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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
