Doctor Who Series 10 Episode 1 review - The Pilot

Doctor who has finally made its return to our screens, it’s been a few years, and a few reviews since his last but he’s back, he’s rested and now it’s #TimeForHeroes *sigh* anyway, let’s take a look at the first episode of the series

So, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, it’s a University, and the Doctor’s been a lecturer there for 50 years whilst he and an also non-aging, robot? Nardole have been guarding a strange thing from forces that might seek it out. Our companion is a working class, mixed raced, homosexual, canteen worker who occasionally checks out the Doctor’s increasingly nonsensical lectures. He soon takes interest in her and offers her tutoring. Nope? Not stopped me at all, have you? Yay for originality!

But in all seriousness, this might be one of the strongest episodes I’ve reviewed for Doctor Who, it already has a major improvement on previous episodes by not having Clara in it. Bill is much more interesting character than Clara, remember Clara was basically a plot device in her opening episodes and like it or not, that hurt her extremely in the long run. Here, Bill is given a lot more development, we find out plenty about her including her relationship with her mother and she’s given a romantic interest.

First good thing about Bill, her sexuality means we’re not going to get awful romantic banter between her and the Doctor, a guy who is over 2000 years old is always going to sound creepy flirting with a younger woman, especially if they look like Peter Capaldi. No offence Peter, I still like you as the Doctor. Second good thing, she doesn’t see her purpose of travelling as ‘helping the Doctor’ and instead wants to learn from him, sure, she enjoys the adventure aspect too but it’s a small point.

Then we have the villain. Given the way she described herself, particularly describing a star in her eyes as a ‘defect’ I was convinced she was going to be a Dalek duplicate, fortunately the episode decided to take a less obvious route and have a time travelling water ship that can shape shift use her as a pilot. She was also a sorta love interest for Bill to help establish her as being homosexual without having to have Sex every 5 minutes. Yes, I’m looking at you, Class!

But yeah, whilst the scariness is never really dialled up to 11 in this episode, the concepts here are brilliantly frightening in a way Moffatt has always excelled.  It kinda reminded me a bit of waters of mars in that regard, pretty sure Moffatt penned that one too.

Nardole doesn’t get a lot to do in this episode but where he helped the most I think it with the banter. This episode has such great dialogue, with a great amount of wit, a few pop culture references and enough to allow the character’s personalities to shine through. They do need to give him a bigger role soon, as he didn’t justify his presence in the Return of Doctor Mysterio.

In addition to the main villain we have an appearance of the Daleks. I think this feels the most obligated of them and is just there to say ‘we’re not really doing a Dalek story this season but we need to honour our promise to the estate of Terry Nation that they’re used at least once a season so here are some Daleks’ on the other hand they are actually killing, and I’m told they’re fighting the movellans, a classic who reference for you.

Speaking of references, there are a few in this episode. The pictures of Susan and River and the out of order sign being a reference to the third Doctor’s earth adventures.

The tease also gave us a bit to look forward to including the first Multi-Master story in the show’s history as John Simm makes a return. Him and Missy are crazy in different ways and I’ll be delighted to see them interact. The robot who speaks emoji just screams ‘trying to hard’ but we’ll see what next week brings.

Rating 9/10