Review of Resolution
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
Last month when we watched the final episode of Series 11, we weren’t actually watching the final episode of Series 11. This was the final episode of Series 11.
Resolution ties into the rest of Whittaker’s tenure to date so seamlessly, I can’t help but wonder whether or not it was Chibnall’s intention all along to make an eleven-episode series. Evidence of that idea is peppered throughout the special, making Resolution and The Woman Who Fell to Earth a pair of perfectly matched bookends.
For starters, both episode titles have double meanings. In TWWFtE, the identity of the eponymous woman is up for interpretation, while here the titular resolution could either be the Doctor’s stated intention to come for the Dalek or the completion of a plot through-line or two.
Aside from that, we end the season as we started it: in Sheffield with an alien threat, a family crisis that affects both Graham and Ryan, and the Doctor and her found family saving the world. While we appear to have come full circle on the Doctor’s choice of moniker for her friends, going so far as to include the additional hangers-on as “extended fam,” it’s the other two pieces here that really cement Resolution as part of Series 11.
Our alien threat—this time in the obligatory form of a Dalek—is the nominal “A story,” a.k.a., the plot. Just like every showrunner before him, Chibnall invents some heretofore unseen variety of Dalek (this one’s a “reconnaissance scout”), likely in a doomed attempt to increase interest or a sense of danger. But although the Doctor seems fairly freaked out about the creature, and Dalek-puppet Lin (whom my family can’t help but think of as Barbara—DON’T TOUCH THE DAMN DALEK, BARBARA!) has an excellently creepy grin, somehow I never wholly bought into the supposed peril.
Meanwhile, our “B story” subplot, where Chibnall once again gets to demonstrate his character-and-relationship chops, is chock full of daddy issues. Ryan’s dad Aaron shows up, complete with a Pete Tyler-esque dodgy sales gig that feels so randomly out-of-place and tacked-on that I should’ve realized immediately it was a Chekhov’s oven. Aaron’s big heart-to-heart talks with first Ryan and then Graham are the clearest evidence we have that Resolution is there primarily to resolve that series-long emotional plot arc.
A few details align more directly with pre-Chibnall Who. The fact that the Doctor “learned to think like a Dalek a long time ago” reminds us that this is frustratingly old hat to her (though, refreshingly, the Dalek also thinks like the Doctor—it’s kind of nice to see one clear-headed enough to counter her tracking measures).
The Doctor also seeks reassurance from her friends like she once did from Clara. “I tried. You heard me, right?” she checks in with the fam. “I tried. I gave it a chance,” she practically begs, the old question “Am I a good man?” echoing eerily in our mind’s ears. “You did. Yep!” they readily reply, and we’re back in Series 11 territory, where the Doctor is good with people.
So though the Dalek and the soul-searching and the in-your-face music (somebody needs to rethink their sound mixing and dial it back again) were all reminiscent of an earlier era, there’s no question that this episode was part and parcel of the preceding series. It even had the Doctor realizing key details in someone’s sitting room, an alien (or alien-controlled) woman working Sheffield steel into a vital tool, and bad optics (the only out queer character, the MDZ guard, dies immediately) like the season opener.
Maybe revisiting certain ideas, seeing which worked and which didn’t, is what Chibnall needed to do in order to move forward. Hopefully with a complete series now under his belt—all eleven episodes—he will feel he has the freedom to take some more risks with his storytelling in 2020. It will be a long wait, but I have high hopes.