The Woman Who Fell to Earth by Chris Chibnall

For me, still Chris Chibnall's best Doctor Who script so far.

There are two types of regeneration story in the revived series of Doctor Who. You've got the ones that deal with the blunt trauma of regeneration, relegating the Doctor as a side character for much of its narrative while their companions deal with the fall out and learn to cope with their friend suddenly looking like a different person. Think The Christmas Invasion or Deep Breath. Then there's this, which in terms of the Doctor, feels a lot like The Eleventh Hour. Although it doesn't open directly with the Doctor, when she appears about nine minutes in, she is thrust into the main action and remains there for pretty much the entire episode. It's a good creative choice and it gives us some early insight into this new version of the character: she's playful, inventive, and connects with the people around her in a very human way. As first impressions go, Jodie Whittaker gives a strong one.

Whittaker effortlessly slots into the role of the Doctor. She gets a number of great Doctor-ish moments, including building a sonic screwdriver out of Sheffield steel in a lovely montage, asking Yaz if she can have a go on the police car sirens, and her puzzled delight of having to find a set of women's clothes in a charity shop. She even gets the customary "I am the Doctor" speech, but it's a lot less grandiose than normal. "Sorting out fair play throughout the universe" might not be the most epic mission statement the show has ever delivered, but it's very portentous of where this character is going to go.

At the same time as presenting us with an entirely new Doctor, The Woman Who Fell to Earth gamely grapples with the challenge of introducing three companions. They all show potential here, which is something that will come back to bite the show when it frequently loses interest in them in later episodes. Chris Chibnall invests a great deal of energy in making them feel real. Yaz is underchallenged as a junior police officer, forced to work her way up. Graham is a cancer survivor. Ryan struggles with his disability and his distant father. These are tropes, for sure, but the reason tropes work so often is that we identify with them. Each of the three of them gets something useful to contribute to the plot and some nice moments. There's work to be done in making them feel like a cohesive unit, but not a bad introduction at all.

Despite its slight plot, the pacing of this episode is frenetic. It jumps from scene to scene, building a great deal of energy into the narrative, while knowing when to allow for smaller or more intimate moments. Like The Eleventh Hour before it, it is determined to make you pay attention. Unpredictably is inherently woven into any new era of Doctor Who, and this utilises that well. At any moment, there is some new mystery to solve, some development to investigate, that keeps everything moving along at breakneck speed. It is a bold gambit to draw in a casual audience that was perhaps watching the show for the first time in a while out of curiosity for the new Doctor and many will have found themselves being swept up in the action. I certainly was.

But, despite the fast-paced plotting, the story also knows where it needs to focus and avoids getting bogged down where it doesn't need to be. Tim Shaw himself is a nothing villain. The Stenza are an interesting concept but it's pretty easily brushed off by the episode understandably concentrating on other things. The relatively forgettable nature of the monster isn't a major problem here, as series openers are usually a lot more concerned about presenting us the new regulars. After all, it's hardly because Prisoner Zero is a villain for the ages that The Eleventh Hour is so good. Most of the problems with Tim Shaw will come later. Here he is good foil for the Doctor to establish her new personality and his face of teeth is genuinely quite unpleasant.

The major flaw with this episode is what it does with Grace. She didn't appear in the promotional material for the season so her card was marked from the beginning. Unfortunately, she also happens to be the most compelling of the four proto-companions: kind, brave, empathetic, and just a great deal of fun to be around. There's a whole load of literature about the problems associated with fridging a female character of colour in order to tell a story about a white man that I won't go into here, but it's a problem for the show that goes beyond the very welcome increased diversity in its casting. Don't get me wrong, I like Graham's character arc in this series (the finale aside), and his speech at her funeral is a very moving moment performed excellently by Bradley Walsh. But it's still a shame that we never see any more of the huge potential in Grace. I only hope Chibnall's decision to kill her off wasn't solely because it created a misdirecting pun for the episode title. I'm going to be charitable and assume that it wasn't.

What's more, this is quite a dour episode, and this isn't helped by the fact that it's almost entirely set at night. There's relatively few funny moments with "These legs definitely used to be longer!" a notable exception. With two seasons worth of hindsight now, it's clear that Chris Chibnall doesn't have the flair for dialogue that RTD or Moffat had. But, even given that, this feels like quite a serious piece, and it invokes the mood of Torchwood at various points. After ten seasons of fast-paced and funny dialogue, this is quite jarring at first. Doctor Who has always had a pretty uneasy relationship with humour, but its absence feels very noticeable here.

There is a huge amount to enjoy in the The Woman Who Fell to Earth. In what was an inherently risky moment for the show with a new showrunner and a new Doctor, particularly the first female Doctor, it delivers a solid episode that, whilst not spectacular, does the job it needs to reassuring the audience that this is still recognisably Doctor Who. A strong introduction for the new Doctor and her companions, who all show a great deal of promise here. In fact, one of my biggest frustrations with this era of the show is how little of the potential shown here is actually followed through later on. This is Chris Chibnall's best Doctor Who script to date. It exudes confidence and never once buckles under the pressure that is inherent with all new beginnings. It is forcefully unapologetic about injecting newfound diversity into its central cast and, an unfortunate creative choice in what happens to Grace notwithstanding, handles the responsibility that comes along with that very well. Series 11 gets off to a very good start.

Random musings

• I approve of the narrative beat at the end where all the regulars get unwittingly teleported off Earth. It's another invocation of very early Doctor Who when the Doctor's travelling companions weren't exactly willing adventurers. Or, to put it another way, the Doctor basically kidnaps them.

• 13 looks great in the ruins of Capaldi's costume. Dare I say it, I much prefer that look to the one she picks out at the end.

• The new score from Segun Akinola is good. It's much more subdued than Murray Gold's bombastic themes, and as much as I massively enjoyed Gold's work on the show, after ten seasons this feels like a welcome change of mood.

• Even while it's striving to carve out a new direction for the show, I find the callbacks to the past strangely reassuring. The orange glow of regeneration energy is still there. The Doctor saying, "Half an hour ago, I was a white-haired Scotsman." Yeah, it's still Doctor Who.

• Because I live in Sheffield, it's quite amusing spotting all the various landmarks of the city that crop up, including one scene that's filmed about five minutes walk from where I was living at the time this was broadcast. 

Verdict

8/10

The Timeless Children by Chris Chibnall

Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.

We'll start with the headline. The Timeless Children is bad. It's really bad. Let me be clear at the outset. I don't care about Doctor Who's internal continuity. It's been chopped up, messed around, and large swathes of it healthily ignored throughout most of the show's history. The problem with this episode is not that it represents the biggest shift in canon since The Deadly Assassin, the story that first introduced the regeneration limit and gave us what was up until yesterday the accepted history of the Time Lords. The key difference is that, in that episode, Robert Holmes wasn't setting out intentionally to fundamentally alter the history of the show. He was just coming up with narrative fixes to help the story he was trying to tell. The Master needs to have run out of regenerations, so let's introduce a regeneration limit. You get the idea. But with The Timeless Children, there is no story that goes alongside the continuity. The continuity is the story.

The big reveal itself, and it's worth pausing on this for a moment, is as follows. The Doctor is not in fact a native born Gallifreyan, but is instead an immortal(?) being from another world whose DNA is stolen by The Time Lords so they can gain her regenerative powers. It's total and unmitigated nonsense. It's the kind of bullshit that Big Finish couldn't come up with in their wildest dreams. The lore that the show is selling here is so bad as to be actively hilarious.

Not only is the content of the reveal total hokum, it's delivered in the most boring way imaginable, through an endless exposition dump that lasts roughly half the lifetime of the universe. It's just poor storytelling, and despite Sacha Dhawan's best efforts to make this information overload compelling, it isn't because we're just being told it without any reaction at all apart from the Doctor occasionally crying "no". There's no dramatic weight at all. I don't normally like to set about rewriting episodes (where we would you even start with this...) but why not have the Master trap the Doctor in the matrix where she has to discover the truth for herself? That might add some tension, or at least sense of agency, to what's going on here. But no, we get half a sodding hour of the Master going, "I'm telling you things. Big things. Important things."

But the very worst thing about this whole sorry affair is that, despite being billed as a finale with reveals that will change everything, and that "nothing will ever be the same again", what we get changes almost literally nothing. The Doctor is still the Doctor. We go through this whole continuing wrecking ball for no reason at all. We know that none of this matters because the Ruth!Doctor turns up and tells us as much, which is the closest this episode gets to being self-aware at any point. I find it very hard to believe that this will materially affect who the Doctor is going forward, or how she operates. She will still be, to coin a phrase, "an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out." If she isn't that, then what you're left with isn't Doctor Who anymore. Which begs the question: what the hell is the point of any of this?

Speaking of the Doctor, Chibnall era Who has reconstituted the character as an ineffectual bystander who does almost nothing in the face of death and atrocity. Here is an almost perfect example of that. The Doctor is so passive in this story as to be almost entirely inconsequential. The Master might as well have been spouting his revelations to a cardboard cutout of the Doctor. She stands around for almost the entire runtime while the Master explains her new Wikipedia entry to her. Jodie Whittaker deserves great credit for her performances over the last ten episodes, but the characterisation is so flimsy here, I barely even registered she was there.

What plot there is alongside this narrative farce is every bit as abysmal as what's going on inside the Matrix. I'd like to be able to say that the worst thing about the Cybermen is that they revert to being the mindless cannon fodder that they were in the 1980s and most NuWho finales up until now. But it's even worse than that, because the Master's dastardly evil plan involves upgrading Time Lord corpses into Cybermen to create a race of unkillable superbeings. It reads like bad fanfiction I know, but that's what happens. Suddenly the non-reveal of what the Hybrid was in Hell Bent looks like an absolutely genius move from Steven Moffat. 

But it's all fine because Ashad, now conveniently killed and miniaturised, and left just lying around on the floor of his spaceship, has a "death particle" (stop laughing at the back) stowed handily about his person. Even more helpful is that random old guy character turns up, exposits his entire backstory in about four and a half seconds, and sacrifices himself to save the day. That was lucky. The Doctor doesn't have to confront the moral dilemma the episode poses because she instead actively runs away from it. In trying to recreate the denouement of The Day of the Doctor, this ends up being its antithesis. Instead of deciding that there had to be another way and that the genocide they thought they committed in the Time War could never really be justified, the Doctor just lets someone else do the genocide thing for her. It's an ending so obvious and signposted, Chekhov's Gun may have just been replaced with Chekhov's Atomic Bomb.

This story is the Cartmel Masterplan on steroids. For those that don't know, the script editor of the final three seasons of Classic Who, Andrew Cartmel, had a plan to reintroduce the mystery of the show by making the character of the Seventh Doctor darker, more mysterious and manipulative. This was all building up to the big reveal that the Doctor was one of the founders of Time Lord society. Cancellation saved the Cartmell Masterplan because you got all of the interesting character work without any of the dumb reveal. This story is the dumb reveal without any of the character work and unsurprisingly it doesn't work in the slightest.

The Timeless Children is a dismal misfire in almost every conceivable way. Like being trapped on a 400 mile long spaceship reversing away from the gravitational pull of a black hole, time did funny things while I was watching this episode. It honestly felt like it lasted about three hours. It sprays great jets of continuity at the audience, with references that even I wasn't immediately able to place. Chris Chibnall has written an entire season of Doctor Who in order to canonise the Morbius Doctors. The fact that this was broadcast at primetime on BBC1 on a Sunday evening is legitimately hilarious. It's an expanded universe aficionado's idea of heaven. I've got a lot of time for the expanded universe material in the form of books, audio adventures and all the rest, but it should always kept firmly away from the main show. I pity any casual viewer watching this, wondering what the hell was going on and why they were supposed to care about any of it. 

I hope that this can be just one of those continuity defining moments that we can collectively move passed. Sadly I feel like that hope is misplaced. Whatever happens now, it feels almost inevitable that we are heading into a period of almost endless extended universe media about this new history of Gallifrey and the Doctor, let alone what future seasons of the TV show have planned. So much of what comes after is going to be defined by The Timeless Children and I feel exhausted just thinking about it. Is it bold and ambitious? For sure. Is ambition alone enough to make up for shockingly poor storytelling? No, of course it isn't. And so here I am, desperately hoping that nothing will come of this, because it would be rubbish if it did.

Random musings

• So, any redeeming features? As I say, I like the Ruth!Doctor's cameo, even if it only serves to highlight how absurd the whole thing is. Graham and Yaz get a nice scene together. If only they had interacted just a little over the past 21 episodes, I might have even been willing to buy it.

• Speaking of the companions, they are totally sidelined here. Again. It seems the show is not quite done with the fam yet, but we've got the measure of them. An enormous waste of potential. I'm all for constructive debate about the relative merits of companions, but is anyone out there arguing that Ryan is a more compelling character than say Bill? I'm not even sure how you would argue that.

• I tried to count how many narrative beats were stolen directly from other, better, Doctor Who episodes, but lost count. I got The Witch's Familiar, The Doctor Falls, The Day of the Doctor, The Parting of the Ways, The End of Time and, of course, the final few seconds of every David Tennant season finale. I'm sure there were others.

• The Doctor seems very angry through a lot of this that she's had her memory erased. So, we're back to saying mindwiping people is bad are we? Nobody tell Ada Lovelace.

• Series 12 has been an odd one. It felt at about the half way point that we might be starting to get somewhere, but it has pretty much fallen to pieces towards the end. For me, it's repeating many of the same mistakes as Series 11, but covering them up with continuity overload. It's a shame, but this finale has catapulted Series 12 right down to the bottom of my season rankings alongside its immediate predecessor.

Rating

2/10