Two years on from the superficially-adequate-but-not-really Resolution, we get a sequel in the form of Revolution of the Daleks. Was this a good episode? No. Was this episode as offensively bad as the lowest depths of the past two series – namely The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos and The Timeless Children? No. You’ll find little here to enrage or enflame; indeed, many seem to have found the episode reasonably enjoyable. On those grounds, it’s done the job.

But there’s equally little here to invite us to take this seriously as a piece of dramatic fiction. One of the few high points of the episode was Chris Noth’s Jack Robertson, whose previous and bizarre role as an anti-Trump Trump clone was thankfully dropped in lieu of a classically out-for-himself businessman. His actions and dialogue were genuinely quite amusing – commenting that “this is a PR disaster” in the face of the imminent slaughter of the human race is a particular stand-out – but only because his presence is a signal not to take anything this episode does seriously. If this character had appeared in the 2005-2017 era of Doctor Who – or, indeed, any other drama – it would have been fair to question the sanity of the writer. But this is Chris Chibnall, who seems deeply uninterested in treating Doctor Who as anything more than a children’s programme.

It’s difficult to conclude anything other than that his approach is a mockery of the dramatic process. Take Ryan and the Doctor’s heart-to-heart, a phrase that should be employed in inverted commas. As with what usually passes for drama in Chibnall episodes, the characters stopped the plot in its tracks to sit down and state their current emotion – including Ryan monotonously asking the Doctor “how do you feel about that?”. It’s no secret that Chibnall lacks the spark for dialogue that his predecessors possessed, but surely he – or anyone, anywhere – can do better than that.

There’s credible speculation that this scene was the one recently filmed and inserted into the episode. If true, this is doubly interesting – first, as dire as it is, this is the deepest exploration of Ryan’s impending departure. Other than the occasional hint, and Tosin Cole being as bored and monotone as usual, there’s vanishingly little in the episode to suggest that he’s about to leave. We don’t actually see his friends, his family, his volunteering, everything that’s enticing him to stay on Earth. Why not, I don’t know, actually convey how he feels through action and scenes focused on him? Why does absolutely everything – emotion, plot, stakes, what’s happening directly on the screen – have to be stated instead of communicated visually? Shouldn’t we know how the Doctor ‘feels about that’ through what we’ve seen on screen so far? Why does she have to tell us?

It’s also telling that this is, by my hazy reckoning, the Doctor and Ryan’s only dramatic scene together (the only other scene they’ve exclusively shared is the comedic one in Orphan 55, with the vending machine). This speaks not only to the underlying problems of the four-person TARDIS – or, more accurately, Chibnall’s inability to juggle his characters effectively – but also to the fundamental rot at the core of the Chibnall project. For an era focused on family, stuffed full of signifiers and imagery and marketing designed to make us feel fluffy feelings for ‘the Fam’, how can they possibly have waited until Ryan’s very last episode for him to share dramatic dialogue with the Doctor? Even worse, how could they have initially filmed the episode without it?

The second interesting thing about this additional scene is the way it deals with the Timeless Child twist; this, after all, is the episode’s biggest acknowledgement of that storyline. Here, the Doctor states that she feels angry that she’s been robbed of her past – fair enough, I suppose, but the way Ryan coaches her out of her funk is particularly odd in that it’s a straight repeat of what Ruth told her in The Timeless Children. I commented at the time that for Ruth to deny that this revelation changes anything about who the Doctor is renders the twist pointless, but it’s telling that Ryan repeats the same logic – that the Doctor is still the Doctor, so it doesn’t really matter. Then he goes on to insipidly argue that new can be scary, but once you confront the new then everything will be alright. None of this is particularly profound or interesting, but it’s important to note that this was the first bit of footage filmed since the shockwave of negative reaction to the Timeless Child revelation. It’s a clear message to the fans – don’t worry, nothing has changed, but expect to see more of this storyline. Chibnall’s Doctor Who has been obsessively concerned with media and audience management since its inception, and it’s always interesting to see that dynamic played out in real time.

I’m amused to see that this era has now completely given up any pretence of doing its own thing – like it or not, at least Series 11 tried something different with its ‘no old monsters’ edict – and has now transformed into a full-throated RTD-era sequel/reimagining: when Jack and the Doctor meet again, their dialogue is directly lifted from their meeting in Utopia (why bother writing something new when somebody’s already done the hard work for you?); Rose Tyler gets an extended shout-out that goes absolutely nowhere; Gwen Cooper gets an admittedly more natural reference; and the episode is an RTD-style Dalek invasion of modern-day Earth. As before, though, these are all the ingredients with none of the talent. It’s an incredibly mechanistic way to approach television – copy the iconography of the past, throw in a few references to ‘when Doctor Who was good’, and you’ve got yourself a stew cooking. Except not really.

As a side note, I continue to find the ongoing rejection of the Moffat era to be bizarre beyond belief. It’s not that Chibnall shouldn’t ignore the past – he’s under no obligation to include or reference anything he doesn’t want to – but for him to selectively cultivate a decade-old era while actively dismantling the era his own follows on from is a particularly odd way to run a series. There can’t be many other examples of this in television. The closest thing I can think of is The Rise of Skywalker’s complete 180 on several aspects of The Last Jedi – and that kind of creative tug-of-war, steered by hatred-filled online discourse, did not turn out well.

What exactly is Chibnall’s creative vision? Why is he making Doctor Who? The overall style of the RTD era was science fiction meets soap opera, always keeping sight of the characters and their families. It was modern, upbeat, and utterly tailored to a mid-2000s audience. While I’d argue that the divisions between the RTD and Moffat eras are mostly illusory, and that there’s more that unites them than separates them, it’s fair to say that the Moffat era is more of a fairy tale, concerned with big thematic ideas and a more thorough exploration of space and time. Like it or not, both executed a specific creative vision.

Conversely, Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who seems content to simply ape the past – not out of creative choice, but cynical marketing strategy. This is how we end up with the climax of The Parting of the Ways (and The Day of the Doctor, for that matter), but with none of the understanding of character or theme those episodes possessed. It’s how we end up with a Tennant-ish, accessible Doctor who summons Daleks to Earth to do her dirty work (and don’t worry, her insane sense of ethics will never, ever be questioned). And it’s how we end up with dialogue lifted wholesale from previous, better episodes – not as mere reference, but as the very function of the programme. This is now the point of Doctor Who – to deliver more Doctor Who, forever. Captain Jack, Rose, Gwen Cooper, the squareness gun, comically hiding things up your backside, ‘have you had work done?’, ‘what, what, what?’ at a cliffhanger, family, the Judoon platoon by the lagoon, an insane Master, chameleon arches, destroyed Gallifrey, Last of the Time Lords…

You remember all of that, right?