Destiny of the Daleks

Chapter The 183rd, where robots from the last days of Disco meet the Daleks and their creator; that actually sounds fun, but it isn't somehow.

Plot:

The Doctor and a newly - and sillily - regenerated Romana arrive on Skaro. They leave K9 in the TARDIS as the robot dog has - sillily - developed laryngitis. A spaceship lands nearby crewed by a bunch of silver disco robots called the Movellans. The Doctor and Romana don't realise they are robots at first even though it's blindingly obvious. They are silly. Anyway, the Daleks are back on their ancestral planet using enslaved humanoids from various parts of the galaxy to mine for something. They are using slaves even though they could do it much quicker themselves. This might be because they have, somehow, become coldly logical robot creatures exactly like they haven't been previously; but, they are manifestly rubbish at being logical. From his previous visit to the Kaled city, the Doctor remembers a short cut to what he thinks the Daleks are after: Davros. The Daleks' creator has been abandoned but kept alive by suspended animation technology in his chair for the centuries since the original Daleks thought they had killed him. This has clearly affected him a bit, as his voice is different and his face has changed so it looks like a mask that doesn't quite fit properly. Funny that.

The Daleks need Davros to help in their war with the Movellans, which is at an impasse because the fleets and battle computers of both sides are too logical to make any offensive move. The Doctor gets the slaves freed in exchange for letting the Daleks have Davros, then makes a break for it. With the help of the freed slaves, the Doctor and Romana defeat the Movellans (the robots have some serious design flaws). Davros's Daleks, each with multiple bombs attached for a suicide attack, approach the Movellan ship, but the Doctor goes back to the Kaled city and finds Davros, and uses Davros's remote control to blow the Daleks up before they do any harm. Davros is imprisoned to be taken off for trial. The freed slaves commandeer the Movellan ship, and the Doctor and Romana continue their wanderings through time and space in the TARDIS.

Context:

Watching the four episodes of Destiny of the Daleks from the DVD for the blog, I was not transported back to 1979 but to almost a decade later and the dark autumn weekday evenings of the late 1980s. The reason for this is that, despite its featuring what would seem to be the popular draw of Tom Baker with Daleks, I could not interest any of the family in watching with me. I had to find time when everyone else was out of the living room to catch up with each episode on my own. It was very reminiscent of how I watched every Sylvester McCoy episode in the 1980s when my family of that time were similarly not interested, somewhat furtively and definitely alone.

First Time Round:

I first saw this story from the VHS, which was released in early July 1994. This was around the time I graduated from university in Durham. I'd got my results and then stayed around, with all my stuff packed up, in a college room for a week or so between the end of term and the ceremony, which was held shortly after everyone else had gone home. It was an odd time as a graduand having nothing to do for a brief pause, except arrange the hire an expensive robe and hat and wait for another phase of one's life to begin. As such, I'm pretty sure I didn't buy and watch the story until I was back home in Worthing a little later. The one memory I have of watching it is not a memory at all but a lack thereof. Either I was tired or I'd had a little too much shandy while watching, or - just maybe - the story itself contributed in some way to this effect by numbing my brain - but I watched it, thought 'yeah, okay', then the next day could not remember how it ended, specifically regarding the fate of Davros. Had he appeared again for a resolution scene at the end? All I could remember was a blur of wonky Daleks with garlands of bombs round their domes squawking and blowing up. I had to fast forward to watch the last few minutes again, for which I had previously zoned out.

A clearer memory was my first reading of the novelisation. For some reason, a friend of mine, Andrew, invited me to meet him in Portsmouth for a day out. We went there a couple of times, as I remember, and this visit must have been sometime in the spring or 1988; I recall seeing a poster advertising Morrissey's first solo album Viva Hate when we went to the shops there. I travelled on the train to meet him, and read the Destiny of the Daleks novelisation on the way. The trip there and back was sufficient time to complete the slim volume. Both of us lived in Worthing at the time, so I've no idea why we went all that way and why we didn't travel over together. Perhaps he was staying with family for a visit and wanted an excuse to get out of their house for a while. That would fit. I don't want to get too Marcel Proust about it, but aside from Terrance Dicks's prose, I can only remember fleeting impressions: that Morrissey poster, Strawberry Switchblade playing at a funfair on a green by the seafront, and my buying and eating a roast almond Yorkie. They don't make the almond version of this UK chocolate bar anymore, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. Anyway, the book was much more exciting to read than the screen version was to watch years later. 

Reaction:

If I had to summarise Destiny of the Daleks in a word, I'd be torn between a choice of two: 'tatty' or 'threadbare'. I'm not talking about the production design though, I'm talking about the script. Some of the production design doesn't help, that's definitely true. Where they are saving money by reusing old elements, it shows: the original Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks four years earlier is showing signs of wear and tear; it also doesn't fit actor David Gooderson, replacing the original Davros actor Michael Wisher who proved unavailable for the recording of Destiny. The Dalek props too are aged and could do with refurbishment. The Movellans are well turned out, though; whatever you think of the choices involved for hair and outfit, which look they might have been made for some high concept Hot Gossip routine, they are done to a high level of quality. The Movellan ship set too is gorgeous. The sets for the Kaled city on the other hand look like the money had run out; perhaps it had all been spent hiring the Steadicam, used here for the first time on a Doctor Who, giving us a few stand-out gliding shots. Even the more conventionally filmed location sequences are excellent, though, with Winspit quarry in Dorset being well used to give some interesting landscapes. The hit rate of the look and feel then is about on a par with any other story of the period. The script though...

Whoever was responsible for the story that ended up on screen (see Deeper Thoughts for more details), it contains much that doesn't work. The central conceit that the Daleks and the Movellans have reached a logical stalemate, each side anticipating the other's every move and therefore locked into immobility, is an interesting one, but is a bad fit for Daleks. They aren't emotionless robots, and have never before been characterised as such. It's heavily implied that they are no longer organic creatures in protective shells, but have dispensed with the organic component altogether. The Doctor and Romana both refer to them as being robots, which is just not the case before or since this story. Even if one accepts this is somehow true, or at least metaphorical (they have got so used to their way of operating that they act like robots, say), I'm still not sure that the stalemate idea hangs together. Couldn't one side or the other just use a random number generator subroutine to choose what to do? How would the other side anticipate that? The scene where the Doctor, Romana and the Movellans play Scissors Paper Stone to demonstrate the difference between machine and human intelligence is cute (goes on a bit, though), but doesn't really make sense. The game involves making a random choice between three options, with no factors to dictate any particular order to favour one of the three options over the others, so there's no reason for a machine to play them in the same order as another machine.

The script also has problems of logic, and lack of follow through typical of other Nation stories. In one episode, the Daleks find the concept of self-sacrifice so illogical as to be unbelievable, in the next episode, a platoon of them have been easily persuaded to strap bombs onto themselves and do a kamikaze run at the Movellan spaceship. In the first episode, it's established as vital that the Doctor and Romana take regular does of anti-radiation drugs, and the Doctor sets a timer for when they'll need the next dose. By the time the timer goes off, they have been separated. The Doctor takes his pills, but can't give any to Romana who by that time has been captured. Romana shows signs of being ill and swoons. But the faint is a feint: Romana's just pretending to be dead as part of an escape plan. She's successful, and meets up again with the Doctor. He doesn't give her any drugs, she's perfectly fine anyway, and it's never mentioned again. Sure, I can tell myself they must have taken the necessary medicine later off screen at some point, but that's a hell of a cop out. The fuss about the levels of radiation set up at the beginning also begs the question of who's giving tablets to all the Daleks' slaves, either before or after they're freed? Why do the Daleks need the captured humans at all, except to provide the Doctor with a rebel fighting force later? It can't be a logical decision; as Romana points out, they'd do the job a lot quicker with machinery. So they're doing it out of spite? If so, how does that stack up with them as robotic slaves to logic? 

Even scripts with lots of plot holes can have exciting action moments. Here, though, Destiny also fails to deliver. The Daleks are portrayed too often as weak. The Doctor jokes about them not being able to climb, he puts his hat over one Dalek's eye stalk and it has a hissy fit. The pepperpots talk a good game, endlessly chanting their repetitive slogans, but there's hardly any extermination. They only kill one character in battle, and a couple more prisoners are lined up and zapped. Davros is literally pushed around by various characters. As he is essentially a wheelchair user, the optics of this did not look so good to me on this latest watch. I know he's evil and all, but he should be allowed to be in charge of his own propulsion. The Movellans are a bit of a pushover too; you just remove their easily accessible power source and they do a bit of community theatre spaced-out hands in the air acting, and then kark it. Peasy. Again, one wonders where a non-robot race could place its most vulnerable point that would be more illogical than the super logical Movellans managed. None of these flaws on its own is that big a deal, but they mound up until they blot out the light of anything good. If there was a bit more pace then maybe one would not have time to think about it: take out an episode's worth of padding and tighten it up a bit, and switch your brain off, and a three-parter Destiny of the Daleks would be an engaging enough, though superficial, season opener.

Connectivity: 

Both stories that open a new season of Doctor Who and feature an alien race landing on a fairly barren celestial body in order to search for someone. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Adams Nation Damnations! In the Deeper Thoughts last time on Russell T Davies, Douglas Adams and Terry Nation were a couple of the contenders I considered but discarded as competition for Davies's crown as the biggest TV writer ever to work on Doctor Who. Destiny of the Daleks was the only time they worked together (in the loosest sense of the term as we shall discover), Douglas Adams as Script Editor, Terry Nation as writer. Well, maybe Nation wasn't the writer, even though he was credited as such. Adams later claimed that Nation did not deliver full scripts for any of the episodes, just what amounted to storyline notes, and Adams himself had to write the lion's share of the story. It's difficult to know how much this is true. Director Ken Grieve backed up Adams's version of events, putting the amount contributed by Adams at 98%; it is also not the first time in Doctor Who's history that the criticism had been raised of Nation's work needing heavy rewriting. Adams's reported woes are consistent with, if a bit more extreme than, those of a few script editors on Doctor Who working with Nation before. It seems unlikely though that the BBC would have had to pay Nation had he not produced actual screenplays for all four episodes, though they would likely still have paid him if they were slim and under-running. It's likely that some exaggeration has crept in to the telling of the anecdotes in the years since.

It's definitely on record that Nation's scripts came in late. The production team wanted to start the season that year with a Dalek story, the metal meanies' return with a bang after four whole seasons without them. Nation had agreed as long as he was able to write it, but he wasn't available to do this such that the story could be recorded first that year. It was dropped to third slot in the production order, making it a tight turnaround to get the episodes made in time for broadcast. When Nation's scripts came in later than expected even on that schedule, it must have necessitated that the in-house script editor had to do any rewrites rapidly rather than everyone wait for the back and forth of Adams' teasing the necessary changes from Nation's pen. It's definitely clear that Adams contributed some material. There is a sequence where the Doctor is reading a book on the origins of the universe by Oolon Colluphid, a reference to an established minor character from Hitch Hiker that can only have been put in by Douglas. Additionally, there's the sequence at the beginning where Romana regenerates. This is of course a standard thing for a script editor to do, writing the sections necessitated by cast changes in the wider production, unconnected to the story of the week provided by the commissioned author.

The sequence at the start of episode one annoyed lots of purist fans at the time, and probably has annoyed more such fans since and to this very day. Without being too po-faced about it, I do think these people might have something of a point. It takes what was one of the most dramatic and significant devices in the history of the show - regeneration, meaning the change of one lead actor for another, a significant and rare event in the show's history - and uses it for a throwaway comedy five minutes. Romana has been recast and this is played out as if the wearing of bodies for Time Lords is like the wearing of clothes for us mere mortals. If it was side-splittingly funny, it might be worth it, but it's smile humour at most, somewhat witty and whimsical but overlong. Crucially, it seems padded out. Other moments that one suspects could have been contributed by Adams are similarly drawn out and not that funny. He could have been having an off day, but - if Adams really did contribute 98% of this material -  I'd expect it to be a lot funnier and much more interesting.

Lots of the material, as mentioned when talking about the story above, is standard Terry Nation serial peril-to-peril plot, without any effort towards surrounding coherence or escalation. There's slaves, and radiation poisoning, and countdowns, and planet destroying bombs; all these crop up again and again in Nations's work, but seem too humdrum to be things that would preoccupy Adams's psyche. Then again, if Nation had written the basic storyline, one wouldn't have thought he'd base it on his creations being robots, nor continually refer to them as such, as he should know if anyone should that they aren't. Even the reason why K9 doesn't appear is contentious and up for interpretation; depending on who you ask, either it was because Nation didn't want the K9 to upstage his creations (which suggests that he was shaping the story as author), or that the production team believed use of the K9 prop would be a nightmare in the quarry location (suggesting that the script editor was dictating elements that could be used for practical reasons).

The final point that suggests Adams contributed a lot to the episodes is that Nation was reportedly aghast at what ended up on screen. I say 'reportedly', as I've seen it relayed as fact in many reputable sources, but I don't believe I've ever seen a direct quote from Nation to back it up. It's true that after his contribution to the 1979/1980 series, Nation didn't work on Doctor Who again, but the same is true of Douglas Adams. They both moved on to bigger and more lucrative things that would take both men eventually, separately, to the USA. If Nation's last Who script never reached the screen as he intended it, neither did Adams's (see the blog post on Shada for more details). And both men died in California after an insufficiently long innings (Nation was 66 years old at the time of his death, and Adams a heart-breakingly young 49). It's almost 20 years since Douglas's untimely death (the anniversary of that sad occasion will be the 11th May this year) and at the time of my writing this it's but a few days to the 24th anniversary of Nation's death (9th March). It doesn't therefore matter therefore exactly what part of the story was written by whom. Both writers contributed greatly to Doctor Who during its history, and I'd be tempted to watch a story by each to celebrate their contributions on those milestone dates. I just won't ever pick Destiny of the Daleks for either of them, that's all. 

In Summary:

Tatty script with some threadbare (and, to be fair, some good) visuals.

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.