Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks: Review

So, this is it then, the start of the end for Jodie Whittaker's 13th Doctor.

In the third festive special to involve the Daleks, and the first of 3 specials that farewell 13, Chris Chibnall cuts loose from the serialised constraints of the recent mini series Doctor Who: Flux to deliver a kind of fun, standalone adventure that riffs as much on Russian Doll as it does a New Year's Eve Groundhog Day.

When the TARDIS lands at the ELF Storage facility in Manchester, the Doctor sets in motion a chain of events that traps two innocent bystanders and her companions in the murderous rage of a Dalek.

Putting the TARDIS into reset mode to purge it of the events and corruptions of the Flux, the Doctor's promised Yaz and Dan some time at the beach to relax while the time travelling machine reboots. But the TARDIS puts down at ELF Storage where Aisling Bea's grumpy and irritable Sarah is having to work on New Year's Eve again - where the only customer is Nick (Adjani Salmon), who shows up every year at the same time.

This year though, there's an extra visitor - an executioner Dalek hellbent on dispatching the Doctor for her actions turning the Flux against the entire Dalek war fleet and wiping them out.  However, soon the Doctor and her companions find themselves trapped in a time loop where the Dalek appears to win each time - and their time seems to be running out...

Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks has a laissez-faire attitude to it that gives it a compulsion and a simplicity of execution that marks it as an episode here for a good time, not a long time.

It helps that a thunderous Aisling Bea outacts anyone on the screen - including Whittaker's Doctor. Her Sarah is both grumpy, funny and human in equal measures and makes the unfolding timeloop sequences feel both poignant and grounded.

Less successful is the wasted appearance of Father Ted's Pauline McLynn (criminally underused) and Salmon, whose softer, shy character doesn't quite feel like he fits in - and certainly doesn't leave his Nick feeling like he deserves the denouement he gets. (And let's not get started on how the Doctor being exterminated doesn't trigger regeneration, time-loop or otherwise).

While the opening 25 minutes is a fairly frenetic pace, Chibnall stops to allow character moments to breathe - and certainly, he gives both Mandip Gill and John Bishop some scenes which shine. 

Gill's Yaz continues to show feelings for the Doctor, and the script indulges these, but never milks them for overt effect. Bishop's Dan takes a bit more of a backseat in this special, but his part in needling Yaz into being truthful feels real, honest and vital to these final episodes.

There's a feeling that Chibnall's taken the real time elements of 42 and stripped back the script of some of the complications which came to the fore in Doctor Who: Flux. 

As a result, the moments which shine in Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks are the ones that take time to breathe expand life into the companions, and show what the series has occasionally missed - its character moments, its focus on relationships and its simplicity of execution.