Doctor Who: The Woman Who Fell to Earth

I haven't watched Doctor Who since, like, 2011 or something, but with a new head writer I thought it might not be so shit any more. At this point I've watched the first three episodes, and so far it's been mostly OK. Not great, not terrible. I've pretty much decided I'm going to watch the whole season, at least.

Ryan and his grandma.

Episode one begins with some wacky bullshit, which I hate. This guy, Ryan, has dyspraxia so he can't ride a bike. Fine. He really wants to ride a bike though, like, to prove that his disability doesn't hold him back. Cool. But why does he need his grandma and her husband there to encourage him like he's a child? Just because it's "funny".

It's a mission marker from an open world game, I think.

But he throws his bike off a cliff in frustration and when he goes to get it he finds this weird glowy thing in the air. Naturally his first instinct is to touch it, which causes a weird pod thing to show up.

For some reason this reminds me of Round the Twist. I don't know why.

So he calls the cops. Because I guess he wants them to arrest it?

Yep, it's definitely weird.

The cop who shows up happens to be someone he knew in school, Yasmin. Meanwhile, two aliens show up on the train that Ryan's grandparents are on.

A lot of people have opinions about the new Doctor Who. I think she's... fine? She's fine.

One of them's a weird tentacle-monster and the other one's the Doctor. She's doing the stupid "I've just regenerated so I'm being extra wacky and unstable" thing that Doctor Who seems to find necessary, and she sticks her finger up her nose because I guess kids find that amusing, but that's all going to get toned way down in the future so I'm not going to complain about it too much. I forget how, but Ryan, Yasmin, the Doctor Ryan's grandma and her husband, Graham, all end up together at this point.

This is the tentacle-monster, but all balled up.

Meanwhile, some guy has stolen the pod, because he thinks it's related to his sister being abducted by aliens years ago. He gets killed by another alien. This one's humanoid and in a suit of sci-fi style armour.

His name sounds like "Tim Shaw", which is funnier in Australia than the writers intended.

The Doctor and friends confront this guy but he runs off. So then Doctor Who makes her stupid magic wand and I hate it. It was OK right at the very beginning, when it was just a sort of tool for working on electronic devices, but it rapidly got upgraded to the point that it could basically solve any problem at all. And so it was written out of the show. Gone. He didn't make himself a new one, because it was a bad idea and needed to be off the table.

OK, "sonic screwdriver", whatever.

Then when they decided to bring the show back in 2005 they also brought back the magic wand. And it's the perfect example of everything wrong with the show. It's inconsistent, both in how it works and what it does. There is no way to predict whether a problem will be solved by using it, because it can do literally anything - but only when the writers want it to. It's essentially a giant plot hole in physical form. Plot holes aren't necessarily a huge problem, but this one is. A major element of this kind of show is the question of "how will they get out of this?" But when the answer is so often "magic wand", the question stops being interesting. Instead it becomes frustrating, both when you see a potentially interesting dilemma resolved in this meaningless way, and when the characters are faced with a problem they've previously solved wit the magic wand but inexplicably don't think to do the same thing again.

Tim without his mask. He embeds his victims' teeth in his own face.

And even when it's used in unimportant ways it's still irritating. Why does it function as a TV remote control? It closes doors now? So why isn't she using it for those things all the time? In fact, why does she use it in some situations and not others? If you think about it at all, it's just an endless tangle of irritation.

Considering his importance to the plot, this guy gets almost no screen time.

Anyway, they find out that Tim is trying to kill this one random dude because he's basically the Predator, so they go to where this dude is to try to save him, but Tim shows up there as well and it's all very dramatic and Ryan has to climb a crane even though he's got dyspraxia but it's OK because it never seems to be a problem when it would actually be life-threatening.

This seems oddly familiar.

The Doctor has to jump from one crane to another to confront Tim, and then she beats him with a solution that she prepared earlier, off-screen. See, there were these bombs implanted in her and her friends, and it was implied that she removed them, and then later they saw Tim downloading the information from the tentacle thing, and she reacted to that like as though it was significant, but it's not until right now that she explains that she put the bombs into the tentacle thing and that Tim transferred them to himself with his download.

She does some good faces.

It's particularly annoying because it would have been incredibly easy to actually set this up properly. It really felt like there was a missing scene showing her transferring the bombs into the tentacle-monster, because you go from her saying "I need a sonic screwdriver to get these bombs out of us" to making the screwdriver to nobody ever mentioning the bombs again. Like, it's clear that she did something to them with the magic wand, but if they'd made it clear at that point where she put them then this ending wouldn't have felt like such bullshit.

You may have noticed that I didn't bother learning her name.

Similarly, Ryan's grandma dies and I'm not sure why. She was trying to do... something? And got electrocuted. She and Graham weren't involved in the main conflict with Tim, they were off try to do something else but I'm not clear on what that was or why they felt they needed to do it. Like maybe the scene with them deciding to do that got cut or shortened.

As with the new Doctor herself, I don't really have an opinion about her costume. It's fine.

Anyway, crisis is averted and (after the funeral), the Doctor's new friends take her shopping and she picks out some new clothes; the clothes she was wearing for the rest of the episode were apparently the last Doctor's. And then they help her make a thing that's supposed to teleport her to her TARDIS. But it doesn't work right and the four of them end up floating in space. And that's the end of the episode.

Whoops.

And it was almost good. Not great, but OK. Except for a couple of things that just... irritated me. Like, with the tiniest bit of effort it could have been good but it just had these little problems. Obviously I've already said I kept watching, and it does get better, but I'm not convinced it's ever actually going to quite be what it so easily could and should be.

Bradley Walsh is fantastic though, obvs.

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