Doctor Who (2023): Season 1 Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the latest first season of Doctor Who! It's also known as series 14 or season 40, depending on how stubborn you are.

Filming began on 5th Dec 2022, so it took a long while for this to finally reach TVs. In fact, the last full actual season of the show was in 2021. But it's finally out and now I have opinions about the dawn of the third age of Doctor Who.

Though maybe I should hang on until the next season's out. I mean 8 episodes and a Christmas special isn't much to review. This run of episodes flew by so fast that I'm not sure I was able to get a good enough look at them to describe what I saw. Then again, if I wait any longer I'll have forgotten what happened, so I should probably just get on with it.

There will be SPOILERS for this season, the recent specials, and maybe other episodes too.

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The first thing I need to get out of the way is the visuals. For the first time ever, Doctor Who looks fantastic. Okay fine, I say the series looks fantastic every season, and it's always true, but this year did not break the streak and the visual effects got a huge boost on occasion. The scene of the Doctor and Mel escaping the death wave sandstorm was actually cinematic, in a 'Did they just take a clip from a Marvel movie for this bit?' way. Look look, they even did the reflection in the windows!

Also, I mentioned in my Thirteenth Doctor Era review that getting Segun Akinola to do the music was a nice change after 12 straight years of Murray Gold... and that getting Murray Gold back would also be a nice change. Well, we got Murray Gold back and it certainly is nice. The Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby both have great themes, among the best we've ever gotten on the show, and we even got the UNIT theme back again. On the production side of the show I have no complaints, everyone nailed it...

...except for the dance montage at the end of The Devil's Chord, which I actually couldn't sit through. You don't truly realise just how much an episode is winding you up until you find yourself saying "Fuck this!" to the TV and then going outside to listen to the rain. I don't think I've ever hated an episode that much. Well, aside from a couple of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 7th season. And the classic Doctor Who story The Web Planet. Also, there was one episode of Highlander... anyway, not important.

The important thing is that Russell T Davies and Murray Gold have returned, with a guest appearance by Steven Moffat, and the dark age of Chris Chibnall is over. Well, I suppose "the tepid age" would be more accurate. For all of Chibnall's flaws, his run stayed fairly close to the middle of the road, without hitting the lowest lows or the highest highs. Not that he didn't take risks, we got the Fugitive Doctor, the Timeless Child and a whole serialised season, not to mention a female Doctor, but with RTD and Steven Moffat you never knew if you were going to get The Girl in the Fireplace or The Moon is an Egg. One minute they're tearing your heart out, the next the Goblin Doctor has gotten superpowers because everyone on Earth said his name at once.

1-01 - Rose

So has RTD2 brought us back in time to 2005 or has he grown as a writer in the meantime? I'd say that when it came to the writing on this new season we generally got the unexpected... delivered in an expected way. I mean, RTD and Moffat brought their bags of familiar tricks, but it seems like there was a real effort made to come up with new ideas and go where Doctor Who had never gone before. In fact, I've seen people saying that the season had too much variety and strayed off-format too much for such a short run of episodes, and I can see where they're coming from.

The series has also regained some of its magic, though maybe more than it needs. Doctor Who has always been willing to test its audience's suspension of disbelief, the Doctor's faced the Gods of Ragnarok and visited the land of fiction, but now that RTD's introduced the supernatural basically anything can happen as long as the writer can come up with a few poetic lines. Time is memory, memory is time, therefore you can make a time machine made of memories appear from a projection of a VHS tape!

I genuinely can't tell if we got definitive answers to major questions like Ruby's snow and the music, because the theory the Doctor came up with was so absurd that it didn't even occur to me that it was true. I'm still hoping we'll get a better explanation in season two, and any explanation at all for what's going on with Mrs Flood would be nice.

Running themes and recurring elements have been a thing in the series ever since Bad Wolf, and this season is absolutely packed full of them. There's the snow, the myths, the meta elements, the Doctor crying, abandoned children, Susan Twist, Mrs Flood, 73 yards, and so on. We were encouraged to speculate on what's going on and how it all connects.

Then we reached the finale and a lot of people were kind of confused. Things weren't really tied together all that much, Susan Foreman wasn't found, the One Who Waits turned out to a big CGI dog that most viewers wouldn't have heard of, the identity of Ruby's mother was a deliberate anti-climax and she had nothing to do with the snow or the music! These were perhaps not the ideal storytelling choices.

Personally I remembered Sutekh from the classic series and I had no problem with Ruby's mother being an ordinary person, but I can totally understand why other people were let down. RTD didn't learn the important lesson from Star Wars: The Last Jedi: if you're going to set up a mystery box it needs to contain something of equal or greater value than what you're leading people to expect.

One thing that's definitely different this season is the Doctor and his companion, now played by Ncuti Gawta and Millie Gibson. Though they're not entirely unfamiliar...

I remember that Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor started out out as the polar opposite of Peter Capaldi's Doctor, without any of his darkness or angst. She was cheerful, friendly and kind. Now we've got the Fifteenth Doctor who's come out of therapy without his darkness and angst. He's cheerful, friendly and kind. In fact, he doesn't even have Thirteen's secretiveness or social awkwardness; his only negative trait is that he maybe cares too much and cries a lot!

Okay to be fair to Thirteen, Fifteen has been similarly ineffective at saving the day. The Beatles defeated Maestro, Vater's AI beat Villengard, he wasn't even in 73 Yards, the folks in Finetime went off to their deaths and Rogue beat the bird aliens. But his music comes on a lot and that always makes it feel like he's helping. Also when he faced his own universe-destroying death wave, he was able to undo the damage!

Personally, I like the Fifteenth Doctor so far. He's not my all-time favourite and he's missing a lot of the alien eccentricity that actors like Tom Baker and Matt Smith brought from day one, but he's charismatic and can own a room. The writers have repeated the success that Chibnall had when introducing the first female Doctor, as the first proper black and gay Doctor has settled in with a minimum of cringy references to his new situation. Okay there was that romance episode I didn't like, but I'm sure that worked fine for a lot of fans.

Ruby Sunday is also pretty low on eccentricity, as her defining traits are being desperate to find her mother, and being really normal. 73 Yards proves that she has enough of a personality to carry an entire episode by herself and the actress is certainly talented, but I don't really have much to say about her. She's what she needs to be for her arc.

Well, it's not really an arc exactly. The show's as episodic as ever really, which is a rarity for television these days. But is it a good thing? Or is it... bad?


THE BAD

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Yes Doctor Who being episodic is a good thing, in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with serialisation, but the series has always switched tones and genres and it would've been a shame not to show off what it can do. Series 1's Rose and series 4's Midnight barely feel like the same show.

Though going from Space Babies to 73 Yards in four episodes instead of four seasons is jarring. One guy wrote 6 out of 8 episodes and the season is still all over the damn place. There's an Alien homage featuring talking babies, a music god who fights the heroes with CGI cartoon notation, a creepy horror that strays close to a political thriller halfway, and then a romance about shapeshifting Bridgerton fans leaving a trail of corpses.

I mean, who is the target audience for this? Younger children watching for the first time? Older RTD fans coming back? I can imagine every episode having its fans, but I have to wonder if any one person enjoyed all 8 of them. Ncuti is bringing new people in who hadn't given the series a chance yet, but are they going to stick around?

It's possible I guess. There is a lot of good in this season as well.


THE GOOD

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The season may not have rewarded all the speculation it encouraged, but the show feels like it's worth discussing again. Events feel important again. It feels like Doctor Who again. Even when it's more like Black Mirror.

This may not be the ideal jumping on point for new viewers, but it's not the worst either. It tells you everything you need to know about the Doctor and the TARDIS (really quickly), it doesn't get too bogged down in past continuity and returning monsters, and it does feel like the beginning of a new era for the show.

Plus it makes it clear that this a new era of the same show. The Jodie Whittaker era happened, the Tom Baker era happened, the William Hartnell era happened... well, more or less. The Doctor's history may be slightly more of a jigsaw puzzle now. But RTD made the choice to keep the show's continuity when he made the first reboot and he made the same decision for volume three of the show.

The whole season is about the power of myths and how we imbue things with significance, so it makes sense the show's own mythology would also be acknowledged and respected. It's important because we believe that it's important. Also because of nostalgia I guess.

But its recollections of the show's past aren't done in a way that excludes new fans. New viewers see Mel look at her Doctor's coat and they get it, everything you need to know is there on screen. Okay, the reveal of Sutekh was a bit of a head-scratcher for anyone who hadn't seen classic Who, but then the BBC went and put a new Tales of the TARDIS featuring Pyramids of Mars on iPlayer. People who jumped on board with Ncuti Gatwa are asking fans where to go next and being told to check out the Christopher Eccleston run. Doctor Who needs to bring in new viewers to have a future, but it's also inviting them into its past, and that's awesome.

Oh, I forgot to mention something else I didn't like: that photo of Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor in his brown coat and orange sweater. It was the first time since I started watching the modern show that I wasn't keen on the Doctor's costume. But then it turned out that Fifteen is a bit of a Pertwee and changes his outfit all the time! The dude even wears wigs. So that's alright then.

Plus the TARDIS gets to join in as well, switching its lighting to change its own look. I'm still not 100% sold on the fact that there's nothing in there but ramps, I've been spoiled by the Capaldi TARDIS, but it's still an awesome set.


CONCLUSION

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I had no expectations for what my favourite episodes would end up being, even Steven Moffat is hit and miss, but his episode Boom and the season finale Empire of Death would've been my top guesses if pressed. That's not entirely how things turned out.

The season was so short I'm just going to go back to my old format of ranking every episode. And then I'm going to throw in the 60th specials as well to make it longer because I'm a rebel.

12.	The Devil's Chord (2) - This was impossible to take seriously and I found the ending was impossible to stand.
11.	Rogue (4) - This was built upon an incredibly rushed romance that I wasn't into.
10.	Space Babies (4) - Talking babies in a farting space station are bad, in my opinion.
9.	The Church on Ruby Road (5) - Time-travelling coincidence goblins who come down in a magic flying boat and sing a song before shovelling a baby into their king's giant mouth are bad.
8.	Empire of Death (5) - This one clearly had a lot of money spent on it, but it's built on a foundation of absolute nonsense and it hardly pays off anything set up this season.
7.	The Star Beast (6) - I was liking this a lot more before London's streets magically repaired themselves.
6.	The Legend of Ruby Sunday (6)  - This has a lot to like about it, but it's all just set up for part two so they had to drag out what little story it has so that it lasts until the big reveal at the end.
5.	The Giggle (7) - Neil Patrick Harris is awesome, but that bi-generation needs more explaining.
4.	73 Yards (7) - This is maybe the best episode this season, if you're into horror stories that make no sense.
3.	Dot and Bubble (8) - A great sci-fi short story slightly diminished by the actors being on FaceTime.
2.	Boom (8) - It's a bit disappointing that a middle-of-the-road Steven Moffat story is so high on the list.
1.	Wild Blue Yonder (8) - This is all the proof I need that bringing back RTD, Murray Gold, David Tennant and Catherine Tate was a good idea.

It's been a long while since I finished a new season of Doctor Who and came away thinking "Yeah that was great, I really enjoyed that," and this season has not broken that streak. Though I certainly wasn't handing out 8s like that during Chibnall's run. Granted that was mostly because I hadn't started rating episodes yet, but 73 Yards and above are better than almost everything in the Chibnall era, in my opinion. The season's average score isn't so impressive however.

I rewatched the original RTD run for in preparation for this season, some episodes for the first time, and I honestly can't decide which series was my favourite. They're just too close. But at least now I know what my least favourite RTD season is. It's this one, this is my least favourite season. In previous years they had an episode count high enough that they had to bring in other writers who gave us stories like Father's Day, School Reunion, The Impossible Planet, Human Nature and The Fires of Pompeii, and I'm really feeling their absence. Without them the season races right from the traditional goofy RTD opening to the traditional epic RTD 'feelings over logic' conclusion.

I'm glad I didn't give up on it though, because there were definitely some highlights in the middle.


Next time on Doctor Who:

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I guess what I want next is a long break.

Every time I watch a season of Doctor Who I end up thinking that maybe this show's just not my thing. Maybe I'm just not a real fan. And every time the show disappears for just long enough for me to recharge my enthusiasm and give it another chance. So I'm sure that next May or whenever I'll be ready to tackle Space Babies II: The Diaper Strikes Back, I just need some time to forget the last one.

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COMING SOON

There'll be no new Doctor Who to write about until the Christmas special, so next up it's Picard episode 6: The Bounty! It'll be a nice change from this nostalgia-fest I'm sure.

What did you think about Ncuti Gatwa's debut season? Was it better than Christopher Eccleston's first series? Better than Jodie Whittaker's first series? Or just a bit of a disappointment.