| Episode: | 841 | | | Serial: | 277 | | | Writer: | Chris Chibnall | | | Air Date: | 07-Oct-2018 |
Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about Doctor Who series 11, episode 1: The Woman Who Fell to Earth. It's the very first Jodie Whittaker story, arriving just 14 months after the end of series 10.
We're actually in year 13 of the revival series now (we didn't get seasons in 2009 or 2016), and the classic series ran for 26 years so it's halfway to matching it! If you're curious, if the classic series had started airing in March 2005, we'd be up to The Talons of Weng-Chiang right now, three years into Tom Baker's run. Somehow I don't think they'd get away with airing that in 2018 though.
There's been two distinct eras to the modern series so far: the Russell T Davies era of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, and the Steven Moffat era of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors. But with this we've entered the third era, of Chris Chibnall and the Thirteenth Doctor. Man, it's going to get awkward writing the Doctor's names out like this once we reach the One Hundred and Twenty-First Doctor. The transition from RTD to Moffat was pretty noticeable, and that was with a lot of the team staying on, including composer Murray Gold. This time around they've apparently got a lot of new people working on it and it seems like it's going to be a much bigger change in tone and style. But I don't know yet as I'm writing this intro before I've watched it.
I have seen a few of Chris Chibnall's episodes before though, like The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, and The Power of Three, and to be honest I don't see this series being disappointing in the same way Steven Moffat's run could be sometimes. Because I had sky-high expectations for Moffat's episodes after he amazed me with his early stories and I'm just hoping I'm not too bored during these ones.
There will be SPOILERS for the episode below and perhaps earlier ones as well, but I'll say nothing about happens after it. And not just because it's the latest episode and I don't know what happens next. I won't be spoiling the David Bowie movie The Man Who Fell to Earth either as I've never seen it.
Speaking of sci-fi, judging by that wall behind him Ryan here lives in a spaceship. And judging by the title of his video he needs to click on some of those blogging tips videos himself because "Hey" is the very opposite of clickbait. But it does suit his style, as he's got a gift for being vague and leaving you guessing what he's actually talking about. It turns out that his video's about "the greatest woman I ever met," but he quickly changes the subject to how he's 19 and still can't ride a bike "because of the thing I told you about before."
Then it cuts to him with his grandparents on a hill in the Peak District, as this is where he goes to practice riding his bike. Why he comes all the way remains a mystery to the end, but my theory is that he wants somewhere without people watching or pavement waiting for him when he falls off. Because he always falls off, and he's really not happy about it, eventually throwing his bike off the hill out of frustration.
Also if you look really close at this screencap you'll see that Bradley Walsh is playing Ryan's step-granddad! The Doctor Who team did a good job keeping their family connection quiet, because I did not see that coming. Though Ryan would rather just call him Graham as even after three years he's still not keen on the guy. Seems like a bit of strange scene to begin an episode of Doctor Who with, but it does set up Ryan, his relationship with his grandparents, and his condition.
Turns out that Ryan suffers from dyspraxia, which seems like a fairly obscure condition as my spellchecker hasn't even heard about it. Then again my spellchecker doesn't know the word 'spellchecker' either. It's a developmental co-ordination disorder that affects movement and co-ordination, which is demonstrated pretty well by the episode I imagine. The guy can walk and think just fine, but something like riding a bike is much trickier for him. Which I think makes him the first Doctor Who companion with a disability.
His grandparents go home on a train while he heads off and eventually finds his bike stuck up in a tree. But next to it is some weirdness and when he touches the weirdness something weird happens.
Actually it doesn't seem to be a threat, it just sits there being cold, which he knows because he touched it as well. The dude has a real problem with touching space weirdness. If he had any sense he'd take his hand off it, step way back, and phone Mulder and Scully. Which is basically what he does to be fair.
I should've really gone with a screencap the showed her face, but then I couldn't have used this shot of the street. Sure it's just houses on a hill, but it's a really nice hill. I just hope it's not far from the forest that Ryan dropped his bike onto or else the poor guy will be waiting for ages for her to arrive.
It's interesting how normal everything is so far, even more so than the RTD episodes. There's nothing exaggerated about these characters at all, and nothing cheesy or camp or fairy-tale about the tone. It's just ordinary people facing an inexplicable horror from outer space that the episode keeps framing like it's a photo for an album cover.
PC Kahn asks for Ryan's name and discovers that they actually know each other, or at least they went to the same primary school. Bit of a weird pointless coincidence, but okay, maybe it'll be more important later.
Then the episode catches up with what grandparents Graham and Grace are up to on their train ride, which is actually more interesting than you'd expect as they're being attacked by a mysterious alien creature made of cables and electricity.
There's a new visual effects company working on the series this season, replacing Milk, who replaced The Mill in 2013, and they ain't bad. The subtle atmospheric music by new composer Segun Akinola does a lot to give the episode a very different feel to earlier episodes, but the visuals make a difference too.
It's interesting how Ryan ran into one alien artefact and now his grandparents are being harassed by another one. You could even that say that it's an unlikely coincidence, though to be fair if the cable monster appeared near to the space onion, then this would be the closest train full of people to attack.
Grace calls Ryan and tells him their train stopped between Hathersage and Grindleford, which actually kind of matches up with where the Doctor was falling at the end of Twice Upon a Time.
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| Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time |
Anyway, Graham, Grace and another passenger (Karl) are trapped and about to be zapped by the monster when suddenly the Doctor smashes through the roof of the train! Man, it's amazing that even when it's exploding and seemingly out of control, the Tardis still manages to drop the Doctor exactly where they need to be, to within a few meters. That's the only way I can justify in my head how three separate aliens have ended up running into this family now during the same hour or so.
I was fairly sure that Chris Chibnall would come up with a crap resolution to the amazing cliffhanger at the end of Twice Upon a Time, but I wouldn't have minded being wrong. Nope, the Doctor survived falling, I dunno, 10 miles maybe because she landed on a train. She was travelling at 120 miles per hour when she hit that roof, head first, and even for a Time Lord that seems fairly lethal. You could argue that she survived entirely unharmed because she's still in the first 15 hours of her regeneration cycle and during this time she's basically Wolverine, but the episode certainly didn't mention a damn thing about it.
Though it sure took her a while to turn up. Over nine minutes, not counting the opening credits... because there aren't any for this episode. In fact, this is the only episode of Doctor Who in its history to not have an opening title sequence of some kind (even Sleep No More had a title card). It's also the only episode so far to star a female version of the Doctor... which means this is the first time ever we've got a female lead in Star Wars, Star Trek and Doctor Who simultaneously!
It's a been a crazy day for the Doctor so far, as it's only been a few hours since she was fighting off waves of Cybermen, and after that she had a Christmas adventure with her past self. She hasn't even had a chance to change out of her shredded jacket yet. Though she did at least get a five minute break while she was plummeting through the sky.
That's fairly horrifying actually now that I think about it. She had plenty of time to think about hitting the ground and knowing her she'd probably calculated exactly when it was going to happen. Maybe she got lucky and passed out for a bit.
Just then Ryan and Yasmin turn up and the creature reacts by zapping everyone in the shoulder with lightning. Then it just flies off into the sky through the convenient hole in the roof. So that was a bit strange. The episode's building up the mystery.
This is usually the point in a post-regeneration story where the Doctor passes out, or goes nuts, or eats fish fingers and custard, but Thirteen seems pretty lucid right now. She immediately starts giving instructions and goes off to check the rest of the train.
PC Khan's trying to be a police officer and take control of the situation, but the Doctor's not having that. She gets her to reveal that she's called Yasmin, or 'Yaz' to her friends, and then decides that she's called her Yaz from now on. Because they're friends. She also convinces her not to report what happened here, because how could she explain it and why would it help them?
Then she tells the audience "All of this is new to you and new can be scary." Oh actually she was talking to the people on the train. A newly regenerated Doctor often finds their next companion pretty fast, but this has to be a new record as she's landed right into a room full of candidates, with two more turning up immediately after. So they're finally going to have a police officer in the police box! Though Karl immediately disqualifies himself by showing zero interest in finding out what's going on and just wanting to go back to his job.
Ryan finally tells the Doctor about the big blue weird thing he found in the forest so the five of them that are left race off in Yaz's car... only to find that it's gone.
I know I've mentioned how different and subtle and moody the music's been in this episode but I feel it bears repeating as it really is a big change from the playful bombastic Murray Gold tunes the series has had for the preceding 12 years. It sounds more like a horror movie, which probably pleased fans of the Philip Hinchcliffe era.
Meanwhile, the Doctor's team splits up to check for reports of other weirdness via their own sources, while the Doctor finally passes out.
Back at the garage the space onion cracks like an egg, and elsewhere in the city the ball of cables and lightning starts doing something up at the top of a tower. I'm not taking the piss out of the direction here, I actually think it's pretty great, but the moment I saw the cable monster up there I immediately thought 'album cover' again.
They've all got bombs in fact, located exactly where the lightning from the cable monster hit them, presumably to make it easy for it to eliminate witnesses. I guess that's a last resort though, as the thing could've just killed them on the train if it'd wanted to.
It's funny how no one mentions poor Karl in this conversation. Seems like this would concern him as well.
It doesn't sound so crazy to use technology designed to pick up signals in order to pick up this creature's signal, but she transforms it in like five button presses! I have no idea what we're supposed to think she did to it. But I suppose it's possible she's got software online she can download and run just in case of this scenario.
Then she zaps her neck with the phone and blasts herself across the room. Why? I dunno! Part of the process I guess.
The guy demands to know where his sister is, but he's not exactly in control of the situation. The man in the spacesuit tells him that he'll never know, then grabs his head and kills him with his ice powers. So that ended his side plot pretty abruptly.
While this was going on, the Doctor and the others were following the signal in Grace's Volvo and they arrive on the scene just in time to watch the onion man leaving. So the Doctor decides to run at the bad guy, to Graham's disbelief. It does seem a little bit reckless, but then I guess when you start the day by free-falling into a train everything else seems a little bit tame by comparison.
They've found the space onion too, which the Doctor identifies as a transport chamber. She can't learn anymore about it without her sonic screwdriver though. Yaz pulls Ryan away to search the place for more information without the Doctor having to tell her to, which is... different. I can definitely get behind the idea of companions going off to find clues on their own initiative though. They're also asking a lot of good questions that the Doctor doesn't have the answer to and she's being surprisingly apologetic about everything.
The Doctor gives them a bit of an insight about what it feels like to regenerate here, which is something I don't think we've ever gotten before. It hurts, apparently, plus you feel like you're dying and then you're born... which puts a different spin on Ten's concerns at the end of his time perhaps.
Actually she's going to make a new sonic screwdriver out of whatever's lying around this garage. I knew that her weird new sonic was handmade in Sheffield from the first time I saw a publicity photo of it! Or maybe since the first time I saw a publicity photo of her working on something with goggles on.
I didn't expect her to make it out of spoons though.
It bothered me at first that she was using basic Earth technology wired together to make her amazing tricorder wand, but then the second time I watched the montage I caught that she'd also taken tech from out of the alien pod. So I'll allow it.
I also noticed that it's got some pretty nice music.
By this point the Ryan and Yas have finally gotten around to telling the others about a video file they found on the guy's PC labelled "IF I DIE CLICK HERE". There's something really screwy about the passage of time in this story. Like how it suddenly turned night time while Yaz and Ryan were in the forest earlier, then they got back to her car and reached the train in just two minutes after getting the call.
The video explains that the mysterious man who stole the space onion did it because his sister was abducted seven years ago and he's been investigating ever since. Sheffield's own Fox Mulder. So that's that mystery solved.
She has a theory that the guy from the pod and the ball of cables are two different aliens using this world as a battlefield (like in the episode Battlefield), so she's going to try to catch them and send them both back. She also promises Graham that she'll have the DNA bombs sorted in 9 minutes. I hope they remember to sort out Karl's bomb too, though nothing's being said about him.
Graham's not just here to continually remind them about their imminent deaths though, as he gets a call from one of his bus driver friends. They've found some of that weirdness he was asking about earlier, so the team's got a lead!
Meanwhile, the others have followed Graham's bus driver intel and have found the cable creature that zapped them.
Just then the other alien turns up to threaten them a bit. The Doctor can't quite identify who she is yet, but she manages to learn who he is at least. He's T'zim-Sha, soon to be leader of the Stenza, and he collects teeth because he likes to implant them in his face. He's a gross teeth-face man with a digitally augmented voice.
And now that they've introduced him and properly established what sort of threat he is, the Doctor immediately undercuts that by calling him Tim Shaw instead. Turns out he's here on Predator business, hunting down a very specific human: Karl. And he sent down his gathering coil to do the searching for him because followed the rules seemed like too much effort. So he's the honourable alien hunter with a code type, with the twist being that he's not honourable and he doesn't have a code.
In fact he's pretty rubbish! The last scene had him killing a drunk just because he was in the way (and throwing tomatoes on him), but now it seems he picked on him because he was an easy kill. He's hunting the least dangerous game and he's cheating.
Once Tim's done he uses a short range teleport to jump away, leaving the Doctor fuming on the rooftop. So now they've got to find Karl before he's captured as a trophy like the guy's sister was.
Tim Shaw's way ahead of them though and has already killed the nice security guy at the construction site Karl works at. They deliberately took a minute to make the guy sympathetic just to twist the knife when Tim killed him and took his tooth.
Seems a bit risky though, sending the guy with dyspraxia to climb up a crane. But I'm sure if it was concern he would've mentioned something and he gets up there no problem. I'm not sure why he had to be up there, as Yaz is the one driving it, but at least he gets to hold a phone for her.
This was the point in the episode where I realised that the story must have had my attention so far... because here's where it began to lose it. Only for a while though, while they were getting everyone in place for the final confrontation.
So the Doctor takes a running jump at the other crane!
Google tells me that Jodie Whittaker's the shortest actor to play the role, which isn't a huge shock, but it's really close between her and Sylvester McCoy. Another thing she has in common with McCoy is that she likes to do her own stunts. Well, in this episode anyway, I think she stopped after this.
So that's presumably the real Jodie Whittaker right there, and it was apparently a real crane too! It certainly looks it, but then the VFX has been so good in this episode so far I'd find it more believable if it was CGI. I mean, it seems really convenient that the production crew just happened to find two cranes exactly this far apart, and a little implausible that they shot the climax 60 foot off the ground.
It seems a bit risky for her to confront the guy who can freeze your face off while cornered on the end of a crane, but the Doctor's got the recall device from his space onion and she's going to drop it unless he leaves Karl alone and maybe gives a bit of exposition.
She learns that the garage guy's sister is still alive in stasis 5000 galaxies away, so that seems like it's going to be important later in the season maybe. I hope so anyway, I wouldn't want someone to go unrescued.
Tim has the trigger for the DNA bombs though and he knows that they were implanted in her and her friends! I guess he got that info from the total transfer earlier. He didn't put one in Karl though, as that would've been counter-productive. Don't want to melt the DNA of the trophy you need to bring back to become leader.
"We are all capable of the most incredible change. We can evolve while still staying true to who we are. We can honour who we've been and choose who we want to be next. Now's your chance."To be honest I never had the slightest expectation that her speech would work because it's not exactly convincing. If you're going to ask a murderer with a face covered in stolen teeth to not bring back the last victim he needs to complete his set and earn the leadership of his people you gotta come with more than that.
At least she gets a bit of hero music here as she reveals that she finally knows who she is: The Doctor! But I can't screencap music, sadly.
Tim's not impressed and he just triggers the DNA bombs... but the Doctor had taken them out ages ago. The clue was that Graham had stopped pestering her about them. Though the episode cheats a bit with the way it claims the bombs were transferred to the cable monster and then transferred over to Tim, because I didn't get the impression the Doctor had enough information at the time to know to do that. Anyway, she gives Tim the recall circuit and tells him to go home.
So that's Rose, The Christmas Invasion, Deep Breath and now this that all end with a face to face confrontation, a speech, and a villain falling off something at the end! But unlike the Half-Face Man, the Sycorax leader and some random Auton, he manages to teleport away, so he might actually survive this. Despite the fact his body's actually melting into goop right now.
The Doctor's a little pissed at Karl over what he did, saying that he had no right, but that's as much as the episode dwells on the subject. It's not like The Christmas Invasion where Harriet Jones gets to make her case for why she killed the aliens after they were beaten and the Doctor punishes her for it. We don't even know if Karl understood that the five bombs in him were just melting his DNA and he was no threat to any of them anymore.
It feels like the writer just really wanted someone to fall off that crane at the end, but knew that the Doctor couldn't be happy about it, so he threw in a line.
It's a strange death though because there was no reason to kill her in this story, except to make people miserable at the end (characters and viewers). It's not like the characters needed an Uncle Ben to die to put them on the path of Doctor Who heroism.
It does bring the episode back to Ryan's YouTube video at the start though, revealing that the special woman he was talking about... was actually the woman motivating him to ride his bike in the first scene! Well, duh, who else was it going to be? This seems like the opposite of a twist. Though it does mean that two people thumbs-downed a guy talking about his dead gran.
Weirdly the Doctor finally chooses to change out of her ruined costume after the funeral, though at least she took the scruffy coat off while she was there.
It looks like it took her longer than usual to find something she liked, seeing as half the shop seems to be piled outside the changing room, but then it has been ages since she's bought women's clothes. Weirdly she's already got her earring in, so I guess that was her first stop.
Yaz isn't impressed by the costume (especially as she has to pay for it), but I think it suits her. I'm just happy she didn't find a clown coat or anything with question marks on it really. Though it'll be cool if that's just her general look from now on, not the exact clothes she'll be wearing every day for the rest of her long existence in this form.
I've wondered sometimes what the Doctor would do if they ended up stranded on a different planet to their Tardis, and now I finally know! Good thing it didn't travel in time, that would've complicated things.
Seems a bit mean making Graham hold the battery for it though, seeing as a: the battery doesn't have to be elevated, and b: this is really similar to what he was doing when his wife killed herself by being reckless with power cables. There's lots of power cables in this episode I've noticed.
All of them getting dragged along was inevitable, they're her companions, but I can't say I expected them to materialise in the vacuum of deep space. I also didn't expect her to appear facing the other direction to the way she was standing a moment ago.
Anyway, they all asphyxiate except for the Doctor who goes blind again, the end. Or maybe they get rescued by a spaceship at the last moment, which would be a bit... improbable, but then Chibnall's already demonstrated he's got no problem with massive coincidences.
There's also a hint of what the opening titles are going to look like in the background and I'm not keen on that either. Hang on... they credited the villain as 'Tim Shaw'? Man, T'zim-Sha gets no respect from anyone. Sadly the guy who threw his tomato at him is not credited as 'Eat My Salad Man'.
Then it ends with a trailer showing all the amazing episodes coming up this season! Actually it shows off the upcoming guest stars, which is kind of unusual. I feel like they expected me to be impressed but to be honest it was a whole bunch of names and concerned-looking faces I did not recognise. Well okay I caught a few of them, like Mark Addy, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Art Malik.
Still, the shots all looked really good! I am now convinced that the cinematography won't take a nosedive after this episode and leave the series looking like it was recorded on a Betacam.
CONCLUSION
That wasn't as bad as it could've been! I'm not sure where I'd rank it compared to the other modern post-regeneration stories, maybe below The Christmas Invasion and above Deep Breath, but I'm fairly certain I enjoyed it for the most part. It's got a noticeably different tone to both the Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies eras, more grounded and sensible, less playful and childish, but it's still recognisably Doctor Who and it's still got the humour. It's a bit strange though, to watch a post-regeneration story with no London landmarks whatever. And no stakes either really, except for poor Karl.
New showrunner Chris Chibnall did a good job I thought with establishing his many companions, who are all very normal people living normal lives, even more than previous companion Bill, whose weirdest trait was how she'd continually say words written by Steven Moffat. No one says words written by Steven Moffat in this; the wit has been dialled down, with the cleverness replaced by earnestness. This had the effect of making none of them really stand out to me as being all that interesting, though they were certainly likeable. Ryan has more problems than personality so far, Yaz seems nice, Graham seems like the closest we'll likely get to Wilf or Rory's dad joining the Tardis crew, and Grace... will not be joining us for future stories. She had a question mark over her from the start, as she's not in any of the posters or adverts, but when I realised she was enjoying being in a Doctor Who story I knew she was doomed. Which is a shame, because she was one of the best characters. Though I suppose she had to be, as we needed to like her before she died.
But you know what was in the marketing? The Tardis. Never showed up in the episode though! Which I guess is one way to solve the 'crowded Tardis' problem. This isn't the first Doctor Who story without the Tardis in it, but it is the first time a new Doctor has started off without it. Which is a shame really because I looking forward to saying all kinds of words about the new interior, and maybe not good ones judging by the leaked photos and the look of the new sonic screwdriver. I'm sure it'll be filmed well enough though because this episode looked fantastic. I'm not sure it was a significant upgrade from the last season, as that looked pretty good to me as well, but it looks expensive enough. The music by Segun Akinola was a fairly massive change though, going for subtle instead of bombastic, and emphasising the horror instead of the adventure. I thought Murray Gold did some fantastic work for the series that suited RTD's and Moffat's eras perfectly... mostly, but Segun's music for this worked a lot better than the soundtrack to Murray's debut story, Rose.
Also a pretty major change was Jodie Whittaker playing the first female Doctor since Joanna Lumley. I have to admit that I wasn't keen on the idea of the Doctor regenerating into a woman at first, purely because every other regeneration we'd seen in the series, whether it was The Doctor, his mentor, Borusa, the Master, Rassilon or Romana, always kept the same sex. There was some talk that the Doctor after Tom Baker could've been a woman I believe, and that might have worked, but after twelve regenerations spanning two-thousand years it starts getting harder to justify why the sex change is only happening now. But then Moffat and others put in the work to set it up, with the sex-changing Corsair mentioned in The Doctor's Wife, the Doctor realising he chooses his appearance subconsciously in The Girl Who Died, the General changing sex in Hell Bent and the Master becoming Missy, so I was more than fine with the idea by the time Jodie Whittaker first fell out of those Tardis doors. She had some plenty big shoes to fill though, following on from Peter Capaldi operating at the very fullest extent of his hair, but she filled those shoes of his suspiciously well.
The Thirteenth Doctor so far is like someone took Ten and Eleven, and then drained out all hint of negativity and hidden agendas, leaving just the childish enthusiasm. Plus it seems like that speech that Twelve had on the way out had a real impact on his subconscious as she came off as very kind and thoughtful compared to the average Doctor. She didn't even get Karl fired after he kicked the guy off his crane in revenge. The episode's a bit like The Eleventh Hour in that it doesn't keep the character off screen to build anticipation, or continually try to convince viewers to give her a chance, it just shows her in action, doing her thing, with most of her wits intact from the get go. Which was probably the best choice really. I mean, I'm trying to imagine Twelve calling her new friends up on the phone and begging them to just give her a chance because she's scared and confused and not as mean as she seems, and it just doesn't work. For one thing, Thirteen seems to have been born without fear, or that little voice in most people's heads that says "maybe check those coordinates a second time before teleporting yourself across the universe." Which is good, because I was worried they'd pull a Peter Davison and tone the eccentricity way down, and they did not.
By the end the episode had won me over to the idea of Chibnall's reign of terrors and gotten me curious to see what the other writers were going to do with the characters. But then it went and killed them all off in the cold vacuum of space. Seems a bit of a waste really.
COMING SOON
Thanks for reading! Leave a comment if you want. Or even if you don't want.
Which I think makes him the first Doctor Who companion with a disability.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't count Kamelion, anyway. And why would you?
It's probably too early to tell, but I hope Chibnall will rely less on jump scares than Moffat did. Well, my wife hopes, anyway. Thinking about how it would feel to spend several minutes falling uncontrollably is way scarier to me than a blast of music.
ReplyDelete