Doctor Who: Resolution

Well, that was terrible. Forget the fact that they called the monster a Dalek - because that word clearly has no meaning any more - this was just a badly written story. The B plot about Ryan's father was actually quite good, but it didn't have anything to do with the rest of the episode and seemed to just be there to fill time.

This is completely pointless.

I knew we were in for a bad time when the episode started with a bit about how there was this ancient alliance to defeat an enemy so powerful that when they killed it they had to cut its body into three parts and bury them at the furthest corners of the Earth. What show do they think they're writing? That's what you do to a demon, not an alien. Also, they buried the pieces, like, 30cm deep. Also them being in three places made absolutely no difference since it was able to teleport all its bits back together as soon as one of them was dug up.

I know if I saw this thing I'd be trying to put my face as close as possible to it without delay.

So a couple of archaeologists find a bit of the monster and then expose it to UV light, which wakes it up. Now I could be completely wrong about this, but isn't exposing things to UV light one of the things that archaeologists try to avoid, rather than doing on purpose? They just act like that's a totally normal thing in this episode and it's really not important, but it struck me as odd. Anyway, one of the archaeologists touches the monster (because that's what you do when you see a weird giant octopus thing, obviously) and it's some kind of brainslug so it takes control of her body.

Even with bulky clothes I feel like this thing should be more noticeable than it apparently is.

Then Ryan's dad shows up, and honestly, the stuff centred on him was actually pretty good - it just had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the episode. It seems like they keep shoehorning this stuff in to give Bradley Walsh something to do because they forgot to give him any kind of role in the actual story.

Although I thought the stuff about Ryan's dad was good, it wasn't really what I'm looking for in Doctor Who.

The brainslug goes around killing people and disguises itself as a cop for no reason - seriously, you'd expect it to do that to try to infiltrate somewhere or get people to cooperate with it or whatever, but it just ends up killing everyone it meets anyway so it's completely pointless. And the Doctor tries to contact UNIT, but finds out they've been disbanded. Also I guess they got retconned into being a UK organisation rather than United Nations one at some point? Anyway, I guess they don't exist any more and it was a complete waste of time mentioning them. I don't think "why didn't anyone contact UNIT" was going to be high on anyone's list of problems with this episode.

I liked Charlotte Ritchie's portrayal of the brainslugged archaeologist.

Then the brainslug (OK, "Dalek") rebuilds its chassis so that it can fuck around a bit more contact the Dalek invasion fleet to come invade, which doesn't really make any sense. What is the Dalek invasion fleet doing now? Just hanging around twiddling their whisks? This Dalek's been chopped into three pieces and buried for centuries; no one's waiting for its signal. In fact, why was it even sent in the first place? If there's an invasion fleet ready to go and they don't need any kind of tactical information, what is this advance scout even for?

Also it kills a bunch of soldiers for no reason.

Anyway, the Dalek breaks into some place where it can suck up all the wifi signals in the country to send a message into space because words don't even mean anything any more, so sure, that's how that works, and the Doctor chases it there and they kill it with a Microwave because they wrote this script by looking around the break room and just writing down whatever their eyes landed on.

The full might of a modern military can't touch it, but strap some bits of a microwave to it and you're in business.

But that somehow doesn't kill it, which makes sense given that it teleported itself back together after being cut into pieces, and it brainslugs Ryan's dad. As far as I can tell, it's not physically very strong and it doesn't give its host body super strength or anything, so it seems to me that they could have just wrestled him to the ground and squished the thing. But they don't do that. Instead they go into space and open the TARDIS doors to suck it out like in Alien. And that works somehow, without also sucking anyone else out into space even though they're all just hanging on with their human hands and it's a tentacle monster that's got its limbs all wrapped around a guy.

Oh no, not Ryan's dad! The guy whom we've heard only bad things about!

And that's it. It's all over and I'm not watching any more of this terrible show. The best episodes were mediocre and mostly it was just lazy writing and not enough Bradley Walsh. How the fuck is this shit so popular?

It did look kind of cool when this one guy got shot by the Dalek gun.

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