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BBC The Woman Who Fell to Earth |
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| Story No. | 303 | 
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| Production Code | Series 11, Episode 1 | |
| Dates | October 7, 2018 |
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With Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill
Written by Chris Chibnall Directed by Jamie Childs Executive Producers: Chris Chibnall, Matt Strevens, Sam Hoyle |
| Synopsis: Multiple aliens have crashed into a train in Sheffield. |
A Review by Aristide Twain 30/7/19
The Woman Who Fell To Earth is bookended by an utterly obnoxious trope, namely a clumsily sentimental, vague monologue which you think is about one thing (the Doctor's arrival), when actually it's about this other thing which the viewer couldn't possibly have guessed in advance (Grace's demise), so all it really does is mock the reader for not knowing how the story is going to go when the writers do. Ha-ha-ha. Oh dear. It's also done as a YouTube vlog, and, really, does anyone like it when Doctor Who tries to be 'down with the kids' like so?
So it's fair to say that this episode got on my nerve in the very first shot. Fortunately, it proceeded to build up a nice atmosphere and mystery. The Doctor is withheld just long enough, allowing us to get invested in the alien tomfoolery without the latest iteration of our favorite Time Lord stealing the show. We also get reasonably invested in our companions-to-be (the sad thing is that we never will be more invested in them in Series 11 than the level of investment reached at the end of The Woman Who Fell To Earth, but that is neither here nor there), so that's nice enough. Bradley Walsh is instantly lovable as Graham; Mandip Gill demonstrates appropriate pluck as Yasmin Khan (whose introductory scene is hilarious); and Tosin Cole is, for now, tolerable as Ryan, because it is appropriate that Ryan be vaguely exasperated in this particular episode.
Then the Thirteenth Doctor gets here and starts being all regeneration-dizzy and quippy and Doctorish, and she almost (almost) succeed in distracting us from the fact that half the tension of the previous episode's cliffhanger has been quietly ignored. The Doctor survives the fall as a matter of course, because... eh? I mean, a fan can work out that this is probably another "first few hours of the regeneration cycle" thing from The Christmas Invasion, but if you were going to use that bit of technobabble as a cop-out, why even build the idea up in the first place? Chibnall? Have you thought this through? (No, of course he hasn't. Chibnall isn't always bad, contrary to what his haters would have you believe, but he is not at all good at thinking things through.)
Jodie Whittaker's Doctor makes a fairly good first impression, at any rate. It's no better or worse than many a Doctor's debut. She is aggressively sold to us as "the fun, whimsical one", taking the childlike aspects of Troughton and Tennant and making them the soul of the characterization whilst avoiding any of the coarser or more serious bits. Now, I love whimsy in my Who (speaking of which, the fact that the Stenza get about by means of giant purple turnips is delightful), but the "no tougher side" thing is is going to bite Series 11 in the backside later, because the problem with the Thirteenth Doctor's characterization is thus that it's direly one-note. But in the small dose of a single episode, it doesn't even begin to have time to wear down its welcome. She's a lot of fun to watch bouncing about, is what I'm saying.
Once we've gotten a feel for the Doctor, the episode circles back around to the alien mystery, and... ah, well, about that. It's, of course, the classical flipside of having too good a setup; namely that it's very hard to fulfill the audience's expectations. It's a credit to the episode that it did get our hopes up even though Chris Chibnall is writing, but the resolution has all the classic Chris Chibnall problems: there are too many ideas in there, some of them good, some of them bad, but none of them followed all the way through; and soapy human drama is tacked on garishly to make you care, without even beginning to connect to the alien bits on a thematic level. Samuel Oatley's T'zim Sha is at least a fairly imposing villain; as one-shot Doctor-debut villains go, he's a notch below the Half-Face Man from Deep Breath, but better than Prisoner Zero in The Eleventh Hour and, I would say, slightly better than the Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion, who are, I think, his closest relatives.
What else? Segun Akinola does his 'amospheric sound mix' thing, which can't help but feel a little thin after the melodic inventiveness of Murray Gold; yes, Gold could sometimes be a bit too loud and pompous, but give me brash over mediocre, any day. But it's never distracting. His version of the Doctor Who theme is a bit of a miss, though; it's trying to be the Derbyshire Theme with more oomph, but it fails to have any actual oomph, instead feeling like somebody took the Derbyshire Theme, fattened it up and forced it to run a marathon anyway. It's heaving and puffing, with the rhythm all wrong.
The visuals Series 11 are extremely lush, very much what one expected after Meet the Thirteenth Doctor and the vividly colorful ad campaign (ah, would that Series 11 had kept this up all the way through). Director Jamie Childs, whom we had to thank for the aforementioned minisode, does not disappoint.
Uhm... oh, I should say something about the "political correctness" thing, shouldn't I? Series 11 haters make too big a deal of it; there's no evil social justice crusade in here or any other such nonsense. But looking at the line-up, there is no denying that the Master's quip from The Sound of Drums about the Doctor's companions "ticking every demographic box" has never been truer: we've got an older cancer-survivor, a lower-class black-skinned young man, and a female police officer of Pakistani descent (whom we'll later learn is a muslim)... not to mention the female Doctor, obviously.
When the Master made his quip, it was obviously a villainous taunt, because it is obviously not Martha and Jack's raison d'etre to be black and LGBTQ+. These were organically part of their characters. With 'Team TARDIS', I am less convinced that they weren't created from a much more dishonest mindset of "How can we achieve maximum representation? We'll think up personalities and justifications why they all know each other, later."
Still, The Woman Who Fell To Earth is as solid a debut as you could possibly have expected from Chris Chibnall. Let's be thankful for that.