Doctor Who: Space Babies

Well, a lot to digest about that two-episode premiere of DOCTOR WHO. I’m going to break my thoughts and reactions up into two separate pieces, each one focused more concretely on an individual episode rather than trying to tackle both at once. As always, I don’t see these as constituting reviews as such, but rather being an almost stream-of-consciousness series of thoughts about what was just watched.

It seems that most of WHO fandom was extremely taken with these two episodes. But I find myself not as wholly on board. Which is to say, I didn’t love them as much as I wanted to, for all that they were both entertaining and fun and easy to watch. But I do feel as though the tone has become slippery in these episodes, which is the same thing that I felt about the Christmas Special. DOCTOR WHO, particularly Russell’s DOCTOR WHO, has always leaned into being a bit more overtly silly and bananas than other incarnations of the show, so I was prepared for that. But somehow, across these two episodes, a consistent sense of jeopardy and stakes failed to materialize.

But let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. Both Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson were in fine form here from the jump, and Gatwa’s Doctor in particular has come more into focus. He’s a lot more emotionally open and demonstrative than most recent incarnations, which is fun–especially given the energy of Ncuti’s performance. And yet, here, he felt more like the Doctor to me. The first fifteen minutes of the episode, in which the bases needed to be run for newcomers, re-establishing all of the particulars of how the show works, were especially well done, especially considering how many times these details have been gone over in the past. Russell had a couple new spins on well-trodden ideas that I quite liked–in particular, the Doctor’s spiel about having no people and no home, but also no job, no taxes, to bills to pay, no cause, no mission–nothing but freedom. It was a really effective distillation of the ethos of this new Doctor. As was his closing exchange with Ruby concerning how, while they had almost died, they had also lived so much.

Millie’s Ruby Sunday is less the Rose Tyler that everybody had been predicting she’d be and rather cut more in the vein of Clara Oswald. I expect that the bit could grow tedious if, in every episode, Ruby manifests some additional aspect of her mysterious background to impact the plot, as she did in these two. As an individual character, she hasn’t entirely coalesced yet–she’s got a mission for sure, to find out about her own past, and it was appropriately heartbreaking when the Doctor laid out just why he cannot take her back to the night when she was left on the church steps. That could have been a dodgy thing, since it seems like it ought to be the first place to go, but Davies found a way to make the Doctor’s resistance plausible. I’m still more than half-convinced that the figure who dropped Ruby off is herself an older Ruby, and that the Doctor knows this, having recognized his companion when she turned and silently pointed at him, gesturing him silently away. But we’ll see how all of this develops in the coming weeks.

I’d already been spoiled concerning the secret of the Bogeyman some months earlier–one of the casualties of being as plugged in as I am is that sometimes there isn’t any getting around such revelations. So I was prepped for the gross-out factor. Again, this is something of a Davies staple–a farting space station this time rather than farting aliens, but the same juvenile humor. And I think that word strikes at what I find myself bothered by. For about half of this episode, I felt as though the show was pitching itself as more juvenile than in recent memory. I don’t know if that’s because the worldwide audience or the Disney platform or what–could simply be that Russell has felt that one of the reasons the show hasn’t connected with the public in a while is that it became too dark and continuity-focused. Which it’s hard to argue with. But that second half of this episode was struggling so hard to be adorable (“Space babies!” for the twentieth time) that the production, for all that the budget is clearly at another level, struck me as being akin to a Nickelodeon comedy series. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I expect just a bit more sophistication from DOCTOR WHO.

Still, there was a lot to like, and I was never bored or frustrated by a plot that made no sense, as I often was during Jodie Whittaker’s time. So I felt well-primed going directly into teh next episode.