In which a young man named Ryan Sinclair is attempting to master riding a bicycle. His efforts are hampered by his dyspraxia, a condition which affects coordination. Offering encouragement are his grandmother Grace and her husband Graham. In frustration he throws the bike off a cliff edge. When he climbs down to retrieve it from a forest clearing he sees strange glowing lines in the air and then a large purple pod appears. He calls the police and WPC Yasmin Khan responds. Ryan recalls "Yaz" from school.
That evening a train is passing through the Yorkshire countryside on route to Sheffield. Among the passengers are retired bus driver Graham and Grace. She was a nurse and met him when he was undergoing treatment for cancer. A young man named Karl is also on board.
The train suddenly halts as the driver sees a squirming ball of light ahead. It crashes through the train and just when it reaches the carriage with Graham, Grace and Karl, the newly regenerated Doctor falls through the roof. The object is composed of thick coils of metal, compressed into a sphere and bursting with electrical power. It seems to home in on Karl.
Yaz and Ryan have been close by and they respond to the train stoppage and board the carriage, where the Doctor has taken charge. After scanning Karl, the entity has fled. Whilst Graham is sceptical that they have encountered an alien, Grace and Ryan believe the Doctor, who wants to understand what it was and why it was here. Karl gives Yaz his details and leaves, wanting only to get to work. Ryan tells the Doctor about the strange pod he had encountered earlier.
They go to the clearing, only to find the object has disappeared.
It has been taken by a young man named Rahul who is obsessed with UFOs and has been monitoring the emergency services for unexplained phenomena. He has come to the forest and taken the pod to his workshop, where he surrounds it with video recorders and sits to wait and see what it does.
Yaz asks her colleagues about odd events in the area recently, and Grace her nursing friends, whilst Graham speaks to local bus drivers.
The Doctor collapses and is taken to the home of Grace and Graham where they learn she has two hearts. Ryan and Yaz join them. The Doctor wakes up and discovers that she, and they, have something implanted under the skin of their shoulders. She identifies these as DNA bombs, which the entity on the train must have embedded in their bodies in the confusion. Their signal can be traced, however.
At his workshop, Rahul sees the pod open and a humanoid figure emerge, masked and clad in a black uniform. He demands to know of the creature what has happened to his sister - his obsession with UFOs and aliens having begun when his sister was abducted.
The Doctor and her new friends arrive but are too late to stop the alien killing Rahul and escaping into the night.
From his video files they learn of his sister and his researches, whilst the Doctor takes the opportunity to fashion a new sonic screwdriver for herself.
The Doctor is concerned that the two aliens are going to use Earth as a location on which to battle each other. The energy coil creature appears atop a high building and they make for it after one of Graham's friends reports seeing strange lights, unaware that the other creature is also making its way there. It has encountered a drunk man and killed him, removing teeth from the corpse.
Atop the building the Doctor learns the truth about the aliens. The humanoid one is Tzim-Sha, a member of the warlike Stenza, whilst the other entity is allied to it - a Gathering Coil employed to scout and collect data.
When not waging war, the Stenza enjoy hunting sentient creatures for sport. Teeth are taken as trophies, and the Stenza adhere them to their blue-skinned faces. An individual human being has been selected for the latest hunt, as they have targeted Earth before. Tzim-Sha is in the middle of a power struggle with his leader. If he is successful, he can rule - but the use of the Gathering Coil is cheating.
He flees and the Doctor realises that the target of the hunt must be the young man from the train - Karl. Yaz identifies where he works and they race to find him. He is a high rise crane operator, working nights on a building site.
Tzim-Sha mounts the crane as the Gathering Coil holds the others back. The Doctor, Ryan and Yaz will climb a second crane and try to get across to Karl, whilst Grace insists on trying to get past the Coil. They decide to attack it with a power cable. They are successful, destroying the Coil, but unfortunately Grace is killed in the attempt.
The Doctor is able to rescue Karl and Tzim-Sha discovers that she has removed all the DNA bombs and used them against himself. As they detonate, destroying his genetic make-up, he falls from the crane as his teleport activates.
The Doctor remains in Sheffield until after Grace's funeral. She adopts a new wardrobe from the contents of a local charity shop, then returns to Rahul's workshop to find a way of tracking the missing TARDIS using some of the Stenza equipment. She sets up a teleport but instead of transporting just herself, she takes Graham, Ryan and Yaz with her - and they find themselves materialising unprotected in space...
Chibnall had not only been unable to have something ready for Christmas 2017, he was not planning to begin his first series in charge until the Autumn of 2018. On taking over he had asked for carte blanche to make changes, and one of these was to be the casting of the first female Doctor (setting aside the comedy version of The Curse of Fatal Death or the alternate universe one on audio). Another was an attempt to revitalise the viewing figures by moving the show away from its traditional Saturday night to a Sunday. Viewing patterns had changed since 2005, and it was felt that there were fewer social distractions on a Sunday. One criticism of this came from parents, worried that their children had school to attend next morning who would miss it if broadcast too late in the evening. The BBC had the option to give it a late afternoon slot, but elected not to use it as Doctor Who still contained material unsuitable for younger children.
As his predecessor had done, Chibnall wanted his own TARDIS, but we don't actually get to see it this week. Murray Gold had stepped down as series composer, and Chibnall had employed Segun Akinola to provide an new arrangement of the theme, plus the incidental music. Whilst the new Doctor's theme was heard, we would have to wait a little longer for the new titles.
Another innovation was a new central location for the series to revolve around. Up until now we had seen both London and Cardiff predominate, but now the series will be set frequently in and around Sheffield in Yorkshire. Most Sheffield scenes were actually filmed in the city, instead of the usual Cardiff locations pretending to be somewhere else.
Seeking the series' first female incarnation of the Doctor, Chibnall turned to an actor he had worked closely with in the past. Jodie Whittaker had been one of two female leads in his crime drama Broadchurch, appearing in all three series. She had been introduced to the public in a short scene broadcast during the Wimbledon Men's Final as far back as July 2017.
The new Doctor gets her first "hero" moment atop the crane as she strives to help Karl and thwart Tzim-Sha.
With a woman Doctor, fans thought that this might lead to a single young male companion, but Chibnall elected to look to the earliest days of the series when the Doctor had three companions - Ian, Barbara and Susan. Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor had also entertained three companions for a large part of his tenure.
However, back in 1963-5, writers and story editors had four to six episodes per story to play with, so had the screen time to develop the companions - allowing them room to explore plot strands of their own. Even then, some companions benefitted more than others. The very first departure was due to Carole Ann Ford disliking the lack of development for Susan. And everyone had complained about the "overcrowded TARDIS" in Davison's time when, again, stories had been much longer.
Chibnall's new series was going to see a shorter season - only 10 episodes - but with an extra few minutes per instalment. His insistence on then adding surrogate companion figures in each story simply led to some of the regulars - Ryan and, especially, Yaz - having very little to do.
The one companion who wasn't overlooked week by week was the one played by the most famous actor - Bradley Walsh's Graham. Luckily he was the most personable and funny of the trio. As well as his acting work, which included Law and Order and Coronation Street, Walsh was a well-known quiz show host and comic.
Ryan was played by Tosin Cole, and Yaz by Mandip Gill. It did not escape people's attention that the trio represented an idealised ethnic diversity. We also had an equal gender divide (and LGBTQ+ representation would follow later). Ryan has a disability his dyspraxia - though it will often be ignored depending on who is writing the episode.
Family had played a major role in the companions' lives since the series came back in 2005, and here we have Grace. She is married to Graham, who is therefore Ryan's grandfather - but only by marriage. A new dynamic which will be seeded through the season is Graham's attempts to have Ryan recognise him as his granddad. Ryan's father - Grace's son - is an absentee parent.
Playing Grace is Sharon D Clarke, best known for her theatrical work. Despite being killed off, Chibnall will find ways to have her make cameo appearances later in the series.
Johnny Dixon plays Karl, and Amit Shah is Rahul. "Salad Man" - Dean - is played by Philip Abiodun.
You can tell the quality of a showrunner's work by the standard of the villains and monsters they create. RTD had a shaky start with the Slitheen, whilst Moffat already had a host of great monsters under his belt from his RTD stories. The first Chibnall alien is the Stenza Tzim-Sha (or "Tim Shaw" as the Doctor calls him after mishearing the name).
His USP is collecting the teeth of his victims as trophies, sticking them to his face. Unfortunately, comparisons have to be made with the Hirogen from Star Trek: Voyager - a similarly masked and uniformed race who thrive on hunting sentient beings and who collect trophies from their victims.
A darkly humorous scene sees the drunk Dean picking a fight with Tzim-Sha by throwing the salad from his kebab at him.
The other new alien entity is the Gathering Coil, which turns out to be a data collection tool. The Doctor describes it at one point as a half-creature.
There is no clear evidence of a potential series-long story arc, other than the Doctor needing to find her TARDIS and the episode ends with a cliffhanger as she and companions materialise floating in space.
Overall, it's a strong start to a new era. The villain is a little on the average side, but the episode exists to introduce the new Doctor and companions, and that it does well. First appearance of the highly annoying "Fam" description of the new TARDIS team.
Things you might like to know:
- The episode title is a play on The Man Who Fell To Earth, the 1976 movie starring David Bowie as an alien visitor to Earth. It can be seen to refer both to the Doctor and to Grace, who falls to her death after an electrical blast.
- In devising her costume Ray Holman was asked to have a long coat with no fastenings, and plenty of pockets. He added green and purple colours to the coat - colours representative of the Suffragette Movement.
- There's a frog ornament in Graham and Grace's home, which will have some relevance in a later episode.
- Bradley Walsh wore a wig throughout the season to make himself look older. He was making The Chase concurrently.
- Dean, the Kebab-eating victim, generated an internet meme with his "Eat my salad, Hallowe'en" phrase. The actor bought his own kebab for the scene.
- With no reprise of the regeneration scene, this is one of 11 stories which do not feature the TARDIS.
- It's the first time since The Faceless Ones in 1967 that the Doctor has had two male companions at the same time.
- DNA bombs had previously featured in the Torchwood episode Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.
- The BBC were especially secretive about this new series, and viewers were starved of footage from forthcoming episodes. This opening instalment opted to have a trailer at the end which concentrated on the guest artists who were due to feature rather than monsters and action. Many of the actors were relative unknowns, and it failed to tempt the casual viewer to come back for more.
- The ratings were very good at just under 11 million - the best since Matt Smith's final story in 2013. However, there were those of us who cautioned that we really needed to see the figures for the third and fourth episodes of the series to properly judge how the programme was faring, once the audience had settled down. This episode was always going to have high ratings as people wanted to see the first female Doctor, and we hadn't had a new episode for 10 months. By trumpeting the figure for this story so much, as DWM did, it made the inevitable fall in ratings all the more spectacular...
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