Sunday 16 April 2017

Doctor Who Series 10 First Impressions: Episode 1 (The Pilot)

(It's that time again! Doctor Who is back on television, weekly this time for the next few months like it used to be in the Long Ago times! I am going to write up First Impressions post for every episode, usually the day after they air but anything could happen. Aiming for Sundays, though. This is The Pilot and it's the first episode and we're going to talk about it and there are spoilers so... go watch it first please.)

Reach out and touch me.
Oh, thank God. We're back. After Hell Bent and the departure of Clara Oswald, Knight of Mirrors And Competence, we had a long journey through the dark. An island of fun during the cold Christmas celebration with the last River Song adventure, and then nothing for an awful awful year. A hero tried to save us a year later, but after so long the program felt like a Ghost. Now we start the song again. There's a new girl ready to be wowed by the prospect of travelling through spacetime, but our title is dubious as best. This is not a Pilot for a new series. This is a series that, as is, is on its final legs. Peter Capaldi is on his way out, and 2017 will be his swan song. Still, it is a song worth singing with a new addition to the chorus. Let's cut all the musical metaphors and dive into the puddle that incites new adventures.


This is The Pilot, and I really loved it.




As I implied, this is not a reboot... but it feels like one in many ways. This is a 50-minute invocation sent out to the world at large to reintroduce Doctor Who to us all after 16 months or so of almost nothing. It's certainly a ritual for the new girl, Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts. I'll cut right to it. I like her. She works. Our new premise begins with Bill summoned to a meeting with mysterious college professor, Doctor someone-or-other who has framed pictures of women on his desk, really weird gizmos in a pencil holder, and a vintage police box in the corner of his office. Our Unearthly Prof offers Bill, a chip (or French fry, if you're here in the colonies) server who's been sitting in on his lectures, the chance to be tutored. Even now he sees potential in her. When she's confused, she smiles instead of frowning. So Bill has a tutor now, and as we see the Doctor's lecture in a beautifully done sequence of moving pictures arranged in order we learn that the human perception of time is life. Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Things aren't as they seem, though. The Doctor and his assistant, some nervous-looking bald man in glasses, have a secret in the basement. Some strange vault thing. That's odd. Very Unearthly indeed, but Bill is more concerned with something more earthly; a girl. Heather, the girl with the star in her eye; a strange defect of her iris that makes her stand out. If Bill had hopes of escaping the Unearthly, it's dashed when Heather takes her to a mysterious puddle in a forgotten corner of the city. Reflection is strange in this puddle, but Bill can't make out why. Oh, yes. When Clara left, I thought we were done with mirrors and reflections. AFRAID NOT, MOTHERFUCKERS! THIS EPISODE'S FULL OF THE SHIT!


There's a lovely scene a little later where Bill and the Doctor hang out on Christmas and Bill mentions her dead mom and how there are no pictures of her. Upon arriving home, Bill's foster mother has found a shoebox full of pictures of the dead mom and we get a scene of Bill looking through them and generally looking very sad indeed. Like Ellie Oswald before her, Mrs. Potts is potential cut short; she never got to know the woman her daughter would grow up to be, but we are getting to know her. Then, an impossibility; in one of the photos, reflected in the mirror (!!!) and holding a camera, is the Doctor. Upon Bill's next return, the rug she gave the Doctor for Christmas is now under the police box... but that box couldn't have moved, it had to be lifted in with a crane. How Strange! From here, things escalate. Heather disappears while looking at the puddle, and Bill explains it all to the Doctor... who runs right off to the puddle to investigate. Bill doesn't know it, but we do; the Doctor can't resist a mystery. Even if she doesn't suspect the kind of story she's in yet, she knows enough about them. Bill shows a savviness to sci-fi tropes, suggesting that Heather was possessed. The Doctor brushes it off, but that knowledge is there. The puddle creeps into her home later, Heather's star eye staring her down from the drain of the shower. Bill will run, but Heather will show up in full, a dripping wet dead person reflecting every word said to her. Heather's dark mirror, the Puddle!Heather, is coming for Bill. Bill runs to the Doctor for help, and they hide in his model police box. What good will that do? Oh. Oh my god. It takes Bill a while to get to it, but we know. We've seen so many people walk into this box and fall out of the Earthly World, getting to it. Bill takes her time, but she gets to it as well.


It's Bigger On The Inside. What follows then is a pursuit, as our dripping dark mirror of Heather chases Bill, the Doctor, and the Doctor's bald friend who's named Nardole. This both shows Puddle!Heather's determination and unstoppable nature, and also the potential of the TARDIS for the unknowing Bill. First a trip to Australia, where the dark mirror of Heather literally comes out of a bathroom mirror to get at Bill and the Doctor. It can travel across space instantly... but also time! 23 million years into the future on a beautiful alien planet, and more theorizing on what the puddle is. There were scorch marks on the ground. Yes. Space oil. Intelligent space oil that absorbed Heather and is acting on her own instincts to leave the planet... but why the chase? NEVER MIND THAT OH SHIT SHE'S HERE. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so we enter a hellscape. A war between alien races. Bill doesn't know it, but those savvy enough to know their obscure Doctor Who trivia can tell that this is the fucking Dalek/Movellan war that happened in the Classic Series. We even see the goddamn Movellans get fucked up. The Doctor has brought us here to get rid of the dark mirror by way of Dalek extermination... but it doesn't work. Puddle!Heather just stands there, mirroring a goddamned Dalek and parroting back its cries of "EXTERMINATE" before becoming it for a brief moment, a Dalek with a star in its eyestalk.


It is here, a good ten minutes before it actually happens, that Bill becomes a Doctor Who companion. She figures out the motivations of the puddle; the last thing she said to Heather was making her promise not to leave Bill behind, and the puddle is acting on that instinct and trying to take Bill with it through the stars. Bill takes the puddle's hand and sees into infinity, only letting go at the Doctor's insistence. The puddle bids farewell to Bill and melts away. The Doctor Who monster's motivation was a gay crush on Bill. Nice. What's not so nice at the end is the Doctor's insistence that he wipe Bill's memory of these events. Bill isn't having it. We refuted this in Hell Bent, and Bill refutes it here... but with her sci-fi savvyness of knowing what a goddamned mindwipe looks like. She refutes with asking how the Doctor would feel if someone did that to him, and for just a brief moment we hear Clara's theme. An echo of memory lingers, and the Doctor sends her off. His ship protests. River Song protests. Susan Foreman protests. She's worthy of more. The Doctor shows up with his TARDIS outside the college. The invocation is complete. Ah, what the hell. You're a Doctor Who companion now. The puddle showed you infinity, and I'll take you there. Doctor Who has returned to television. History may not show this as one of the all-time classics of Doctor Who, but I'll say it. This was the best opener to a Peter Capaldi series for me. Deep Breath left me on unstable ground, and The Magician's Apprentice was good and all but it lost me on its back half a little. The Pilot has the job of making us like our new pal Bill, and it succeeds. Time will tell if I adore her as much as Clara Oswald, but there's no need to compare. Bill champions her own merits of genre awareness and a strong will, and I like her. The Doctor has his secrets as well, and I like the idea of the vault being the possible series arc. For once, it's an arc based on the Doctor knowing more than us rather than waiting 13 weeks for random cutaways and arc words to catch up to him. It will be interesting to see where we go from here, but Doctor Who is back and I'm properly excited for it again. Don't let me down, show. Don't let me down.


Next time:




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