Fourteen months after the reveal that Jodie Whitaker would be making history as the first woman to play the Doctor, her highlight anticipated debut, “The Woman Who Fell To Earth,” premiered via a global simulcast.
Prior to this, all we had was the short clip at the end of “Twice Upon A Time” and the small clip that was released about a week before the premiere.
Instead of being London focused as Doctor Who has been for most of its current run, it seems as if Series 11 will be centered around Sheffield where the companions (or friends) are from. This gives us a new setting and allows us to explore the Northern parts of the United Kingdom in greater detail than we have been able to with one episode jaunts.
But let’s focus on the episode at hand.
The episode opens with a V-log where Ryan is describing the most funny, smart, caring woman he ever met.
As we quickly meet his grandmother, Grace, I begin to wonder if the V-log is talking about her or The Doctor.
Ryan has a coordination disorder, dyspraxia. Because of this disorder, Ryan has never learned to ride a bike. Grace and Graham are working with him. Out of frustration, he throws the bike off of a cliff.
We then meet Yasmin Kahn. She poses some logistical errors that could have been easily fixed but yet don’t quite work for me. It was revealed at SDCC that her character is 18. Yet, we quickly learn she’s in her second probationary year as a police officer.
That’s possible, but out of curiosity, I did some digging. To become an officer in the UK you must be 18-years-old and have your A levels. To still be 19 and having gone through your A levels, training, and then started as an officer is cutting that very, very close.
Not impossible, just unlikely. Likely, Yasmin is currently a Police Community Support Officer which replaced the Police Cadets. The cadets were disbanded in the 1990s and the PSCO program started in 2002. This would give her similar powers to a constable.
The episode centers around this warrior race known as the Stenza. Apparently, they’ve been coming to Earth for quite some time. Their leader selects a random target and they come to hunt it without weapons or assistance. This particular warrior is undertaking the trial with the hopes of ascending to the position of leader.
He cheats though, using these Gathering Coils to help him gather data that he can transfer to himself. The Doctor wants to stop him and send a message to the Stenza race that Earth is not a hunting ground.
This episode does do something that I do not believe we’ve seen in the New Series. We actually get a montage as The Doctor makes the new sonic screwdriver. She makes it with parts she finds around a warehouse. That was a unique aspect, getting to watch the Doctor make her tool of choice.
If you watched the Next Time trailer, you got to hear the remastered theme which was something I greatly enjoyed. It reminds me a bit of the series 4 theme but a bit different. That being said, it does go closer to the original than we have been in the latest series which I appreciated.
As for Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor? I honestly think that she needs time to figure out who she is. For most of the episode, she seemed to be emulating David Tennant’s Doctor and shared a lot of traits with him. Now what she’ll keep as she goes on and what will change is something we may need to wait. It’s not unusual for Doctors to take time to develop their characters.
On a critical note, while the writing wasn’t the extremely bad writing of the Steven Moffat era, it wasn’t fantastic. I was hoping that when Chris Chibnall came out of the gate and had to present his best writing for this episode that we would get something like the second series of Broadchurch.
This episode’s biggest crimes are the missed opportunities, one of which greatly surprised me. Coming from the guy who created and wrote one of the most popular procedurals in the UK this decade, you would think that when he had the opportunity to visit cold cases and explore the alien threat and how long they’ve been there he would take it.
Apparently, the Stenza have been coming here for a while. We know of at least one former victim. But are there others? I would have loved to see a bit of that. Not only that, but Chibnall does have a track record for writing good mysteries and he should have played to his strengths when writing this first episode, especially when the plot lent itself to that possibility.
The other one is in the episode title itself. When we left the Thirteenth Doctor in the Christmas special, she had fallen out of the TARDIS and was falling to Earth. Yet we don’t see the fall, we don’t see how she gets out of it. All we see is her land in the train completely fine.
And yes, I acknowledge that End of Time Part 2 had a fall but I’m fairly certain that he fell from significantly less height. By starting there we could have given the opening a much needed dose of action that would have better grabbed people’s attention.
After the dreadful writing and overly complicated plots of the Steven Moffat era, the beginning of the Chibnall era was a stark contrast. Instead of dreadful, we honestly got bland writing. As for the over complicated plots, Chibnall seems to have over compensated by dumbing it down and holding the hands of his viewers.
Overall, in ways it was better than most of the episodes we’ve seen in recent years. I’m curious to see how the series develops as both Chibnall and Whitaker ease into their roles.
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