TV Review | Doctor Who: “Arachnids in the UK” by Chris Chibnall

We’ve come a long way since Metebelis III. The first Doctor Who story in a staggering forty-four years to feature giant arachnids as its monster of the week dazzles in just about every respect, despite not having a great blue crystal anywhere in sight.

Fulfilling the “Aliens of London” function in this brave new era’s burgeoning native, “Arachnids in the UK” sees the Doctor return her friends home to their native Sheffield in the present day. There they discover that something has caused the city’s spider population to grow out of control and converge on an unopened hotel that Yaz’s mum - sorry, Najia - is getting set to manage.



Whilst the episode’s ambitious effects leave a lot to be desired - director Sallie Aprahamian might have considered taking a leaf from The X-Files’ playbook and using far less light in some of the more effects-heavy sequences - any visual shortcomings are made up for by Chris Chibnall’s scintillating script. Like many of the series’ finest offerings, “Arachnids in the UK” is as fast and as funny as it is unsettling. Yet such qualities belie the aching pathos at the story’s heart; I’ve heard of sympathy for the Devil, but sympathy for a spider? Thirty-seven seasons in and Doctor Who still continues to astound with its innovation.



And Chibnall’s plot is the season’s most sophisticated so far. Impossible to predict but thoroughly rewarding in its payoff, “Arachnids in the UK” eschews the series’ reliance on extra-terrestrial threats to the planet and instead serves as the series’ most scathing ecological commentary since “The Green Death” of 1973. The writer doesn’t limit his social commentary to conservation concerns, though - the character of Robertson, for instance, who’s magnificently realised by Chris “Mr Big” Noth (yes – I’ve seen almost every episode of Sex and the City, just as the missus has sat through most episodes of modern Doctor Who), is a harrowing reflection of those with power and wealth today. What’s particularly unsettling about the character is that at a first glance he’s every bit the loathsome, larger-than-life human foil that we’ve seen so many times before in Doctor Who, but then you realise: there’s no such thing anymore, life really is that large now. Robertson might be planning to run against Trump in the 2020 election (should Trump make it that far...), but he’s a representation of him in all but name.



The episode is also a strong character piece for the ensemble, cementing Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor in the role through an enchanting fusion of social awkwardness and gung-ho cool. Gone are the days of the Doctor not doing “domestics” - she throws herself headlong into dinner at Yaz’s here, her patent loneliness turning quickly to exuberant delight. She calls people “dude” now, can do the kookiest of small talk, and is as naively nonchalant about her possible involvement in a same-sex/different species relationship as she is Ed Sheeran’s identity.



And this week it’s also Yaz’s turn to shine. For the first time, we see her character in context, surrounded by her family. She’s not just the ambitious, downtrodden trainee police officer we saw in “The Woman Who Fell to Earth”; she’s also a daughter and a big sister, and so we get to see her trying to reconcile those roles with her new one as a time-travelling adventurer. It’s a wonderful dynamic; the back and forth with her mum (Shobna Gulati of Corrie fame) is particularly arresting.



The men take a bit of backseat, in contrast, though the script does check in with Ryan a few times - usually for action sequences - and we start to explore Graham’s grief in earnest. Chibnall presents us with a wonderfully moving and ambiguous sequence that could just as easily be a moving character moment, the prelude to a spooky story later in the season, or perhaps even both. I do think more needs to be made of Ryan’s dyspraxia, though - it’s not been mentioned in a couple of weeks despite the character needing to do some really quite coordinated stuff. Surely catching and securing a giant spider is on a par with riding a bike? I’m no expert, of course, but that’s kind of the point - I was expecting to be by four episodes in, and not just because I’ve done my due diligence on Wikipedia.

Overall, though, “Arachnids in the UK” is another hit for what is fast becoming, once again, a hit series, and I await Team TARDIS’s first voyage into the future with bated breath.

The new series of Doctor Who airs on Sunday nights on BBC One and this episode is available to stream or download on BBC iPlayer in the UK, where the preceding 149 episodes are also currently available. A series pass is available from iTunes for £23.99.

TV Review | Doctor Who: “Rosa” by Malorie Blackman & Chris Chibnall

Now my knowledge of recent Doctor Who is far from encyclopaedic, but I can’t remember the last time that it told a good, old-fashioned historical story. By that I don’t mean an almost exclusively educational piece the like of which half the Hartnell era was built on, nor do I mean the just-happen-to-be-set-in-olden-days capers that we frequently saw during Smith and Capaldi’s tenures. I’m talking about an episode built around a historical icon or event but that doesn’t necessarily eschew the series’ sci-fi staples. A piece that entertains as it educates. A piece that, in this case, even uplifts.

The series’ first tour de force in years is in fact a deceptively simple tale of intolerance writ large across the ages. Former Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman and incumbent showrunner Chris Chibnall couch the famous tale of Rosa Parks and her world-changing line-in-the-sand in the classic Who scenario of a rogue time traveller looking to subvert history. But the Devil is in the detail, and though the formula may be familiar, here it is the detail that sets this episode apart. The Doctor and her friends aren’t charged with putting great wars or natural disasters back on track this time – their concern is incredibly focused and specific. Their role in “Rosa” is intimate and mundane, yet still immeasurably important - they just have to make sure that a hard-working and kindly seamstress gets her usual bus, that the bus in question is full, and that its usual despotic driver is behind its wheel.



Vinette Robinson, who’s no stranger to Doctor Who, having played Abi in the Chris Chibnall-scripted “42” more than a decade ago, gives a beautifully restrained performance as the put-upon Mrs Parks. The script depicts Rosa as a righteous, God-faring woman - but not one that you would expect to change the course of history, were it not for your foreknowledge. When we meet her, the “coloured” community in Montgomery is still reeling from the murder of Emmett Till (and the acquittal of the two white men widely believed to have murdered him), and as the events of the story unfold we see Rosa increasingly tested by the inequality all around her. Robinson brings a sense of weariness to the part that’s unexpected, but really helps to make the character resonate as person as opposed to a cultural icon, thus making her fateful act of defiance all the more inspiring.

“Never give them the excuse.”

The script adroitly serves each member of the Doctor’s “gang” too, affording each the chance to develop. In the cases of Yaz and Ryan, who, thanks to the colour of their skin, find themselves instant social pariahs, “Rosa” gifts each character a fascinating opportunity to reflect on how different their lives would have been had they been born just sixty years earlier. Both are given chance to vocalise their anger at not only the injustice around them, but their continuing struggles in the present day – and, crucially, without it ever coming close to breaking or provoking them. They share stories of narrow-mindedness from 2018 as the institutionalised bigotry of 1955 forces them to hide behind bins, but there is not a moment in the episode when either character fails to rise above the hatred.
 

Ryan makes you want to punch the air as he and Graham torment James Blake, the bus driver destined to have Rosa arrested, with their friendly overtures. Yaz makes you smile as she acerbically wrestles with the “Mexican” label foist upon her by a town unable to comprehend her mixed lineage. Even Graham, who is just about the only member of the Doctor’s entourage not to find himself instantly marginalised in 1950s Alabama, isn’t pushed to the sidelines as his bus-driving knowledge, and, indeed, skill, proves pivotal to the plot. As ever, though, even when his presence isn’t directly contributing to the storyline, Bradley Welsh’s comedic delivery and occasional heartbreaking moments of wistfulness threaten to steal the show. 



Another strength of the script is its refusal to give the baddie of the piece, Krasko, any sort of motive beyond basic racism. It would have been all too easy for Blackman and Chibnall to paint a picture of a man once hurt or wronged by a “coloured” person and now looking for macroscopic revenge, but I find their image of a man who just wants to stop black people ever “getting above themselves” altogether uglier, and altogether bolder. Krasko is exactly the villain that “Rosa” needs, and Joshua Bowman plays the part with just the right sort of smug spite – his permanent, superior sneer and righteous exasperation will be all too familiar to many viewers. 

Perhaps most importantly of all, though, the Doctor enjoys what feels like her first full episode as herself. Hyperactive and ultramodern, Thirteen is down with the kids (“You’re killing the vibe, Graham!”), playful (“You’re not Banksy!” / “Or am I?”), and seems to share the second Doctor’s penchant for lulling opponents into a false state of security – her silly, almost ner-ner-ner-ner-ner, sonicing of Krasko as she apparently retreats from him is a case in point. At her core though, she is still the unwavering moral force who will always do what must be done, no matter the personal cost to her. The part that she, Graham and Yaz must ultimately play in Rosa’s story is absolutely gut-wrenching, and Whittaker sells it all with just a few looks. It’s a heartsbreaking performance from the series’ leading lady. 



My only minor grumble with what is, undoubtedly, the finest episode of Doctor Who in a decade, concerns the often overbearing nature of Segun Akinola’s score. Admittedly, watching shows like Better Call Saul I’ve becoming accustomed to hearing the drama speak for itself, but particularly with “Rosa” it feels like loud music is – needlessly – trying to dictate how I should be feeling. You’ve got an intimidating looking teddy boy lurking round the TARDIS and stalking Rosa Parks – you don’t need to deafen me with sinister strings to suggest that he’s up to no good. I get it. My seven-year-old gets it. It’s there on the screen. 

Nonetheless, “Rosa” is an episode that ticks every box. It walks that pixel-thin line between being recognisably Doctor Who, and being something brand new. It’s the first episode of the series that I’ve watched more than once since “The Day of the Doctor”, and on the second viewing in particular it really struck me just how well this season – and this episode in particular – reflects the zeitgeist. Yes, it’s that word again, but for me it encapsulates this new era. Recently I showed my eldest daughter “Rose”, and I could tell from her expressions that it seemed as ancient to her as black-and-white Who did to me as a child. I showed her “Rosa”, though, and she was rapt. Not behind the sofa, but on the edge of it.

If I had any lingering doubts, then “Rosa” crushed them utterly. Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor has arrived.
 
The new series of Doctor Who airs on Sunday nights on BBC One and this episode is available to stream or download on BBC iPlayer in the UK, where the preceding 148 episodes are also currently available. A series pass is available from iTunes for £23.99.

Review by Lottie (age 7)
“It was good. We did about what Rosa Parks did in assembly and I liked that it showed you the full story of Rosa Parks. And it made me laugh when the Doctor got the year wrong.”

TV Review | Doctor Who: “The Ghost Monument” by Chris Chibnall

Having introduced the newest incarnation of the Doctor to her record-setting 10.9 million viewers in present-day England, Chris Chibnall’s second script as showrunner hurls the audience headlong into another of the series’ most prominent playgrounds: space.



But just as salad-and-steel Sheffield wasn’t quite familiar old London (or even Cardiff disguised as London), this episode’s setting isn’t quite the sort of space opera that we’re used to. We’re in space, but not in the future. Then we’re on an alien world, but it’s still now. And perhaps most remarkably of all, we’ve got there without the TARDIS, which at the start of the story is still missing in action as a result of the closing moments of “Twice upon a Time”.

Despite drawing loose inspiration from Russell T Davies’ successful present/future/past reboot structure, just as his predecessor Steven Moffat did, here Chibnall manages to further the intoxicating feeling of innovation that “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” engendered. Just like RTD, Chibnall is eking out his reveals for the new audience; in fact, he’s going one better and building entire episodes around them. “The Ghost Monument”, for instance, is an unashamed TARDIS hunt, plain and simple. Even its space-race subplot has that extraordinary blue McGuffin on its finish line. The story’s straightforwardness isn’t a problem, though: it’s perfectly pitched for new viewers (and there’s no question that there were many new viewers amongst the millions, some taking the place of former fans, and millions more piling on besides), and beautifully refreshing for long-suffering ones like me.

“Can people and things stop putting stuff inside me without my permission!”

Above all else though, “The Ghost Monument” is an episode designed to see its characters flourish, and for the most part that is exactly what they do. Bradley Walsh is the clear standout once again, continuing to astonish me with his dramatic acting chops in the same way that Billie Piper did more than thirteen years ago. His character’s chipper spirit in the face of the most chaotic adversity, particularly given the devastating loss that he’s just suffered, is exceptionally endearing. He has shades of former companions - sorry, former friends - as sundry as Ian Chesterton, Ace, Donna Noble and Wilfred Mott about him along with something bright and new. His step-grandson, Ryan, enjoys another strong outing too. “The Ghost Monument” teaches Tosin Cole’s character some invaluable lessons about life alongside the Doctor, and does so in ways that range from hilarious to heartrending. When the Doctor condemns the use of weaponry, only for him to ignore her counsel, you have to laugh as his Call of Duty skills backfire and send him guiltily scurrying back to her. Later, when the Doctor tells him that she’s “proper proud” of him in an attempt to get him to quickly climb a ladder despite his dyspraxia, you can’t help but share in that pride - and, if you’re anything like me, feel another atrium full of doubts about Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor pump straight out of your heart.

“Come to Daddy... I mean Mummy.”

Whilst still a little too Tennanty for her own good at times, and - so far - too fifth-Doctory when it comes to gravitas, “The Ghost Monument” truly marks the arrival of Whittaker’s incarnation. This episode is as much hour two of a two-hour premiere as it is a stand-alone story, and this is most evident in the Doctor’s increasing poise. Here we see her start to discover who she really is, who she’s going to be, and - beguilingly - perhaps even who she once was in the very beginning. The last thing that I was expecting this season to do was revitalise the mystery of the Doctor, but, for viewers new and old, that’s what it’s doing - and doing tantalisingly. I’m proper impressed.



The episode’s guest stars were each as scorching as the wastes of Desolation. I wasn’t a fan of last week’s actor-focused trailer for the rest of the season; to me it veered too near to celebrating celebrities. But seeing supporting performers the calibre of these three in action shows that such fanfare was warranted. Shaun Dooley is just as brooding and intense as in just about everything else that I’ve ever seen him in, and Susan Lynch is even better – hard as Hell, but for a reason. Even Art Malik’s character’s non-presence somehow has real presence.

If there is one problem with this episode, it’s Yaz’s near-redundancy. Whilst she does enjoy a nice moment reflecting on her love for her family, and to my delight made a comment about Surrey Street’s locally infamous green police box (the nonsense of which used to drive me nuts as a kid!), her character has no real involvement in the plot. This is something that I think is going to be inevitable for at least one regular going forward, given that the writers have four of them to serve each week, but this needn’t harm the show provided that its scripts continue to “check in” once or twice with the short-straw companion as Chibnall’s does with Yaz here. The binge-watching habits of millennials allow the show much more leeway on matters such as this than it had back in 1963 or even 1981 - the only two occasions (on telly) when we’ve had such a crowded TARDIS for a sustained period.



“The Ghost Monument” is also notable for establishing the title sequence and TARDIS for this new era. The former I loved - the haunting yet conventional take on the theme tune, the less intricate and more classic visuals - albeit with the caveat that I’m not a fan of opening an episode with it. I can see why they did so here - there was no teaser in the traditional sense; just a cliffhanger get-out - but in future I think this would be better placed after the customary cliffhanging teaser. The TARDIS, meanwhile, is the most inspiring that it’s looked since the series’ so-called “grunge phase” of 2005-2010. The exterior has finally shed that awful, Cushing-esque sheen, and the interior is something else altogether. I’m especially taken with the complete police box shell being incorporated into the design - it’s exactly how I always pictured that classic-series lacuna between the police box doors and seemingly separate console room entrance in my head.

It’s been an marvellous and welcome surprise to find that something I feared would kill Doctor Who has helped to breathe life back into it. I’m still saddened that I can’t put myself into the Doctor’s shoes anymore, but when watching the programme as something new, as opposed to something weighed down by more than half a century’s convoluted continuity and preconceptions, I’m utterly enthralled by it. And so, tail between my legs (and yes, I’m fully aware of the acute irony of this phrase here), I’ve reinstated the old History of the Doctor website. The Doctor might be a woman now, but the realisation is slowly dawning on me that she’s still the same chap at hearts.

The new series of Doctor Who airs on Sunday nights on BBC One and this episode is available to stream or download on BBC iPlayer in the UK, where the preceding 147 episodes are also currently available. A series pass is available from iTunes for £23.99.

TV Review: Doctor Who: “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” by Chris Chibnall

After almost fifty-five actual years and a couple of thousand pretend ones, the Doctor (she / her) has become the BBC’s first prime-time hero to change gender. 

Last year I resolved not to watch Doctor Who anymore. Recent series had done little but madden me, taking an actor the calibre of Peter Capaldi - someone who had all the tools to be the definitive incarnation of the Doctor – and presenting him with one lacklustre script after another. Within a few short years, I had gone from obsessively curating a popular Doctor Who reviews website to going as long as twelve to eighteen months after transmission before begrudgingly sitting down to watch an episode. I was the first to admit that the show needed reinvention, but I have really struggled to come to terms with the sheer magnitude of that reinvention.

Whilst I never shared the toxic, dogmatic views of many who took to social media to condemn Jodie Whittaker’s casting, I found myself in complete agreement with the softly spoken views of former Doctor Peter Davison, who was one of the few public figures brave enough to give voice to his concerns despite the inevitable backlash. Like many fans of the series, I wasn’t particularly upset about the show’s long-standing mythology being subverted - the prospect of Susan rocking up with a great bushy beard and a bald head rather amused me, as did the idea of an appearance from the Doctor’s meathead mate, Romano. I’d just lost my life-long role model, and felt a bit sad about that. That’s about all there was to it.

“If I feel any doubts, it’s the loss of a role model for

boys who I think Doctor Who is vitally important for.”



It’s a ludicrous thing to feel down about, really. The Doctor is supposed to be an alien who’s changed her entire body more than a dozen times over already. But to someone who - until mid-2011 or thereabouts, anyway – followed literally all of her adventures across the media, I’ve been feeling what I can only describe as grief. I know a lady whose little girl grew up to be her strapping son and all the guiltiness and anguish that she experienced as a result. That lady loves her son, but she still grieves for that lost little girl. It doesn’t make her sexist or narrow-minded; she’s just a human being dealing with a mind-bogglingly complicated and emotionally-charged situation. What I’ve been experiencing this last year isn’t anything close to that level of heartache, obviously, but it does come from the same bewildered sort of place – and it is a place of love.

“Oh, my dear, I... I hope it doesn't offend you,

that I have had some experience with the... fairer sex.”

Every time I thought I’d come to terms with the new status quo, I’d take two steps back. I forced myself through Capaldi’s last season, half-swayed by his lecture about the ancient civilisation of Gallifrey not concerning itself with something as trivial is gender, only to be snapped back hard by the lecturing “Twice upon a Time” and its unwarranted, retrospective reimagining of the first Doctor as a rampant chauvinist. Every time I saw Missy, I’d be floored by what a truly fantastic character she is, only to watch her diverge so far from the Master that she found herself directly at odds with him. Over the course of three seasons the writers softened Missy, made her compassionate, even allied her with the Doctor. They took every hackneyed, empathetic female stereotype and used it to annihilate any last vestige of a once-great arch-villain. It made a mockery of all those who argued that a character’s gender is of no consequence. The Master’s change of gender altered her so clearly and so utterly that changing his name wasn’t enough: she had to kill himself. It had become an inescapable narrative imperative.

 Above: Sue Cooper, Jodie Whittaker, V.E. Bolton.

It was only very recently that I relented. My sister, who teaches in a Sheffield school, was fortunate enough to meet Jodie Whittaker when she came in to surprise her students with a sneak peek at her debut episode. Despite her own reservations about the Doctor’s change of sex (which I understand arose largely from how the Doctor’s relationships with some of his companions had been portrayed, Rose in particular), my sister was won over by Whittaker at least enough to give the new season a chance, thus piling the pressure on me to follow suit. 

This last year I’ve also been keeping up with my Big Finish listening, and in their magnificent Gallifrey: Time War series there was a gender-change regeneration that I thought was handled exceptionally well – by which I mean it wasn’t even acknowledged. It just happened and everyone moved on; even Ace wasn’t fazed by it. It was probably this that ultimately tipped the scales towards acceptance for me. This, and the knowledge that if I didn’t watch, I would indeed be guilty of prejudice – quite literally pre-judging something I’d never seen. After thoroughly entertaining me for thirty-odd years, Doctor Who deserved another chance, right?

“I suppose one more lifetime wouldn’t kill anyone. Well, except me...”

The first thing to strike me about “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” was its radically different look. The BBC logo appears centre-screen before cutting straight to the action, Marvel-style. For the first time ever, there was no title sequence to be found anywhere in the episode – not even after the Doctor’s dramatic entrance, at which point the pull of that familiar howl must have been near impossible for the producers to resist. There were no inlaid credits, either. Even Segun Akinola’s score was far sparser and more subdued than Murray Gold’s ever was, although when it did swell up, it did so triumphantly, with what I’m sure will become Thirteen’s theme instantly raising goosebumps. This new season is unashamedly television custom-made for the binge-watchers of tomorrow. A new look. A new sound. A new Sunday slot. A new era.

“Is it wrong to be enjoying this?”

Beautiful vistas from my home city were marred only by their failure to fill my screen. The series’ trendy 2:1 aspect ratio might cajole the odd critic into throwing the word “cinematic” into their tabloid review, but it’s as much because they associate black bars across the tops and bottoms of their screens with watching a movie as it is due to any cinematographic wonders captured by the production team’s new anamorphic lenses. All this format does for me is remind me of the dark old days of watching 14:9 BBC-cropped X-Files episodes on a 4:3 TV. I will never understand why it’s become chic to produce a programme specifically for viewing on a particular device in a frame too small for that very device. Whatever happened to broadcast standards? It’s just robbing viewers of pixels.

 

Very quickly, though, I found myself focusing less on the series’ annoying new letterbox format and more on the instantly appealing characters. Whilst my views on Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who episodes to date have been mixed, he’s had more hits than misses for me. I was also a huge fan of Torchwood during his tenure as its showrunner, and Broadchurch is without a doubt one of the greatest British series to come out of this golden age of telly. At his best, Chibnall is able to create and quickly make you care about characters that are both very ordinary, yet somehow extraordinary, and I was delighted to see him hit the ground running. Mandip Gill’s young trainee police officer, Yaz, was a delight from the moment that she opened her mouth. There she was, stuck in a pedestrian job that she’d yet to really find her feet in, unsure how to even go about reporting an alien attack on a train to her superiors, and yet before the night was over she was competently helping the Doctor to defend an innocent crane driver against an alien hunter. It was like Zootropolis, only with tooth-faced monsters instead of drugged-up predators.



Tosin Cole’s Ryan is also a case in point – likeable, relatable, but living with a condition that very few viewers probably knew much about prior to watching the episode. His show-stealing, go-getting nan, Grace, vibrantly portrayed by Sharon D Clarke, was just as quick to endear herself to me, as was – to my astonishment – her husband Graham. I’ve never seen Bradley Walsh give so dazzling a performance before. In sixty-three minutes his retired bus driver took viewers through the whole gamut of human emotion, from humour to heartbreak through just about everything in between. He was awesome.



And an older human companion opens up so many fresh areas of storytelling for the show. Big Finish saw the sense in bringing in an older companion for the Doctor long ago, and it’s great to see their influence over the series continuing into this brave new era. Many of my favourite moments in the episode were scenes between Grace and Graham – they seemed to hit just the right note between mundane and heightened; that elusive and magical Doctor Who blend that Russell T Davies first perfected thirteen years ago. With Graham rounding out the TARDIS crew we might just have the makings of a team to rival the original 1963 contingent on our hands here.



Perhaps the thing that I enjoyed most about the episode though was its setting. Given all the time that I spent in Sheffield as a young man, it was fantastic to see bus shelters that I’ve stood in and roads that I’ve driven down immortalised in an episode of Doctor Who. Within the fiction too, the episode’s setting felt fresh and original, lending the series a sense of sincerity that I think it often loses when it spends too much time in or around London and other done-to-death filming locations. And just like the new regular characters, every one of Chibnall’s supporting players shone. From the self-help-seeking crane driver to the guy picking his salad out of his kebab, they were all so very redolent of people that I grew up around, yet there they were, being menaced by aliens but still drunkenly lobbing tomatoes at them (“’alowe’en’s next monf mate...”). Even the Doctor’s incredibly Yorkshire “Tim Shaw” gag cracked me up. It’s hard to point to another show that can have a monster of the week that’s as hilarious as “Tim Shaw” is without having things descend into utter farce.

As to the plot, one of my biggest issues with Doctor Who since “The Day of the Doctor” has been its eschewing of consequences. Particularly during Peter Capaldi’s tenure, which was characterised by its bold part ones and cop-out part twos, it was hard for me to care about whatever I was seeing on screen because I realised that Steven Moffat would just undo it if it risked really mattering. Chris Chibnall, on the other hand, imbued Torchwood with a genuinely dangerous “anything-can-happen” vibe, and probably the most outstanding thing about his Broadchurch was its refusal to limit itself to the standard murder-mystery format. Once Hardy and Miller had caught their child-killer, Chibnall’s story was only really gathering pace – the larger drama of the trial and the long-term aftermath was still to come. If the closing act of “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” is anything to go by, Chibnall will stay true to his strengths as a writer and explore the human cost of the Doctor’s meddling, and that is most definitely something that I’m excited to see more of.

 

Turning to the Doctor herself, it’s a credit to both Chibnall and Whittaker that the Doctor’s gender was never a factor in the story at all. It was acknowledged a few times, but only in little asides that were often buried in her post-regenerative ramblings. In the long-term this bodes very well for the future of the series, but the rub comes in the Doctor’s characterisation, which was, even for a post-regeneration story, rather thin on the ground. Whittaker spent most of the episode channelling David Tennant’s regular patter, only seeming to add her own catchphrasey little flourishes (“Should be fine...”) to her Tennant template in the episode’s final furlong. Measure this against “The Eleventh Hour”, which Matt Smith owned from the moment he stepped out of the TARDIS doors, and note the difference. Even Peter Capaldi was his distinctive, gruff old self right from the moment he opened up those big scary eyes. Each incarnation of the Doctor should be the same, yet different. This Doctor, astonishingly, is more of the same.

I strongly suspect that the familiarity of Whittaker’s post-regenerative performance was a conscious move on the production team’s part intended to appease long-term viewers who might be struggling with the Doctor’s newfound womanhood, and that as the season rolls on Whittaker will claim this incarnation of the Doctor as her own. We all know that she certainly has the talent to put her own distinctive stamp on it. And there are certainly plenty of positives to be found in her dynamic portrayal in this season-opener – her voice, her humour, her physicality – but so far we have seen none of that weight, none of that fire, that every modern Doctor has had burning behind his cold eyes right from the start. She needs to find that fast as the whole series is going to live or die on the strength of the next couple of episodes. The largest audience since the glory days of RTD tuned in on Sunday evening to see what all the fuss was about, but can she hold them there?

A final disappointment with the episode was, of all things, its end title sequence. As the opening title sequence had been omitted (or dispensed with for good?), I was expecting it to close the episode in the same sort of way that Spock’s speech and Alexander Courage’s original Star Trek theme had closed the 2009 Star Trek movie. Once the Doctor had her new outfit and her new mission, a proper title sequence felt “earned”, and would have made for quite the uplifting finale. Instead, ending on really quite a bleak cliffhanger followed by just the standard scrolling text felt a little flat. Had it not been for me wanting to listen to Akinola’s new haunting rendition of the classic theme, I’d have probably switched off immediately.

“I thought I knew him, Mum...
then he goes and does this...”

This is the age of press-fuelled populism - what the papers want, the papers get. As everyone’s favourite robot-romancing, Sabacc-playing, cape-swishing smoothie would put it, “I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it - but I accept it.” The Doctor’s a woman now, whether I like it or not; more category than character. Yet as a result of this ballsy move, the series has recaptured the zeitgeist that has eluded it for many years. I might still be feeling like Rose in “The Christmas Invasion”, desperately trying to process a change that’s a little beyond both my brain and my heart, but perhaps that’s a small price to pay if legions of little girls worldwide are having their eyes opened to science fiction. I just hope my two will join their ranks when we tune in next week. And tune in we shall.

The new series of Doctor Who airs on Sunday nights on BBC One and this episode is available to stream or download on BBC iPlayer in the UK, where the preceding 146 episodes are also currently available. A series pass is available from iTunes for £23.99.