Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks director reveals new twist to time loop format
Exclusive: The Doctor does Groundhog Day in the New Year’s Day special – but there’s a slight change this time…
Upcoming Doctor Who special Eve of the Daleks traps the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and her friends in a festive time loop, hunted by Daleks over and over again in their own personal Groundhog Day.
Or at least that’s what we thought – because episode director Annetta Laufer has revealed a new twist on the familiar time loop format, which created even more of a headache for the production team to keep track of.
"I think with any time-loop kind of structure, you need to set the rules, and you need to set the rules at the beginning so that the audience will know: ‘We’ve gone into a new loop,'" Laufer told RadioTimes.com.
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"And the loop is always defined, usually, by something happening in the same way. And so the character then goes, 'Hang on a minute!' – and then sort of diverts, or does something different."
Confusing already – before showrunner Chris Chibnall introduced a new quirk which would see time gradually moving in the right direction within the loop, slowly ticking down to midnight…
"Chris added the extra 'losing a minute' per loop," Laufer explained. "Normally, in these sort of stories you just have the loop, or you go back to the beginning, and you start again, and then something different happens.
"But he added an extra complication. So we had to really keep an eye on: 'Well, OK, time-wise, where are we?' Which was fun, but also, yeah, quite complicated at times.
"I mean, for me, as the director, I had to play that very carefully so that I knew, very quickly, which loop we were in, and also what time it was."
Altogether, it sounds like Doctor Who fans might need to break out a notebook and diagrams to make sense of the loops when Eve of the Daleks arrives on New Year’s Day. There’s probably still a few spare pages left after Doctor Who: Flux, right?
Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks comes to BBC One on New Year’s Day 2022 at 7pm. For more, check out our dedicated Sci-Fi page or our full TV Guide.
Authors
Huw Fullerton is a Commissioning Editor for Radio Times magazine, covering Entertainment, Comedy and Specialist Drama.
