Terminus

Chapter The 139th, concerns Terminus, definition - noun: the end of the line.

Plot:

The Doctor has welcomed Turlough aboard the TARDIS, not knowing that this new young companion is a somewhat unwilling agent of the Black Guardian tasked with assassinating the Time Lord. Only Tegan suspects Turlough, but no one listens to her as she's always moaning about something. Anyway, Turlough's attempts at time machine sabotage cause the TARDIS to lock on to a nearby craft, which is decorated with pictures of skulls everywhere, so obviously must be a safe haven. Nyssa's room is nearest to the ensuing cosmic disturbance, so she escapes into the craft and the others follow her, getting split up as is the fashion. The Doctor and Nyssa meet up with a couple of space pirates, a raiding party whose (space)ship-mates have abandoned them, as it turns out they've raided a plague (space)ship - ferrying victims of space leprosy to a space station called Terminus. In Space.

Nyssa has caught the disease (somehow), and gets taken off by guards called the Vanir. The others follow. Once there, they aren't really in any jeopardy, except for some minor league bullying from the Vanir, as everyone - even a giant glowing red-eyed man-dog called the Garm - actually does want to help cure the people that arrive there. It also turns out that Terminus is at the exact centre of the universe (!) and its engines firing were responsible for the big bang because of some timey-warping (!!). The Black Guardian tricks Turlough into another act of sabotage which starts the Terminus engines again, threatening to destroy the universe, and everything comes to a crescendo with the giant dog-man pushing a lever back to its off position (!!!). Tegan and Turlough spend 90% of the story crawling around in air ducts, by the way, with the former only emerging at the end to be told by Nyssa that she's leaving the TARDIS, and is sticking around to help run Terminus. Tegan gives her a big hug, thereby offering her arms to an ex-leper. Arms to an ex-leper? No? No... I'll see myself out.

Context:

When Terminus came up next on the randomiser, I groaned inwardly. It's one of those stories I never find too appealing for a rewatch. A tired and tatty reputation proceeds it, but being stuck in the middle of a loose trilogy of stories, and writing out a companion, it can't be skipped; so, it tends to be watched only out of a stubborn and gruelling sense of duty. Watched alone without the bookends of the far more fun stories either side (Mawdryn Undead before, and Enlightenment after) is particularly hard. Poor Terminus. If Nyssa didn't leave in this story, I don't know if anyone would ever watch it all, as it's got naff all to do with the 'Black Guardian trilogy' really, as a friend of mine once observed (see below). My unfavourable feeling going in may have been subconsciously broadcast to my viewing mates, as all the children (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) bailed after episode 1, never to return. I watched the remainder of the story from the DVD, an episode a night, on my own. It does get a bit better as it goes along. (I watched without the enhanced CGI, by the way, because - to be honest - I'd completely forgotten until after I'd seen the episodes and was exploring the disc that there were any replacement CGI effects for Terminus).

First time round:

I did catch this on its BBC1 broadcast in February 1983, but don't remember anything significant about that viewing. I wasn't madly in love with Nyssa like some of my peers at that time, so neither her leaving, nor the sight of her in a camisole and petticoat, meant much to me. I remember more about the VHS release, which came out approximately ten years later. This was during my second year at university in Durham, when I'd gravitated towards a group of like-minded (or at least tolerant and slightly nostalgic) individuals who would watch Doctor Who with me. I bought the tape in Volume One in Worthing, my usual supplier of the time, and watched it at home before term started. Then, a month or so later, as I remember it, a few of us visited a group of friends' student digs in Neville's Cross on a Sunday, and watched my tapes of the whole of the Black Guardian trilogy back to back. God, we knew how to live back then. David, long-term fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog, was there, as was Kev B, another friend from his year group. They both must have been visiting for the weekend as they had left Durham the previous year. l remember having a discussion on the day with David about whether it was still worth watching a terrestrial repeat of Doctor Who if you already have it on video  - they were showing old Whos on BBC2 on Friday evenings, but it was something like Genesis of the Daleks or Caves of Androzani on at the time, which I had on tape, so I didn't bother watching; David, on the other hand, thought that any Doctor Who being shown 'live', as it were, was exciting and I should support it. Three-quarters of the way through watching Terminus, Kev B spluttered in frustration "This has got nothing to do with all the Black Guardian stuff". And he was right.

Reaction:

The author of Terminus, Steven Gallagher, is a pretty good writer, and one of only a handful of classic series Doctor Who writers who made a big name for themselves with significant work away from the show (novels and TV series, in his case). His previous script, Warrior's Gate, certainly had some problems during its production, but on the page it sings. So, why's Terminus such a mess? It too had a cursed production, where it seemed everything that could possibly go wrong did, but there's major issues with the script too. No production, however swish, could save it. Just to take one example, consider the mysterious company Terminus Inc. that runs this healthcare institution. As we find out later, the cure they offer does work, although it's hit and miss. So, why does nobody ever return? Why do people keep paying them, if their reputation is so bad (as pretty much every character confirms - it's not just the pirate Olvir's bias). Olvir says that the company continues operating, and nobody complains, because having a relative with the disease is too shameful for anyone to make a fuss. Do we buy that? If someone with enough money or clout paid for someone with the disease to be cured, and they disappeared without a trace, surely they would investigate? How likely is it that only un-rich or un-influential people are affected by Lazar disease?

Well, maybe it is possible, as Lazar disease doesn't seem to be one of those dull diseases that follows logic or anything; instead it claims only the person in the cast whose contract was coming to an end, leaving lots of other people unaffected who had as much or more contact with infected people or atmosphere. It also strikes insanely rapidly, which makes one wonder how anyone could survive an intergalactic trip once they came down with it. Let it also not be forgot that one of the symptoms is to take one's clothes off, wander around in one's undies for a bit, then don some medieval peasant rags. It is indubitably an unusual and interesting disease.

The Garm's motivations at least make sense, but he is woefully badly realised. This era (and pretty much all of classic Doctor Who, to be honest) has its fair share of monster creation being fumbled on the journey from script to screen, but they're not always so damaging to the intent of the story. The Garm as he finally appeared looks like a cuddly big teddy bear. He looks friendly, which of course - he is! He's supposed to look terrifying, so that when we find out later that he's friendly, it's a surprise twist. A key part of the story is fatally undermined, plus, you know, the Garm looks embarrassing throughout too - everyone's a loser. Gallagher's gone on record saying that the original script had the Garm remain unseen, just a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness; that would definitely have worked better, but would have been hard to realise in the studio, and eventually the whole costume would have had to be revealed as the Garm has to help save the day at the end.

Without the terrifying version of the Garm as originally intended, Terminus doesn't even have a pretend antagonist. That's not necessarily a fault, though; I think it's one of the story's few strengths is that Nyssa stirs up a quiet and small revolution amongst characters that aren't big and bad and evil, but just normal - if slightly desperate - people; it suits her character, and it's refreshing that the stakes don't always have to be high. Other positives: Bor is a good character, and nicely played by Peter Benson. And Liza Goddard trying her hardest to make her hard-bitten space pirate character believable, despite everything around her, from her costume and make-up outwards, working against that, is a triumph of determination.

Connectivity: 

Not very much links the black-and-white historical The Reign of Terror to the 1980s space adventure that is Terminus. All I can think of is that their respective first episodes both have a lot of wandering around exploring, with only a couple of guest characters appearing, then the rest of the cast - and the plot - turns up from episode two onwards.

Deeper Thoughts:

Vanessa Feltz's Grandmother. There's clearly much that is risible in Terminus, but a moment that  - though it is indeed silly - had never much registered previously, was part of an early scene. Peter Davison rushes into a room to see the door on the far side rapidly closing, so throws a chair with almost supernatural accuracy into the gap, stopping the door from slamming shut altogether. British TV whimsy-merchant Harry Hill and his writing team must have been tickled by this when researching material for an appearance of Peter Davison on Hill's Alien Fun Capsule programme last year. The result was a game / sketch called Chair Jam in which Peter and the other guests compete to best recreate this historic television event. The clip is online here and it's a lot of fun. If you haven't seen it, a note of caution before you click on that link: you won't be able to see that moment of Terminus the same way ever again. Now, I know that often gets said, but this time I think it's true: every time I watch Terminus from now on (which probably won't be that often, but you never know) the chair moment is going to stick out, and I'm going to think of Harry Hill.

This is a phenomenon of which I'm very familiar: there are lots of moments or lines of dialogue in films or TV shows that have become stuck in my mind by association with something else. Normally, it's experienced the other way round, though; rather than be reminded of something when watching a show, I'm reminded of the show when doing something else. This normally then elicits a quote in recognition, at least in our house. I don't know if 'normal' people do this. A couple of examples: whenever the Better Half or I are involved in any risky or thankless endeavour, one will say to the other "It won't work, will it, Ted?" and the other will reply "No, but we have to try" - this is based on the exchange between Ted and Dougal in the series two Father Ted episode Tentacles of Doom.  When there's no food in the house, and we need to do a big supermarket run, it is consistently known as a 'lentils and wallpaper' shop, after the shopping list Neil starts to write when they need "everything" in The Young Ones episode Flood. There's loads of others too - the semiotic thickness of our day-to-day dialogue is such that, were we not allowed our meta-textual references, it would probably get a lot quieter in our house.

There are obviously lots of Doctor Who instances too, some of which I've mentioned in the blog before. Whenever someone says anything patently obvious in our house, they receive an impression of Mr. Sneed in The Unquiet Dead: "The whole blummin' world can see that!". At least once a day throughout our summer holiday this year, someone sitting at the poolside but not getting in would be told by someone in the pool "You shouldah come intah the wartah wiv us, then we'dah bin tuggevah", parroting what is, I think we can all agree, the finest line of dialogue in The Curse of Fenric. Whenever, there's a discussion about 'fire' or 'leaders' it won't be long before "There were leaders before there was fire; fire will kill us all in the end" makes its entrance (Old Mother's dialogue from An Unearthly Child, done in an exaggerated impression of Eileen Way's delivery).

I'm going out on a limb here a bit, but I think that Doctor Who fans understand this behaviour; a particular Doctor Who fan - Russell T Davies - wrote about it. In an exchange between Lance and Henry in episode six of his 2015 series Cucumber, Lance tells how he once read an article by Vanessa Feltz about her grandmother doing the washing-up, always with the water too hot to the touch. This is also how Lance likes to do the washing up, so: "Every time I wash up, I think of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. Isn't that ridiculous? Every single day of my life, just for a second, I think of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. Cos she's in there, she's stuck - she's this tiny little fact that won't go away". Like all good bits of dramatic observation, this made me feel understood, and part of something wider. Since then, all our little family catchphrases and the regular events that invoke them have become known as Vanessa Feltz's Grandmother moments. The only drawback with this is the cognitive pile up: when it's cold and someone wants the fire put on I am reminded of Old Mother's portentous pronouncements in An Unearthly Child which reminds me of Lance and Henry in Cucumber which reminds me of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. It's a wonder I get anything done!

In Summary:

If Terminus didn't exist, there would be no Chair Jam, and Chair Jam's quite funny; so, that's in its favour.

The Reign of Terror

Chapter The 138th, the 138th Chapter Spectacular.

Plot:

The original TARDIS team, Doctor 1, Ian, Barbara and Susan, find themselves in post-revolutionary France, a couple of days walk - on pretty revolutionary exterior film, no less - from Paris. Unfortunately, the first thing they stumble upon is a safe house for royalists fleeing the country. Before too long, the place is surrounded by soldiers, Susan and the two teachers are captured and taken off to the capital for a date with Madame Guillotine, and the Doctor is left unconscious in the building, which has been set on fire. Luckily, he gets rescued by a boy he befriended earlier, and makes his way to Paris, being sidetracked briefly on the way by being press-ganged onto a road digging party. After failing to escape from the Conciergerie Prison, Susan and Barbara are rescued when their tumbrel heading towards execution is attacked by a couple more royalist supporters, Jules et Jean. They are taken to Jean's place where Barbara takes a shine to Leon Colbert, another conspirator. Ian meanwhile has shared a cell with a dying man, who with his last breath gives Ian a message to pass on to a spy from England called James Stirling. He escapes the jail to track this spy down, but asking too many questions at a local inn, he ends up getting attacked by Jules et Jean, and dragged off to Jean's place too.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has disguised himself as a Regional Officer of the Provinces to inveigle his way into the Conciergerie, but once there he gets caught up with Lemaitre, the official in charge of the prison, who takes him to meet Robespierre. A couple of twists and double-crosses later, the TARDIS travellers find out who Stirling really is, and he gets them to do him a favour undertaking a mission to spy on Robespierre's deputy Paul Barrass, who has a secret meeting with the young Napoleon Bonaparte. Robespierre is overthrown in a coup, and the TARDIS travellers make their way back to the TARDIS and depart.

Context:

Before the broadcast of The Happiness Patrol, one of the final classic Doctor Who stories in Sylvester McCoy's penultimate year, there was a rumour going around that it's final episode was going to be animated. It wasn't true, needless to say; but, it wasn't too believable either. At the time, it seemed very unlikely that a conventional BBC1 show would dip in and out of animation in such an avant-garde manner. In the many years since then, though, we have somehow come to the point where it's the default expected for those few stories from the show's early years where there are a few episodes missing from the archives, but which are mostly intact. The very first of these came out in 2006, which used animation to plug the two episode-long gaps in Patrick Troughton Cyberman story The Invasion. At the time, many fans myself included wondered how BBC Worldwide could afford it, and perhaps they couldn't quite as it would be another seven years before the next part-animated story was released, and that was The Reign of Terror. There were a handful more done in those last couple of years of the regular DVD range: The Tenth Planet, The Ice Warriors and The Moonbase. Lately there have been a few animations of wholly missing stories (The Power of the Daleks and The Macra Terror so far, with more planned). Every animation to date with the exception of The Reign of Terror has been of a monster story; monsters are presumably easier to animate, and certainly easier to animate interestingly than 18th century French persons. The therefore somewhat unusual and experimental Reign of Terror DVD was popped on, and I watched it on my lonesome an episode a night during the evenings of one week.

First time round:

Twenty years before the DVD release of Reign, 1980s Doctor Who producer John-Nathan Turner came to the end of his employment doing special releases for the Doctor Who VHS range. One of many ideas he had introduced to allow greater access to the archive was the release of some of those stories with gaps. Instead of episode long animations synced to the surviving audio, the gaps on video tape would be covered by an actor from the story giving a brief synopsis of the missing material to camera. The Reign of Terror was originally planned for release in the 30th anniversary year, with the actor that played Susan, Carole Ann Ford, having been recorded summarising the missing episodes 4 and 5. For reasons unknown, though, it was shelved, unlike everything else for which Nathan-Turner had assembled footage.

It wasn't released until 2003, ten years later than planned. It was the very last release of the VHS range, in a box set with some other odds and sods. I bought it in the MVC on London Bridge during lunchtime, on the day it was released. I may have been lucky to get it too; it was a limited edition, and my memory is that it was hard to find and lots of other fans reported online that they'd missed out (possibly because - DVDs being the big thing by then - VHS tapes were only expected to sell to raving lunatic completists like what I am, and it was probably therefore a little too limited compared to demand). I would have then taken the train home to Brighton and watched it that evening, and been confused as to who the hell was who when all the script's to-ing and fro-ing, double-crosses and traitors, and suspicion falling on different people in turn, was condensed into 5 minutes of brisk chat. 

Reaction:

I've written recently about how Doctor Who can do beginnings better than endings; I'd never thought about how well - or not - it does middles. The Reign of Terror's episodes 1 to 3 and 6 have some nice moments, but they feel quite episodic: escapes, comedy characters, walking, ooh Napoleon! But nothing ties them together. The missing episodes 4 and 5 develop the mystery of who's on who's side, and reveal in each of the two episode endings who is the bad guy, and who's the good guy. You can't skip all that, or skim over it as John Nathan-Turner 's VHS version did, and not be left with a pile of unconnected bits rather than one story. With the episodes reinstated using animation, it holds together as one story, but whether it's a particularly coherent story, that's a different matter. It's probably a bad sign if parts 4 and 5 of 6 are where most of the plot is, and the beginning and end of a story isn't contributing very much.

Let's start with episode 1. It's mostly exploration, taking it's time to let the regulars uncover where and when they are, and for the complications to arise. That's all well and good, and it's fun to spend time in their company (Ian talking the Doctor down from his mood of high dudgeon with the offer of a drink is a lovely moment). The episode's undermined though, by none of the principal guest characters appearing in it. They all enter in the next episode, or later. This is a problem in a spy story where the major dramatic question is who is the 'mole' in both camps: someone has been informing on the royalist sympathisers, and someone else is an English spy. Introducing the suspects earlier, instead of other characters who are only seen in this first part, would have allowed the mystery and tension to play out longer, and therefore mean more by the end. All the action of the story takes place in Paris, and by parking the Doctor and Co. so far out, writer Dennis Spooner stretches out his narrative at the expense of its focus: there's lots of 'shoe leather', scenes in the next couple of episodes of the Doctor, walking to the capital, and getting into scrapes which again don't have anything to do with the plot except to add colour.

Meanwhile, the others are trapped in jail cells for most of episodes 2 and 3. Ian goes one better - he's trapped on film (in pre-recorded inserts, as actor William Russell was on holiday for the studio days). The intrigue gets started then, with a cryptic deathbed message being passed on, but there's not much room for it to develop amongst all the other 'business'. It's difficult to ascertain how this would have gone over to those watching on its contemporary broadcast: it was very much an experiment in how much humour could be introduced into a story, with The Reign of Terror going further than any serial had in that first year of Doctor Who's life. The comedy jailer is okay, as he runs through the remainder of the narrative, having a purpose as an obstacle to our heroes. The scene with the Doctor getting the better of the road works overseer - despite some lovely Stan Laurel-esque physicality from Hartnell - is pure padding. Even the scene of the Doctor larking about in a gentleman's outfitters doesn't really go anywhere - the shopkeeper later turns him in to the authorities for disguising himself, and the authorities don't do anything about it. Meanwhile, Barbara and Susan have nothing to do at all, and Susan's character is very badly served: she would rather not try and escape because there might be rat in the cell, so she'll just wait to be guillotined instead? Really?! This isn't the telepathic future child that Carole Ann Ford signed up to play, and it is obvious why she left a couple of stories later.

An oddly shot action sequence where Barbara and Susan are rescued by another couple of significant characters (who are only being introduced half way through the story) takes us to the animated section. This is where the plot gets interesting, including the wonderfully tense sequence of the TARDIS women forced out of hiding to consult an untrustworthy physician. The animation helps one to follow the action better than an audio recording or summary would, but it isn't perfect. The character designs from some angles are very impressive; from others, they are unrecognisable as the actor in question - sometimes switching multiple times in one scene. Ian's likeness is particularly bad, very fleetingly looking anything like him. All the character models also have very prominent teeth: I don't know what's so off-putting about that, but it was all I could concentrate on for the first few minutes of episode 4, until I got used to it. I suppose you do see people's teeth when they act in real life, but I'm definitely not so consciously aware of it. The other major problem is that there are flurries of rapid edit points. Sometimes, a scene of something dull like someone being offered a chair and sitting down cuts six or seven times in a second. It's distracting and - needless to say - not representative of the stately pace of the episodes on either side of the animation.

The animation ends with all the mystery of the story resolved, and so there isn't much to do in the final episode, when we're back to live action. The final episode is off by itself like a one-act play of Ian and Barbara playing at being spies, tying up the staff of an inn and taking their place to watch a secret - and not historically verified  - meeting between Barrass and a young Napoleon. It's mildly diverting, I guess, but nothing really to do with the plot of the previous few episodes. Robespierre gets deposed, which is presented in a historically accurate way, but that feels like the finale to a different story, and one we haven't been watching at all, so ends up feeling a bit ho-hum. Then, it's over, with only an echoey voice-over from The Doctor over a starscape to give the ending faux gravitas (it was the end of the first ever season of Who, so I forgive them for indulging a little bit).

Connectivity: 

Both The Reign of Terror and The Bells of Saint John have most of their action take place in European capital. New episodes of both stories debuted in 2013 (when the animated middle episodes were released on DVD). That's pretty much it.

Deeper Thoughts:

2019: the year of new old Who. It's been more than 14 years since Doctor Who returned to our screens, but they've only managed to make 11 series in that time. As with everything to do with the show, there were lots of online rumours and conspiracy theories flying around whenever there were fewer than the expected number of episodes planned for a particular year, but the reason seems obvious: Doctor Who costs too much money to make every single year. 2009 and 2012 had only a handful of stories shown, but they still maintained a presence in the TV landscape, as significant things happened (the bowing out of long-running regulars in both cases). It wasn't until 2016 that new Who had it's first proper 'gap year', and 2019 is only the second time it's pulled this cost-conscious trick. In each case, there was a single festive special shown as a consolation prize. 2016 also had 'Class', a spin-off show that most thought was woeful, so it probably provided little consolation to adventure-starved fans; 2019 has had not a sausage since Resolution finished airing on the very first day of the year. Even the recent Children in Need segment, as sweet and affecting as it was, was just a personal appearance by the show's stars not any 'in character' drama.
    

Luckily, though, this year has seen a lot of new old Who. Unlike the deprived 2016, the emergence of the Blu-ray range has meant a regular delivery of classic adventures on shiny disc again in 2019. This isn't just repeats either. The online trailers for these sets have developed as time's gone on, with some of the latest ones including in-character appearances by classic series companions, continuing their stories in a vaguely canonical way. Katy Manning and Stewart Bevan got to play Mr. and Mrs. Jo Jones once more, having a rematch with some giant maggots in the trailer for the season 10 set, and - best of all - the recent trailer for the forthcoming season 26 set, which writer-director Pete McTighe discusses in detail in the current Doctor Who Magazine, which features Sophie Aldred as a grown-up Ace, in charge of a charitable organisation (in line with a reference in an episode of spin-off show The Sarah-Jane Adventures). It's really rather lovely and worth seeking out. For something a bit longer, the recent season 23 box set (The Trial of a Time Lord) re-edits one of the four sub-stories, Terror of the Vervoids, removing the trial bits and making it stand-alone, plus adding some cut material and new CGI. It's a breath of fresh air, and like coming to the story anew, working much better when the action isn't being halted to go back to the trial room every five minutes. The edit goes further than just removing the framing, though, and reshapes the material losing what the Blu-ray producers presumably thought were rubbish moments and lines from the original. It's an interesting experiment.

Another interesting experiment,and probably the most remarkable new old Who this year was the recreation of missing one-episode William Hartnell era story Mission to the Unknown. Students, graduates and staff from the University of Central Lancashire remade the episode as a media project, utilising the techniques and technology of 1965, when the story was first made. It was a great choice, as -compared to the rest of the missing stories - it is short, relatively self-contained and - crucially - doesn't feature the Doctor. It was an odd intermission in the usual TARDIS adventurers, instead featuring a three-man spaceship crew, crash-landed on a planet where the Daleks are plotting. If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend seeking it out on youtube. Another 1960s story recreation, building on the early work done on such releases as The Reign of Terror DVD, was the fully animated Patrick Troughton story The Macra Terror which was released in March. Two further Troughton stories, The Faceless Ones and Fury From the Deep, are being worked on now for release next year.

The online rumours and conspiracy theories carry on, and the latest (wishful?) thinking is that we're going to get a surprise Jodie Whittaker 2019 Christmas special announced any day now. Even if we don't, though, 2019 has had an embarrassment of riches.

In Summary:

Without the middle, it's a bit muddling. With the middle, it's only really middling.

The Bells of Saint John

Chapter The 137th, which features the world wide web of fear.

Plot:

Eyes down for Steven Moffat bingo: the Doctor is hiding out away from society (playing at being a monk in 1207), but gets brought back from his self-imposed exile to solve something timey-wimey (someone's able to call the TARDIS phone, even though she's in a different era); he joins up with a new female companion who has some cosmic significance of which she is unaware (he's met versions of her twice previously, but both of them died); the bad guys utilise an everyday object / concept (wi-fi) for their own ends, and victims of their evil trot out a catchphrase ("I don't know where I am") when they die; a childhood image is twisted into an object of fear (an illustration from the dust cover of an old book comes alive and stalks Clara), but it's really misunderstood technology (a walking wi-fi base station); Doctor and companion get involved in the adventure with lashings of quippy dialogue and innuendo; the Doctor and villain (Miss Kizlet) have a confrontation where the Doctor grandstands about how he's going to stop their plan; he then resolves everything with a solution that's clever but a bit pat (using the disguised base-station against Kizlet). The Doctor asks the companion to travel with him, but he's not letting on about the ulterior motive of wanting to uncover the mystery of them. Plus, if you include the online prequel for the story, there's even a bit where the Doctor meets the companion as a child before embroiling himself in their life later on as an adult. House!

Context:

I didn't find an opportunity to watch this with the family over the recent half term, so watched it on my own one evening the week after, from the appropriate disc of the series 7 Blu-ray box set.

First time round:

Easter weekend 2013; if I remember rightly, we had our friends Alex and Rachel (mentioned many times previously on this blog) staying; there were a few glasses of wine drunk, and the story was watched (likely a few hours after broadcast to allow time to put our youngsters to bed first). I watched the episode again the following day, as I couldn't really recall much. This was not down to the wine this time, but instead is an apt summary of The Bells of Saint John - it doesn't leave much of a lasting impression.

Reaction:

As you can tell from the plot synopsis above, I feel this story is very much a Steven Moffat script by numbers; that doesn't however mean it isn't good or worthwhile necessarily. After a couple of years running the show, he and the production team around him have got efficient at delivering this kind of action-packed series curtain-raiser. It has some nice moments. In fact, it's pretty much all nice moments. There's the bravura sequence early on where the Doctor and Clara - helped by some subtly disguised edit points - step from an exterior scene into the TARDIS control room, then double back out through its doors again, finding themselves on board a rapidly descending aeroplane  - all in what looks at first glance to be one continuous shot. This is then topped off with a rather lovely rapid-fire introduction of the character to Clara - and to some new audience members at home no doubt - as he says "I'm the Doctor. I'm an alien from outer space. I'm a thousand years old, I've got two hearts and I can't fly a plane!"

Then there's the beginning sequence, where a lone vlogger's 'youtube video' explains the chilling concept - if you are tempted to use a free Wi-fi connection labelled with some odd symbols, it will steal your soul - interspersed with lots of users worldwide dropping like flies as they succumb. The episode was, according to interviews at the time, an attempt to do an urban thriller in the Doctor Who format, but the set up is instead pure urban horror. This is typified by the sequence where Clara's mouse pointer hovers over the strange symbols long enough for the audience to chant inwardly "Don't click it, don't click it", but of course she does. Not far in, through, the episode loses all pretence that the bad guys need someone to have used their cursed Wi-fi connection, or that the victim is being excessively punished for their transgression. Suddenly, they can control anyone who's even walked past a piece of technology. This is much more like an urban thriller with a seemingly all powerful unseen conspiracy to be defeated, but it doesn't fit very well with the opening section at all. Both succeed in their own way, though, and first time of watching, you glide right past any anomalies.

Celia Imrie is excellent as Miss Kizlet, giving a veritable masterclass in how to pitch a Who villain perfectly; the sequence where the morally outraged Doctor has a conversation with her through the medium of random bystanders, taken over to become mouthpieces for her words, is another stand-out moment. The surprise ending, which leaves all the baddies returned to their mental state when they first were ensnared gives Imrie the chance to do a different bit of acting, which is hauntingly shocking. One also has to acknowledge the chutzpah of the bit with the Doctor riding his motorbike up the side of The Shard ("Did you even hear the word 'anti-grav'?") to confront Kizlet towards the end, which is made all the sweeter by being accompanied by one of the best of Murray Gold's cues from this era (called, prosaically, 'Up the Shard'). Another suitably scary moment - apt for urban thriller or horror alike - is the 'Spoonhead' reveal, where a character's head rotates 180 degrees to reveal a shiny concave surface which then starts sucking the life out of people - it's a triumph of effects work, as well as being an interesting idea and visual.

There's lots of nice dialogue and gags: "Did you just hack me?" "Because you changed your mind?" "I hope I did"; "When you say mobile phone, why do you point at that blue box?" "Because it's a surprisingly accurate description"; "I invented the quadricycle!"; plus, the Doctor's mission statement: "I can't tell the future, I just work there" and Clara's suspicion that the TARDIS is a "snogging booth". Then there's the episode's title, where the whole monk sequence appears to been inserted just so that Moffat can pull the wool over our eyes about what the title of the story might mean (spoiler - it doesn't really mean anything!). As well as that, there is a sprinkling of enjoyable continuity kisses - a book written by Amelia Williams (née Pond), Jammie Dodgers, the Big Bad revealed at the end to be an old friend (well, enemy), doubly underlined when UNIT make an appearance to mop up at the end. These are pointless, probably, but not dwelt on long enough to be alienating for the unaware.

So, with all of that going for it, why is the sum not as much as the component parts, and why does it all seem so thin and ephemeral? It might be because it is so the beginning of a new run of stories: it's precision-tooled to tease the audience, but not to provide any closure. Maybe Moffat had pulled the same trick too many times before to diminishing returns. Was I curious about who Clara really was, and how she can have lived and died as separate entities in other times? No. I'd been through similar wondering recently about Amy, and it turned out the answers weren't as interesting as the questions. The same is also true of what the Great Intelligence is up to. I can't really care when watching The Bells of Saint John, as I know I'm not seeing the whole picture yet. The story is simply not self-contained enough.

Connectivity: 

The Bells of Saint John, like The Face of Evil, was shown as a launch story after a mid-season break. It is also the third story in a row covered for the blog that features the introduction of a new female companion.

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who's Mid-life crisis. When Doctor Who reached the age of twenty in 1983, there was a standard yearly run of episodes, each of which to a lesser or greater extent looked back, taking something from Doctor Who's past; this was then followed after a bit of a break by a one-off feature length special (The Five Doctors) reuniting some of the actors who'd previously starred as the Doctor with the current version, in a celebratory story. For the 30th and 40th anniversaries, the show was off the air. The next big birthday bash was when Doctor who became officially middle-aged, turning 50 in 2013. Curiously, the pattern was much the same: a run of stories starting with The Bells of Saint John which individually, and taken together as an arc, were mostly fixated on the history of the show. In both instances, there was a one-off feature length special with the return of old Doctors following a little time after; in 2013, it was The Day of the Doctor. Curiously, in both 1983 and 2013 the special proved massively popular, but the run of stories preceding it... not so much.

As someone who is fast approaching his own 50th anniversary (still a few more years off, yes, but too few) I can understand why. You're allowed to dwell on the past as a one-off on the actual day; stringing out the nostalgia for the whole year, however, is rarely entertaining for anyone else. The 2013 launch story is already part 3 of a lengthy set-up of the mystery of Clara (with previous appearances by Jenna Coleman in Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen the previous year), so even the new companion doesn't feel that new. The episode also includes an old enemy from the 1960s, The Great Intelligence, who'd also been featured in The Snowmen. The Ice Warriors return in a later story, which nobody had really been crying out for, Moffat going on record as saying he wasn't keen, but had his arm twisted by the writer of that story Mark Gatiss. The Cybermen come back later on too, and then The Great Intelligence features again. There's an episode delving deep into the mysteries of the one constant in the history of the show, the TARDIS (but why?), plus the return of old friends Vastra, Jenny and Strax.

Only Neil Cross's two scripts for the 2013 run are nostalgia free, mostly - Hide does keep name-checking the planet Metebelis 3 which featured regularly in the later Jon Pertwee stories (though they end up pronouncing it wrong, undermining the callback somewhat). So, the only wholly original story in the series is The Rings of bloody Akhatan, and the less said about that better. The series ends with an orgy of continuity with Clara breezing through the back catalogue, visiting every Doctor and era, with loads of clips and cameos. It is the equivalent of a maudlin drunk in the early hours after their birthday party droning on about all the great times they had when they were young. God knows, I've been there, so I know: it doesn't last forever, and you can move on from it. This happens with Doctor Who - periodically it binges on the good 'ol days, but then periodically it cleanses itself of the excess nostalgia. The most recent series shown last year was an extreme detox, containing no elements at all from the previous 50+ years of Who; but this itself seemed artificial, like a middle-aged man donning Lycra and doing triathlons every weekend, pretending to be young again with no baggage. It will be interesting to see the reaction against that in the next batch of episodes, and see how much of the old stuff is featured when the (soon come?) new series begins.

In Summary:

Not uninspired, but somewhat uninspiring.

The Face of Evil

Chapter The 136th, wherein two tribes go to war and it's hard to see what the point is that they're trying to score.

Plot:

On an unnamed planet, the Sevateem tribe wear skimpy loin-cloths, worship a god called Xoanon, and hate rival tribe the Tesh, who they believe are in league with Xoanon's foe, the Evil One (who happens to look a lot like the Tom Baker Doctor). A young warrior Leela is cast out of the tribe for speaking heresies. Banished to the lands outside her village, she bumps into the Tom Baker Doctor who's just arrived - what a coincidence! Avoiding the rest of the Sevateem who want to kill him, the Doctor investigates with Leela, and finds lots of evidence of an advanced space-faring civilisation in amongst the tribe's religious artifacts. Turns out the Sevateem are descendants of the survey team who ventured out to explore the planet, and the Tesh are the technicians, who stayed on the ship. The Doctor and Leela, followed by the tribe, find a way to reach the ship by climbing through a carving of the Doctor's face on a mountain. The Tesh attack them with psi-powers, but they manage to get through to Xoanon, who turns out to be the ship's advanced computer, driven mad by the Doctor's previous interference. Years earlier, the Doctor had visited the expedition and fixed the computer, but left his personality imprinted on it. Since then, Xoanon has experimented on the Sevateem and the Tesh, pitting them against one another. The Doctor puts things right, and leaves the two tribes squabbling about who will be leader. Leela insists on coming with him, barging in to the TARDIS as it dematerialises.

Context:

In between watching episodes and extras from the Trial of a Time Lord box set (which came out a few weeks back, but with its hours and hours of extra material is still dominating the Blu-ray player), I snuck in an episode of this story every so often. All told, it took two weeks to watch the lot, from the DVD, accompanied by all the children (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7); the Better Half was busy doing other things. Why did it take so long? That was my fault, as I was finding the story hard going, so - and this is the sort of heresy that gets one thrown out of the Doctor Who fan tribe and fed to the Horda - I much preferred to watch Trial of a Time Lord instead. The Face of Evil is a story in one of the most highly rated Doctor Who seasons ever, starring the most popular Doctor ever. Trial of a Time Lord is... not held in such high esteem, it's fair to say. The children, though, loved The Face of Evil. I think this was mostly because of the character of Leela, to whom they all responded well. Even the youngest guessed that the Doctor was going to pick up a new companion this time "'cos he always has a sidekick". In the scene where Leela is poisoned with a Janus thorn, and the Doctor is racing to save her, all three of them watched from the very edge of their seat, holding their collective breath.

First time round:

I was still living in a little studio flat in Worthing in May 1999 when this came out on VHS, but I moved out the following month to the much cooler nearby Brighton. I remember vividly the first VHS release that came out once I was living in Brighton (The Crusade / Space Museum double pack) as it contained a recently recovered and previously missing episode, and it had a free key ring. The Face of Evil also had its own free gift in a way: on the tape was a bonus archive clip, an interview with Louise Jameson, who played Leela, on Swap Shop from around the time of the story's original broadcast. I remember that very clearly, as I was convinced that Noel Edmonds was attempting to flirt with Jameson in a slightly creepy way. But I recall nothing of my first viewing of the episodes themselves. This story obviously isn't one I can engage with: I'll try to unpack why I feel this way ... 

Reaction:

This story's author Chris Boucher could very well have ended up the script editor of Doctor Who the following year (the script editor of The Face of Evil, Robert Holmes, left halfway through the next season). Instead, he took the same job on a new BBC sci-fi series called Blake's 7, and Doctor Who instead got Andrew Read and then Douglas Adams in the role over the same period. It's often pointed out that Adams wasn't very well suited to the discipline of script editing, and that this should have been obvious based on his first produced Doctor Who script - The Pirate Planet in 1978 - which had far too many ideas for the running time without a sensible structure and characters to frame them. This criticism is never levelled at Boucher, but based solely on his first produced story The Face of Evil (a story with far too many ideas for the running time and no sensible structure and characters to frame them) it maybe should be. Boucher did follow it up with a much better structured script (The Robots of Death, which was broadcast immediately after The Face of Evil) and proved a much more successful script editor than Adams; but, based on that first production, you'd maybe not have predicted it would be thus. Face of Evil's incoherence is perhaps overlooked because the main point of the story is to introduce a new companion, and this is done well. All the surrounding material though, with tribes and mad computers, is a confused and confusing mess.

The first issue is the many members of the Sevateem tribe introduced en masse early on. Because of the nature of the setting, a primitive tribe with everyone clad in skimpy leathers, there can't be a way of making them visually distinct. As such, it was essential that the script gave them actions that efficiently conveyed their character, so you can follow who's who and why that's important; alas, there are so many of them that there just isn't time. The characters of Andor and Sole, Leela's Dad, get good intros in the first section, but then don't really have any relevance to the plot thereafter. Caleb, who is much more key to the story all the way through, has nothing to do in those scenes, and so remains indistinct for a damaging amount of time after that. There's an exchange of dialogue between other characters saying he's cunning and shouldn't be trusted, but that's the ultimate in 'tell rather than show'. Boucher's mistake has come from over-ambition, which is laudable, but it's a mistake nonetheless. It would be better to merge some roles. Sole could become the deposed leader of the tribe, with the sneaky Caleb arranging for Leela's banishment and her father's death so he can take over the tribe from the start of the story, removing the need for Andor - and exposition-heavy dialogue -  altogether.

Part of the reason why the tribe don't get enough screen time to make their presence felt is that the second half of the story focuses on the Tesh instead. The Tesh are ascetics who control their emotions and deliver everything in a flat and emotionless way; consequently they are very dull. The only thing about them that's interesting - for the wrong reasons - is their costuming, which we can't blame Boucher for, of course, but it is another major issue: bright green shoes, candy-striping, inflated shoulder pads, knickerbockers! This is not how techno-monks should dress. Worse than any of that, though, is that they don't fulfil any plot function except as barriers to our heroes reaching Xoanon and fixing him. Maybe it would have been better for the Tesh's evolution to have progressed a little further, so they were essentially relentless machines, with barely any human features left. This would avoid the need to give them individual characters, simplifying the cluttered cast list further, and would also give the Face of Evil what it notably lacks compared to the other stories of this period: a monster. Okay, there is the pit of Horda creatures, I suppose, which the Sevateem suspend people over, including the Doctor. But given that those scenes take up lots of the running time, and have zero to do with the main dramatic questions of Sevateem versus Tesh, or the mystery of the rogue computer Xoanon, then they can easily be snipped out. They likely were only inserted in the first place because there was otherwise no monstrous alien creatures at all.

The story's not all bad though: there's good dialogue, and good set pieces throughout, and Louise Jameson is a big hit as Leela, a clever and resourceful character who can stand up to the Doctor while not undermining him; despite the fact that Baker had reservations about the character's inclusion, they have an instant chemistry. The jokes are good (the Doctor threatening someone with a deadly jelly baby has gone down better in the history of the show than anything else here). The Xoanon plot works well too, when you scrape off the other distracting surrounding material, and the cliffhanger ending to episode 3, with the voices of its multiple personalities screaming out before dropping down to a single child's voice crying over and over "Who am I?", is effectively creepy. Making the all-powerful antagonist barmy, though, does give scope for ill discipline: anything that happens can just be explained away as a symptom of madness. I'm not sure that Xonanon's experiment in eugenics with the Sevateem and the Tesh stands up if subjected to even the slightest scrutiny.

Connectivity: 

Another story that introduces a new female companion, and which would work as a useful 'jumping-on point' for new viewers.

Deeper Thoughts:

Deja Who. The Face of Evil is one of a story type that Doctor Who does occasionally, the sequel to an unseen previous story. The Doctor is placed in an opposite position to the audience, being familiar with some aspects of the backstory, while it's all new to the viewers. From the very beginning, there's always been an effort to place the Doctor's TV adventures as just part of a wider set, some of which we have not been shown. In early episodes of the very first season in 1963, there are references to the Doctor's previously meeting Henry VIII and Beau Brummel, for example. Beyond name dropping for comedy, or painting a word picture to give detail to the series for no extra budget, these didn't amount to all that much. It wasn't until three years in and the story The Celestial Toymaker that the format establishes itself fully. The Doctor has fought The Celestial Toymaker before, even though we've never been made aware of it, and the TV story is therefore a rematch.

Since then, the device is used periodically throughout the classic series. In later years, Ben Aaronovitch delivers a trad version of this staple with Remembrance of the Daleks, which follows up on unseen business done by William Hartnell in 1960s London just before we meet him for the first time in An Unearthly Child. Aaronovitch follows this up by giving things a twist in his next story, Battlefield: this time, the story is a sequel to an unseen adventure of a future Doctor: now, the audience and the Doctor are both level, neither knowing what's going to happen next. Going into the post 2005 stories, the sequel to an unseen adventure story type has not been used so often, but the timey-wimey version has been deployed by Steven Moffat. His Library story scripts introduce an old flame of the Doctor, River Song, but the audience - and the Doctor - have never met her before. The trouble with the timey-wimey version, though, is that there's the temptation to fill in those gaps in future. Over the years, every one of River Song's interactions with the Doctor have been filmed, and nothing is now left to our imagination. Nobody has yet made the prequel / sequel to Battlefield as yet, but it could still happen one day.

What this structure brings is questionable, in my view. Does it smooth the delivery of exposition, or give more depth than just doing a standard plot and layering in backstory in the usual way? Like Xoanon, I'm in two minds about it. In The Face of Evil, there's at least the added dimension that the Doctor's actions in the previous unseen story have given rise to the complications in the present. It's not hard to see why this is a trick that hasn't been pulled that often, though. Putting aside it making the Doctor effectively the bad guy (The Face of Evil embraces this with floating Tom Baker heads shouting and zapping and controlling people), it also undermines every other Doctor Who story ever made. It makes one wonder what happens once the final credits roll, when the Doctor's whizzed off to a new time and place. The terrible realisation is that he could have made things worse rather than better every single week.

In Summary:

A bit of a mess, on the face of it. Leela's great, though

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.