The Pilot

Chapter The 135th, where the Doctor finally settles down, gets a job, and picks up the Bill.

Plot:

Bill Potts lives with her awful step-mum, works in the canteen at St. Luke's University, Bristol, and has a crush on a student, Heather, who has a defect in one of her eyes that makes it look like a star. She's also being tutored by an eccentric lecturer who's worked at the university for decades and is known only as the Doctor. For many months, Bill visits the Doctor weekly, during which time a few mysterious things happen: the Doctor and his assistant Nardole sneak around a secret underground vault in a university building, Heather is fascinated by a puddle which appears to reflect light in a weird way, and at Christmas - after Bill mentions that she doesn't have any photos of her mother, who died when she was a baby - a cache of them turns up in the back of a cupboard. Scanning one, Bill sees the reflection of the photographer in a mirror - it's a grey-haired man that looks remarkably like the Doctor.

One day, Bill sees Heather from afar staring into the puddle, but when she turns a corner to talk to her Heather is gone. She tells the Doctor about this, and about the mysterious puddle, and he rushes off to investigate. The puddle is not water but space fuel, and it wasn't reflecting but mimicking. It has eaten Heather and taken her form, and is now stalking Bill wherever she goes, flooding under doors and dribbling through shower-heads and the like. The Doctor invites Bill into the TARDIS, and accompanied by Nardole they take a quick multi-stop tour of the universe trying to outrun the Heather puddle, but it keeps coming after them. Finally, while trying to lure the Heather puddle to its destruction in the middle of a Dalek / Movellan skirmish, the Doctor realises that Heather means Bill no harm. She has now been made the pilot of this galaxy-spanning goo, and wants to take Bill with her as a passenger, the fixation caused by the last words they exchanged before Heather was puddle-ised. Somewhat reluctantly, Bill releases Heather from her bond, and watches as she disappears off into the universe. Despite protestations from Nardole that he has to keep his post guarding the vault, the Doctor offers to show Bill the universe too, and maybe they'll catch up with Heather somewhere out there one day (spoiler: they eventually do).

Context:

One Sunday night during what I still think of as the 'Songs of Praise TV zone', despite not having watched Songs of Praise since I was a child, I popped on the disc from the series 10 Blu-ray box set to watch with the whole family. It had been a very busy weekend, and we were behind with getting school bags and packed lunches and the like ready for the next day, so I thought it might have to cut the episode short and watch the second half another day. The Better Half was only slightly engaged, as she was off in the kitchen cooking something on the hob. Anyway, 50 minutes later, we were all sat down entranced, watching to the end. The pan on the hob had very nearly got burnt, such was the attraction of this story; the idea of stopping halfway through had very quickly been abandoned. I hadn't remembered how very good it was. My memory of my reaction to the first watch was that it was okay enough, but it lacked a little spark. This time round, it went down much better. It must be very good indeed to have held everyone rapt for its entire running time,

First time round:

This still feels like 'new' Doctor Who to me, but it's two and a half years' old and a whole regime change ago. I watched it go out live on BBC1 with the family on Saturday 15th April 2017. It had been a while since the last series; there had been the then obligatory Christmas specials on the big days of 2015 and 2016, but there hadn't been a weekly airing of episodic Who for 16 long months. The last full run had had its moments but overall was a bit lacklustre, but I had high hopes for the new episodes from what I'd seen and heard thus far (Bill Potts looked like a breath of fresh air compared to previous backstory-heavy overwritten companions Amy and Clara). To get myself in the mood, I'd watched a Capaldi episode earlier in the Easter holiday with the family, and published the blog on it that Saturday morning (see here for more details). Then all that was left was to wait for the evening to roll round and hope that the world would survive until then (the American president was escalating his sabre-rattling at North Korea at the time, as I recall). 

Reaction:

This story primarily exists to introduce the new regular, Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts. If the actor wasn't any good, or the character was lacking, then it would be stymied to begin with; luckily, both are brilliant. Mackie has a fresh, offbeat way of handling the material that injects a vital new burst of energy into the show. The writing uses this to great effect, making Bill the kind of character that asks the questions nobody's thought to ask before. Writer Steven Moffat has to think those unasked questions up, of course, and that's a challenge after 50+ years of the show, but he manages it (nobody has thought before, for example, to have a character ask how the Doctor can be an alien if his travelling box is named with an acronym that only works in English). The script also doesn't let one miss that Bill is a lesbian; maybe they hit that note a little hard and not too subtly, but it was a trail-blazing development (at least for Doctor Who), and it's good to have another proportion of Who's diverse audience represented with a identification character - and a hero - on screen, so why not?!

The tweaked series set-up of the Doctor, having retired from travelling to start lecturing in a university, works well for Capaldi's version of the character. It's thrillingly brought to life in the early set piece of the Doctor giving a poetic lecture about time travel ("Time and Relative Dimension in Space - it means life") interspersed with montages of Bill's studies and student life progressing. That was one of the best moments of the story for me - written, performed, directed and edited perfectly. The lecturer thing, though, is a little bit too similar to scenarios Moffat's done multiple times before. Douglas Adams once considered a similar story during his time as script editor of the show, but it was vetoed; Moffat seems to want to make up for that by trying every permutation of the idea he can think of; in fact, it was only the previous full Capaldi season that started with the Doctor having to return to travelling the universe after an extended period in hiding.

It's given a twist here, though, as the Doctor is somewhat reluctant about this retirement, having to keep control of his wanderlust because he has the self-imposed duty of guarding whatever is in the mysterious vault. For this reason, I think it was a mistake to suggest that the Doctor has been doing this lecturing job for decades - he would have gone out of his mind with boredom long before. Matt Lucas's Nardole works better in this set-up than when it was just him and the Doctor, but there's not a lot of him in these earlier stories, to make room for the Bill / Doctor relationship to be foregrounded. Mackie and Capaldi have great chemistry together, as Lucas will with both eventually later in the year, when he gets more of a look in.

Taking out the material setting up for a longer run, the plot for this first story is perhaps inevitably a bit thin. Again, there is the reuse of familiar ideas from Moffat's time running the show: the Bill/Heather love story that at first looks like a horror story is very reminiscent of the Matt Smith story Hide, and the antagonist seeming to be malevolent but it's all a misunderstanding caused by malfunctioning technology is reminiscent of about 10 previous stories Moffat has had a hand in. Nonetheless, there are some very effective scenes of creeping menace where Bill is pursued by something that can dribble under every door, and flow through any drain. The later sequences, as the episode turns into an intergalactic chase sequence, move pretty energetically, but it's a tad 'bitty' - it's nice, for example, to see the Movellans (one-off disco robot adversaries from 1979's Destiny of the Daleks) in the series once more; but, blink and you'll miss 'em.

There are a few flaws: there's something odd about the Doctor having framed publicity pictures in his rooms of Carole Ann ford and Alex Kingston (playing his granddaughter Susan, and wife River Song respectively). This, plus the pot of Character Options sonic screwdrivers, classic and modern, on his desk makes the Doctor look like a fanboy merchandise collector: he's only missing a shelf of Target books with an action figure of Tom Baker as a bookend to make things complete. Most irritating, though, maybe because I've got one of those obsessive compulsive kind of brains, is that from the moment she gets into the TARDIS, Bill says she needs a wee, but she never has a wee. I'm watching and I can't help but think: she must be absolutely bursting by now, why hasn't she mentioned it again? The action's pretty much continuous and there is no opportunity for it to happen. Even when she's in a bathroom in Sydney, and they could have cut away discreetly, they don't: poor desperate Bill only gets to splash some water on her face. It slightly undermined the remainder of the action for me, I have to say (and I'm only partly joking!).

Connectivity: 

Both The Pilot and The End of Time include scenes set at Christmas; they both feature a semi-regular character played by a performer most famously noted for TV character sketch comedy work, who was first introduced in a Christmas special but is now returning to the role. The Doctor in both stories is hinted to have used time-travel in order to give his companion a gift (Donna's lottery ticket, Bill's family photos), and the John Simm Master appears in both (just a glimpse in the Coming Soon trailer at the end of The Pilot).

Deeper Thoughts:

Repiloting. In the UK, drama and comedy shows don't tend to relaunch that much. Personnel change over time definitely, but a big major reboot is a rarity. Take for an example New Tricks, a show that in the mid-2000s was regularly getting as big if not bigger audiences than Doctor Who. This was a show about three retired policeman brought back to work on cold cases, all reporting in to a younger female senior officer. By the time of its last series, that's still what it was, but every one of the four main cast, the retired cops and the female officer, were different characters played by different actors. Every change, though, had happened piecemeal with the final original cast member bowing out at the start of the last series in 2015. Doctor Who from 1963 was much the same, with companions leaving, and new ones joining, but - for a good few years at least - there was always someone familiar appearing in both the last one of one season, and the first one of the next. Who reached its New Tricks tipping point with The Tenth Planet, a story that saw the final remaining member of the original cast (William Hartnell in this instance) leave. Doctor Who carried on after that point without a break for more than 20 years, whereas New Tricks managed only 8 more episodes. I wonder why that should be.

One reason is that Doctor Who didn't ever tiptoe around this. In New Tricks, when Alun Armstrong's alcoholic autistic savant character Brian Lane left the series, he was replaced by emotionally unavailable, autistic savant Dan Griffin played by Nicholas Lyndhurst. But this was obviously a very different character, because ... um... well he wasn't an alcoholic. And he was played by Nicholas Lyndhurst. Different, see?! An audience is savvy enough to realise that a cut and paste job has been done, but they accept it, begrudgingly or otherwise. Compare this to Doctor Who, which did the exact opposite. It made a big fuss that the replacement was playing the same character, but his looks and personality were completely different, and it didn't happen with a bit of HR in-out - it happened when the main character's face exploded. The chutzpah of this is still impressive now: recasting someone with a similar actor is one thing, writing someone out but replacing them with an identical plot function / personality type template is another, but calling someone the same name but having everything about them be different, and drawing maximum attention to this with a burst of pyrotechnics, that was a gamble. But it paid off, giving Doctor Who an engine that would power it through multiple changes in the years to come.

Even with this miracle of in-built periodic metamorphosis, Doctor Who still did occasionally have to repliot. I should explain that term, as it's not really a thing - it was invented, or at least popularised, by the TV show Community, the mainstream network sitcom Dan Harmon created before he co-created Rick and Morty. Community comments on itself in a meta fashion, as one of its main characters Abed is an autistic savant (there's a pattern here) who seems to know, or at least act, like he's in a sitcom. The issue with Community was that it had an end date baked in: its precinct was a community college, and it centred on a character having to study there to complete his bachelor's degree over four years. What would they do when it came to season five? Well, they'd repilot of course. The main character Jeff returns to college and becomes a teacher, and through a series of dark twists and coincidences, encourages all his old study buddies to re-enrol too. As is typical for Community, all this is commented on as it happens by Abed. The episode is called 'Repilot' and contains many echoes of the very first episode of Community series one.

The relaunched Doctor Who's season 10 in 2017 was kicked off by an episode called 'The Pilot'. It aimed to do the same thing as that similarly titled episode of Community: recreate itself as new, from the ashes of its former version. Writer and showrunner Steven Moffat had done five series and was - reportedly - stuck with doing another year because Chris Chibnall wasn't ready to take over until he'd finished the third series of Broadchurch. Faced with generating more stories, Moffat seems to have decided that the best way to do this was to create a new start, a jumping on point. Just like in Community, he playfully draws attention to this with the title. There's also some lovely echoes with initiation episodes of Doctor Who past: Bill's ordinary life of chips is almost certainly a reference to the reoccurring motif of fried potato segments in the life of Rose Tyler, first ever companion of the new Who era; a curious student following two faculty members into a world of mystery, as happens in The Pilot, is also a clever inversion of the events of the very first Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child - this probably isn't a coincidence.

This isn't the first jumping on point story in the show's history. Jon Pertwee debut Spearhead from Space, although it includes a character who had appeared in a couple of stories previously, contains no regulars held over from the previous story broadcast, and it completely changes the focus of the show: it's no longer about travel to the stars, it's about the aliens coming to the - grounded - Doctor. The Doctor in The Pilot, living on Earth and not travelling the universe, is again an echo of this. Rose, the 2005 relaunch story, is by necessity the same as regards to all-new regulars, and though it is more subtle, it does alter the focus of the show for the future, with the removal of the Doctor's planet and people, leaving him alone. Matt Smith and Jodie Whittaker's debuts also contain no supporting cast crossing over. How does the show keep getting away with this? During the Repliot episode of Community, there's a lot of comparisons with Scrubs series 9, which did away with a lot of the main cast, including the phasing out of the main character, and changed the precinct of the show. Scrubs never made it to a series 10. So, doing things gradually or doing them sharply can both end up alienating the viewer. A jumping on point can become a 'jumping the shark' moment. Doctor Who, though, seems to thrive on change. Anyway, the phrase 'jumping the shark' like 'repiloting' isn't really a thing unless you get hung up on these details.  As Community had it (in an episode in the earlier, and maybe funnier, years): "For the record, there was an episode of Happy Days where a guy literally jumped over a shark and it was the BEST ONE!" 

In Summary:

The Pilot steers the show off in a good new direction.