"The Robot Revolution - Doctor Who s15e01 Review

Doctor Who is back! And here we are again. And also here we are for the first time.

This is the fifteenth season premiere in the new era, the sixth time Russell T. Davies has done a splashy opening to catch the attention of the potential viewing audience, and the first time I’m doing a straight up Doctor Who review in real(ish) time in… god who even knows. Twelve years?

Apologies for me being rusty.

RTD’s big splashy opening

This has all the sorts of hallmarks you’d want to see from a Davies opener. It’s big on ideas and budget, swinging to capture attention everywhere with big sound and big colorful robots. Lots of laser blasts and explosions. For Davies, this sort of loud excess is part of his aesthetic. As Davies is the first vision of the show I knew (and fell in love with), I admit to finding it charming, even when the result is something like last season’s “Space Babies.”

Primarily, the thing that sticks out is this being the first time the show’s been able to do a TARDIS crew that made up of no white people. Prior to Gatwa’s arrival, the best the show could hope for was a non-white companion (which it did with Martha Jones, Bill Potts, Yasmin Khan, and Ryan Sinclair), and with the arrival of Gatwa, last season featured Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. But now we have Varada Sethu joining Ncuti Gatwa as Belinda Chandra. Already they have a good relationship, and it’s a fresh dynamic that I love to see. It opens tremendous story opportunities and I can’t wait to see what it does.

It also, for the first time in the new era, has created a point in time to which The Doctor actively cannot travel, so he’s forced to take Belinda home “the long way around”. It’s a fun development, and while I do long for the series to build off of the “Companion has an active life outside of the TARDIS” that Moffat introduced with Amy & Rory and then went full bore with Clara and then Bill, this return to that original Barbara and Ian dynamic where The Doctor is trying to get them home and maybe can’t quite control where he’s going is a far cry from basically anything in New Who.

I acknowledge I’m cribbing from Sandifer in this, but I agree with her that the thing I want to see most in Doctor Who is something new and exciting.

And in that… it feels like this is a failure.

Here we are again

Part of Davies’s remit with these season openers is to re-introduce key aspects of the show. It stands out that we The Doctor introduces himself to his companion, utilizing an X-ray blanket to showcase his two hearts. And… he should. That’s not what bothers me.

What bothers me (and I promise I am not going to get ranty and mad about this) is that much of this episode is heavily, heavily recycled from other Doctor Who stories. I have no issues with Davies’s recurring motifs and pet loves. There came a point in the Moffat era where people (myself included (and I was wrong)) would criticize Moffat for playing similar sorts of beats over and over again in his stories. While that might be true, he did always try to do something new within those contexts. It’s easy to conflate a particular taste or narrative compulsion with hackery, but that’s not what Moffat does (or, to be honest, what Davies does either). Davies has every right to be obsessed with working class characters who live in council estates and who don’t come from posh, privileged backgrounds. To treat those recurrences as though they’re him xeroxing himself is handcuffing his ability to tell the stories he wanted to tell.

But here? Well. What have we seen before?

For starters, the opening in the hospital reminded me deeply of “Smith & Jones” in ways that felt Davies was bereft of ideas. There’s always a temptation to link The Doctor and his companion somehow, be it by giving her the last name Smith (Sarah Jane) or by connecting some profession (Martha or River Song or (if you want to expand to Big Finish) Molly O’Sullivan). Belinda being a nurse feels tired, and “Smith & Jones” might be almost twenty years old, but it was still something I had trouble shaking specifically because Davies was the dude behind script.

For another, the big confrontation between The Doctor, Belinda, and Al felt deeply reminiscent of “Voyage of the Damned”, where The Doctor comes across a villain in the bowels of a crumbling society and confronts the monstrous-looking malignant tumor at the heart of all this suffering. Like there, Davies uses the moment to pay off something he established early in the episode. Given what we know about Davies’s process, this sort of easy setup/payoff structure is par for the course, an idea he has in his head to pay off later. However, because Davies doesn’t outline, this moment stuck out as inelegant (which as a Davies staple that usually doesn’t bother me) because of how much it specifically aped another script Davies wrote almost twenty years ago.

And then, of course, there’s the cute little polishing robot, one whose “polish polish!’ deeply reminded me of the “gadget gadget” robot in the Davies-penned “The Waters of Mars”. Part of that is the trochaic dimeter of its catchphrase (and I do love Davies’s rhythms), but Davies has such a penchant for strange and rhythmic words. Words like Raxacoricofallipatorius or The Mighty Jaghrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxenrodenfoe . They might seem like words I had to look up, but I only had to check them for spelling. I could say them properly because of how well Davies’s meter can branding iron its way onto your skull. So… “polish polish” felt uninspired.

Those are just the things that Davies is ripping off from himself. That doesn’t even touch on the “Companion is some mystery to be solved” trope, which is a Moffat invention. Amy Pond as The Girl Who Waited was exactly this trope in Series 5, and The Doctor treated Clara as this when he labeled her as The Impossible Girl in the back half of Series 7. Maybe this will turn into the same sort of idea: where Moffat used those stories to subvert the Doctor’s objectification of his companions so he might be better able to treat them as actual people with fresh and interesting viewpoints.

But then I think about how the show lampshades pretty hard that Verada Sethu also played Mundy Flynn in “Boom!” and I’m right back to “do we really need this?” Isn’t it enough that we just found a rad actress to be a companion? At least when Martha Jones explained that her cousin died in the Battle of Canary Wharf, they didn’t underline like like the Crack in the Wall or Amy’s Schrodinger Pregnancy.

Nor does it touch on The Doctor being unable to get Belinda back home. May 24, 2025 is six weeks from now, the projected date in which this season will air episode 7, which is the season’s penultimate episode and likely first part of a two part finale. It’s nice to have a plan. And the big reveal at the end of the episode is that on that date, it looks like our entire planet has been completely vaporized, with major landmarks floating in space, wrecked and destroyed. This is the same exact trick that Moffat pulled for “The Pandorica Opens”, where the date for the end of the universe was the air date for that episode.

And maybe Davies is riffing on Moffat in the same way Moffat used “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang” to tell the ultimate version of a Russell T. Davies’s finale. I’d love to see it, but for now it feels like we’re back doing something similar. Given the ruts Davies seemed to be stuck in for “Empire of Death” at the end of last season. I already have concerns. And that’s not a place I want to be.

Not ending on a negative.

I realized something today.

The Disney+ era has felt lite on actual content. Eight episodes last season (ten if you count the Christmas specials on either side) doesn’t feel like enough for a good exploration of the spaces Doctor Who can so easily occupy. This season was produced over a year ago and has been sitting in a can since then. It was part of the initial production order from when Disney+ started working with the BBC to produce the series. As such, this feels like the second half of that season much in the same way the Clara back-half of Series 7 felt wholly distinct (yet linked) with its Pond Farewell first half.

And in looking back at that season, the thing that excites me most about this one is the promise of more of Gatwa’s Doctor. We’ve gotten a good amount, but last season did have a bit of a hamstringing because of his other commitments. “73 Yards” is a marvelous episode, and “Dot & Bubble” might have been the best episode last year, vying for that slot with “Boom!”. But all three of those episodes are extremely constricted in terms of premise. Yes they’re experimental and I love them, but the season didn’t feel like it was a full opportunity to stretch Gatwa’s wings and show what his Doctor is capable of. If you don’t count “The Giggle” (and I don’t), Gatwa’s only been The Doctor for nine Doctor Who stories before this one. Be he disappeared in “73 Yards”, stuck interacting via vidscreen for the majority of “Dot & Bubble”, or planted on a landmine in “Boom!”, it’s meant that a full third of Gatwa’s time as The Doctor has felt constricted in a way that’s borderline suffocating. Despite this, it’s a mark of episodes like “Rogue” or “Joy to the World” that it feels like we’ve gotten a rich enough canvas on which he can paint.

These experimental episodes (much as I love them) have left the series feeling relatively unmoored, like there’s not enough to hang onto when it comes to him and his Doctor. It’s not that his Doctor deserves better; I wish for scripts and stories to feel emboldened to use his Doctor more.

Seeing him back here again is marvelous. Given the lead time, there’s no real reason or need for a Doctor-lite episode (though maybe we’ll get one and I promise I won’t mind so long as it’s good), and I’m so looking forward to seven more hours of him back on my screen, being The Doctor.

Also? Not for nothing, but Davies going full anti-incel for Al as the villain is excellent. Davies is not afraid of being “deeply” political, but making a story that introduces the first ever TARDIS team of color be about roasting misogynist incels as complete douchebags is a beautiful wonderful thing. As Hamish Steele wrote on BlueSky “I feel like The Doctor turning the villain into cum and then vacuuming them up is certainly one of the more unique ways they’ve ended a story.” Not for nothing, but for all my complaints about the “Polish polish!” robot being a retread and the sort of thing you can see Davies gleefully inserting into his script and cackling with every type of its dialogue (and I can), I couldn’t help but cackle as the little cumstain of a villain was casually wiped away with absolutely no fanfare.

Because fuck Al and fuck incels. The Doctor fights douchebags like that, and Belinda was 100% correct to tell him to go fuck himself. Thank god Davies putting The Doctor in the middle of that fight.

Deathwatch

For all of how this write-up might feel critical (and… it is), I should add that I liked this episode just fine. I’m watching this season and writing these reviews under the crushing reality that this might be the last televised Doctor Who we get for a long long time, and it’s hard to escape looking at this as the last gasps of the show after twenty long years on the air.

If I’m critical, it’s only because I love this show more than just about any other media in the world. I demand the very best from this wonderful, transcendent institution that has quite often provided me with exactly that.

Given recent comments by Davies and the doom and gloom of Doctor Who fandom in the corners of the internet I sometimes wade into, the state of the show feels very dire. Whatever the next seven weeks brings, I am going to savor what we are so lucky to have, perfectly content in the knowledge that Davies is not the sort of dude who’s going to phone this in in any way. He’s making the best possible show he can under the circumstances and will go screaming into this goodnight (if that’s what it is). This opener was never going to be the highlight of the season and when has a Davies opener ever been that for any season he’s worked on?

Because… god. Next week? Alan Cumming as a psychopathic 50s cartoon character come to life to menace the real world? The promise of something like that is why nothing in the history of television has ever been as good as Doctor Who.

Series 15 Rankings

1. The Robot Revolution