Plot:
[A new episode, so the following synopsis - and post - is going to be spoilerish: be warned.] In present day Sheffield, Ryan Sinclair is looking for his bike in the woods (long story) and accidentally invites an alien warrior to Earth when he touches a shimmery floating alien button thing that appears in thin air before him. The warrior's called Tim Shaw (long story) and with the help of a tentacle bio-android thingy, he must hunt and catch a randomly chosen human, as an initiation test to become leader of his tribe. Ryan calls the police, and meets up with an old schoolfriend, Yaz, who's now a probationary police officer. They then catch up with Ryan's grandmother Grace and her husband Graham, plus the post-regeneration Doctor, sans TARDIS, who has dropped in (long story, or rather a short punchy few seconds at the end of an otherwise very long story). Together, they work as a team to find out what the alien warrior is doing and save Karl - the lad with self-esteem issues who's being hunted. They succeed, but at a cost. The Doctor enlists her new friends help once more: she rewires Tim's travel technology to send her through space to the location of the TARDIS; but, she is instead transported into the vacuum of space, alongside Ryan, Yaz and Graham...
Context:
I left a few days after watching this for the first one and a bit times (see below) to allow a bit of space for my thoughts to settle; then, I watched it again midweek on my own (well, on my own except for a gin and tonic). It was just as good as first time round. The Woman Who Fell to Earth is a solidly constructed narrative that doesn't rely on surprise, so it doesn't suffer from knowing what's going to happen before you watch it unfold. If anything, this second watch was marginally better as I could put the subtitles on, and find that the Tim Shaw character is actually pronouncing his name as Tzim-Sha.
First-time round:
The family (me, the Better Half and three kids - boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6) gathered round excitedly with some white-chocolate popcorn that the BH had prepared, watching the last few minutes of Countryfile, a programme we'd never normally watch, just to ensure we didn't miss a moment of Jodie Whittaker's first story on its BBC1 broadcast. The drawback with Doctor Who now being broadcast on a Sunday is that it makes it more difficult to view the episode for suitability beforehand. We'd have had to wait to do this Sunday night after the kids had gone to bed, which they were too excited to manage (frankly, the adults were too excited too). Should it prove suitable, making them wait to see it until Monday, after a full day of school, seemed a bit mean. So, I did what I could, and read reviews to get a feel for the tone. Will Gompertz's BBC news site review particularly led me to believe there wasn't much that was scary in The Woman Who Fell to Earth; but, alas, my youngest found a face full of other people's teeth too much, and left the room for the last 15 minutes, her Mum accompanying her. When she was settled down, and the others were also abed, the Better Half caught up with what she missed, and I watched that section again with her too.Reaction
However good or not the story was, and it was jolly good, the only thing that ultimately matters is Jodie Whittaker's performance as the Doctor. It too was jolly and good. The first story of any new Doctor is more than anything a showcase of that actor's new take. Jodie's Doctor is your best and bravest and cleverest friend, but resolutely in charge. Each scene fizzes with energy (even the scenes where she's asleep) and her dialogue is studded with mission statements about how change is scary but okay, how knives and for idiots, how she's good at building things (probably), and how she ensures fair play across the universe, and so on. She had me at "Oh Brilliant" really, but I think I was wholly won over by the time she swirled round and said with smiling authority "I'm calling you Yaz, 'cos we're friends now".
It's a team effort, though, both in terms of the characters and the actors. Every one of the regular cast is delivering the goods. Bradley Walsh is perfectly pitched as the Everyman voice of reason; Sharon D Clarke is no-nonsense and brave; Mandip Gill and Tosin Cole arrive fully-formed as the audience identification figures. More than being this decade's Rose and Mickey, I'd say they were shaping up to be this century's Ian and Barbara: two old friends thrown together in an adventure they didn't ask to go on, with maybe a hint that they might become a couple (though it's early days yet). Everyone's work is faultless, and they get given some lovely lines; "Can't ride a bike, started an alien invasion" from Graham is a favourite. There's something of a Sarah Jane Smith Adventures vibe, and I mean that in a good way in case you were wondering: it's probably inevitable; the shape of our new heroes' group silhouette is very similar, with only the ages of the characters tweaked a bit.
Beyond the regulars, every character, however minor, is given enough room to shine, right down to the doomed drunk guy throwing his kebab salad at an alien he mistakenly thinks is a Halloween celebrator out a month early. This is all packed in to an only slightly increased running time alongside a quite dense plot with lots of intrigue and a couple of expert set pieces (if the jumping from crane to crane sequence didn't make your toes curl, you may well be a corpse, just sayin'). This is down to a very well constructed narrative, which is never overcrowded or convoluted, and keeps it lean with anything even slightly extraneous trimmed out. There's not even a title sequence (is that a first? even the assembled found footage episode Sleep No More had a brief one), and no appearance of TARDIS interior or exterior. This makes it a perfect jumping-on point for new viewers. There's only one line, about the Doctor previously being a Scotsman, that hints that this isn't a brand new show. The cliffhanger lead-in to the next episode keeps things intriguing to the end, with many revelations remaining for newbies and seasoned veteran viewers alike.
There's high quality in terms of look and feel too: good visuals, well lit, with a nice choice of interesting urban locations, as well as the windswept hills and dales at the start (a silly place to learn to ride a bike, but I'll allow them that as Ryan was probably too embarrassed to do it anywhere nearer to other people). The theme music and pulsating images accompanying the end credits are old-school but given enough of a twist to be new too. The incidentals are great; Murray Gold did sterling work over thirteen years to keep things distinctive and fresh for each story and each new Doctor, and I'll miss him; but, we have someone just as good in new composer Segun Akinola. Not everything was perfect, of course. The Stenza concept is a bit derivative of the Predator movie franchise. It's pushing things for Yaz to be recognisable to Ryan and his Gran if they last saw her at primary school age. However paranoid his preparations and monitoring, how could Rahul have found the alien transport so quickly? Plus, hunter and prey separately bumping into members of the same family on the same night in a city as big as Sheffield is stretching coincidence a bit too much. These are very minor points, though, and this is only the start of this new new Who - it's a work in progress, but then so is life.
It's a team effort, though, both in terms of the characters and the actors. Every one of the regular cast is delivering the goods. Bradley Walsh is perfectly pitched as the Everyman voice of reason; Sharon D Clarke is no-nonsense and brave; Mandip Gill and Tosin Cole arrive fully-formed as the audience identification figures. More than being this decade's Rose and Mickey, I'd say they were shaping up to be this century's Ian and Barbara: two old friends thrown together in an adventure they didn't ask to go on, with maybe a hint that they might become a couple (though it's early days yet). Everyone's work is faultless, and they get given some lovely lines; "Can't ride a bike, started an alien invasion" from Graham is a favourite. There's something of a Sarah Jane Smith Adventures vibe, and I mean that in a good way in case you were wondering: it's probably inevitable; the shape of our new heroes' group silhouette is very similar, with only the ages of the characters tweaked a bit. Beyond the regulars, every character, however minor, is given enough room to shine, right down to the doomed drunk guy throwing his kebab salad at an alien he mistakenly thinks is a Halloween celebrator out a month early. This is all packed in to an only slightly increased running time alongside a quite dense plot with lots of intrigue and a couple of expert set pieces (if the jumping from crane to crane sequence didn't make your toes curl, you may well be a corpse, just sayin'). This is down to a very well constructed narrative, which is never overcrowded or convoluted, and keeps it lean with anything even slightly extraneous trimmed out. There's not even a title sequence (is that a first? even the assembled found footage episode Sleep No More had a brief one), and no appearance of TARDIS interior or exterior. This makes it a perfect jumping-on point for new viewers. There's only one line, about the Doctor previously being a Scotsman, that hints that this isn't a brand new show. The cliffhanger lead-in to the next episode keeps things intriguing to the end, with many revelations remaining for newbies and seasoned veteran viewers alike.
There's high quality in terms of look and feel too: good visuals, well lit, with a nice choice of interesting urban locations, as well as the windswept hills and dales at the start (a silly place to learn to ride a bike, but I'll allow them that as Ryan was probably too embarrassed to do it anywhere nearer to other people). The theme music and pulsating images accompanying the end credits are old-school but given enough of a twist to be new too. The incidentals are great; Murray Gold did sterling work over thirteen years to keep things distinctive and fresh for each story and each new Doctor, and I'll miss him; but, we have someone just as good in new composer Segun Akinola. Not everything was perfect, of course. The Stenza concept is a bit derivative of the Predator movie franchise. It's pushing things for Yaz to be recognisable to Ryan and his Gran if they last saw her at primary school age. However paranoid his preparations and monitoring, how could Rahul have found the alien transport so quickly? Plus, hunter and prey separately bumping into members of the same family on the same night in a city as big as Sheffield is stretching coincidence a bit too much. These are very minor points, though, and this is only the start of this new new Who - it's a work in progress, but then so is life.
Connectivity:
Both
Fear Her and The Woman Who Fell to Earth take place in a UK city, and involve the Doctor interacting with a family and visiting their house. In both instances the child of that family has one deceased parent; in both instances, the Dad is absent, and is characterised as being a less than admirable human being. The tentacled bio-thing looks quite similar to the scribble creature too.
Deeper Thoughts:
Sundayness. The move from Saturdays to Sundays makes more sense now I've seen The Woman Who Fell to Earth. For quite a while into the story, I couldn't work out why the tone felt so different. It was shot and directed well, but Doctor Who wasn't exactly poorly served in those departments previously. It had a bleak and dark quality to the visuals, but again this is not far from previous years. It was focusing on the Doctor's friends and their wider family as an introduction before the Doctor appeared; this is the standard pattern, though, in previous jumping-on point stories like Rose and The Eleventh Hour, and even last year's The Pilot. The most major behind-the-scenes change has happened in the writing, so maybe that's where lies a clue; but what is the factor that made it feel - for this viewer at least - so different from the stores from 2005 to 2017? The penny dropped only near the end, after Bradley Walsh had delivered Graham's eulogy, and then explained to the Doctor that his cancer was in remission. All the new characters introduced in The Woman Who Fell to Earth are real. Or, as real as TV character's can get.
Every death (and life) is made to count. Take Dennis for example, who has a sweet chat with his granddaughter moments before being offed. It would be a hackneyed device akin to the "it's my last day before retirement" cop, if the script were being cynical, but I don't think it is. I think in this it is putting out its wares for your appraisal: this is a show about real people living real lives, and this show loves them all. Graham's cancer, Ryan's dyspraxia, Yaz's struggles to be taken seriously in her job, Karl's self-help tape litanies, even Rahul's desperate loss, which is the most out there aspect - each of these grounds the characters more than ever before in new series Doctor Who (and probably in the whole of Doctor Who). The characters here are in much sharper contrast to the extra-terrestrial oddities they are going to come across in future weeks. This is now a show that puts a character in a position where he has to learn how to drive a crane. What does he do? He googles it on his phone, of course, just like we all would.
Sundayness. The move from Saturdays to Sundays makes more sense now I've seen The Woman Who Fell to Earth. For quite a while into the story, I couldn't work out why the tone felt so different. It was shot and directed well, but Doctor Who wasn't exactly poorly served in those departments previously. It had a bleak and dark quality to the visuals, but again this is not far from previous years. It was focusing on the Doctor's friends and their wider family as an introduction before the Doctor appeared; this is the standard pattern, though, in previous jumping-on point stories like Rose and The Eleventh Hour, and even last year's The Pilot. The most major behind-the-scenes change has happened in the writing, so maybe that's where lies a clue; but what is the factor that made it feel - for this viewer at least - so different from the stores from 2005 to 2017? The penny dropped only near the end, after Bradley Walsh had delivered Graham's eulogy, and then explained to the Doctor that his cancer was in remission. All the new characters introduced in The Woman Who Fell to Earth are real. Or, as real as TV character's can get.
Every death (and life) is made to count. Take Dennis for example, who has a sweet chat with his granddaughter moments before being offed. It would be a hackneyed device akin to the "it's my last day before retirement" cop, if the script were being cynical, but I don't think it is. I think in this it is putting out its wares for your appraisal: this is a show about real people living real lives, and this show loves them all. Graham's cancer, Ryan's dyspraxia, Yaz's struggles to be taken seriously in her job, Karl's self-help tape litanies, even Rahul's desperate loss, which is the most out there aspect - each of these grounds the characters more than ever before in new series Doctor Who (and probably in the whole of Doctor Who). The characters here are in much sharper contrast to the extra-terrestrial oddities they are going to come across in future weeks. This is now a show that puts a character in a position where he has to learn how to drive a crane. What does he do? He googles it on his phone, of course, just like we all would.
Characters in previous years since the show's return in 2005 have been grounded too, to a lesser or greater degree; but, compared to Graham, Yaz and Ryan, they are almost cartoons. The stories they were in, though, went out on Saturday rather than Sunday and thus had to stand out amongst the shiny floor spangles and glitter sequins of early evening light entertainment. To make this work, the first new Who Showrunner, Russell T Davies, made his regulars slightly comic caricatures at first glance, so he could reveal their vulnerabilities and strengths in brief, telling moments. Second showrunner Steven Moffat made the regulars superheroes for most of his reign: The Girl Who Waited, The Centurion, The Child of the TARDIS, The Impossible Girl. Their mild mannered alter-egos of Amy, Rory, River Song and Clara were there for most of the time, but any moment they could take off their metaphorical Clark Kent specs and reveal their uber-selves. Interestingly, the person most like a previous new series regular in Jodie Whittaker's debut is Grace: the one who runs towards danger, and relishes the adventure. And [major spoiler, don't read until you've seen the show] she's the one who doesn't make it. Is hers a symbolic death, representing the end of the show as we've known it previously? Time will tell; it usually does.
In Summary:
The best praise is that I can't wait to see The Ghost Monument, and you can't say better than that. Roll on Sunday.
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