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