Uncle Josh on Eve of the Daleks

Note: Obviously, spoilers ahead, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know.

We watched the latest Doctor Who special. It was a time loop episode and those kind of stories can be tricky to pull off. The other time loop story that always comes to mind is from Star Trek The Next Generation where the loop was a single block of subjective time but not objective time. The crew learned they had lost several weeks of their life to the time loop, but were able to find a way to give clues as they repeated the loop to break out of it in the end.

In Eve of the Daleks the loop is truly objective, but handled better. Sarah and Nick are our normies; she does not like him and he has an adult crush on her, plus he’s a little awkward and has a strange habit of keeping his ex-girlfriends’ stuff, which is viewed as slightly creepy. They recognize the déjà vu as a time loop even before they meet the Doctor. The time loop is given a countdown device, so each loop is shorter, causing dramatic tension. At one point Sarah believes that Nick’s death is fixed in the loop (Nick never survives to 11:55), so she believes (and I believe her for a moment) that a loop will start with Nick already dead and thus permanently lost. I like this because it means they have a goal they assume as their own; they’re not running around befuddled until the Doctor sorts them out. They actually have a tense relationship with the Doctor and only follow begrudgingly.

The time loop is the Doctor’s fault and it’s funny how the Doctor never realizes when the strange impossible thing is the direct consequence of something she’s done. The TARDIS is being reset, causing a time loop. The Daleks get this, but she doesn’t. 

The Sarah-Nick romance plot kind of works. They’re both flawed at the start. She’s bitter about just about everything in life and he’s clearly got relationship issues and from the beginning strikes me as someone who doesn’t stand up for himself. He doesn’t know how to approach women with enough stability to keep a relationship for any amount of time. She’s stuck with the burden of a property and business she doesn’t want, an employee who breaks the rules and promises, and has a mother who wants her to get hitched.

When the fullness of Nicks’ insecurities are put on display, Sarah unloads on him, and something in him snaps. He either throws his life away as worthless, or he discovers some inner strength, but he moves forward. In one loop he manages to take out two Daleks and it is a wondrous hero moment for him. 

In later loops he admits his crush on Sarah, which is just awkward (as it should be), and she admits that she wasn’t trying to save him in an earlier loop like she claimed. They both stop lying to each other.

Faced with death over and over again, and never quite being sure if they’ll come back, they finally let go of the bullshit they’ve been carrying. This is what the Stoic practice of memento mori is supposed to be like^[1]Yes, there is much much more to the topic. In this show of course it’s compressed for drama. Knowing death is approaching, understanding that our time is limited, we shouldn’t waste time on meaningless grudges or useless anger. We can be true to ourselves because to do otherwise is a waste of our limited time, and time is our only true resource.

That they end up together in the end is not surprising, but not annoying, either. Hopefully we’ll never see them again.

The Yaz-Doctor one way romance was annoying, only because we’ve seen this play out before. Rose and Ten annoyed me, too. Rose annoyed me in the end. Each regeneration seemed to have their own understanding of relationships. Ten had to remind people that he was a father. Eleven went all schoolboy at the thought of even kissing River Song. Twelve enjoyed it, because he finally had the upper hand on her. I’m tired of companions falling in love with the Doctor.

Nit-Picky things:

• The Doctor is shot by the Dalek Gatling Gun Thing several times but the regeneration doesn’t actually start. I wonder if it’s too sudden a death for the regeneration to kick in.
• The Daleks were able to identify the energy signatures of the TARDIS, but normally they can’t otherwise every single episode would be a host of Daleks coming in guns ablazing. Maybe this is a result of the TARDIS resetting and was therefore vulnerable to such detection.

I’m not sure how they will end Whittaker’s run, but I have enjoyed it overall. Hopefully the next time around it will still be fun, but I have my doubts. I hope Davies has grown as a storyteller.