death to 2000, which was my first exposure to it. We've had plenty of our own statue-topplings over here, and there's way more to our story, and I expect more over there, to dismiss it as random violence in a single phrase.
But the "smashing up" in our Rochester is your poster child for wild Antifa BLM? That is bullshit. Your Empire's Rupert Fucking Murdoch took that "incident" and made it into something it wasn't. If you lived there (and I don't but I did and am there way more often than you, Dom), you'd know that the "smashing" occurred at a couple of tables at a couple of schmancy East and Alexander joints; that the "frightened white people" customers were near unanimous in understanding and supporting the protest and the underlying anger in the days after learning of a Black man's death at the hands of police and its coverup; and that the owners of those restaurants themselves posted words of support and regret that they'd tried to take a "business as usual" approach in the face of such tragedy. (That piece is about a later twisting of a protest story into clickbaity right-wing fake news, but it references the "restaurant riot" incident.)
Speaking of foodservice: it's bad enough that BBC America has to pad the 71 minutes of Doctoractuality into a 98-minute stretch with endless adverts and promos- many of them for the "adaptation" of Sir Pterry Pratchett's The Watch premiering on one of their affiliate US networks tomorrow night, and which his family and most fans have panned. But the other leading advertiser throughout was for an uncooked meat delivery service called Butcher Box, during an episode featuring Daleks turning human beings into Soylent Green or worse, it got me wondering if their advertising executive told them what, exactly, was going to be shown before having them try to sell raw flesh on this thing?
Exterminating for a friend.
In all? It was a 2020 Doctor, and I'm not about to throw shade on an essential worker, or question the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. It was about the best they could do. But we'll get better.