I’m In Love with Her & I Feel Fine
"The Woman Who Fell to Earth" heralds a new and (mostly) fabulous era of Doctor Who.
Note to The Vestibule’s subscribers: When, not so long ago (on 21 June 2024, to be precise), “Empire of Death”—the Series 14 finale of Doctor Who—broadcast (on BBC One) and dropped (on Disney+), New Who’s newest era came to its first season’s thundering, yet curiously pedestrian, conclusion.
Despite the stellar acting of Ncuti Gatwa (as the Fifteenth Doctor), Millie Gibson (as the Doctor’s 19-year-old companion, Ruby Sunday), Jemma Redgrave (as UNIT Commander-in-Chief Kate Lethbridge-Stewart), and Bonnie Langford (as returning companion Melanie Bush), “Empire of Death” is both more and less than the sum of its parts, a remarkably bizarre effect that makes Russell T. Davies’s return as Doctor Who’s showrunner, while still cause for celebration, also reason for mild worry given that Series 14’s swan song—like much of its parent season—delivers only 85 percent of the time, which means that it’s a good (and, occasionally, incredible) episode, but one with plenty of asterisks, wrinkles, and hiccups—pick your favorite term—to ponder and to parse.
I’ll have more to say about this episode (and about the three 60th Anniversary Specials broadcast during late 2023) in a future, season-spanning review-essay, but the end of the Fifteenth Doctor’s inaugural run—with many ups, fewer (but nonetheless real) downs, and everything in between—forces me to think anew about the first journeys through the time vortex of each Doctor since New Who’s 2005 regeneration: Christopher Eccleston’s magnificent Ninth Doctor, David Tennant’s wonderful Tenth Doctor, Matt Smith’s outstanding Eleventh Doctor, Peter Capaldi’s fabulous Twelfth Doctor, and Jodie Whittaker’s brilliant Thirteenth Doctor.
When not contemplating “Empire of Death’s” many pleasures and perils, I’ve found myself thinking about Whittaker’s first go-round as Gallifrey’s favorite Time Lord, in 2018’s Series 11, more than all the others. As the first woman to play New Who’s leading role, Whittaker’s time aboard the TARDIS saw many victories not merely for the notion of, but indeed the realities of representation and inclusion. Even so, the Thirteenth Doctor’s era, captained by showrunner Chris Chibnall, saw too many drawbacks on these scores given how Whittaker’s landmark casting forever shattered the program’s glass ceiling.
My current perspective about Gatwa’s debut season finds it replaying similar triumphs and shortcomings, since, as the first Black man and the first gay actor to play the Doctor, Gatwa’s casting breaks as much new ground as Whittaker’s and as Jo Martin’s, who, in Series 12’s fifth outing, “Fugitive of the Judoon,” pierced Doctor Who’s color line by revealing her character Ruth Clayton to be a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor that was quickly nicknamed “the Fugitive Doctor.” As readers of my Series 12 reviews know, Martin’s performance in this role creates an extraordinary character who deserves to return to onscreen Who as much as, and perhaps more than, any other franchise veteran.
Chibnall, in casting Whittaker and Martin, deserves tremendous credit for paving the way for Gatwa to step into Doctor Who’s title role, just as Chibnall’s predecessor, Steven Moffat, deserves equal plaudits for establishing, in Series 8 and Series 9, that Gallifrey’s Time Lords can change gender, ethnicity, and race while regenerating, with the previously male Master revealing herself to be Michelle Gomez’s remarkable Missy (short for “Mistress”) in Series 8’s penultimate episode “Dark Water” and Ken Bones’s White male character—known only as the General—becoming a Black woman (played by T’Nia Miller) in Series 9’s finale “Hell Bent” (after Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor shoots the General at point-blank range during the Doctor’s furious attempt to save companion Clara Oswald’s [Jenna Coleman’s] life after her death two episodes earlier, in “Face the Raven”).
Chibnall also hired more writers of color than any previous showrunner in franchise history, a far-too-late-in-the-day change to Doctor Who’s creative staff that Davies, for mystifying reasons, decided not to continue in Series 14, instead commissioning exclusively White writers to chart the adventures of the first full series of the first Black actor to become the program’s leading man.
In the same way that Chinball, despite hiring female writers and directors throughout Thirteen’s three seasons, sometimes mangled the implications of the Thirteenth Doctor’s gender change, Davies’s attempts to address the Doctor’s new racial identity in Series 14 falls into many of the familiar traps that White writers frequently lay for themselves when addressing issues of race from a vantage point that unwisely tries balancing what these writers imagine to be honest depictions of nonwhite experiences with a seemingly marrow-deep impulse to forward the mantra of “we’re all the same!” colorblindness that produces tepid, milquetoast, and disappointing stories that these authors think are more thoughtful than they actually are.
And that dispiriting idea returns me to the Thirteenth Doctor’s introductory season and, especially, her introductory adventure, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth.” You’ll see why as you read this review, first published in Washington University in St. Louis’s The Common Reader: A Journal of the Essay way back on 16 August 2019. Executive Editor Gerald Early and Managing Editor Ben Fulton kindly asked me to review every Series 11 Doctor Who episode for their publication, which I obliged in what became a tremendously happy period of my writing life. After all, who wouldn’t enjoy getting paid to watch one of their favorite television programs and then opine about it for everyone to read?
I’ll reproduce all of these Series 11 Who reviews over the coming weeks, all aligned with The Vestibule’s house style and all lightly revised to account for events that’ve transpired in the five years since these dispatches saw their initial publication. When this project is complete, all my extant Doctor Who reviews (so far, of the Thirteenth Doctor’s era only, although more are on the way!) will be available here, on The Vestibule, for what I hope is your reading pleasure.
All the best—Jason
Doctor Who
“The Woman Who Fell to Earth”
Series 11, Episode 1
Written by Chris Chibnall
Directed by Jamie Childs
Starring Jodie Whittaker, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill, and Bradley Walsh
Guest Starring Sharon D. Clarke, Jonny Dixon, Asif Khan, Asha Kingsley, Janine Mellor, Amit Shah, and Samuel Oatley
63 minutes
Original Broadcast 7 October 2018
1. Doctors Who!
Jodie Whittaker has arrived as the Thirteenth Doctor, and she’s magnificent.
When Doctor Who returned to our television screens in 2005, no one predicted the tidal wave of enthusiasm it would loose into our globalized popular culture, least of all the BBC’s executive board (led by the indomitable Jane Tranter, the network’s then-Controller of Drama), the program’s cast (led by the fabulous Christopher Eccleston, in the role of the newly regenerated Ninth Doctor), and the crackerjack production team (led by Russell T. Davies, one of the great writer-producers of our era). These people worked tirelessly to revive a science-fiction series that, in its original incarnation, had produced a record-setting 26 full seasons (or series, as the Brits call them) that, beginning in 1963, amassed a fervent following in the United Kingdom, but went fallow after BBC Managing Director Michael Grade cancelled the travels of the Seventh Doctor (wonderfully played by Sylvester McCoy) in 1989.
Then began what that group of dedicated fans known as Whovians (yes, I’m a card-carrying member) calls the Wilderness Years, the 16-year interregnum that ran from 1989 to 2005. The adventures of the Doctor—a two-hearted extraterrestrial Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who travels through space and time in his ship, the TARDIS (short for Time and Relative Dimension in Space)—continued in novels published by Virgin Books, several of them authored by future New Who television writers, most notably showrunner Russell T. Davies.
When the BBC and America’s Fox Television tried to resurrect the series in 1996 with a backdoor-pilot telefilm titled, aptly enough, Doctor Who, they hired Paul McGann to play the title role in a muddled story that, despite McGann’s marvelous work as the Eighth Doctor, wasn’t enough to convince the two networks to greenlight a full season. That’s where Big Finish Productions enters the tale, launching in late 1998 a series of Doctor Who audio dramas voiced by McGann, McCoy, and their three predecessors (Fourth Doctor Tom Baker, Fifth Doctor Peter Davison, and Sixth Doctor Colin Baker), along with many other performers who had appeared in the classic television program, to keep the Who fires burning.
Then, 2005, the annus mirabilis: Doctor Who was back on the BBC, and better than ever.
Since then, the changing of the guard between one Doctor and his successor has become a major pop-cultural ritual, occasioning sadness, longing, and regret as the actor currently playing the role departs and we watch, through tears, as he regenerates into the next incarnation (to wit, when Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor became David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in 2005’s “The Parting of the Ways” and Ten became Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor in 2010’s “The End of Time,” I felt like I’d lost treasured family members. Ditto for Eleven and Twelve).
And he is the operative word since, until now, the Doctor has been played by thirteen actors—all White men, all impressive (including, in a brilliant one-off performance in 2013’s Fiftieth Anniversary Special, “The Day of the Doctor,” John Hurt).
Yet, when outgoing showrunner Steven Moffat and the BBC approached Chris Chibnall to take the flagship’s reins, Chibnall—creator of ITV’s crime-drama sensation Broadchurch, writer of five previous New Who episodes, and crackerjack showrunner of the Who spinoff Torchwood’s first two seasons—insisted that Doctor Thirteen be a woman.
And, to coin a phrase, lives changed.
Forever, and for the better.
2. Enter, Stage Sky
Chibnall’s inaugural effort as head writer, cheekily titled “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” references Nicholas Roeg’s now-classic 1976 film adaptation of Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, but, more prosaically, acknowledges the fact that, when first (and last) we saw the Thirteenth Doctor (in 25 December 2017’s Moffat-penned Christmas episode “Twice Upon a Time”), she—having just regenerated from her Scottish predecessor (Peter Capaldi’s fantastic Twelfth Doctor)—speaks only two words (“Oh, brilliant!” in Whittaker’s native Yorkshire accent) before the TARDIS, flying high above the fields of Sheffield, England, disgorges her. The craft dematerializes as the Thirteenth Doctor flails into space and plunges toward the ground below.
Chibnall, for the uninitiated, wrote the Thirteenth Doctor’s introduction in “Twice Upon a Time.” His decision to throw her out of the Doctor’s beloved timeship before the character can find her footing is the perfect metaphor for announcing that new directions lie ahead. Now that the Thirteenth Doctor’s landed, we can repeat, as we do every time the lead character changes, “all that’s old is new again.” This mantra also describes every new Doctor, who alters personality just enough to allow the new performer to bring individual quirks, concerns, and insights to the role, while embodying that old Hollywood adage about successful sequels: They must be the same, but different.
Whittaker was worth the ten-month wait. That notion applies to New Who as a whole, but particularly to this long-in-the-coming, female Doctor. Chibnall introduces her alongside four subsidiary characters that, given the episode’s 63-minute running time, he develops in remarkable detail. Good as his writing may be, Chibnall and his team have cast lovely actors in the roles of Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole), a 19-year-old warehouse worker whose YouTube vlog frames the episode’s main story by declaring that “today, I want to talk about the greatest woman I ever met. Smart, funny, caring, special—proper special”; Yasmin “Yaz” Khan (Mandip Gill), a Sheffield probationary police officer assigned to traffic duty who longs for more responsibility; and Graham O’Brien (Bradley Walsh), a retired bus driver married for three years to Grace Sinclair-O’Brien (Sharon D. Clarke), a chemotherapy nurse who’s also Ryan’s grandmother. Yes, Graham is Ryan’s step-grandfather, but Ryan still hasn’t warmed to Graham’s presence in his (or his “nan’s”) life.
But the Doctor’s entrance portends enormous changes, which occur—thanks to an extraordinary coincidence engineered by Chibnall’s authorial hand—just as an extraterrestrial warrior named T’zim-Sha (mockingly pronounced “Tim Shaw” by the Doctor) arrives in Sheffield to kill randomly selected people in a ritual hunt that characterizes his militant species (the Stenza) and that, in an extraordinary stroke of bad luck for Shaw, offends the Doctor’s moral sensibilities.
This aspect may be the episode’s weakest element, with the Stenza functioning as Who’s version of the Predator alien, although T’zim-Sha, played with menacing brio by Samuel Oatley, is more successful than his cinematic counterpart, particularly as seen in Shane Black’s regrettable and embarrassing The Predator (2018). Shaw’s hunt is memorable for two reasons only: He removes a single tooth from each human corpse that he then attaches to his own features (in a terrific prosthetic makeup job by Claire Pritchard-Jones and Charlie Bluett), while his body temperature is so cold that he freeze-burns his victims’ faces.
Yet this plot is simply a clothesline onto which Chibnall hangs all the elements longtime fans expect of a post-regeneration episode: 1) the Doctor—dazed by the experience of becoming an entirely new person—takes time to emerge as a fully formed character, 2) the Doctor, despite temporary amnesia, neutralizes an alien threat that is equal parts fascinating and forgettable, 3) the Doctor meets new friends and companions along the way, 4) the Doctor spends most of the episode clothed in the previous incarnation’s costume before choosing new threads, and 5) death remains ever-present despite the sometimes absurd shenanigans.
This episode’s many strengths—excellent performances by all concerned, beautiful cinematography by Denis Crosan, outstanding direction by Jamie Childs, and a moody electronic score by incoming composer Segun Akinola (taking over from the great Murray Gold)—outshine its weaknesses, particularly the Stenza storyline. This narrative strand remains straightforwardly simple, which at least allows the characters to take center stage and, in the space of one hour, to breathe, to grow, and to become real people with human flaws and complications.
This outing’s largest regret, for me at least, involves Grace, who falls to her death from a tall construction crane after saving Ryan and Yaz from T’zim-Sha’s attack (in a development that recalls, coincidentally or not, the Fourth Doctor’s exit in 1981’s excellent serial “Logopolis”).
Chibnall pulls no punches here, alerting the viewer to the fact that Doctor Who’s nominal status as family entertainment doesn’t preclude the most serious themes from emerging (Russell T. Davies did the same in New Who’s premiere episode, 2005’s “Rose,” by killing numerous people when the Autons, that segment’s extraterrestrial threat, rampage through London), but Clarke plays her supporting role with such irrepressible joie de vivre—at one point delightedly asking husband Graham, right before taking the fight to Tim Shaw, “Is it wrong to be enjoying this?”—that, had she become the Thirteenth Doctor’s sole companion, loud applause would be the only appropriate response.
3. Yes, We’re Friends Now
Instead, Chibnall kills her, but the political implications of sacrificing a Black woman so that her White husband can continue into future episodes rankles, particularly after the many necessary conversations about how Whittaker’s casting as the first woman to play the Doctor is a significant victory for onscreen diversity in our reactionary political times. Indeed it is, although “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” only acknowledges this gender change twice, in throwaway comments designed to keep events moving at a quick pace.
Emmet Asher-Perrin, in “Because We’re Friends Now,” his insightful Reactor Magazine review of “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” states this matter best by writing, “Knowing, as fans generally do, that she wasn’t set to be one of the main companions for the season, I was worried that Grace might die when we met her at the start of the episode. But then I thought, no, they couldn’t do that.”1 Why not? Asher-Perrin tells himself (as I told myself) while watching, “On the very first episode showcasing a female Doctor, they wouldn’t kill another woman, an older woman, a woman of color, just as we were coming back into the fold. An incredible woman in her own right, a woman who makes it clear that she should be the companion, they wouldn’t do that to her or to us.”2
Yet they do. Asher-Perrin also recognizes how Grace’s death is cheapened by functioning as a life lesson that helps her grandson and her husband grow into proper Who companions:
Women do not have to be snuffed out to make room for male development, women are not damned training wheels. There were other ways this could have gone down, and I miss this woman already. I miss everything that she deserved to experience and all the adventures she’ll never get to have. Perhaps something miraculous will happen—Doctor Who is known for its share of revivals and reunions—but I’m not giving them any points until I see it.3
I fully agree. Grace’s exit is too neat, too tidy, and far too reminiscent of those cloying Afterschool Specials that dotted American and British television during the 1970s and 1980s. Let’s hope that Series 11’s oncoming episodes revisit Grace to treat her passing in more adult fashion than its premiere does.
“The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” as such, is an imperfect—yet auspicious—debut for this next era of New Who, encompassing all the ups and downs that’ve characterized the BBC’s 61-year-old behemoth since it premiered in 1963. Like its namesake series, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” dares to be serious and silly, fun and frustrating, mature and juvenile, dramatic and deranged, happy and sad all at the same time. That’s a delicate balancing act for Chibnall’s script to maintain, and if the Stenza storyline and Grace’s death suffer by comparison with everything else packed into this exceptionally busy hour, viewers at least have Oatley’s fierce performance as Tim Shaw and Graham’s touching eulogy to Grace, gorgeously played by Bradley Walsh, to sustain them in these lesser moments.
But, at the last, as in all Doctor Who post-regeneration episodes, how well the new lead actor plays the Doctor will forever stick in our collective memory. Jodie Whittaker, on this score, is a smashing success: effervescent, fabulous, fantastic, brilliant, and a dozen other superlatives that I won’t list here. The moment when she tells Tim Shaw, “A bit of adrenaline, a dash of outrage, and a hint of panic knitted my brain back together. I know exactly who I am: I’m the Doctor, sorting out fair play throughout the universe” is so terrific that I rose from my armchair to cheer.
So yes, like Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith, John Hurt, and Peter Capaldi before her, it’s love at first sight. Whittaker is a superb addition to Doctor Who’s revolving-door protagonist, and, as far as I can tell, the best person alive to shatter the program’s glass ceiling. One of the world’s great working actors gives a tremendous performance in her (yes, her!) first appearance as one of British television’s most famous heroes, and we now get to enjoy watching Whittaker as the Doctor for the foreseeable future—for three series at least (or until the year 2020), if tradition holds.
I don’t know about you, but, speaking strictly for myself, that’s high cotton.
FILES
NOTES
Emmet Asher-Perrin, “Because We’re Friends Now: Doctor Who, ‘The Woman Who Fell to Earth,’” Reactor Magazine, 7 October 2018, https://reactormag.com/because-were-friends-now-doctor-who-the-woman-who-fell-to-earth/.
Ibid.
Ibid.