Before continuing, please be aware that all of this content is made possible by the goodwill and support of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy the work on this site, please consider supporting the creation of more content like this by clicking the button.
Renaissance of the Daleks opens with a random landing in London, tea and scones, and an American general who already knows too much. Meanwhile Nyssa’s off in Rhodes doing her own thing in Crusader cosplay, and the Daleks have apparently gone full Etsy entrepreneur — because their new invasion strategy involves tiny toy Daleks, alternate timelines, and nanotech nonsense. It’s like someone fed a bag of Big Finish tropes into a blender and shouted “EPIC!” while it exploded.
From the first act, it’s obvious this thing wants to be cinematic. It’s practically sweating under the strain of its own orchestral bombast. But instead of grandeur, it delivers the narrative equivalent of a migraine. Everything’s happening all at once and none of it matters. The Fifth Doctor tries to sound engaged, Nyssa tries to make sense of anything, and the Americans… oh god, the Americans. All plastic smiles and stilted lines like a propaganda film about space friendship.
This story is so desperate to be The Apocalypse Element again — big stakes, cosmic grandeur, Time War echoes — but it doesn’t have a fraction of that energy. There’s no tension, no dread, no character focus. Just endless scenes of people shouting military jargon while the Daleks mumble about destiny or whatever. When the Daleks finally show up, they sound bored too. They’ve seen better scripts.
And then there’s the pacing. Imagine you’re trapped in a traffic jam where every car is trying to overtake itself. That’s Renaissance of the Daleks. So many disconnected subplots jostling for attention that you can feel the writer’s fingers slipping on the typewriter. There’s a Crusade subplot! A nano-invasion subplot! A toy Dalek subplot! And somehow, they all manage to step on each other’s throats and collapse in a heap of “eh, good enough.”
By the time the Doctor realizes the toy Daleks are part of a hidden invasion plan, you’re too exhausted to care. The story doesn’t build to a climax — it just sort of slides into one, apologetically, while mumbling something about time paradoxes. The finale should feel like a crescendo; instead, it’s the sound of a balloon deflating in an empty room.
Themes? Sure. There’s something about war and history and the commodification of violence. But it’s buried under so much clutter you’d need a sonic broom to find it. The moral seems to be: “War is bad, but not as bad as listening to Renaissance of the Daleks.”
Final Thoughts:
Big. Loud. Hollow. It’s all noise and no heartbeat. I wanted adventure. I got static.
Rating: 1 out of 5 toy Daleks tragically crushed under the weight of their own hype