New Who New Year's Day special: Resolution

[strange_complex]

Oh dear, yeah. I didn't have hugely high hopes, but I'm afraid that really did feel like Doctor Who by numbers to me. Basic plot-line - a Dalek is unleashed, causes a bit of havoc before being tracked down by the Doctor, and is then defeated via a combination of Technobabble and the Power of Love. We've definitely seen that story before, and the arc involving Ryan's Dad was particularly poorly integrated into it. It really made me miss RTD, who made those sorts of emotive personal plot-lines into the beating hearts of his stories, rather than feeling like an awkwardly bolted-on extra.

It's a pity, because I have a soft spot for Doctor Who stories involving archaeology (which as a real-life form of time travel offers a lot of potential for parallels with what the Doctor does), and the three Custodians seemed exciting initially. I could really have gone for a story in which their descendants had to come together and work with the Doctor (in the place of the lost third) to save the world. But we didn't get that, and even within what we did get I felt the design department did a pretty poor job of putting together the materials about the legend. Would it have been too much to ask for some authentic-looking ninth-century documents, rather than a picture-book which looked like it had been bought in The Works?

Oh well. Plenty of time to forget all about it before the next series...

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

I quite liked it. The bits with squid dalek were particularly good, helped by the quality of the acting.

The stuff with the soldiers and the tank did a good job of showing how tough a dalek is, although, apart from the weapon, how much other stuff did it manage to get of its former casing, and so how much of the new casing wasn't dalekanium but just bog standard steel and therefore not that invulnerable?

The dad stuff dragged on a bit, and the microwave was a bit silly -- as in, nobody's thought to beat daleks with a microwave before?

The coda with the dalek on the dad felt a bit unnecessary.

[strange_complex]

Yeah, I mean individual bits were fine. I appreciated the way the fight you mention with the Dalek included shots from above, both showing how numerically-unequal the fight was and replicating the feel of a lot of modern real-life military footage. But the dad stuff really was weak, and the story-line as a whole felt to me more like the sort of plot you might find in a comic strip in a Doctor Who spin-off magazine than a flag-ship show with a large production team.