There is admittedly a subtle texture to the picture that makes things seem a bit more like a film than a television series, with a more colorful feel on display than we've gotten before. This is apparent from the first scene, up in the hills above the South Yorkshire city of Sheffield, where we meet Ryan Sinclair, a 19-year-old male with dyspraxia (a neurological condition that impairs coordination), who's trying to learn to ride a bike with his grandmother, Grace, and Grace's husband Graham O'Brien. After he gets frustrated and throws the bike off the cliffside, he discovers while going to retrieve his bike a strange glowing symbol in the air that he touches, which then produces a weird giant blue teardrop-shaped thing. So he calls the police and they send out a probationary police officer, Yasmin Khan, who Ryan went to school with. Graham and Grace, meanwhile, have left Ryan behind and are taking the train back home, when a strange ball of tentacles smashes into the train, sparking and being generally weird and spooky as it approaches Graham, Grace, and a third passenger, Karl... And that's when a woman suddenly crashes through the roof into the train.
Up to this point you can see how the episode is being set up as a case of "strange things happening in Sheffield"; in some ways it feels like any number of opening episodes of similar genre shows, taking time to introduce the characters before it starts introducing the elements that are going to send things into typical sci-fi territory. But, as with all good Doctor Who, the arrival of the Doctor distorts the familiar tropes, changing the direction of the story. And Jodie Whittaker makes one hell of an entrance, crashing in and then immediately taking charge against the weird sparking ball (which she later calls a "gathering coil"). Instead of trying to ease both her and the audience in to this brand-new Doctor, writer and showrunner Chris Chibnall smartly has her hit the ground running (so to speak), immediately having her take charge even while she's not 100% certain who she is.
Because yes, Jodie Whittaker is our first bona fide female Doctor (since people such as Joanna Lumley in The Curse of Fatal Death or Arabella Weir in Big Finish's Doctor Who Unbound series don't quite count), which means that there are a lot of expectations being heaped upon her. And she confidently shatters them all. There's never a sense that this was a mistake or that making the Doctor a woman is going to change things in some fundamental way; instead, it's clear that this is the same Doctor we've always known. It helps that this isn't one of those regeneration stories where we spend time waiting for the Doctor to revive (such as Spearhead from Space, Castrovalva, or "The Christmas Invasion"). This is one more like Robot or "The Eleventh Hour", where the Doctor regenerates and then more or less continues as he/she means to go on. So the thirteenth Doctor gets to spend time investigating and being clever, with the "still cooking" stuff only occasionally intervening. And we see that this Doctor is a kind, caring Doctor, with a touch of the tenth Doctor in there (the way she sort of rambles on about things -- "Right then, troops. No, not troops. Team? Gang? Fam? –I'm distracting myself"-- has a definite Tennant flavor), but still with some definite traits of her own. When she thanks Grace for thinking of covering the body, for instance, we get a sense that this Doctor cares. (One wonders if this Doctor was in fact informed by the twelfth Doctor's dying speech.)
And standing alongside her are a whole cast of characters: we get Mandip Gill as Yaz, Tosin Cole as Ryan, Bradley Walsh as Graham, and Sharon D. Clarke as Grace, all of whom are willing to help this strange woman deal with the gathering coil and the alien pod. Bradley Walsh in particular does a great job as Graham, not really thrilled to be involved but nevertheless choosing to muck in. (Walsh here making his second appearance in the Doctor Who universe: he'd been Odd Bob the clown in the series 2 Sarah Jane Adventures story The Day of the Clown.) Really, if there's any downside to this large supporting cast (the largest number of regulars since 1983) it's that it does mean some of the others don't get perhaps quite as much screentime as we'd like -- although they also get an equal share of the action here and there's plenty of time to explore their characters down the road, so it's not the greatest sin.
It's interesting, though, how in some ways this feels a lot like a Steven Moffat series opener, with lots of action and rushing about and such, but with the emphasis tweaked a bit. So instead of dealing with an invasion or something similar, it's just one person, Tzim-Sha, on a hunt, and while Tzim-Sha is built up as a threat, he's also deflated in some ways -- most notably in how everyone (even the credits) refers to him as "Tim Shaw", but also by showing that he's cheating at this "noble" hunt meant to determine the leadership of the Stenza. So instead of saving the planet we're just saving one person, Karl: the stakes are smaller scale. And this also seems like a more self-reliant Doctor: the sequence where she makes her own sonic screwdriver (rather than just being provided one by the TARDIS, as both the eleventh and twelfth Doctors were) shows that she's smart and capable, just getting on with solving the problems at hand.
But in some ways the biggest shift is at the end, where the Doctor stays for Grace's funeral, after the show goes and kills one of the best people in it. Grace is absolutely wonderful ("Is it wrong to be enjoying this?" she asks Graham happily at one point), and so it's heartbreaking to see her die, even if it is a noble death. It also gives Ryan's YouTube video, which opened the episode, a new meaning: the greatest woman he ever met isn't the Doctor, like we were initially led to believe, but instead is his nan, which is a really nice move.284 But yes, the Doctor stays for the funeral, in what feels like a unique aspect of this Doctor (compare, for instance, with the seventh Doctor quietly pulling Ace away from Mike's funeral in Remembrance of the Daleks). That just reinforces that this is a Doctor who is kind, who cares, who's willing to stay and deal with the consequences sometimes. (Unless you want to think she was forced to stick around because she still needed Graham, Yaz, and Ryan's help, of course, but I'm personally not that cynical.) This isn't a Doctor who's a lonely god, or a figure of legend; she's simply a wanderer: "I'm just a traveller," she tells Yaz. "Sometimes I see things need fixing, I do what I can." It's part of a move this series to bring the show back to its roots somewhat (in addition to having a full TARDIS complement, just as they did in 1963), and we'll see more of this as series 11 progresses.
 |
| The thirteenth Doctor selects her new outfit. ("The Woman Who Fell to Earth") ©BBC |
And so we finally get a chance to see the new title sequence and hear the new theme arrangement from Segun Akinola. (Unless you were watching on BBC America, which for some reason believed we would rather watch Wil Wheaton and a bunch of nameless "celebrities" discuss the episode we'd just seen instead of getting to hear the new theme.) Akinola's theme kind of feels more like a remix of the Delia Derbyshire original than a brand-new envisioning, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Plus this version of the credits (which includes a slightly odd trailer, highlighting upcoming guest stars rather than upcoming scenes) gives us the middle 8, which is pretty great. I don't know that I would say it's my favorite rendition of the theme, but it's not the worst one I've ever heard. And the titles aren't bad, although they do seem quite visually dark. I do like the approach of essentially making a color, CG version of the old howlround graphics from the 60s though, even if it sometimes looks like we're actually underwater.
So overall "The Woman Who Fell to Earth" is a confident series opener, showing us a group of likable new companions and an outstanding new Doctor in Jodie Whittaker. The threat isn't the most compelling (and this'll come back to bite them a bit in later episodes), but the fact that this episode is built up on relationships between characters -- both new regulars and characters we've only met a little bit (such as Karl, or Rahul, the man who lost his sister) -- means that a smaller threat isn't a bad thing, because it's not really the focus: the focus is on the new thirteenth Doctor, and Jodie Whittaker more than delivers. This is the Doctor, the same as ever, no substitutions required: "I know exactly who I am. I'm the Doctor. Sorting out fair play throughout the universe." Let's hope the series can keep it up.
284 Of course, that means that there were two people who watched Ryan talking about his now-deceased grandmother and still chose to downvote his video; people really are the worst.