#Doctor Who Delivers A Killer Time Loop Episode On The ‘Eve’ Of Jodie Whittaker’s Departure

Because of Sarah’s misdirection (sending the Doctor on a wild goose chase through Jeff’s fifth floor emporium), it takes a few time loops for the gang to all get together and agree to a plan. The Doctor has found Jeff’s very explosive stash of stuff and decided that the best course of action is to use the New Year’s Eve phone call from Sarah’s mom as a trigger to blow up the building while they escape through the garage, thus freeing them of the time loop while destroying the Daleks! The Doctor even caps off the plan with an inspirational speech about how “we improve together and we ultimately succeed!” Easy peasy, right?

Of course, the sixth time loop is where everything goes wrong. A third Dalek joins the battle, throwing another wrench in the Doctor’s plans, and the Daleks shut off the lights to the building — which means this is the (literally) the darkest timeline. Amid the eerie atmosphere and blinking lights, everyone gets killed quickly and hopelessly, and the Doctor is brought to her lowest point once again.

With time slipping away from them, it seems like their plan is impossible — but more determined than ever, the Doctor pulls a solution out of her pocket. With their seventh and penultimate loop, they’re going to run through a “decoy loop,” luring the Daleks down false paths so they can enact the real plan in the final loop. They all take a particular glee to giving the Daleks chase in this decoy loop, with Nick getting something to do other than look perplexed, by getting a Dalek to burn up all the items in his storage units — items that belonged to all his exes — and making the pun “Ex-terminate!” before he gets killed.

Chibnall pens this episode as a solid, if not foolproof, piece of clockwork storytelling, with a few red herrings thrown in that actually serve as red herrings for both the audience and the characters. But the best part about the time-loop conceit is that it allows Chibnall to both limit his worst impulses and take advantage of them. In every “Doctor Who” story he’s penned, Chibnall has made a practice of giving himself an arbitrary ticking time bomb (see: the 42 minutes before the ship flies into the sun in “42,” the cubes counting down in “The Power of Three,” etc.) and throwing in several new twists throughout the episode to artificially raise the stakes. In “Eve of the Daleks,” both of those elements are already built into the time-loop conceit, and it ends up working to the episode’s advantage — what better than a countdown to midnight on New Year’s Eve? But Chibnall’s worst sin, his love of unwieldy large ensembles, is the one thing that this episode doesn’t fall victim to — likely because of Covid shooting restrictions — and the episode’s character writing is so much stronger for it.