Spoilers The Woman Who Fell to Earth grade and discussion thread

[BritishSeaPower]

I quite liked this episode and that really surprises me. Introductory stories for new Doctors are usually terrible, with the Eleventh Hour being the lone New Who exception up until now. Rose was really meh, with The Christmas Invasion and Deep Breath being downright terrible. Even classic Who had this problem, with Robot, The Twin Dilemma, Time and The Rani being godawful, Spearhead from Space and Castrovalva are decent but not great.

Over Christmas, I rewatched all the Regeneration and all the post-regeneration episodes and I was very surprised by how I felt about them. I'd long held up Spearhead as the quintessential post-regeneration episode. Watching it now, I was taken aback by how... poor it is. The Blu-Ray transfer, great! The Brig and Liz, great! The Doctor spends two full episodes incapacitated, the plot is not very good and in the end it has a rushed finish. Conversely, Robot, which I long hated, is actually really tight. Well-paced, well-acted good chemistry, if Harry is a little tacked on. I like Castrovalva but it's an odd one. Power of the Daleks is good, but benefits from just being a Doctor Who episode with the added need to introduce a new-ish character.

 

[BritishSeaPower]

If they said there was some outside reason he couldn't ride a bike, then they damn sure didn't make it obvious.

It was mentioned, specifically, in the scene with him riding the bike. Then his nan and Graham fight about his dyspraxia when Graham implies he uses it as an excuse and then immediately takes it back. They mention it to the Doctor and it comes up with Yas. It's also part of what Ryan's Nan asks Graham to be patient with Ryan about. If you couldn't pick it up from that perhaps the show is too advanced.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Enjoyed it quite a bit -- albeit perhaps the editing made the pacing seem a bit off here and there. The antagonist was basically a naff cross of Breen, Predator and Jem'Hadar. I suspect a further episode this season will involve the Doctor intervening on its homeworld.

The show needed a good shake up to refresh it and CC seems to have done the trick. The tone is a lot darker with the deaths of several peripheral characters, never mind the mostly night shoots, so I'm curious if that will be a constant or whether the mood will vary over the season's episodes.

 

[jaime]

The condition he suffers from is dyspraxia and I am pleased that they are showing someone with this condition. In some ways he would have similar problems to what my son has. My son has the ataxic form of cerebral palsy which has some symptoms similar to dyspraxia though the causes are different.

I believe that this is the first companion to actually have a disability.

Ace had Dyscalcula, though it never came up, and Adric was played by Matthew Waterhouse.

 

[Christopher]

She felt half asleep for most of the episode, honestly.

As opposed to "Spearhead from Space," "Castrovalva," and "The Christmas Invasion" where the Doctor was fully asleep for much of the story?

So, this hunter alien transports from 5000 galaxies away to hunt a random human for ... reasons? Aren't there any species in their own galaxy that would suffice for the hunt?

If aliens didn't randomly fixate on Earth as their preferred target for whatever it is they're doing, the Doctor would have a far more peaceful life. For that matter, why did the Doctor ever fixate on Earth, out of all the worlds in the universe?

Look at it this way -- at least it wasn't London or Cardiff this time.

I wondered at one point if the tentacle ball was a Rutan. I’d like to have seen that story, I think.

The Doctor was no doubt thinking of the Sontaran/Rutan war when she formulated her first theory about warring aliens using Earth as a battleground.

The whole "locked in the train" part was equally dumb. All train carriages (including aincent Gatwick express ones) have emergency hammers to break windows. They didn't even try to break the windows to get out.

I don't think they had time. The Gathering Coil showed up pretty soon after they determined the doors were locked.

Whittaker was almost there, but didn't quite nail it for me. Very much felt like a performance, almost a throwback to the pre-reboot Doctors, and not in an especially good way.

And Tennant, Smith, and Capaldi didn't feel like performances to you? I think Whittaker's Doctor is the most naturalistic, least affected performance we've gotten since Eccleston.

Overall plot wasn't terrible, but the script wasn't especially well written or clever either (setting up a deux ex machina off screen, bleh).

It wasn't a deus ex machina. We saw the Doctor working with the pod recall device when she was assembling the sonic screwdriver; we didn't know what it was at the time, but we were shown a close-up of the big red prism as she pulled out a component adjacent to it. Then we saw her use the sonic to manipulate the neutralized Gathering Coil, and we saw her step back and allow Tim Shaw to link with the Coil and extract its data. We were shown, onscreen, every step of her plan to stop Tim except the key bit where she removed the DNA bombs and implanted them in the Coil. But even that was set up when she said to Graham "Give me 9 minutes and I'll have a plan," and by the fact that we didn't hear Graham express worry about the bombs after that point. It was subtle, but the whole thing was set up ahead of time, just like a fair-play mystery or plot twist is supposed to work. When I rewatched the episode, I could see all the bread crumbs that had been laid out. That's the exact opposite of a deus ex machina, which means a climactic plot twist that wasn't seeded earlier.

(By the way, turns out that DNA bombs are a Torchwood nod, first used in the Chibnall-written "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.")

 

[Mr Awe]

Enjoyed it quite a bit -- albeit perhaps the editing made the pacing seem a bit off here and there. The antagonist was basically a naff cross of Breen, Predator and Jem'Hadar. I suspect a further episode this season will involve the Doctor intervening on its homeworld.

It's funny but the alien reminded me of one of the aliens from Red Dwarf. Not a specific one but their general approach of making a supposedly threatening alien a bit goofy!

 

[Mr Awe]

If aliens didn't randomly fixate on Earth as their preferred target for whatever it is they're doing, the Doctor would have a far more peaceful life.

Here's the way I see it. Some aliens will fixate on a planet. Of those aliens, some will fixate on Earth. The Doctor also fixates on Earth. The DW series follows the Doctor.

Ergo, we'll see the Doctor, a lot of Earth stories, and aliens that fixate on Earth. The doesn't mean that aliens only fixate on Earth. We just aren't going to see aliens who fixate on other planets in DW! Or at least not as often. Logical!

 

[CuriousCaitian]

It's funny but the alien reminded me of one of the aliens from Red Dwarf. Not a specific one but their general approach of making a supposedly threatening alien a bit goofy!

His armour and heavy footsteps did put me somewhat in mind of Hudzen 10, but then my mind's wired oddly like that.

 

[Australis]

Not great, not terrible, I voted Good.

I think I'll have to watch it again, it sort of washed over me. It's yet another example of genre shows not hitting the spot like they used to (DSC comes to mind).

Whitaker seems ok to fine, probably better when she has a chance to settle into the role. Same with the companions. The villains were mildly interesting. The plot a bit standard.

In short, nothing exciting, but enough to get me to tune in for a few more eps.

Anyone else notice Graham said Aliens aren't real? did they just retool the entire show and throw out the last 13 years

Yeah, I wondered about that too.

 

[John Clark]

I thought the story could have been a bit better, but I did like JW in the role a lot

 

[Neroon]

Yeah, I'm not going to pay much attention to the adult trying to ride a bike when I'm watching

DOCTOR FUCKING WHO

and the show spends the first 10 minutes refusing to show the title character. Fuck, even Clara managed to make a good first impression, she just got terrible almost immediately after her first episode (I'm talking about her first full episode, not the Dalek one) and didn't waste everyones time. I actually barely remembered that bike guy had even found the stupid pod until he talked about what he did, because it was all so boring and went on way too long. The first 8-10 minutes of the episode should have been 2 minutes, and The Doctor falling out of the TARDIS should have started the episode. Instead, a bunch of boring characters did stupid shit, and an idiot saw a space pod.

So, yeah, maybe they outright said he had some disorder. Maybe if he wasn't shit, and the bike riding thing wasn't so stupid, I would have caught whatever they said about it. Instead I was fighting off a TV induced coma until The Doctor fell out of the sky, so my attention wasn't really on why the characters were doing stupid things in moronic situations, I was mostly just thinking "Where the fuck is The Doctor? Did Chibnail forget the show he was writing?". I'm pretty sure the answer to that is yes he did forget, and then didn't want to go back and rewrite pages of script so he just went with it.



That Bike guy has a disorder for no reason? There was no point to the scene at all, except to show he didn't like his step granddad very much (which could have been done with a line or two of dialog).

Unless this ends up being chekhov's disorder and him being unable to balance on bikes comes back to effect the plot, I once again have to ask: Who gives a fuck? None of the companions are interesting or likable, so them also having stupid subplots is just obnoxious.

WHOOOAaaaa.... @kirk55555, please dial it back. You don't need to change your opinion of course, but the conversation is going on well. The angry retort doesn't help.

 

[Ithekro]

With the comparison to the Second Doctor, who will be the 13th's equivalent to Jamie (who was introduced in the Second's second story).

 

[Romulan_spy]

Enjoyed the premiere. It is great to have Doctor Who back again.

I think Jodie Whittacker did a superb job. She appears to have jumped into character pretty quickly. She should settle into the role pretty easily if this premiere is any indication. I look forward to her portrayal of this Doctor. She seems like an energetic, fast paced, quirky, smart, risk-taking doctor. I know the Doctor always takes big risks but when she almost missed that jump, I thought "be careful there doctor or this 13th incarnation is going to be a very short lived on". I do appreciate that this doctor does not seem afraid to takes risks. She seems to be a take charge, run into danger, help people without a second thought kinda doctor. She kinda reminded me Tennant's Doctor in how she talked fast, always running, quick to head towards the problem.

It will be interesting to see how this Doctor reacts to more complicated ethical problems. The way she dealt with the alien, I get the impression that she will be more diplomatic. She tried to negotiate with the alien and use the recall device to coax the alien to leave. She did not just kill the alien in cold blood like Tennant's doctor might have done. LOL.

This Doctor also seems to be more of a MacGyver than previous incarnations. Twice in the ep, we saw her build something on the spot. I also liked how matter of fact the episode treated it. We did not get a lot of technobabble and the ep did not spend a lot of time on the how. The ep seemed to treat it as common and normal that the doctor just built a sonic screwdriver or a transporter from scratch. And I loved her saying that the sonic was more like a swiss army knife than a screwdriver. That was a very meta statement considering how the doctor has used it for pretty much everything except as a screwdriver.

I was fully expecting the TARDIS to appear at the end of this ep so that we could see the new interior, get the classic "bigger on the inside" moment from the companions as well as get a proper departure to the next adventure. I guess the writers want to create some suspense.

I like that we are getting 3 companions. It should be a nice change of pace from always having the one companion that has a special bond with the Doctor. It also looks like these 3 companions won't be dead weight which is also good.

 

[Redfern]

On a lighter note, Whittaker sure had her index (?) finger wedged deep up her nostril, didn't she? Of course, if it had been any of the first four incarnations, they could have lost their entire hand up there!

 

[The Wormhole]

Did I miss something, or did they say what happened to Ryan's mother? His father, I know apparently has nothing to do with the family, but where is his mother?

 

[dahj]

On a lighter note, Whittaker sure had her index (?) finger wedged deep up her nostril, didn't she?

It's okay, it was as empty as her pockets.

Did I miss something, or did they say what happened to Ryan's mother?

She died 6 years ago.

 

[Spot261]

Absolutely, I was waiting to cringe with annoyance at another magically solved disability on television, and it didn't come - lovely beat.

What did make me wonder a little was the Doctor allocating roles and choosing him to follow her up the ladder whilst leaving the others to evacuate the staff from the site. Was she attempting to build his confidence? Did she simply err and not take into account that he might be at a dangerous disadvantage?

 

[Paul Weaver]

She died 6 years ago.

And the father (gran's son) was unreliable and missing at the funeral.

 

[Professor Zoom]

Yeah, I'm not going to pay much attention to the adult trying to ride a bike when I'm watching

DOCTOR FUCKING WHO

and the show spends the first 10 minutes refusing to show the title character. Fuck, even Clara managed to make a good first impression, she just got terrible almost immediately after her first episode (I'm talking about her first full episode, not the Dalek one) and didn't waste everyones time. I actually barely remembered that bike guy had even found the stupid pod until he talked about what he did, because it was all so boring and went on way too long. The first 8-10 minutes of the episode should have been 2 minutes, and The Doctor falling out of the TARDIS should have started the episode. Instead, a bunch of boring characters did stupid shit, and an idiot saw a space pod.

So, yeah, maybe they outright said he had some disorder. Maybe if he wasn't shit, and the bike riding thing wasn't so stupid, I would have caught whatever they said about it. Instead I was fighting off a TV induced coma until The Doctor fell out of the sky, so my attention wasn't really on why the characters were doing stupid things in moronic situations, I was mostly just thinking "Where the fuck is The Doctor? Did Chibnail forget the show he was writing?". I'm pretty sure the answer to that is yes he did forget, and then didn't want to go back and rewrite pages of script so he just went with it.



That Bike guy has a disorder for no reason? There was no point to the scene at all, except to show he didn't like his step granddad very much (which could have been done with a line or two of dialog).

Unless this ends up being chekhov's disorder and him being unable to balance on bikes comes back to effect the plot, I once again have to ask: Who gives a fuck? None of the companions are interesting or likable, so them also having stupid subplots is just obnoxious.

I feel like you don’t like it when people disagree with you.

 

[Professor Zoom]

I thought the premiere was great. Whitaker owned it right from the beginning. I liked the new music, creepy as hell. I like the new direction. I like the new companions. Ready for more. The only thing, it didn’t feel like a family show... maybe TOO scary for the wee ones. But, maybe not.

Looking forward to the rest.