Tony’s joining the
Doctor’s fam.
There hasn’t been so
radical departure from ‘business as usual’ in the history of New Who as that
surrounding the beginning of the Chibnall era.
The casting of the first
‘official’ female Doctor, the time-slot shift from Saturday to Sunday, the
statement that there would be no ‘old favourite’ monsters or villains in the
first series, the supposedly po-faced prosecutional rage at leaks ahead of
broadcast, and a sense perhaps that the fun had gone out of the public-facing
production team – things were very nailed down in the run-up to the launch,
with just a couple of faintly meaningless clue-words thrown out as to what the
new Doctor would be facing in series 11.
All of that adds up to a
big gamble. If you are to justify a change out of a much-venerated time-slot,
you’ve got to absolutely crush the ratings. If you’re going to justify a series
full of all-new villains, they have to include some new stone-cold classics. If
you do the maths on Doctor’s first full series, the only time a Doctor has
launched in a season where everything was new was Jon Pertwee’s Season 7 –
which introduced us immediately to the Autons, and followed up with the
Silurians, not to mention finishing the run with the dimension-swapping genius
of Inferno. Sylvester McCoy went almost
entirely new in his first run, but was anchored in place by a regeneration
story with the Rani. Notably, after this experiment, the very first story of
his second season pitted him against the Daleks, an experience which had by
then become and remains today the ‘rite of passage’ for any new Doctor.
So – setting yourself up
against the landmark of Jon Pertwee’s first season. Gutsy move – but did it
work?
Immediately when The Woman
Who Fell To Earth opened, it went out of its way to present the show as a serious,
character-led drama: we had no title sequence reveal, no new theme arrangement,
we simply had to knuckle down and focus on the young dyspraxic man trying to
ride a bike, his nan and her second husband encouraging him, and the young
policewoman frustrated at the slow path of probation, determined to do more. It
was quite some way in before anything untoward even began to happen, with Ryan
and the mysterious shapes leading to the arrival of the bulb of sub-zero space
garlic. There’s some fairly severe directorial sleight of hand to get everyone
on a train in time to deal with the arrival of a coil of ‘tentacley things’…and
then the Doctor literally falls through the train. Which, considering
everything, is an extraordinary stroke of luck and aiming.
Here’s the thing. With a
new Doctor – with the Doctor generally, come to that – we’ve come to expect a
certain rapidity of speech and thought, a certain facility with technobabble in
recent years: Tennant could reel off a line of technobabble at double-speed,
chuck in an ‘Allons-y’ and off we went. Smith slowed the pace of the babble
down, but turned it into a full-body slapstick routine to embody his
‘thing-in-progress’ Doctor. Capaldi said less than either of them, but gave us
some great eye-work, to suggest his brain was such that he could crush us like
a bug if we were going to be pudding-brains.
Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor,
in her regeneration story, gives us a rather more ‘say what’s written on the
page’ interpretation of the joyful, ludicrous technobabble any Doctor will have
to spout, which is a dangerous way to play the role, because established fans
will undoubtedly be hearing ‘more Doctorish’ ways of delivering those lines.
There’s plenty of emerging
Whittaker Doctor in The Woman Who
Fell to Earth – her grin when she tells her friends ‘You have no idea’ about
the process of regeneration, her ‘This’ll be fun!’ as she disappears to make
her sonic Swiss army knife, the frankly terrifying puppydog earnestness as she
advances on her friends to tell them that when people need help, she never
refuses, her request to have the lights and siren on in Yas’s police car, her
‘I would of’, her commanding ‘Oi!’, her ‘he would be, wouldn’t he?’ when she
learns that Karl from the train is a crane driver, her ‘See? Now you’re
worried,’ her talking to Ryan about his father, and the touching speech about
her family, almost mirroring the Patrick Troughton explanation of how he
remembered them but giving it a touch more emotional welly. There’s all this
and more in The Woman Who Fell To Earth to start us on the road to who the
Thirteenth Doctor will be, but those who love their technobabbling Doctor have
reported feeling that something was ‘off,’ or ‘not quite there’ about Jodie’s
delivery of those lines. Maybe, going forward, there’ll be a shift in the way
the glorious technobabble is incorporated, maybe there won’t, but if you
accentuate the positives, there’s a distinct, joyful, childlike Doctor emerging
even in this episode.
Perhaps more importantly
even than that, her Doctoring is inherently more practical than the last two
Doctors, at least in their regeneration story. Eleven ran around being busy for
an episode, and then essentially told the Atraxi to simply bog off. Twelve,
after an episode of self-crisis, defeated the Half-Face Man by either pushing
him out of an airship or talking him into throwing himself out. Thirteen,
rather like Ten, takes active steps to defeat the threat: Ten had a sword
fight, threw a satsuma and brought down a government. Thirteen removes the
Stenza’s DNA-bombs and, in effect, tricks Tim Shaw – would-be King of the Tooth
Fairies – into implanting them in himself, and then steals his recall circuit
to use as leverage. She still, as all Doctors do, gives him the choice to make
a moral decision, or to be a destructive tosspot. And when he makes the wrong
decision, just as Ten has no apparent compunction in plunging the Sycorax
leader to a squishy death on the surface of the Earth, Thirteen tells Tim Shaw
that he’s brought the imminent explosion of his own DNA on himself and
contemptuously lets him go home. Bizarrely though, she’s then morally outraged
when Karl pushes him off the crane, even though Old Denture-Face dematerialises
long before hitting the ground. But
Karl’s no Harriet Jones, and Thirteen’s rage is less roiling than Ten’s – she
might be annoyed, but she quickly forgets about Karl’s actions, because there
are more important things to deal with – like attending Grace’s funeral.
Let’s talk about Grace for
a minute. Actually, let’s talk about all the companions for this first series
with the Thirteenth Doctor. Ahead of the series launch, there was plenty of
worry to go around at the ‘full Tardis’ scenario, where companions end up
standing around doing nothing, or simply asking ‘What’s that, Doctor?’
Chris Chibnall in this
first story for Thirteen delivers us a proper roster of interesting human
beings, and then makes sure there’s something for them all to do. Ryan and Yas,
while frequently sticking together, are each well delineated, and Graham and
Grace are immediately wonderful – his overcaution acting as a great foil for
her ‘get out there and do it’ enthusiasm. When Grace falls…to earth…we see a
marked shift from the Moffat era. She dies. Despite the Doctor still presumably
being in the first however-many hours of her regeneration cycle, she doesn’t
offer any energy to Grace to bring her back from the dead. There’s no
marvellous ‘just this once’ moment of the Doctor acting as miraculous saviour.
Grace dies. And she stays dead. The Doctor even attends her funeral. Played by
Sharon D Clarke, Grace becomes an instant favourite throughout the course of
The Woman Who Fell To Earth, and so, absolutely, it’s dramatically right that she
dies. Her death will go on to prompt consequences throughout Series 11, and act
as a kind of oracle to both Graham and Ryan as they grieve for the loss of her.
After the ‘no-one important to the Doctor ever really dies’ era of Steven
Moffat storytelling, it’s initially sad but ultimately refreshing to be in the
company of a Doctor who knows she’s not a miracle worker, and that she
shouldn’t set herself up as an antidote to death. Perversely, given her
sudden-breaking smiles of absolutely childlike delight, this is a more grown-up
Doctor even than the white-haired Scotsman, who despite his gruff exterior, on
the quiet, wasn’t averse to giving a little zap of energy and life to people.
The point of a
regeneration story is not, for the most part, to wow us with plotting or dazzle
us with alien menace, but to introduce us to a new Doctor, their character and
quirks. If we’re starting again from scratch, as with Rose and The Eleventh
Hour, it’s also to give us a way in to the lives and personalities of the new
companions. It’s fair to remember that both Power of the Daleks and Spearhead
From Space did a lot of both – Spearhead in particular giving us a fantastic
new alien menace, while introducing us to a mostly-comatose Doctor, a spiky new
companion, changing the set-up of the show entirely and turning up the colour.
But the quality of villainy on display in a regeneration story needs only to be
good enough to show us the new Doctor and how they defeat it. In those terms,
Tim Shaw and the Stenza are on a par with the Atraxi. On a personal level
though, a single stompy, freezy bloke with a face full of teeth isn’t perhaps
the most bladder-loosening villain, and Tim Shaw has a tendency to underwhelm –
and wow, does he like a bit of exposition. ‘What are you doing here?’ has
seldom, even in Doctor Who, produced a response so entirely thorough in terms
of detailing the alien’s plans. He also serves the audience’s expectations
rather too clunkily when he asks the Doctor a second time who she is, because
we’ve all been waiting for the moment when she declares herself to be the Doctor, and the writing cuts to
the chase of that in an underpolished way. Ironically, thanks to a handy
sackful of cash being thrown at the CGI, Little Timmy Toothypeg’s ball of
coiled menace is actually much more ominous and scary every moment it’s brought
to life by effect-work, despite, when deactivated, looking like a clearance
sale at a vacuum cleaner repair shop.
Overall, The Woman Who
Fell To Earth is the regeneration story viewers familiar with his work should
have expected from Chris Chibnall: it’s heavy on characterisation and character
interplay, fairly light on plot, somewhat dependent on coincidence and
positively thick with exposition, while saving its surprises for a reveal of
off-screen action (when exactly did the Doctor remove the DNA bombs from her
friends? Anyone?). But it’s also a warm, chatty debut for Jodie Whittaker’s
enthusiastic, sudden-smiling Time Lord, and it beds her companions firmly into
our psyche, so their stories are as interesting before they meet her as they
will go on to be in her company, with Bradley Walsh as Graham and Sharon D
Clarke as Grace standing out and raising the game. No, it’s never going to blow
the socks off the viewers with the wow-factor of its villainy, but in terms of
delivering new characters and making us want to see where they go from here, it
certainly justifies the impressive viewing figures it got.
The Doctor is here. The
Doctor is new. The Doctor’s as glorious as ever.
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