The Woman Who Fell To Earth
(Season 11, Dr 13 with Graham, Ryan and Yaz, 7/10/2018, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Childs)
Rank: 284
'A new Doctor is born in the stillness of morning
In the start of a whole new era that yet leaves me
yawning
It’s about endless love, in infinity so small
Yet nothing seems to happen barely at all
In this corner of space
In this dark universe
In…Sheffield?’
We’ve had ‘Life On Mars’ (it was the Ice Warriors or maybe The Flood) and multiple stories about being ‘Heroes (Just For One Day)’ while ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ is kind of ‘Ashes To Ashes’ (if you squint. A lot) so now it’s another Bowie reference where ‘The Man Who Feel To Earth’ has regenerated into a woman. Although ‘Absolute Beginners’ might have been better given that this is another debut Doctor story. Or ‘A Space Oddity’ given how weird the threat from space turned out to be (definitely not ‘Fashion’ given the new Doctor’s dress sense. Things aren’t ‘Hunky Dory’ either. Graham is something of a ‘Laughing Gnome’. Alright you’re safe, I’ve run out of Bowie songs now). Anyway, here we are at the start of yet another era of Who, with a new lead, new companions and a new showrunner all at once for the first time since ‘The Eleventh Hour’ eight years earlier, all of which have to be introduced at speed. The first stories of any new run are tough to write: they have to sell a completely new era by grabbing a whole new potential audience by being contemporary enough to other TV (including a whole new generation to whom this will be their introduction to Dr Who and the default mode through which all stories from the past will be watched) without being so very different you ‘alienate’ your core audience. ‘We can evolve by staying true to who we are’ as The Doctor herself puts it at one stage of the story. Alas this story scores badly on all of those fronts: it’s too boring and longwinded to make you want to rush back next week, too dull and slow. It’s too adult for kids with its central conceit of grief and petty family squabbles. And for oldies it’s pretty poor recycling. The obvious thing to do is to keep things simple, to put your characters front and centre in a story that gives them just enough jeopardy to vanquish, a ruse that Dr Who has used many times in the past. ‘Spearhead From Space’ and it’s plastic mannequins most obviously (a story Davies nicked from for the Autons in his debut story ‘Rose’ and Moffat borrowed for the hospital setting in ‘11th Hour’. Chibnall makes it three out of three by borrowing the look of the ‘space pods’). But to do that you have to a clear and scary central threat and interesting characters you want to follow for the next few Saturday nights. Chibnall doesn’t quite do either of those things either. The result is, even more than ‘Deep Breath’ (a story with which this one has a lot in common), an awfully anticlimactic way to start a fresh era of the show, a poor re-tread of what has come before with only the odd toe dipped into new places where the show should never go. Dr Who has fallen to Earth with a bump.
Certainly re-watching
this story after the end of the Jodie Whittaker run is a very different
experience to watching it at the time though, now that we can see which bits
were quirks of this particular episode and which were of the series as a whole.
At the time I might have put this one right at the bottom rung of the ladder,
given that it lacks the 'special' feel of all the other Who debuts - a lowkey
start to a new era with a bonkers but pathetic new enemy, no links to the past
beyond the name (not even the Tardis) and post regenerative trauma that makes
the Dr quite unwatchably bonkers for long periods. Most of all though the
chance to see the universe through a whole new showrunner's eyes is reduced to
wandering around the uglier parts of Sheffield in the dark. Watching it
again though, knowing we won’t be doing most of this ever again, lets you enjoy
the things that the rest of the Chibnall era didn't really do. Keeping so much
of it to the 4 regulars (plus Graham’s wife Grace) gives them all more
character than they'll ever have again, in time we'll get so bored of old
monsters returning Tzim-Sha doesn't seem so bad and it makes a nice change
seeing industrial Sheffield rather than alien planets or trips to London and
Wales. Oh and that post regenerative trauma? Actually it's gone within a few
minutes and this regeneration of the Dr is really going to be as bonkers and chatterboxy
as that for thirty whole episodes.
The general feeling at
the time was disappointment. Not least because this re-boot looked so very
different from everything the publicity has promised us: Jodie Whittaker was
revealed as The Doctor in a very clumsy yet colourful way, walking through a
woodland near her home with her hoodies over her head and a Tardis prop hastily
convened, revealed at the worst possible time (in the run-up to the Wimbledon
finals, when even I was annoyed they were ruining the atmosphere with another
programme, even one I loved). It looked fairytale-like, bright, lush. Further
promo snippets emphasised that this story was going to be more whimsical, more
ethereal, more other-worldly, more glamorous. And what did we get? An hour in
Sheffield, shot mostly in the dark, with a story that starts with a teenager
(trying to) ride a bicycle, moves to an ugly railway carriage (all planets have
a Northern Rail!) and ends up with a big climax on top of a building site. It
just felt weird, as if we’d put the wrong disc in the DVD player. Future
stories will throw in a bit of what we were expecting (particularly ‘The Ghost
Monument’ the following week) but by and large this is how the Chris Chibnall
era of the show will be from now on, mud and grime and spiders and frogs and
industry and warehouses and pollution while most future stories will also be predominantly
shot in the dark. It’s a feeling that never quite left me during what is
undeniably a new low era for the show (and funnily enough a low one in the
opposite way of the mid-1980s rut when everything was too bright, too garish,
too action-packed, with this one too dark, too slow, too thoughtful). While most of us crossed our fingers and said
‘ah well, maybe it’ll be better next time?’ there was a sinking feeling that if
Dr Who was going to be like this each and every week maybe it was best to hop
off the Tardis here and now and save ourselves some angst.
Of course most people
tuned in just to see what the series’ first female Doctor would be like. A lot
had been written – and I mean a lot – about how the show might change, with a
lot of fans claiming it would kill off the show and another lot thinking it
might be the kick in the teeth the show needed after a general slide in quality
across the Moffat years (though series ten was very much a rise upwards
again). Of course it wasn’t quite
either. The idea of a female Doctor had first been mentioned by Tom Baker when
he left the show in 1981, originally as a joke to annoy new producer John
Nathan-Turner (with whom he didn’t get on and who hated being embroiled in
publicity wars he didn’t start himself) but it made a few fans wonder. Why
couldn’t there be a female Doctor? This is a fictional scifi series where the
lead gets a new face every few series and changes his personality, his face and
his features. Why not his gender as well? Moffat too had paved the way for this
by having The Master and a few other timelords regenerate into women. I have
some sympathies with this: the only actual reason it a bit of continuity in the
1970s that ‘time ladies’ were distinct from the men and had a better, more
gentile life away from all the politics (notably Rodan in ’Invasion Of Time’, though Romana is a
Time Lady too). Times change though and so do timelords. I admit I was torn:
the Doctor is the one decent role model blokes have that isn’t an action hero,
who uses his brains rather than his brawn (yet isn’t a comedy sidekick) and who
saves the day by being clever, courageous and kind. There are already lots of
female role-models like that. Far better would be to have a character who was
as interesting as The Doctor with all his powers and very much his equal but
independent (like River Song would have been had her entire life not been built
up around The Doctor’s). But I also saw the joy on the faces of little girls
who finally got to cos-play ‘as’ The Doctor, after decades of being stuck as
the companion, and took Jodie to their hearts. To be honest my first thought,
when I heard the rumours that ‘the woman from Broadchurch’ had been cast
(Chibnall’s hit detective show starring David Tennant and Arthur Darvill) my
first instinct was ‘yahoo, they got Olivia Coleman, she’s going to be
fantastic, mumsy but fierce!’ In the end Chibnall does a very clever thing
though. The best scene in the story comes near the beginning when The Doctor
has fallen to Earth and future companion Yaz tries to take charge. ‘If you’d
like to come with me madam’ she starts before The Doctor looks puzzled. ‘Why
are you calling me madam?’ ‘Because you’re a woman’ splutters Yaz. ‘Oh am I?
Does it suit me?’ she replies then that’s it, with no more interest in her
gender than her hair and eye colour. That was by far the best way to play it:
this still is The Doctor and their gender is incidental for the most part.
Now, I did and still do
have problems with what this Doctor will be. This really wasn’t the time to
create a Doctor that falls into all the female stereotypes of being a ditsy
blonde scatterbrained chatterbox and there will be times in the future when Dr
13 will be the most irritating character in the room, either being anti-social
and rude or standing around in the background of her own series while the
baddies do things to her. However I have to say there’s none of that in this
debut where The Doctor gets to do all sorts of things she’ll never do again.
This is a story that very much revolves around her, where she gets to do
physical things rather than be passive (she even leaps from a crane to catch
the baddy), has her ordering people around (‘come on!’) and where she’s
naturally the centre of attention even when she’s not trying to be. All this despite
not having the Tardis or the sonic screwdriver. She’s also brilliantly
eccentric and uncaring in a way she’s never allowed to be again, with the scene
of her buying her clothes randomly from a charity shop what her Doctor should
have been (and why have no previous Doctors ever done that? It seems obvious in
retrospect. Check out the smirk on Mandip’s face when Yaz suggests to The
Doctor that she should ‘get out of those clothes’. Does the ‘Thasmin’ romance
start this early?!) While she’s a bit manic, as many recently regenerated
timelords are, Dr 13 has none of the anti-social awkwardness of later stories
too and is if anything a far more personable Doctor, cheekily telling Yaz that
‘I can call you Yaz from now on because we’re friends’ and making it seem the
most natural thing in the world – even though, thirty odd stories on, she’s
still struggling to talk to Yaz about anything. Thankfully she’ll always be
bright, as girls tend to be compared to boys (sorry, lads, it’s true!) but here
it comes naturally rather than being a last minute moment of inspiration from
someone who doubts their own cleverness as per later. I wouldn’t say Jodie
Whittaker nails the part or anything (she still seems a bit lost at times) but
she’s clearly far more comfortable with this sort of dynamic role than the one
she got later (and Jodie is a friendly personable soul, rather than the awkward
regeneration she portrays), so why did Chibnall change it? My guess is
two-fold. The casting took a while so it could well be that Chibnall worked on
this script without knowing who the new Doctor is yet and leaving them to fill
in the ‘gaps’ (not that unusual ‘Spearhead’
‘Robot’ and ‘Time
and The Rani’ were all written the same way) and instead wrote it for a
combination of the two Doctors he’d made scripts of already, the manic cheeky
charm of Dr 1- and the eccentricity and gabbling of Dr 11. Only later did he
put his tweaks to the regeneration to make it more ‘his’ and, like many script
editors/showrunners before him, re-moulded her into a version of himself
(Chibnall is lovely but he doesn’t have the charisma of Davies or the quiet
confidence of Moffat and does tend to hang in the background more. He’s a
listener where the other two are talkers, a trait Dr 13 will adopt too). There
will be flashes of greatness across Jodie’s run and times (specifically ‘Fugitive of the Judoon’ ‘Village of The Angels’ and ‘Eve Of the Daleks’) when she’ll connect with the
writing and nail her particular Doctor. But they don’t happen often enough,
because that isn’t her Doctor. She should have been more like this version,
running around being madly brilliant, and it’s only understandable nerves that
prevent this from being her greatest moment as The Doctor.
Unfortunately the
companions never really come alive and while they get far more character
development here than in future stories you still never quite know who they are
by the time they leave. The story starts by centring on Ryan and he is in some
ways the most developed, probably because Chibnall based him on someone he
knew, his nephew. However you have to ask how much time Chibnall actually spent
with him because Ryan is not like any teenager you’ve ever met. He’s the sort
of person who sees the entirety of space and time and then shrug and go back to
playing video games with his mates. He has no ambition no drive, no anything
and yet he’s not the jaded sort who couldn’t care less about anyone either – we
do see Ryan’s emotional passionate side, usually when someone is dissing his
family. Most of the time though he’s so laidback it’s a wonder he can sit on a
chair without falling off it. Which brings me to my biggest issue: Ryan has
dyspraxia, because that’s what Chibnall’s nephew had and he wanted to bring
attention to an under-discussed condition. As a fellow sufferer that’s
brilliant - we need more role models – but here’s the thing, nothing Ryan ever
does matches mine or anyone else’s experience with dyspraxia. It’s a
co-ordination issue, where your brain scrambles signals from your body, which
means you’re always tripping over air, pouring drinks on yourself and
struggling to do anything that involves motor skills like running, jumping,
catching, cutting with scissors, colouring in, tying shoelaces, basically all
the things that everyone else can do by the age of six and you never can no
matter how much you try. It’s an incredibly irritating, frustrating condition
which you learn to cover up early and where you learn to avoid certain
activities like the plague. The 'struggling to climb stairs' scene also hints
that Ryan can overcome his co-ordination problems if he really tries hard
enough. Trust me, you can't, it doesn’t work like that, you can’t turn it on
and off and you can’t ever rely on your co-ordination the way other people can,
even if there are days when its better than others. Not knowing what body you’re
going to wake up in (another thing they could so easily have linked back to the
regenerated Doctor if they’d tried) and being at the mercy of your own
uncontrollable brain is the most frustrating thing on the planet. Yet Ryan is
the least frustrated Human in the entire series. No way would a true dyspraxic
be playing sport for pleasure the way Ryan often does, no way would he able to
shoot guns while running (not without falling over) and no way would he be riding
a bicycle the way he is when we first meet him (you learn early on that balance
while telling your lefts from right is just too much guesswork for your brain).
As a dyspraxic I can't tell you how much the scenes of him trying and failing
to ride a bike made me wince. Even undiagnosed I knew at 8 that riding bikes
just wasn't going to be a thing for me. Ryan is 19 and knows why he can't ride
one. Presumably the scenes of him trying and failing over and over again are
meant to make him seem determined and for it to seem endearing. But it doesn't.
So he can't ride a bike? No problem - he's old enough so that everyone's out in
cars by then anyway. Had they made his dyspraxia make him fail his test and
make him depressed about ever keeping up with his peers I would have believed
it more. We don't get much representation on TV; it matters a lot when they get
it this wrong. Ryan never seems quite real. Because he isn’t. Now had they made
Ryan the ‘clever’ one, who used his brains and got the others to do all the
running around and who secretly wishes he was like the others (while they
secretly wished they could be like him), now that would make him ‘real’ and be
a true source of drama. Instead Ryan just sort of drifts through life. Even the
death of his Granny seems to barely affect him. The biggest problem with Ryan
though is that he’s so seemingly emotionless we hardly ever learn what he’s
thinking or feeling. He just sort of ‘is’. Tosin Cole struggles too with a part
that demand he play younger (he’s really twenty-six not nineteen; Sharon,
playing his granny, is exactly twice his age!) and it’s hard to tell whether
Ryan’s habit of standing at the back of shot looking bored is based on the
character or because he wants to fire his agent for getting him a job he
clearly has no interest in.
Yaz, his old
schoolfriend, doesn’t feel too real either though at least Mandip Gill is a bit
more enthusiastic about being here. In this first story she feels like she has
fra more promise, a newly trained policewoman out of her depth fighting
monsters from space and trying to do everything by the book even though it’s
obvious that this is not always possible. She’s a cross between Romana
(booksmart but life-thick) and the Brigadier (bringing the story back to Earth)
and had they continued with that across her run of thirty episodes (she’s the
only companion to ever stay as long as a Doctor barring UNIT; even Jamie missed
Dr 2’s debut story) she might have flourished into an interesting character,
rooting Dr 13 to Earth. But they seem to forget all that in future stories
where Yaz is the ultimate companion whose function is to ask ‘why?’ and nothing
more. The trouble with Yaz is that she too never gives away what she’s thinking
or feeling – as a police cadet she’s been trained to keep her feelings out of
things, but even before that you suspect she was a ‘keep calm and carry on’
type who just got on with tidying up the mess made by her siblings. It’s really
hard to imagine Yaz and Ryan hanging about at lunchtime: ‘You ok?’ ‘Yeah you?’
‘Yeah, sandwich?’ ‘Thanks’. That would be it, for the entire lunch break.
Mandip, aged thirty in this first story, also struggles to play younger and
have Yaz be the naïve innocent she needs to be, while in her first appearance
she doesn’t have her future central character trait of being loyal to The
Doctor come what may (when she’ll be more like Jamie! In, umm, trousers). Of
all the companions, though, Yaz is the closest to Chibnall and the one that
feels most like ‘him’, the way Rose and particularly Donna are Russell T in
fancy dress (gobby in other words) and Amy is Moffat personified, feisty and
Scottish.
That leaves Graham, who
is by far the most interesting character especially across the first year. When
Bradley Walsh, a TV quiz host, was cast we all groaned (not least for the
hypocrisy: there’s a hilarious video of Chibnall on a TV panel criticising John
Nathan-Turner for the ‘stunt casting’ of Bonnie Langford, an extra on the ‘Time and The Rani’ DVD). Actually he’s
surprisingly good. Graham is another character who will be out of his depth for
most of the time during his run (honestly when were there ever three such
useless companion around at the same time?) but he’ll be a lot better at
voicing it. For the most part he’s the comedy relief, cutting through the
metaphors and high-falluting concept with his supply of sandwiches and his
ready quips, but he’s also the character most able to voice his feelings too.
The end of the story for instance, where he loses his new wife Grace, is
something Bradley would never ever have been called on to do before and he does
it rather well. He’ll get better too in stories built around Graham’s feelings
(he’s the highlight of ‘It Takes You Away’ where
Grace’s sort-of ghost comes back). Even he never feels fully three-dimensional
though. The three of them never feel like a ‘team’ despite spending two whole
years together (as long as Rose and Dr 9 and 10 put together and way longer
than the likes of Susan and Ace had in pure minutes) – for the most part they
don’t even seem as if they like each other and it’s a puzzle why they hang
around as long as they do (at least when they tried a similar thing in the Peter
Davison years Adric and Nyssa were planet-less orphans and Tegan was trying to
get home). Oh well it could have been worse. One of the many issues with the
Chibnall era are the lacklustre supporting characters and there’s an awful
moment when it looks as if comedy relief crane operator Karl is joining too (he
has shared many of the adventures after all).
The solution seems
obvious: there’s an amazing companion-to-be in this story, one who is erudite,
courageous, intelligent and emotional, someone who feels like a fully thought
out contradictory person. She's sassy, funny, naughty, rebellious, caring and
has all the best lines. Unfortunately Chibnall’s decision to kill Grace off
might just be the single dumbest decision in all of his four years running the
show. Sharon Clarke is clearly having the time of her life playing her and
outshines all her co-stars to the point where they recede into the background
early on and never quite come out of the shadows and she’s an obvious companion
in a way we’ve never had before (till now Barbara ad Donna have been the oldest
TV female TV companions and both were only around thirty; having someone this
enthusiastic for life getting a second chance in their fifties, rather like
Evelyn Smythe over in the Big Finish audios, could have been great. Graham
moping and cracking the odd joke is no substitute). It’s a suicidal move to
kill her off, not least because it’s handled so badly and a waste of drama.
Grace could have died saving The Doctor, putting her in debt to Graham and Ryan
for the rest of their travels. Grace could have saved Graham, giving him a
crisis of confidence and survivors guilt till The Doctor encourages him to use
his life to save other people the way she did him. The baddy Tzim Zha (aka Tim
Shaw; neither suit him) also kills Grace indirectly when she happens to be
standing near something he explodes while shooting at The Doctor: how much
stronger would ‘The Battle Of Ranskoor Av Kolas’
have been if Graham had been seeking out revenge for a direct murder than a
mere accident? But then why bother
putting in the death of a loved one at all if you’re going to have four
characters who don’t know how to grieve properly (The Doctor is too awkward to
know what to say, yaz is all stiff upper lip, Ryan is emotionless and Graham
laughs so he doesn’t start crying).
Even so, I like the theme
of grief which crops up a lot in this story It feels as if Chibnall sat down to
watch Moffat’s stories properly and began to think about how he would do things
differently. Moffat famously couldn’t kill anyone off properly, starting with a
story where ‘everybody lives!’ (‘The
Empty Child’). It became a game: which character is going to not-quite-die
this week (and why is it Rory, again?) Chibnall’s strongest suit across all his
stories is that they’re rooted in the ‘real’ world, where people get hurt and
people die, including the goodies. Even The Doctor talks about regeneration as
‘the feeling that you’re dying’, right up until the last second when ‘suddenly
you’re born instead’ (a more graphic take than the more spiritual idea behind ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ ‘Logopolis’ and ‘The End Of Time’). Somebody had to die in this
story, just to prove that the rules were different and it’s the one you least
expect, the plucky heroic ful of life one who would usually be guaranteed to
last till the end credits. They actually talk about it too, The Doctor hanging
round for the funeral rather than rushing off (suggesting she spends a week or
so in Sheffield without her Tardis. Is she in Graham’s suddenly empty spare room?
That must have taken a lot of explaining to all the well-wishers dropping in to
see him!) and offering up a speech about her own lost family and how she ‘even
though they’re gone from the world they’re never gone from me’, which means
well even if it’s a bit glib and more something you say in a greetings card
than in a memorable speech. Still, at least they acknowledge it. The title and
the opening, narrated by Ryan on his vlog, are clever too: when you first see
them you think it’s a cliché take on people having their lives changed by The
Doctor. It’s only after the end of the episode you realise they’re referring to
Grace, an ‘ordinary’ Human who fell to Earth to stop monsters from space and is
every bit the incredible amazing woman who changed Ryan’s life. A little more
of that audience teasing and misdirection would have done wonders.
Equally I kind of like
this story’s setting in the heart of industrial Sheffield, so different to
Rose’s debut in the heart of London or Amy’s in rural Scotland, surrounded by
girders and steel (which also hep The Doctor rebuild her sonic screwdriver). In
time the repetition of warehouses, rubbish tips and dark dingy basements will
get boring but at the time it was a nice surprise, rooting a series that had to
often flown away with the fairies back in the real world. The cinematography
across this story is sublime too: they somehow manage to make even Sheffield at
night look beautiful and full marks to the director Jamie Childs and especially
the lighting director (uncredited, annoyingly, even in the extended credits
online) who somehow also manage to make such an ordinary place look
extraordinary. It’s also the one part of
this story that’s ‘bold’ rather than ‘old’ and something this series had never
really done before (although it has to be said the entire finale, at the
construction site, is ripped off wholesale from our old friend ‘Quatermass’ (and
not all that far removed from Dr 4’s fall in ‘Logopolis’ referenced in a few later
stories).
Alas there’s nothing much
else to go on. The plot, for what it’s worth, recycles the ‘DNA capsules’ idea
from ‘The Next Doctor’ and has an
alien come to Earth to look for it, to turn it into a ‘bomb’ (like so many Dr Who
stories). Chibnall has at ;east done his research: genetic bombs are an actual
thing, a theoretical weapon where high doses of radiation or an agent known as
doxorubicin can wipe out your enemy by wiping out their DNA coding (the way you
can wipe old magnetic tape), which means your body can’t renew its cells and
you die by degrees as your body stops working piece by piece. Which, in an
episode about The Doctor renewing theirs, could have been a really scary threat
(this Doctor can’t re-grow a hand but might un-grow all her body parts!) But
instead of making a point about it, this aspect is just there – no one connects
the dots. Equally this story could have been a welcome chance to focus on
identity what with the Doctor’s post-regenerational amnesia and her actually
rather good speech about what it feels like to regenerate (and feeling ‘echoes
of who you once were, slowly moving instinctively towards something and hoping
for the best’). Instead the two plot points are never connected, something
Chibnall is going to be doing a lot of from now on. As for the baddy he’s a
disappointment. Chibs didn’t talk as openly as his predecessors about what he
was going to do but one thing he mentioned was avoiding old monsters because he
wanted to build up a pantheon of his own. After all, the universe is a big
place – it’s a bit silly if the same old species keep turning up time after
time. Great we thought, Chibnall must be bursting with ideas and this might be
a return of the Troughton ‘monster era full of new colourful baddies all with
their own distinctive colourings and motives.
Alas it will be a quirk of the Chibnall years that he can’t create new alien species for toffee and all of them will be pale re-treads of monsters who came before (by contrast, when he listens to feedback and brings old monsters back again, he’s actually pretty good at writing for them, breathing new life into Daleks, Judoon and Weeping Angels who feature in his best stories). Tim is a terrible disappointment, a sort of cross between a Sontaron and the Terminator who fell asleep at the tattoo parlour. He talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk and doesn’t do much besides threaten (even Grace’s death is by accident, not design) while his only ‘new’ feature is the repellent thought that he takes teeth from his victims to use in his mouth as a trophy (he needs to be chasing lantern fish from ‘A Christmas Carol’, not Humans!) He’s so forgettable I couldn’t actually remember who he was when he popped up in the series finale ten weeks after this episode and I wasn’t the only one judging by re-actions online going ‘eh?’ The Doctor defeats him in the simplest way possible by using his own weapons against him – on the plus side that’s more proactive than anything Dr 13 will do for the rest of her run; on the minus side it’s excruciatingly anti-climactical after an hour of running around.
The overall feeling then
is one of disappointment. It’s not that ‘Woman’ is bad, just bland and empty (it
would have felt overlong in the usual forty-five minute slot but somehow this
is dragged out needlessly to sixty-five). There’s nothing here to get your
teeth into, no exciting vision for what this new era will be. It’s as if,
having made the bold decision to cast a female Doctor, all of Chibnall’s nerve
left him and he played safe everywhere else on a story that always feels as if,
like Yaz, it’s following the rulebook and too afraid to shake things up. This
era of the series badly needed it and you could argue that after six series of
increasingly complex timey wimey non-linear Moffat stories we needed something
a bit simpler. But to do that you have to do simplicity well, to have
characters you care for in a story that matters and Chibnall doesn’t do that
either. If this was the very first Dr Who story and I’d never seen another one
before it I wouldn’t have tuned in for another – it was more in the hope that things
would get better and build on its promise I kept tuning in (and they did, after
a fashion). Apparently it was too little for other fans too, for the publicity
worked: a very healthy 8.2million people saw this story overnight, with 10.95 million
when i-player figures and repeats are taken into account (admittedly perhaps
the unusual Sunday slot gave it a boost, as so many people are out on the
traditional Saturdays) compared to 5.7million for ‘Twice
Upon a Time’ (and that was on at Christmas when there are always more
people watching!) Yet near the end of the run (with Dr 13’s penultimate story ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ it had fallen to a
pathetic 2.2million. Even accounting for changes in how people watch telly
that’s a lot of people to lose in just four ish years and evidence that
something has gone badly wrong somewhere with luring in new fans. Had this
story and the ones after it been unrelentingly dreadful I would have done the
same. For the most part this story, which starts with a literal train wreck and
an actual fall from the Heavens continues both metaphorically with one mistake
after another. But here’s the thing: there are sparks of greatness scattered
across every Chibnall script somewhere and this one isn’t immune. Though most
of this story is a waste of celluloid the moments that actually matter are
great: when The Doctor opens up about her regeneration, when Graham is
struggling to cope with losing Grace, or when all hope looks lost at the construction
site. But these are fleeting moments and the bits in between them are frustratingly
ordinary. After all this is a story with a whole new showrunner, a whole new
companions, a new monster and three new companions to get to know. If even this
story is playing things by numbers what hope the ones that follow? Dr Who hasn’t
crashed, not yet, but it’s clearly in freefall.
POSITIVES + Chibnall
sticks all his best jokes in this episode, most of them said by The Doctor. My
favourite comes when she’s still trying to piece her memories together and
hears about what Tim Shaw is up to. “That’s exciting,” she says “No, not exciting. What do I
mean? Worrying.” The whole post regenerational aspect, of trying to piece together
your personality and remembering words is handled well all round actually, the
first time since ‘Castrovalva’ that
the series has actually stopped to think about what changing personality and
coming out a whole new person would feel like.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Things She Felt While Falling’ is Chris Chibnall’s contribution
to the lockdown tweetalong, not so much a prequel or sequel as much as an
extension of the opening to his first story as showrunner. This story re-tells the
Doctor’s fall to Earth and into the middle of a Sheffield railway carriage from
the Doctor’s point of view. A five page stream of consciousness, it captures
Jodie Whittaker’s rat-a-tat delivery well as she talks to herself, though it
doesn’t add a lot you wouldn’t already have guessed. The best part: the Doctor
can’t work out whether the Tardis has exploded or dematerialised so coins a new
word ‘dematerialexploding’. Weirdly the Doctor looks through her new
characteristics the way other people would their clothes (does she do that
every regeneration or just this one? It might explain why she’s one of the more
self-conscious Doctors) and figures that above all she’s an ‘optimist’ who is
‘kind’. I’m not sure how Dr 13 can work that out while doing nothing else but
falling – and it’s not strictly true given what we see on screen where she’s
the most distant, randomly angry and least friendly Doctor of them all in many
ways (except, perhaps, for the special case of the War Doctor). A bit of filler
and not much more really, but of course the current showrunner was going to be
represented by something and actually Chibnall is better at words on paper than
he is dialogue spoken out loud.
Previous ‘Twice Upon A Time’ next ‘The Ghost Monument’
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