Doctor Who is
back. Jodie Whittaker is the Doctor.
This review will contain some
spoilers so be warned…
First off, Jodie Whittaker. She
hit the ground running (literally as well as metaphorically!). From the moment
we first encountered her, I felt like Jodie Whittaker was the Doctor. Jodie
Whitaker’s Doctor was smart, funny, and utterly likeable. This is the newest
incarnation of my hero growing up. There were elements of her performance that
reminded me a little of Matt Smith and David Tennant but at the same time she
utterly made the role her own.
One of the things that makes
or breaks any era of Doctor Who is
the companions. I think the 13th Doctor is going to have a good team of friends
to play off and I think watching the dynamic unfold between them will be really
interesting. Each of them is going to bring something different to their
adventures with the Doctor. You can already see the traces of what’s going to
make them fantastic companions as the series progresses in much the same way
that Rose Tyler was showing what she was made of right from the beginning.
Ryan seems to be the smart one
but not in a traditional book smart way. It also seems like he has some
self-confidence issues which I think the Doctor will help him work through. He
was a likeable and relatable character which is what I want to be seeing from
any new companion.
Yas seems to have an
investigative nose which reminded me somewhat of Sarah Jane, any companion that
reminds of Sarah Jane must be doing something right! Also having a companion be
a Police Officer is a pretty original idea but one that I think will work well.
I thought Graham was going to
be the weakest of the new TARDIS team but I was wrong, I don’t think there is a
weak member of the team. It’s interesting to see a companion who’s more
cautious, I don’t think that’s really happened before.
I had a feeling that Grace was
going to die, but that didn’t undermine the poignancy of her death. I think
that her death is going to be something that has an important and powerful
lasting impact throughout the series.
Monsters, this episode had a
proper monster! If you read my Doctor Who
Series 10 reviews you might recall I complained frequently about a lack of
proper monsters. Well The Woman Who Fell
to Earth gave us a proper monster. I don’t think Tim Shaw will come to be
regarded as one of the all-time classic Doctor
Who monsters but he was a good adversary for the new Doctor to face.
Even the setting was new,
instead of London we’re now in Sheffield. After Clara Oswald and Amy Pond both
having fairly vaguely defined backstories it was nice to see the new team
having a life in a city before they met the Doctor. I think moving away from
London is a smart idea, since 2005 pretty much every series of Doctor Who has been very London heavy so
leaving the capital really makes this feel like a fresh start. It was
definitely Sheffield, I’m from Yorkshire and it felt like an authentic representation
of my county.
Fundamentally this is a ‘new
Doctor’ episode. To a certain extent it followed the mould that has been set by
The Christmas Invasion and The Eleventh Hour for what a new Doctor
episode is. The Doctor has to figure out who they are in their newest
incarnation and save the world. That is the type of episode that The Woman Who Fell to
Earth is. Is that a bad thing? I
don’t think so. This is a new era of Doctor
Who, with a brand new Doctor, I think it was right to start the series like
this. It was a great episode to whet our appetite for more Who and I definitely want to see more of what this era has in
store.
Also I loved that tease we got
of the new theme tune over the credits. It gave me a Classic Who vibe in all
the best ways.
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