The Pilot
(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 15/4/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Lawrence Gough)
Rank: 167
On the Doctor Who weather channel tonight: the sun's going to explode and turn supernova! Though not for a few million years yet, don't worry. Also, watch out for snow - especially when built into snowmen that have been possessed by The Great intelligence. Oh and if you see a fog do not enter it or you might find yourself part of some 'war games’. Watch out for Sutekh’s gift of sandstorms (unless you remember to bring the gift of a broom to sweep them up). And if you’re an alien monster tyrant then look out for ‘the oncoming storm…’ Have a nice day! Err, those of you who aren't being invaded right now anyway...'
We Doctor Who fans had become so used to big flashy attention-grabbing series opener re-boots that this low-key story really wrong-footed us and we didn’t quite know what to make of it. You see Dr Who had been off the air for an unprecedented long time; taking two Christmas stories out of the equation it had been a full sixteen months since the last ‘regular’ Who episode – everyone was expecting a big budget special effects filled bang, not a story like this where not a lot happens and there are no big monsters to fight except a dripping ghostly girl; by 2017 we were so used to saving the universe every five minutes that ‘The Pilot’ risks coming off as, well, a bit wet. The monster isn’t really a monster, the threat isn’t really a threat and far from a mass invasion of Earth with all the special effects that entails the ‘monster’ never gets further than a car park (and, err, some toilets in Australia). The more I re-watch this story though the more I like it, both as a standalone episode and as a change of pace that runs throughout the much improved series ten. It’s simple, but sweet, making good use of lots of things that are in the Dr Who arsenal but which the series doesn’t use very often: as well as the usual comedy, drama and scifi it’s a romance (err, of a sort) with a realistic ‘kitchen sink’ realism feel to it as well that makes it feel more like a soap opera. Only in a different way to the Russell T Davies formula of including wives and husbands and mothers: this is the Doctor on outskirts of real life going on every day, rather than the outskirts of real life happening on the edge of The Doctor’s adventures. It almost feels like the start of a different show – hence the clever, punning title which refers to the idea of a ‘Pilot’ being the ‘launch’ show for a series (to see if a first episode will ‘fly’ before a network orders a full series) and is about an alien pilot of a space-puddle – and it’s one of the biggest stylistic changes we’ve ever had on Dr Who between episodes without a change of Doctor or production team. Clearly Steven Moffat was hoping to lure in a whole new audience with this story, looking at Dr Who with fresh eyes as he re-introduces the Whoniverse slowly, as if assuming the people at home had never seen it before.
Why suddenly do this now in year ten of the ‘comeback’ series? And why the big gap between episodes? Well, it was all due to a mixup. Steven Moffat wasn’t intending to write this series at all. As far as he was concerned ‘Hell Bent’ was going to be his last story and he’d already lined up his replacement: one time Torchwood runner and occasional Who writer Chris Chibnall. The writer was ecstatic to be asked to take over but had a few issues: basically he had too much on his plate. His crime series ‘Broadchurch’ starring past Who alumni David Tennant and Arthur Darvill alongside future Who alumni Jodie Whittaker had been the runaway success of 2013 and it was no surprise that the BBC wanted more, despite being the very definition of a ‘one shot’ series. It was a surprise that they ordered a third series at the same time as the second though and Chibnall had to see that through to fruition first. It became clear early on he wouldn’t be ready for the Christmas special as hoped; keen not to lose the lucrative spot Moffat wrote that as a ‘filler’, coming up with ‘The Husbands Of River Song’ as a second farewell. Then a year went by so Moffat wrote another festive special cashing in on the craze for super-heroes ‘The Return Of Dr Mysterioso’. Then it became clear it would be another year, so Moffat got back to work for a full year, introducing a new one-season companion to go alongside Dr 12 so as to clear the slate again when Chibnall absolutely honestly definitely took over in 2018. As much of a pain as this must have been for Moffat it was the best thing to happen to the showrunner’s writing in years: there’s a real sense of joy and enthusiasm that had been missing in his work across the Peter Capaldi years as he puts all thought of complex series arcs and responsibilities to bed and simply writes for the hell of it, enjoying the chance to write for Dr Who all over again. He also tries to look at the series with new eyes finding new ways to say old things and re-introducing everything firmly through the eyes of the companion (rather than The Doctor the way he had with ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and his other soft re-boot ‘Deep Breath’).
What’s been quite a
sizeable gap on telly has been quite a sizeable gap for The Doctor too. For the
past fifty years or so he’s been working (unpaid but unbothered) as a lecturer
at the fictional St Luke’s University (in reality Cardiff University or the
outside of it at least – the inside is the Reardon Smith Theatre at the
National Museum of Wales), with Nardole as his assistant. It’s a really clever
idea: the 12th Doctor has always had something of the ‘mad professor’ about him
and this is the perfect job for Peter Capaldi’s incarnation, where he can
pontificate and talk to himself and be as eccentric as he likes. It also
mirrors the plot of ‘Shada’ where it was fellow timelord Professor Chronotis
working as a mad professor in the one institution where being eccentric and
acting a bit alien seems entirely normal. Of course they aren’t very normal
lectures at all: they’re mad talks about anything and everything, that say
they’re going to be ‘about’ physics but end up being about philosophy or poetry
because, as a seasoned traveller, they’re all the ‘same thing’ to The Doctor
(another lift from Douglas Adams and his ‘Dirk Gently’ detective books, where
falling down a rabbit-hole of, say, Bach piano pieces ends up giving Dirk his
scientific breakthrough needed to crack a case). I love the way he’ s decorated
his office with random bits of furniture from different Earth periods and has
two photographs on his desk like the cliché of executives with their own office
(his family spouse River Song and grand-daughter Susan) as well as a collection
of old sonic screwdrivers where his pens would normally go. It’s also a neat
mirror to where we began in ‘An Unearthly Child’ only with The Doctor as the
mysterious teacher who intrigues his brilliantly down-to-earth pupil, seeing
him anew through new eyes. Goodness only knows what career Bill could possibly
have from a degree with The Doctor though, or what subjects it could possibly
be called (can you graduate in ‘everything’?!)
Bill Potts is a really
under-rated character in the Whoniverse, sadly forgotten because of falling
ratings and the fact she only did one series. I like her more than Amy or Clara
though: she’s just as brave and feisty as the pair of them but only when pushed
out of her comfort zone; for the most part she feels more ‘ordinary’, less of a
mystery or enigma and less tied up in The Doctor’s world. She’s exactly what Dr
Who needed in 2017: our first ‘Gen Z’ companion after an era of millennials
since Rose (just about in the timelines anyway), more in touch with her
feelings and a more working class, realistic girl than Amy or Clara et al. She
isn’t even a student exactly - she’s only hanging round the university to do
menial work in the canteen (with a nod of the head to Rose in the way she
mostly spends her time serving chips) but the Doctor is above such working
class prejudices and sees a spark in her that leads him to offer her the whole
universe. She’s an interesting inversion of Clara in particular: where Clara
was quiet yet comfortable in most dangerous circumstances, aping The Doctor in
the way she stayed cool and calm under pressure (something which led to her
sort-of demise in ‘Face The Raven’) Bill
is nervous, which makes her go all chatty and talkative. Like so many Dr Who
companions before her she’s an orphan, starved of love and attention, but
unlike others who have been moulded into hard, combative characters she feels
unworthy. She’s exactly the sort of person a real university lecturer would
ignore but who is the perfect protégé for this alien above such things as fees
and status and grades, catching his eye as she ‘smiles’ at things she doesn’t
understand instead of looking baffled or frowning, as if pleased at how much
she still has to learn. Pearl Mackie is a breath of fresh air, acting with a
more natural instinctive style than either of her predecessors (the line that
her face ‘is always making expressions when I’m trying to be enigmatic’ was a
real thing said by Pearl at the auditions Moffat liked so much he wrote into
Bill’s character) and it’s fun seeing Dr Who through her eyes as she uncovers
everything bit by bit, slowly, rather than all at one because its stuff the
audience at home already know (again very like ‘An Unearthly Child’ when all
this stuff really was new but something the series hasn’t tried since ‘Rose’). She’s also very much not doing
the normal ‘Dr Who’ style of acting (Pearl had never really seen the series and
asked for lots of old tapes to research but Moffat actually stopped her, seeing
her character as being ‘fresh’ to the series and wanting her to stay the same).
In other words it all feels new but it also feels somehow right, moving The
Doctor back to being the shadowy figure on the outside with all the answers
again, like the 1st and 2nd, rather than someone front
and centre like all the ones since.
Usually when I mention
drippy romances in Dr Who that’s a bad thing (Leela and Andred, Seth and Teka in
‘The Horns Of Nimon’, Jo and any number of wet alien boyfriends) but here the literally-dripping
‘love story’ angle is in many ways the best bit, handled in a way we’d never
had in the series before. Bill, just like Rose Amy and Donna, have spent their
lives secretly hoping for someone to whisk them away and make their lives
better. Only it’s very much not a man: Moffat was halfway through writing this
episode when he figured that he couldn’t quite get the tone right and that we
were long overdue our first lesbian relationship on Who (between humans anyway,
Madame Vastra and Jenny doesn’t count!) In time it will get irritating fast as
Bill seems to drop it into conversation at the most inopportune moment (such as
when hiding out with Picts in ‘The Eaters Of Light’) but here it’s done subtly.
You feel for Bill as it becomes another thing that keeps her somewhat removed
from the rest of her peer group, muttering under her breath when her adoptive
mum natters on about her getting a boyfriend and her first hesitating talk to
Heather (when is the point when she works out that Heather is a lesbian too by
the way? They seem to talk as ‘just friends’ when Heather’s human then
naturally assume it’s a relationship when she turns alien without anything
being said. Compare this to how romance used to be in Dr Who, with Martha
making her feelings for the Doctor painfully obvious and him just not getting
it repeatedly across series three. And if you think that’s just the series
making out men to be clueless and women to know these things instinctively
Moffat did the same trick to Amy, whose spent years not realising the extent o
Rory’s feelings for her in ‘Let’s Kill
Hitler’). Despite having all of what, three conversations together they
make for a believable couple though, one of those couples who are opposite in
every way but complement each other rather than clash: Heather’s straight hair,
reserved features and intense stare is so different to Bill’s well meaning
goofiness and afro hairdo but it kinda works. Especially the way that Bill, who
has every reason to be depressed, is a natural ‘up’ person full of enthusiasm
for life while Heather, who is rich and happy from what we see and has every
reason to enjoy her student days, is deeply depressed. They offer each other a
way of looking at life through ‘other’ eyes: Bill’s not comfortable with such
intensity without turning it into a joke while Heather needs Bill’s joie de
vivre in her life. It’s a match made in Heaven – or at any rate a car park. It’s
also rather sweet that they’re named ‘Bill’ and ‘Heather’ just like William and
his wife Heather Hartnell, the ‘oldest’ real-life romance in Dr Who circles; of
course Hartnell might have had a few things to say about lesbian romances on TV
and moreover in his show, but then he was of the Edwardian generation and Dr
Who is all about moving on and reflecting the times its made in (Moffat has
since said that this was a complete coincidence when he named the characters
but it’s so perfect I like to think that, subconsciously, he realised it
somewhere deep down). I just wish we’d had longer to see the two together or if
they’d had this relationship for a term or two before Bill met The Doctor,
especially given events at the end of ‘The Doctor Falls’ at the end of the
year.
Talking of seeing things
through new eyes that’s the plot: Heather has a real but rare eye condition, central heterochromia, where the sufferer has
a ring inside one of their irises that’s a different colour to their pupil and
which makes it look like a ‘star’. You’re led to think at first, what with her
reserved not-quite-human stare and eye condition, that Heather is an alien. But
no: the twist is that she becomes one, after discovering a puddle and
recognising, thanks to her eye condition, that it was reflecting her image in a
really odd way: she was seeing herself as she really is, not as a reflection
the way she should. It turns out that (spoilers) the puddle is a sentient alien
life form looking for a lonely Human who doesn’t want to be there on Earth
anymore to fly away and visit the stars (such a clever mirror of The Doctor
being an alien in hiding, offering Bill much the same thing for very different
reasons). The only problem is Bill asked Heather to ‘let her know’ if she ever
decided to up and leave so now she’s being followed everywhere – after The
Doctor gets involved even to Australia or Skaro. This is where the story starts
to go downhill rather, messing up all the usual ‘plot elements’ the series
usually does so well. The science fiction aspect is muddled because we never
learn about the ‘pilot’ – it’s just a ‘thing’ that’s left unexplained. This
aspect of the plot is ripped off wholesale from ‘Flight Of The Navigator’
(1986) in which a pre-teen boy wanders into a spaceship which melds itself to
him and takes him off round the world and then into space, depositing him back
home a decade later. It’s all handled a bit clumsily: we don’t know Heather
well enough to be concerned for her, while surely there would be implications
for her family if a girl had simply disappeared (with Bill apparently the last
person to see her – she ought to be on a list of people the police should
question at least). The hint is that nobody cares or would notice if Heather
ran away so nobody would look for her, but surely if she’s hanging round
university grounds she has a class that would miss her? Or are we so early on
in the term she hasn’t made any friends yet? It really does seem a remarkable
coincidence too, even for Dr Who, that the alien puddle lands right next to a
university where the last of the timelords has taken up residence and that it
ends up melding with the would-be girlfriend of the pupil he’s just taken under
his wing. Plus we already did near-enough the same plot already with ‘The
Lodger’, another tale of an alien searching for a Human ‘pilot’, while ‘Fear Her’
and ‘Night Terrors’ both featured aliens reaching out to a Human in search of ‘love’
or ‘belonging’. It all seems like one of Who’s more far-fetched plots too,
which seems wrong as the second half to a story that seemed to be going out of
its way to be ‘real’ in a way few other season openers had been.
The same goes triple for
the mucking around with the vault, the ‘real’ reason The Doctor’s attached
himself to one place and time to better keep an eye on it, the ‘big mystery’ of
the year that Moffat usually handles so well but feels hurried here. This is by
far the story and series ten’s weakest link: I’m not sure if it’s even worth a
‘spoiler’ to tell you it’s Missy in there as it’s something I guessed first
time around (and I don’t usually guess anything right!) I mean who else would
it be? A dangerous foe that the Doctor wants to protect personally: I mean it
could be Davros (and at this early stage Moffat was considering that too before
deciding Missy would be more fun) or one of our old friends turned evil or even
a future shadowy incarnation a la The Valeyard, but Missy was always going to
be the obvious guess. It all feels a bit stuck on though, as if Moffat figured
he needed a series arc and just couldn’t think of one so decided to stick
‘something’ in a box and work out what it was later. It just doesn’t really
fit: Missy is the last person who’d enjoy being contained anywhere, in an even
less salubrious exile than that of the 3rd Doctor and yet she never
really grumbles or moans the way you’d expect beyond a bit of sarcasm. There
should have been multiple escape attempts by now and yet if there are we never
hear about them. Surely a vault isn’t enough to keep a timelord this power and
this ruthless out. Just try and imagine the Delgado Master in here: you can’t
as he’d have had the entire head of faculties on his side questioning The
Doctor for why he has a mysterious vault in his possession before you could say
‘tissue compression eliminator’. The
Doctor is really asking for trouble, too, talking about it in hushed tones in
his office to Nardole: they have a perfectly good soundproof Tardis for that
sort of thing. They could have really gone to town with this ideas: The Doctor
voluntarily sticking to the same spot for half a century as jailor to The
Master, who used to visit The Doctor at UNIT and gloat. How does it feel, for
two of the most seasoned travellers in the universe, to be stuck in one place?
We never really find out. How did Missy end up in the vault? We never find that
out either. Instead Missy’s kept in place until she’s needed at the end of the
year, a ‘reformed character’ whose arc would have been so much more interesting
if we’d seen how she’d been reformed. Did all that time in ‘solitary’ alone
with her thoughts make her see the error of her ways? Did the Doctor’s loyalty
bring out the best in her? That’s what we’re meant to think but we never really
see it. And while Moffat is the best ‘mirror’ writer in the buisness have Missy
ask herself ‘am I a good woman?’ seems frustratingly close to the Doctor’s own ‘am
I a good man?’ arc from series eight and nine that was getting old by this
point.
Season openers are always
a little different, with the story second to the new characters and this one’s
no different – it’s just that the plot is barely sketched in rather than done in
a big and bold cartoony way so that audiences can understand what’s going on straight
away (see ‘Rose’ with Autons, ‘New Earth’ with Cat nuns, ‘Smith and Jones’ with
a platoon of Judoon on the moon, ‘Partners In Crime’ with walking fat and ‘The
Eleventh Hour’ with Prisoner Zero). There’s a rare stillness to this story
where the main chase scene comes in rushing to a car park to stare at a puddle
and where the ‘baddy’ materialises from head to toe rather than from side to
side. On the plus side that means there’s time to really get to know Bill straight
away, instead of just sketching in the basics to be filled in later, on the
minus side it does mean that there’s nothing that really grabs you in this
story and demands you come back to watch next week. It might be significant
that, even though viewers mostly hung around for the next story ‘Smile’ (4.64 million down to 4.26million) this series
loses more viewers from first episode to lowest episode (‘Eaters Of Light’) than any other since the
time Dr Who got cancelled in 1989. That’s no reflection in quality: series ten
is by far the most consistent of Moffat’s six seasons as showrunner, with every
story at least decent and most of them pretty good, a big step up from the
mostly disappointing series nine and the rollercoaster of series five to eight.
For in being forced to stay on another year Moffat is pushed far out of his
comfort zone, all his big ideas used up, and has to find new and inventive ways
to keep things interesting, offering up an under-rated run of episodes that has
a very different quieter no-frills feel compared to other years, stories that
are slow and lower budget than before but never ever boring.
Despite its smallness
this episode carries some really big themes and carries them off well. While
the dialogue doesn’t sparkle throughout like Moffat at his best there are still
some inspired liens there, such as the one about how ‘angry’ and ‘hungry’ feel
the same if you’re down the wrong end of a knife (taking one line to say
poetically what nearly three whole hours of ‘The Two Doctors’ tries to say so
clumsily). What it doesn’t always have, though, is the budget to carry them
off. Other series openers tend to have more money spent on them than other
episodes in an effort to suck viewers in but this one looks cheap even compared
to the rest of the run: a lot of it takes place in a car park with the characters
effectively talking to a puddle, while even the ‘I can show you all time and
space’ promise turns out to be a quick romp to a suspiciously English looking
Australia (in reality the ‘World of Boats’ museum in Cardiff with Syney Opera
House added through greenscreen) and an oddly setbound Skaro. You can’t help
but feel that this episode needs a little…something extra going on too. Unlike
practically every other Moffat script there’s no twin plot as big as the main
plot, not even a sub-plot unless you count the very slight hints at Bill’s
orphaned background. I can totally see why some fans were non-plussed with a
story that has very little action, not all that much dialogue, a monster that
isn’t much of a monster and whose set pieces are so everyday and ordinary they
risk seeming, well, everyday and ordinary. No wonder so many aliens end up
invading Britain if they’re using puddles as cover; as someone who lived in
Carlisle for years I can also tell you that puddles that last a whole year even
at the peak of Summer really aren’t that unusual (and no, sadly, it didn’t turn
out to be an alien spaceship; I checked). There are times when you look in vain
for more: surely that university lecture has to be a ‘clue’ rather than the
Doctor simply rambling? Surely there has to be a reason why Nardole is still
hanging around (as opposed to Matt Lucas’ agent ringing up Moffat and saying he’d
be keen to work in as many episodes as the showrunner would like, having enjoyed
his first two so much). Surely this can’t just be a story about a puddle and a
romance between two girls who hardly know each other?
Still, even if it gets in
a bit of a muddle navigating its way through to the end ‘The Pilot’ gets there
in style for the most part drip-feeding all the bits of the series as a whole
and the season to come as and when it needs to in a more relaxed way than
normal. The effects are really good: it wouldn’t surprise me if the story was
written around the mill’s CGI ‘dripping’ effect which takes the basic idea from
‘Waters Of Mars’ and goes one better (that was a story, after all, where
Russell T deliberately tried to write in the style of his successor, making it
creepy and full of still creatures about to pounce, perhaps better to bridge
the gap between the two eras. This story and indeed this series might be
Moffat’s attempts to do the same and go for the more down-to-Earth realism
style Chibnall had made his own on Torchwood and Broadchurch in the mistaken
belief that this was the way Chris was going to go – it wasn’t, for the most
part, the 13th Doctor era being a weird amalgam of the preachy bits
of Davies with the wackier end of the Andrew Cartmel/late JNT years). It’s
effective and creepy the way Heather, who had an intense stare as a Human
anyway, simply won’t let go and follows the Tardis everywhere, fulfilling her
last promise and trying to get Bill to come with her. This wouldn’t be the
first Dr Who ghost story that turned out to be a love story (see ‘Hide’) but
it’s handled better here than being tucked away into the coda and the idea that
love is at least as strong as anger or revenge or lust for power is a nice
twist. It’s a neat way of writing in what the Tardis can do, too, as it travels
to the other side of the world and then in space and then in time, with Bill
having one of the best ‘Tardis entry’ scenes as she talks scifi stuff to The
Doctor assuming he won’t understand it and hovers at the door, telling him it’s
futile to hide in a box made out of wood while the viewer longs for her to turn
round. Her first question, when faced with all this amazing technology, being
to ask where the toilets are because she’s ‘had a fright’ also shows that she’s
a very different breed to past companions (Donna might have said something like
this but it’s hard to imagine Amy or Clara asking that question). I love the little details in this story more
than the main picture: Bill asking The Doctor if he got the Tardis ‘from a kit’
(there are lots of them for police telephone boxes now thanks to Dr Who! Even clumsy
old me I built a cardboard one that stayed up for, ooh, half an episode). The
perceptive way Bill says that she senses The Doctor travels because ‘my mum
says you can small the wind on their clothes’, leading into a neat and natural
reference to the fact that she’s dead (and only said this in Bill’s mind’). The
fact The Tardis has a macaroon dispenser now (jammie Dodgers were so last
regeneration!) The way Bill surprises The Doctor with a Christmas present and
he in turn gives her what she’s always dreamed of: a whole box of pictures of
her dead mum suddenly ‘discovered’ down the back of a cupboard (which does
rather imply that Bill is in the same house her mum grew up in and that it’s
hers not her adoptive mum’s family, which is a bit weird but still – it could
happen). Nardole’s reaction to a Human getting on board The Tardis being to
attempt to exterminate it. Bill finally being a companion whose interested in
scifi and seen every film going, second-guessing where the plot’s going to go
along with the viewer and ending with a tearful plea to The Doctor not to wipe
her memory because nothing interesting ever happens to her (she isn’t to know,
of course, that this is exactly what happened to The Doctor and Clara at the
end of ‘Hell Bent’ and that he knows exactly what she means more than he can
possibly tell her). The fact that Bill assumes the Tardis has travelled in time
when she sees daylight outside and The Doctor laughing at her for being silly
because they’re really in Australia. The way that it’s The Tardis who has to ‘remind
The Doctor of who he really is as he rushes out to Bill after telling her to
run away (with the hint, like so many past stories, that the Tardis ‘knows’
Bill is meant to be a companion somehow and at least partly involved in the
choice – contrast this with Cara, the one companion it tried actively to bar
from entering, give or take Captain jack on becoming immortal, both of them
turning out to be ‘wrong’ in a timeline sense). Even something as dumb and
small as the fact that the record The Doctor plays (and kisses) in his office
is the 1949 single ‘The deck Of Cards’ by Phil Harris, a singer better known
for his role as Baloo the Bear in ‘The Jungle Book’ (who teaches Mowgli how to
enjoy life after only being brought up with Bagheera’s strict rules; this is
exactly what The Doctor does for Bill after a lifetime of being brought up by
her strict and morose adoptive mum; equally after fifty years of being stuck
with rule-abiding Nardole Bill is Baloo to The Doctor too).
Most of all I love the
fact that Bill starts the episode thinking she’s worthless, feeling unwanted
and unloved, and ends it having two of the most powerful beings in the universe
in love with her, in quite different ways. That’s such a wonderful Dr Who
message; in fact it works for Heather too – hang on to life just that little
bit longer because you never know what great things might be destined for you
around the next corner, even something as ordinary as a puddle turning out to
be extraordinary and turning your life around. That’s new: we’ve had Moffat write
several deep sombre pieces about grieving and mourning someone you love but
this is the story about how there is still joy to be found in the universe if
you look for it, even after thinking it had passed you by. Bill makes The
Doctor young again and as much as Bill is taken on as his student it’s the
Doctor who learns more in a short period of time this series, from his new
pupil, after being closed off from the world for so long after losing Clara.
That’s a clever thing to do, similar to the 11th Doctor sulking on a
cloud after losing Amy in ‘The Snowmen’ yet different enough to be worth
watching and a neat setup for a series that dares to be different and go to new
places the comeback series at least hadn’t touched on before. Yes I’d have liked
more pizzazz at times and I feel sorry for the people who went out specially to
watch this series launch at the cinema (it’s not the big spectacle its
predecessors ‘Day Of the Doctor’ or even ‘Deep Breath’ were, deliberately designed
to be small and contained better seen on TV sets – notably Who hasn’t tried
this trick again since), but overall ‘The Pilot’ is Dr Who’s quiet beating
heartbeat, a back to basics story that gets all its emphasis back on the right
things again away from the noise and spectacle: a sense of adventure, of
freedom and the right to love of every being in the universe, no matter how
unloved or alien they feel. Sadly not many viewers jumped on at this point in
Dr Who’s long history but if they had they’d still have been sucked in by a story
brave enough to be different and bold enough to be ‘empty’ in all the best ways.
POSITIVES + Stephanie
Hyam excels at the thankless guest role of ‘Heather’. With very few words and
nothing much more than her eyes to act with Stephanie really gets across the
feeling of passion and love, which are also vague enough to be interpreted as
hate and anger for most of the episode. The poor actress really went through it
during this shoot, more often than not dripping from head to toe in water
(those aren’t all effects, just when her character disappears!) but still
managed to look natural and feel like a ‘real’ person. I was hoping she was
going to be in the series more than just the first and last parts.
NEGATIVES – That part
two-thirds in, with a trip in the Tardis to see if the puddle is following, is
awfully rushed. Why do we have the trip to Skaro at all? Couldn’t we have saved
the money and done a bit more with the other effects? In an episode that takes
so many risks elsewhere it feels like a defensive ‘let’s throw some aliens in
here to keep people quiet’ and it doesn’t fit at all. The low budget Dalek on
Movellan action is cheap and silly, the sort of thing other people parody Dr Who
for (including Russell T Davies it has to be said; the scene in ‘It’s A Sin’
with the Daleks is like a 1980s version of this sub-plot). Initially the idea
was just to have the one Dalek turn into a puddle but when Moffat discussed the
idea with Mark Gatiss the latter suggested how fun it would be if they dropped
into the middle of a part of Dalek history, like the Movellan war from ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ so in it went. This
scene makes more sense if you stop ‘The Pilot’ at the start of this scene and
watch ‘Friend From The Future’ instead (see ‘Prequels/sequels’ below) which is
like one long ‘cut scene’, even if it was apparently always supposed to run
this way, Moffat worried that he would lose too many longterm viewers if Bill
simply kept asking questions they knew the answers to (though why a bunch of
footballers desperate for the second half of an important match should care anymore
is another point). It just doesn’t work: there’s easily another episode to be
had in this war and teasing us like this and never going back to it again is
just cruel. It never feels like it fits either: The rest of this story tries so
hard to court a whole new, more adult and subtler audience that this brief
shoot-‘em-up sequence really stands out in the worst ways.
BEST QUOTE: ‘Imagine if time happened all at once. Every moment of your
life laid out around you... like a city. Streets full of buildings made of
days. The day you were born. The day you die. The day you fall in love. The day
that love ends. A whole city built from triumph and heartbreak and boredom and
laughter and cutting your toenails. It's the best place you will ever be. Time
is a structure relative to ourselves. Time is the space made by our lives.
Where we stand together forever. Time And Relative Dimension In Space, it means
"life".
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: How many Whovians do you know who also love football? Aside from Matt Smith? Probably not many? Well, the BBC seem to disagree as one of their weirdest publicity blitzes of all time was to plug series 10 during the middle of a programme when they were certain lots of Whovians would be watching…Match Of The Day. Yes, that match of the day. The one with the football scores. Sadly there was no sign of Skaro United but there was a two-minute trailer introducing new companion Bill Potts with two minutes’ worth of clips from the upcoming series with an official in-house not-used-on-screen title of ‘Friend From The Future’. Usually we don’t bother with trails but at the heart of this one is an ‘extended scene’ from ‘The Pilot’, the rather rushed one with the Doctor and Bill rushing from a Dalek Movellan war (‘referee’s a robot!’) Bill quite naturally asks what a Dalek is and gets the unhelpful reply ‘it’s a Dalek’ before the even more unhelpful (and inaccurate) summary that it’s ‘a deadly alien war machine’ (not a patch on the more accurate ‘bubbling lump of hate’). Bill also asks a question no one else has ever asked before ‘Why has it got a sucker instead of a gun?’ to which the Doctor replies ‘I don’t know – I’ve never asked because I’ve always been too busy running away!’ Bill’s next question (she’s full of them today) ‘Why do they keep saying exterminate? Wouldn’t it be quicker just to say ‘kill’? The Doctor then getsa message on his psychic paper from 2017 and comments that ‘we have to get back to the future – it needs us!’ before they run down a corridor. Not the most subtle or entertaining scene I fear which was useless as a trailer, heading worryingly far into 1980s ‘we’re the show with wobbly sets and silly monsters hahaha’ postmodernism that got the show cancelled which might be fun for us fans who take all that in our stride (and know it’s only maybe a quarter true) but damning to a general audience of footballers who just want to get back to something more interesting. Like kicking spherical object into a net and falling over a lot. Not one of Who’s better ideas.
Previous ‘The Return Of Dr Mysterioso’ next ‘Smile’
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