Could (and should) the Daleks return in the Doctor Who New Year special?

Doctor Who will be getting a holiday episode on New Year’s Day – might one of the Doctor’s most famous adversaries return? Probably not, but let’s investigate.

So, it’s official: Doctor Who won’t be having a Christmas special this year. Instead, the sci-fi series will be airing a special episode on New Year’s Day this time around, which is kind of weird in and of itself. But it sounds as though that might not be the only big shift happening to ring in 2019. (More on that in a second.)

The idea of a New Year’s episode is a bit strange on its face, as Doctor Who has been pretty dedicated to the idea of doing a Christmas Day episode each season since the series returned in 2005. Certainly, the show didn’t always choose to tell Christmas stories – David Tennant’s “The End of Time” certainly wasn’t festive holiday fare, and Peter Capaldi’s “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” was pretty much just a regular episode that happened to air on a holiday.

But the powers that be at Doctor Who did seem particularly invested in keeping the show in that timeslot. Former showrunner Steven Moffat even extended his final season behind the helm for one more episode just to do a Christmas installment, keeping the holiday tradition alive and holding on to what was, ostensibly, a highly coveted timeslot.

Not anymore, apparently.

This season, Doctor Who will instead broadcast a New Year’s Day episode, and that may not be the only unexpected thing that happens to wrap up Jodie Whittaker’s first season.

Because the Daleks might be coming back. Now, before anyone gets excited, we have exactly zero evidence of this. And the existing knowledge we do have points to the series’ marquee villains being on something of an extended hiatus.

But never say never, right?

The latest revival of this idea comes from the Radio Times and is, quite frankly, pretty much a conspiracy theory in fancy dress. But it’s always fun to speculate, so let’s break it down.

We all know that showrunner Chris Chibnall seemed pretty adamant that season 11 would feel like a new start for the show. He promised more standalone stories, new monsters and journeys to planets Doctor Who viewers hadn’t seen before.

And for the most part, he’s held true to that, no matter how you feel about whether the season needs a cohesive arc.

The gist of the Radio Times theory goes like this. Chibnall has been asked roughly five hundred times about Daleks and other classic monsters and his answer has always been the same: No.

But he has also been clear that this isn’t a hard and fast rule forever and that we’ll likely see all these fan favorites again at some point. Just not in season 11.

But – and this is the money quote – the Radio Times seems to think there’s some linguistic trickery going on. At the season 11 premiere in Sheffield, England, Chibnall said this:

"It’s just that this year in the series we’ve got new monsters and new faces, but as is relatively well-known, I’m as big a fan of the show as anyone. So there’s lots of things you would like to bring back, and we might do that in future. But just not this year."

It’s that “not this year” bit that the Radio Times has seemingly latched on to, insisting that since the New Year’s special will technically air on January 1, 2019, that’s not this year anymore and it means the Daleks are fair game once again.

Quite frankly, that seems like some seriously aggressive wishful thinking.

First of all, the official synopsis the BBC dropped along with its announcement of the holiday episode definitely doesn’t hint at Daleks:

"As the New Year begins, a terrifying evil is stirring from across the centuries of Earth’s history. Will the Doctor, Ryan (Tosin Cole), Graham (Bradley Walsh) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) be able to overcome this threat to Planet Earth?"

Okay, fine, that could maybe be Daleks if you squint really hard. They are in fact both terrifying and evil. But it still seems very unlikely.

And you know what? That’s not the worst thing in the world. Because we really can survive a season or two without them, and the show might even be better for giving them a bit of a breather.

Out of every Doctor Who villain, Daleks are the most iconic. But that also means that they’re the ones we’ve seen the most often and, as a result, they don’t feel super fresh as adversaries at the moment. What stories are there that we haven’t seen here?

Additionally, throwing the Daleks into the mix at the end of a season in which Doctor Who seems to be focusing on different kinds of villains feels unnecessary and almost like a step backward. Most of the creatures we’ve met thus far this season have been plenty interesting in their own right – or maybe not even monsters at all.

Take, for example, the adorably furious Pting from “The Tsuranga Conundrum.” While the little rage monster almost destroyed the ship that the Doctor and friends were traveling on board, it wasn’t actually trying to hurt anyone. Neither were the (admittedly disgusting) giant spiders in “Arachnids in the UK.” The titular “demons” in “Demons of the Punjab” were trying to do good things, in the end.

Many of season 11’s new monsters exist in a fascinating gray area, and it’s one that Daleks really can’t occupy in the same way. We’re too ready for them to destroy everything, even when it’s a Dalek we might feel some sympathy for (i.e. Rusty from season 10.)

And maybe, just maybe, we should kick off a new year by looking forward, not backward. Save the Daleks for season 12.

Doctor Who season 11 continues next Sunday at 8 p.m. EST on BBC America.