It felt weird not watching an episode of Doctor Who on Christmas Day, yet we were lucky enough to have a brand-new episode on New Year's Day instead. This episode was based around resolutions as the name of the episode suggests. An old monster and enemy get a new look for this make-over. In the past series, the real villains have been people based yet this time the real threat is a Dalek.
In this episode, we get to meet an old foe, the Daleks were back in this episode, yet the Dalek got a new look. Nicholas Briggs is back as the voice of the lone Dalek; to begin with we see the Dalek out of his casing, just in mutant form. This Dalek has been dormant on Earth for hundreds of years and is a different rank we haven't see or been mentioned before; what we get to witness is one of the first Daleks that left Skaro and scout the planet they want to invade. The scout Dalek is more powerful than a normal Dalek as it has powers and is more intelligent than a normal Dalek we have seen before. Also, the new look for this Dalek is slimmer and their head has a light and less metal. Also, we get to see a new use for the casing dimples, in the past they have been used to aid the self-destruction of a Dalek however this time they are used to disguise missiles that are held within the Dalek. What is odd is that this Dalek managed to survive being chopped up into thirds and these parts are travelled to the other ends of the world. Then it managed to sum the two remaining parts back together with the third that is discovered and put under the ultra-violet light. What is interesting is seeing how the new Doctor Who team have managed to deal with old monsters.
The story for this episode was interesting, however it felt like too much was happening at once. We had the Dalek dilemma and a lot of characters. Normally the Christmas episode focuses on the monster, yet I felt this episode was more focused on the characters. This episode was an hour long instead of the normal 45 minutes; this episode not only was a series finale, but it also concluded some character arcs from the past series. The biggest surprise was the appearance of Ryan's dad, Aaron, we have been told that he is an awful dad as he left Ryan, but at the end of the episode we find out that Ryan doesn’t think too badly of his dad as he doesn’t want to lose him again. We also meet Mitch and Lin, the two arachnologists who find some ruins which include one third of the Dalek. These two have very good chemistry together. Unfortualty, the Dalek attaches himself to Lin and uses her as a puppet to get it to make itself a shell. You feel bad for the character Lin as she is struggling to break free from the Dalek until it gets what it wants.
Another surprise in this episode was that U.N.I.T doesn’t exist anymore, hopefully we'll find out more about this in the next series but at the moment there is no one now protecting Earth from alien threats. Maybe U.N.I.T will come back but it's such a shame that Chris Chibnall has decided to shut it down as a dig at Brexit. U.N.I.T was first introduced in 1968 and 51 years later it has come to an end, hopefully it'll come back as I feel like it was a stupid reason to get rid of U.N.I.T as a comment on Brexit; however Kate Stewart, the daughter of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is presumable still out there somewhere with her possibly-Zygon companion Osgood, so there is chance we may bump into them again.
There were so many different characters to focus on in this episode; Graham got side-lined in this episode and we got to see how he interacts with Aaron even though it is clear he doesn’t like or care about him. Yaz still doesn’t make an impact, the story wouldn’t be any different if she wasn’t there. Even in this episode we find out more about this new Doctor and the main thing is that this Doctor makes mistakes and struggles at times when the stakes are really high.
With all this being said, this episode felt like a proper series finale as the stakes were much higher and the story was more engaging. It's a shame that there is no new who until 2020, but it means the anticipation for the next series will be greater and hopefully it'll deliver.
Resolution was a good episode however it could have been better; it felt like it focused on the characters relationships a bit too much and there was a few too many characters introduced thus a lot of happening in the episode, but still a good watch on New Year's Day.
