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Doctor who is BACK, baby!
All the buzz, of course, is going to be about Jodie Whitaker, will people accept her as the new Doctor, etc. And I will be talking about that, believe me; but let me tell you what else is exciting about “The Woman Who Fell To Earth”:
The Moffat era is OVER.
“The Woman Who Fell To Earth” isn’t just about introducing the new Doctor. It’s introducing the new showrunner; and it makes some very clear statements about how the storytelling is going to be different this season. Chibnall, who got his Doctor Who sea legs as a writer working for Russell T. Davies, shows us, in “The Woman Who Fell To Earth,” that he’s interested in bringing back some of the basic narrative principles that Moffat set fire to when he took over. Moffat fans may mourn. I personally am dancing. I can now watch Doctor Who again and have it make me happy instead of making me angry. Which is why I started watching the show in the first place.
Spoilers under the cut tag, but let me just say up front: Whitaker is fantastic in this episode and she’s going to be a great Doctor. Her physicality and energy hearken back to Ten, her voice reminds me of Nine (who I still really miss), and this episode gives her a chance to do all the characteristic Doctor things and she nails them all. Whitaker’s Doctor comments on the change at moments when it actually does matter and otherwise there is not a lot of BS about the Doctor being GASP A WOMAN NOW. The Doctor just rolls with it. She’s interested by everything that’s new about this the same way she’s interested in every new alien life form she encounters; but she doesn’t dwell on it or make stupid jokes about it. And that’s a huge relief to me.
And in fact, as this episode demonstrates, the gender swap does not really change as much about The Doctor as everyone seems to have been assuming it would. David Tennant, in a conversation on Stephen Colbert’s show, talked about how the reason he identified so powerfully with the Doctor as a youth was that he was “the only action hero who wasn’t a jock.” And I’d never thought about it that way; but that’s really important. For most of the show’s history, the Doctor’s character was defined *against* the whole Male Action Hero Package: no guns, no magical hotness, no interest in proving his own sexual prowess or testing anyone else’s, and definitely not about dominating everyone and everything he comes into contact with. For most of the show’s history, the Doctor is a scrappy little weird-looking nerd roaming the universe in a ridiculous box and trying to solve intergalactic problems with a freaking screwdriver. Vulnerability, compassion, resilience, and determination in the face of impossible odds are core elements of the Doctor’s character. So unless you don’t believe that women can be smart, strong, and brave, it is actually not hard to accept a woman in this role. In fact, as you watch Jodie Whitaker, you realize that in some ways the Doctor’s life resonates pretty strongly with many types of women’s experience. It’s not really a shock to see a woman out there being the One Lone Figure defending Earth from the aliens with empty pockets and bravado. In a lot of ways, it already feels familiar. And that’s exactly how you want a regeneration to be.
Discussion of the actual episode follows.
Here are things that this episode restores to this show that I thought were going to be gone forever:
* Companions I can care about.
All the potential companions introduced in this episode–Yaz, Ryan, Grace, Graham–are in the mold of the pre-Moffat companions: apparently ordinary human beings leading ordinary lives who have always been yearning for something more and seize the opportunity as soon as it presents itself. I am here for this. The curiosity that makes Ryan touch the big glowing light thing, Yaz’s desire to challenge herself and her frustration with the parameters set for her by her training, Grace’s drive to live life to the fullest–OK, Graham is a bit of a stick in the mud but he has obviously been transformed by his time with her and has embarked upon some kind of a Journey now–that drive to get outside the defined boundaries and discover new possibilities without and within is what, for RTD and now for Chibnall, defines a companion. And since all of us are watching Doctor Who because we all feel at least a *smidgen* of that in our own hearts, this means we can all put ourselves in the story through them. That is so much more inviting and engaging–to me, at any rate–than the elaborate mystery women Moffat invented during his era (season 10′s Bill Potts being a glorious exception).
* Good solid storytelling at a pace you can follow.
When someone asked me a while back whether I thought Chris Chibnall would be a good showrunner based on Broadchurch, I said well, one thing I could see cutting either way is that he really likes to slow things down and really explore everything and everyone. Fortunately, “The Woman Who Fell To Earth” is not as slow as a lot of Broadchurch episodes–or as slow as some of the episodes Chibnall wrote for Doctor Who back in the day. But it does insist on taking the time to introduce you to the companions; and that is time well spent. It’s obviously intentional, given the way the episode is framed: it begins with Ryan talking about the greatest woman he’s ever known, and of course you assume it’s the Doctor; but at the end, we discover it’s Grace. And by the time we discover that, we understand why. This is a huge change from the Moffat era but it is very much in line with the RTD era, where the companions always had families and we always had a sense for what their lives on earth were like. It makes the show mean more and gives it more emotional power. I personally am loving it.
* It isn’t all about the Doctor all the time.
Thirteen is given some moments in which to ruminate on her regenerating condition, and those are all compelling and useful in bonding us to her as a character. But we have said goodbye–and IMHO, good fucking riddance–to the Moffat universe in which it often seemed that the only point of the plot was to pump up the Doctor’s own awesomeness, or maybe tear it down so that it could be miraculously pumped up again in the next episode. Thirteen identifies herself to her new friends as “just a traveler” who sometimes sees people who need help or things that need fixing and stops to sort it out. That’s the Doctor everyone fell in love with; and I am super-excited to have that Doctor back.
* Dead is dead and death matters.
Grace’s death, I predict, will be the subject of some disagreement. Acknowledging that, I just want to say that after the Moffat era I think Chibnall may have felt a need to establish up front that people can die in his Whoniverse. It was a real problem in seasons 5-7 that people kept dying and coming back to life; if you know that no important characters are ever going to REALLY die, it lowers the emotional stakes of the show to the point where you have a hard time caring what happens to the characters. It also establishes something which has long been part of the Doctor Who ethos, but which Ten sometimes rather tragically forgot: how you live matters more than how long you live. Grace has no regrets, even though it turns out she probably did not have to put herself in danger like that. She lived a risk-taker and died a risk-taker. RIP Grace, I’m glad I got to meet you.
Also, just: How much do I love it that they put a reboot Fox Mulder into this episode, even very briefly? I love it a lot.
So it isn’t just that the Doctor has been given a new lease on life; the whole show is being regenerated. And this iteration, at least on the evidence of this episode, is going to have a lot more of the things that drew me to the show in the first place. It’s so good to be back in the TARDIS again.