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IMAGE SOURCE: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jcn8k

(WARNING: THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS)

At the end of my review of Twice Upon A Time last year, I made the remark that the biggest mistake Chris Chibnall could make as Doctor Who’s new showrunner was to assume people would like Doctor Who whatever it does just because it’s Doctor Who. To my surprise, it seems he’s taken that concern to heart, because The Woman Who Fell To Earth genuinely feels like a reinvention. And even though I might be biased in its favour, I personally think that’s a very good thing.

It’s a fairly simple plot, all things considered: having just regenerated, the Doctor crashes on Earth (more specifically in Sheffield) with a touch of amnesia and lacking her TARDIS and Sonic Screwdriver, and meets disgruntled twentysomethings Ryan and Yaz and Ryan’s step-grandfather and grandmother Graham and Grace, who have all been in contact with mysterious alien life, one taking the form of a giant blue pod and the other a mass of aggressive tentacles. It’s eventually revealed the pod houses the humanoid alien Tim Shaw, a member of a race of honourable warriors who hunt humans for sport, and the five of them seek to stop him.

The episode admittedly starts rather oddly with one of the new companions, Ryan, explaining his inability to ride a bike as a lead-in to the start of the episode’s plot in a vlog, which admittedly put me on the back foot. It’s a silly idea and comes off as the show desparately trying to be relevant in an embarrassing way, as well as being reminiscent of one of the show’s most hated episodes, Love & Monsters. Fortunately, though, the show simply uses it to introduce Ryan and then calls back to it at the end, although I personally would’ve dropped it and just started with Ryan trying to ride the bike on the hill.

After that, though, the episode picks up significantly, and fast. The scene of Ryan discovering the alien pod and touching it is atmospheric and nicely executed, and it works nicely to offer the episode its opportunity to introduce Yaz. In a sense, Yaz is probably my favourite of the three companions, as she’s likeable, brave and has some nice setup for a potential arc what with her feeling underused by the police, and the scene where she investigates the pod with Ryan works well by establishing their relationship in a neat way that feels kinda natural, as the situation of bumping into an old school friend like that is a nice and relatable idea.

The scene afterwards with Graham and Grace’s train ride also works well in the horror stakes, even if the dialogue here and there is a little clunky (especially Graham mentioning they’ve been married 3 years offhand), with the show doing a good job of recapturing what Jon Pertwee once described as the ‘Yeti on a loo in Tooting Bec’ concept by making an ordinary-looking train scary thanks to moody, dark lighting and the spectre of an alien monster haunting it.

After some skulking in the shadows and the emergence of a tentacle-like monster, the Doctor finally makes her appearance, with the show having established the new companions first. This is a pretty neat decision, as not only does it re-establish the ‘companion as audience focal point’ aspect which tends to make the show compelling, but ensures the Doctor has to act on her wits to stop the monsters rather than waving her sonic around to make sure she establishes her credentials as a hero in her first real scene since regenerating.

One of the smaller touches I liked was when Rahul, a man whose sister was murdered by one of Tim Shaw’s race and originally took the pod he came from as part of an attempt to work out what happened to her, only to be killed himself. When the Doctor and co discover the warehouse he was using to research it, the episode does a great job of taking a scene which could’ve just been exposition about how the creature works and gives us an idea of who Rahul was and what he was doing. It makes it feel like Chibnall cares about fleshing out the show’s minor characters far more than Moffat tended to, where so often it was all about the Doctor and a tiny handful of people who were worth caring about and all the people around them were also-rans. If this is something he intends on doing more often, I’d be delighted to see it.

Similarly good was Karl, the construction worker who seems to be an insubstantial background character in the train scene only for the episode to give him a real personality, an insecure young man employed by his dad desparate to prove himself, and ending up embarrassing himself to the Doctor once he does what he thinks to be the heroic thing. It’s a shame the episode didn’t really follow up on this besides the Doctor briefly chastising him, but it’s still a big improvement on how side characters have been written in recent series and a potential new direction for the series to go.

On top of this, the villains were quite good. Tim Shaw was an intimidating monster with a cool design, as were the cyborg aliens he had working with him, and the honorific monster species concept was clever, the Doctor using the specificity expected of his conquest to threaten him in a much cleverer way than simply intimidating him by saying she’s the Doctor. 

The idea of Tim Shaw taking teeth from his victims to wear as trophies was a gruesome touch, although it does lead me onto a problem I had with the episode: in some places, the editing was odd, especially with the Doctor and Ryan just describing Rahul’s dead body without the audience seeing it, because apparently showing him with a tooth missing would be over the line for Doctor Who somehow.

The way the Doctor dealt with Tim Shaw at the end was also a bit of a cop out, with her simply telling him how she disabled the explosives in her and the others’ necks and fed them back into his with the Sonic Screwdriver without us seeing a proper indication it would happen beforehand or even how she could do so. It’s not an enormous problem, but it did annoy me a little.

As far as performances go, I can say without any doubt that Whittaker is great as the new Doctor. She manages to capture the kind of manic energy that defines the Doctor without overdoing it, and while being a likeable lead manages not to overshadow the other characters or be treated as the most amazing and awesome person in the universe, two problems which I constantly had with the Moffat era. It doesn’t hammer in the Doctor being a woman, either, with a quick reference or two to the Doctor’s gender before simply going on with the story.

I have to be honest, I wasn’t sure about the show having so many companions, especially given this is the first time since An Unearthly Child that three new regulars have all been introduced in the same episode, and because of how infamously difficult writing three companions proved in the 1980s with one of Adric, Nyssa or Tegan usually being visibly relegated to the sidelines in each story. But I think this episode did a good job of doing so. Ryan was a little annoying in places, being a bit headstrong (especially with throwing his bike off the hillside), but I can understand it’s part of his character and hopefully he’ll grow on me. I like Yaz a lot more so far, given that we get the sense she’s being underappreciated by the police and she seems more mature and suited to being a companion than Ryan at this point.

Graham and Grace were also nicely done, with Graham seeming to mature a little as the episode goes on and become more likeable as he becomes less in denial of the Doctor and the others. He’s also a little reminiscent of Wilf as an older man with close links to the Doctor, which I’m open to as I really liked Wilf and seeing a permanent companion as much older as Graham is than Ryan and Yaz (and how the Doctor looks) could set up an interesting dynamic. On top of that, Grace was very well handled, with the episode building her up as more adventurous and heroic as Graham only to have her die helping them all, proving pause for thought for Graham and giving us the very touching funeral scene (although I’m not sure the rest of Ryan’s vlog being about her was necessary, since he could’ve just spoken at her funeral as well as Graham).

I do have two small gripes that are a little more personal: the first was the absence of the show’s iconic theme. I was really looking forward to hearing Segun Akinola’s version of the theme and a new title sequence, but instead of a cold open and then the titles we just got an ending theme, at which point it felt kinda underwhelming. I understand that Chibnall probably wants to avoid alienating a new audience who might not have watched Doctor Who with its older trappings, but ditching the theme strikes me as a bit unnecessary.

The other, and obviously this is something the show could fix next week, is the cliffhanger into the second episode with the Doctor, Ryan, Yaz and Graham floating in space. Why aren’t they dead and why did they not get back to the TARDIS (which I was also interested to see the new iteration of and didn’t get to, incidentally)? I guess maybe we’ll find out next week.

But all in all, I think The Woman Who Fell To Earth is a promising start for the Chibnall era. It’s fixed a lot of issues I had with Moffat’s era, introduced a strong cast and style of storytelling, and has me excited to see what’ll come next. It’s a brave new vision for fans and a great jumping-on point for newcomers.

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