TEH WOMANG WHO FELL TO EARTH
So, this episode featured a promising debut performance by Jodie Whitaker, and did an efficient job of introducing the supporting cast, and setting up the series premise for brand-new viewers. The score was a vast distance from the overstatedness of 2005-2017’s composer Murray Gold, though the issues with sound being mixed for 5.1 and dialogue therefore being frequently drowned out persist (and my vote is still for 2010-2017 to be rescored by Paul Hartnoll).
But beyond that, it aggressively lived down to my expectations for Chris Chibnall, a man who has never shown the signs of having a single idea that would motivate a Doctor Who episode, and a steadfast refusal to actually follow through any of the points he sets up in his stories. This might be a tribute to Russell T. Davies, who at least wilfully thought that you were boring and dumb if you expected any of his careful details to link up. Davies was obviously correct in this, as his “bugger the facts, feel the emotions” approach made the series a bigger and broader success than it had ever been. But it made it maddening to have a writer who would set up clues, or establish stats and figures, in a way that made it seem the viewer ought to be rewarded for tracking them, if you were the viewer who took him at his implication.
Chibnall, in having a stunningly basic alien-invades-middle-sized-UK-city, gets-turned-away plot for his opener, will plausibly build a new audience of children and grandmas again. But let’s not forget that Steven Moffatt’s “make it clever enough for ten year olds and hope the adults can keep up” approach also made the series bigger globally than it had ever been. As well as bringing new and weird and interesting ideas, and recruiting other writers for the same, Moffatt kept changing his approach to the series year on year, whereas The Woman Who Fell To Earth feels just like an episode of the 2006 Chibnall-run Torchwood with different accents.
From the opening scenes, Chibnall sets out his MAKE NO SENSE agenda: Ryan and his family are up a hill that gently slopes away. He takes nine steps away from the sort-of-path, and is suddenly on top of a cliff. By the time he gets down to the valley to hunt for his bike, we see the tall trees rising indicating the depth, but no cliff edges anywhere around – yet his bike is suspended right above the nadir of the valley. If his dyspraxia mainly manifests in gross motor skills, is it really that much easier for him to pick up, carry and throw a bicycle than to ride it? (Genuine question!) Even if so, I think it hugely unlikely that he could throw it a distance of what must be at least 30 metres. Or that any human could.
This locality aside, the geography is overall very confusing, though it might make perfect sense to anyone familiar with the area. Hathersage, Grindleford and Sheffield are the only pointers given. By the time Bradley Walsh and Sharon Dee Clarke off of them Nomads are on the train, it’s pitch-black night. They had to leave Ryan on the clifftop because it was 20 minutes until their train left. So presumably they’re further away than, and get on earlier than, Hathersage – backed up by Grace saying “we’re between Hathersage and Grindleford,” not “we’ve only just left the station.” But Yasmin, complaining about her assignments from a police station in Sheffield [right?] gets sent out to this rural location. Ryan presumably calls the Sheffield police because they’re his local… so does that mean that he doesn’t live where he’s learning? His grandparents CAME OUT ON THE TRAIN with him to (checks train map) Bamford so that he would be far enough away from anyone he knows to make fun of him, but ditch him to walk his bike up a cliff from a valley and then all the way back to the country town station to take a multi-train trip back to the city? This is a wild mix of extreme care and total cuntery. I guess maybe he’s thrown enough 19-year-old tantrums that Graham’s “are you going to blame THIS on the dyspraxia, too?” frustration is actually rooted in something, and this is genuine characterisation that Chibnall is laying groundwork for, and not just bad-soap-level dialogue. I’ll start holding my breath not just yet, though.
Even if Ryan has a reason to call Sheffield cops, and the supervisor is bored of Yasmin’s complaints enough to send her out of jurisdiction on a wild pod chase just to teach her a lesson – surely sending an inexperience, teenaged, trainee female officer to answer what you believe to be a completely made up call by a young man, to a fucking valley half an hour away, out of her own jurisdiction with no backup, is liable to have the supervisor lose his job when she gets murdered by the nutcase who called in?
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The first scene with the Doctor is nearly great – her challenging Yasmin on what she’s going to say when she reports the event is great, like a classic Doctor inviting a companion to come away with him, except here just encouraging her to be a nosy adventurer on her own terms – except that it opens with the Doctor seeing an alium for the first time, immediately grabbing a sparking cable and electrocuting it. My group was all shocked at this. The Doctor’s first response to an unknown species should not be to attempt to MURDER IT IMMEDIATELY, without even finding out if it can talk. [hey, wait – how is everyone later able to talk to Tim Shaw, when there’s no TARDIS around to translate? I’m sure Chibnall reasoned that part of his race’s hunter’s honour code requires them to learn the local language for every place that they go hunting on any planet, and we’re not going to see them chatting freely with any other aliens next week.) She follows with “that should buy us a few seconds,” but come the fuck on.
Did Capaldi take everything out of all his pockets before regenerating in Twice Upon A Time? I don’t actually give a shit about continuity like that, but since they keep referring to it and to him, I did keep wondering.
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When Ryan touches the space testicle in the valley, it’s so cold that he snatches his hand away in pain. Yasmin touches it half an hour or more later, and it’s still that cold. We later learn that it’s the travel pod for Tim Shaw, who is permanently so cold he can freeze a human to death, so presumably it stays that cold until it releases him.
[wait a sec here – if he needs a pod to travel to Earth by himself, how is he able to teleport away with just a badge, while also carrying a human: especially when he can’t touch that human to transport them? You’d think the pod would be more necessary for the return voyage, not superfluous.]
So how the shit are Rahul and his white mate (aside here just to note huge approval of the majority-melanin lead speaking roles this episode) able to PICK THE WHOLE THING UP WITH BARE HANDS, having to press their whole arms and probably torsos and maybe faces against it, walk very slowly sideways out of the valley and up a hill to (presumably) a carpark, wrestle it into the back of the van, and get it out again at the other end (and arranging it carefully in the middle of the surveillance zone BEFORE TURNING THE LIGHTS ON), without so much as a blanket lining the van for insulation? Also, Rahul spent seven years figuring out when Tim Shaw’s teleport thing might be happening SOMEWHERE around Sheffield, but how the flying cockfarts did he deduce that it had actually manifested in that exact location in a valley half an hour away in the country?
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I still haaaaaaate glowy energy regeneration being the same every time, but also don’t get what the deal was with the bit that floated away out of the napping Doctor. Maybe this will pay off later, and they need to go back to in a future episode because she left an important piece of her brain somewhere, somewhere in a flat in south Yorkshire.
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I said “uh, it’s a Predator” at the first shot of the out-of-pod alien, not knowing a) how accurate I was, and b) how exactly Predator 2 it was. People praised the alien design but… it’s a guy in a leather outfit? Who just walks like a guy? He doesn’t appear to be body-acting at all, just walking slowly and stiffly because his costume is too tight. Apart from looking more like a rando motorcyclist than the motorcyclists from Mandy (which, I took it on my first viewing, were meant to initially suggest might be demons manifest on earth), Tim Shaw is plainly not mechanical, but sometimes, only-when-it’s-spookiest-to-do-so, makes hydraulic mechanical noises when he moves his arms. (And Gaiman wasn’t allowed to have silent, sneaky Cybermen!)
And the toothface makeup is DUUUUUUMB, just glistening wetly and… are all the teeth human? Even though he’s only ever hunted a human once before in his entire Competitive Hunting career? Shaw’s OWN TEETH are blue and pointy, so were two different ppl working on designing and building his face without ever speaking to each other? Did Chibnall not bother to include anything about other aliums in his script?
His makeup is just “human, but with a few wet ridges.” It’s ‘90s Star Trek level. (Definitely feels super-racist for Bradley Walsh to call him “that creature.”) And is he absorbing the teeth? How are they staying in his face? Does all his race keep teeth in their face as souvenirs, or is this supposed to mean that he’s a GIANT PSYCHO who everyone else hates and keeps setting spurious nigh-impossible tasks of hunting to get him off the planet and away from the government? This might be an interesting approach if we end up going to their planet later! Let’s see!
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The team arriving at Rahul’s warehouse and crouching over his battered corpse is so tell-don’t-show that it feels like Big Finish. How can Doctor Who see a tooth has been taken? From the face we see on Tim later, he’s only taking molars (and maybe an incisor or two)? So how can she see just from looking at a guy lying on the ground? Tim would have had to tear Rahul’s cheek open, leaving his entire jaw and mandible exposed, for her to see this – and if so, then “what sort of creature kills someone then stops to pull out a tooth?” shouldn’t be remarkable. If it’s literally tearing his face open, then it’s already slowing down more than a little.
Doctor Who spends at least an hour, probably a few, building her new crystal steeldriver – given the time to find components, figure out the construction, but specially to SMELT AND WORK STEEL and let it set – and the exact second she’s done, Ryan runs back in having watched the computer video file that he’d clicked “play” on before she began. We then see the video, which runs for about 20 seconds. Did Ryan and Yas go through his file folders, find a couple of films he’d torrented, and watch them before suddenly thinking that finding the “thing” that’s “come back” after seven years to hunt humans might be worth following up on?
“Only idiots carry knives.” Firstly, way to sevateem-shame, and secondly, what if you’re the sort of person who often gets their friends captured and tied up and needs to rescue them?
Doctor’s miscalculation that the two aliens are fighting, like Sontarans and Rutans, is good. Show her as fallible, and throw a slight curveball or two to viewers.
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Salad-tossing: that is some of the worst drunk-acting ever. But beyond that: is this a side salad in a kebab or munchie box, or is he fishing the bits out of a burger to throw away? The tomato being in slices, not wedges, suggests the latter, but maybe sliced is the custom in Sheffield. If not, why is there no burger? And given the weight of the Styrofoam container suggests there’s nothing in it but salad, if he’s finished the other stuff, why not just shut the lid and toss the box?
But then all of a sudden when Tim Shaw steps on the dropped box, it’s piled high with food – the shot’s too short to see, but looks like kebab meat piled on a very soggy half a burger bun, on top of another burger bun?
“Halloween’s next month, mate.” – Chibs was obv originally expecting more than a week or two gap between the series and the Christmas / NY special!
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It’s not until she’s electrocuted it a SECOND time and said “overloaded its circuits” that Doctor Who scans the tentacle thingy and realises it’s half machine! She’s tried to kill it twice before doing any kind of scan to determine that this wouldn’t kill it.
The sound design and music mix drowning out dialogue becomes more troublesome when its drowning out the already-impossible-to-understand Tim Shaw while he’s delivering long exposition dumps supposedly explaining the entire premise of the episode. (I tried to go to the Thursday cinema screenings to get around this, by Moviepassing in to something else, but by 7:30 all screenings of the two films on MP for the day had been removed from the app.)
Tim Shaw: Well done. Your tiny mind must be burning with such… effort.
DW: ………..did he just say I’ve got a small mind?
Is her brain still regenerating, so she can’t figure this out (in which case he might be accurate and she oughtn’t be offended), or is this the standard of banter we can expect from Chibnall for the next three years? (I know which one my money’s on!)
If he needs “access granted” to retrieve the “selected trophy,” then is it really Marquess of Queensbury rules to murder so many other ppl? They keep pointing out how he’s cheating the rules of the hunt itself, but that there are so many rules makes one wonder if it’s really kosher to murder everybody else you encounter on the way to capturing the one you’ve been assigned.
“What’s it doing?”
“TOTAL… transference.”
Why the emphasis? Just “transferring its data” would make more sense – he’s not absorbing the tentacle thing’s life or energy or w/e – this feels like Chibnall thinking he’s being SUPER DOUBLE EXTRA SMART in setup, laying very careful info to point up something that in the end doesn’t actually make any sense.
Lol at Tim Shaw setting off his “short-range teleport” by throwing a smoke bomb at the ground and vanishing, but not even showing special effects of smoke or a camera trick of him vanishing, just having Doctor Who say what happened. Again, like a Big Finish.
Ugh at the font on Carl Limmybloke’s app looking like it says YOU ARE VALULD. Terrible design. But I guess he doesn’t think he deserves a top quality self-affirming app yet. Or maybe it starts displaying better UX once he starts exhibiting greater self-esteem! In which case, A+ world-building from the production there.
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It must be WELL after midnight by now, and Carl is just starting his shift at the … crane exercise yard? Construction site? He was on a train heading to work before sunset, which in Sheffield in late September would be… 18:00ish? (Never mind that it had fallen completely dark by the time the train LEFT the station.) And was worried about getting there on time? Even if we call it midnight: So the job site is six hours walk from the train station? With presumably six hours walk back, and an eight-hour shift, Carl must do all his eating and shitting at work, and - even if we assume he lives at Hathersage, right next to the train station - be operating heavy machinery every day on less than three hours sleep, and never showering. No bloody wonder he thinks his colleagues don’t like him. Also take a bloody thermos up your giant climb into a shaking, juddering machine, not an open mug of coffee, dipshit. How is it still so full that he can sip from near the top? Maybe he’s pissing in it and drinking that. Again, no wonder he’s unpopular.
Fukkn loollllll at the security guard talking to his granddaughter on the phone before going to investigate the alien arrival. Was it his last week before retirement, too? At least he acknowledges mildly that it’s too late for her to be up and phoning, but if he so regularly avoids his job of being alert and watching for things that he keeps a tablet on a stand on his desk for video calls, it’s a wonder he’s made it to retirement.
Fair play to Carl for paying more attention than Grandead, but surely he shouldn’t be looking out of the cabin and peering at the tower beneath him, rather than actually watching what’s happening with the heavy and valuable payload that he’s shifting. Whatever that is. He really doesn’t seem to have anything hanging from the end of the crane, but I was looking at the people so might have just missed it.
I guess we’re supposed to take it as fortunate that the guard got killed, so that Bradley and I Wanna Give You Devotion could sneak or break into the facilities and steal hi-viz vests that aren’t the same hi-viz vests that the workers wear, and clipboards.
Why the fuck was the guy with a coordination disorder carrying a switched-on torch in one hand while climbing a super-tall ladder that is already very strongly illuminated with giant kliegs? Just so we can gasp when he drops it. Great work, Chibs.
I really couldn’t track at all what’s going on with Doctor Who suddenly being at the top of the crane but Yas and Ryan having to climb it slowly after her and then the tentacle creature is alive again (so, not TOTAL transference) and trying to bring the crane down just by… glowing near it? When seconds ago it was only /guarding/ the other crane by glowing near it? Can anyone explain what does actually happen here?
Does Ryan look up crane-operating instructions on Reddit? Ugh.
Lol that they have to super-slow down Carl’s “jump” across a gap of approx. 15 inches, fictional distance, to make it seem scary. Even more so that IRL it’s filmed on a studio and he’s not even jumping that far.
But then DW runs and jumps by kicking off the “floor” of that gantry arm, with the safety-rail-prow thing COMPLETELY VANISHING so that it doesn’t trip her up and send her plummeting to the ground (where she could regenerate again, into Peter Davison).
“What do you do with them, your human trophies?”
“They're held in stasis in our trophy chambers, on the cusp between life and death.
“Left to rot? How completely obscene.”
Are you listening? He just said they’re kept in stasis. That’s obscene enough in itself: bad form for The Doctor to make up almost the opposite of what the baddies do and then condemn them for it.
Telling off Carl for booting Tim Shaw off the gantry is fucking idiotic – she tried to electrocute another alien on sight, and on second sight, and she’s just Seventh Doctor-ed him into blowing himself up, and Carl quite reasonably might think it’s safer for Tim Shaw to BLOW UP IN MID-AIR than to EXPLODE WHILE DIRECTLY STRADDLING CARL.
Why do Walsh and Devotion bother to take time to remove their hi-viz before embarking on the electrocute-alien-to-death-for-the-THIRD-time mission?
Eulogy runs 1 minute 20. Are there really no Moffat episodes which spend 1 minute 20 on a single scene or on emotion?
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It’s after the funeral that they tell the Doctor to change her clothes, and she says she has to be getting on. So she’s been sleeping on someone’s sofa for at least a week, without anyone taking he to a charity shop?? And she then hits them up for cash, when they’ve been housing and feeding her for eight days already? And she didn’t bother to start building a space teleporter at all during that week, and when she does, expects someone who is GRIEVING HIS GRANDMOTHER to help out now? The bloke who’s grieving his wife is also drawn into it, but let’s imagine he chose to come along to keep distracted.
Also, what a dick to hurl half the contents of the shop over the floor. (And why is Yasmin standing there, metres away, holding another armful of clothes?) Fair enough if they bring this up and bawl her out next week though: “we spent a bloody week smelling your dirty derps and feeding you, and then you almost killed us all in an airless void!”
Anyway the music is an improvement, the cast seem promising, an expanded team could work well and Chibnall seems happier with an ensemble cast, given Torchwood, Law & Order and Broadchurch. The very very very simple plot with no actual subtext or concept is probably a tactic to onboard new and casual viewers easily and I give it full marks for that. But I wish it was a simple plot where things actually flow together, and Chibnall regularly showed evidence of thinking about how all the details in his stories actually connect. I knew the next few years were unlikely to be to my taste, though, and if the ratings stay good and do well with women aged 5-35 and old folks, then hoorah for now, and roll on Jamie Mathieson in 2021.
― My Gig: The Thin Beast (sic), Sunday, 14 October 2018 02:17 (five years ago) link