Having been
off-air for the entirety of 2016, save for the Christmas special, Doctor Who returns for its first full
series in a little while with the beginning of Peter Capaldi’s final season in
the role, “The Pilot”, the cheeky title of which shows its intention in
re-establishing the series. Unfortunately, the episode gets off on the wrong
foot and never really recovers.
The
pre-titles sequence is fatally misjudged: it’s languid, rambling, filled with unnecessary
continuity references and, worst of all, it’s utterly pointless. There’s just
nothing we learn here that isn’t restated in the very next scene. If the show
was trying to reintroduce itself here, then it fails completely, and it makes
for a really bad establishing of the dynamic between the Doctor and his new
companion. The languid pace continues for a while as the episode tries to both
establish the character of said newbie Bill Potts and a mystery concerning a
puddle. (I’ll refrain from making jokes concerning intellectual depth.) Pearl
Mackie does well with what she’s given, but we don’t really learn that much
about the character, and also the mystery about the puddle isn’t really
expanded on beyond “there’s something wrong with it” for a while.
Unfortunately,
when we finally start learning more about this week’s story, the episode
develops a serious case of ADHD as we ping-pong rapidly from the Marie Celeste to Australia to the year
23 million AD for no especially clear reason. And yet despite that, the
plodding tone from earlier is still present even as the show remains unable to
stay in the same location for more than a minute. The Puddle Monster is really
flimsy and underdeveloped, with no real explanation for what it’s trying to do
or why, and then the Daleks show up for a gratitious cameo that smacks
uncomfortably of a problem I’ve consistently had with Steven Moffat’s Who: self-indulgence. This scene exists
only so the Daleks can show up, and to compound things there’s a cameo from the
Movellans, a race whose only previous television appearance was the 1979 Tom
Baker serial Destiny of the Daleks. I
have mentioned previously how Moffat ran the risk the previous year of alienating
the casual viewer; this isn’t as bad as the previous series opener, which
required intimate knowledge of two 1970s stories and an online-only minisode to
make sense of, but it still feels like a problem.
The episode’s
strongest plot strand is Bill’s relationship with Heather, a girl she fancies
who is subsequently possessed by the Puddle (although the possession itself is
badly garbled and again it’s not really explained what’s going on, and the show
keeps on ‘explaining’ things with flashbacks to earlier in the episode in a way
that feels vaguely patronising). Oh, and Matt Lucas’ Nardole is also in this
episode, although I’m not sure why as there’s no reason for him to be whatsoever.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the actor, I like the character, he’s just pretty superfluous
to requirements here, which even the episode seems to be aware of to some
degree as he goes missing completely towards the end without explanation.
Remember
when I had problems giving an adequate description of the Sherlock episode “The Final Problem” because of how incoherent the
whole thing was? This is kind of similar, but the plot’s too flimsy to really
talk about much. There’s not that much incident to speak of, which seems to be
because it’s focusing on developing the new companion, but there’s not all that
much of that either (the only character in the episode I’ve yet to mention is
her foster mother, who only has a few lines of dialogue); by the end it doesn’t
feel like the Doctor and Bill’s relationship is as developed as it should be.
This is not, by any means, a terrible story; it’s just a bit undercooked, and
generally sort of there… and it also
makes a couple of baffling decisions. It makes for a disappointing return.
Still, this
was one of Peter Capaldi’s better performances in the role, and I have high
hopes for Pearl Mackie (to close on a positive, the moment when she sees the
world through the eyes of the possessed Heather is really well done, being
beautifully performed, directed and scored). It’s a shame this first outing
didn’t really work for me, but I’m sure there’s better to come.
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