Written by Brian McNamara
Doctor Who’s New Years return (aka Doctor Who Series 12 Premiere) has a lot going on. It’s a James Bond sendup first and foremost but it does a few other things along the way that are interesting. With Team TARDIS settled in their roles and Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor solidified, the show zips along with enough hijinks and twists and turns to keep each viewer occupied.
Spies are being attacked across the globe by mysterious glowing beings who can move through walls. The only person who can help the global intelligence agencies are the Doctor and her intrepid friends. We get a few moments of the home lives of each of our companions that serve to both remind us of each character and reestablish their status quo. Ryan (Tosin Cole) is shown lining up a shot with a basketball, emotion on his face as we’re cued back into his dyspraxia; he tells his friends a litany of medical maladies for why he’s so absent. Yas (Mandip Gill) is with her family explaining why she’s being pulled away from the probationary police force yet again, and then the same with her boss. Graham (Bradley Walsh) is getting a medical evaluation as his attending doctor discuss his deceased wife. All three are interrupted by men in black who whisk them away in cars.
They – along with the Doctor – are brought to MI6, but not before an attempted assassination by driverless car and GPS. At MI6 they are clued into the ongoing spy plot by C (Stephen Fry) before he was assassinated just after giving our team boxes of spy gear and the basic plot. As they escape the light-beings, Ryan and Yas split off to track down the possible double-agent and head of a massive search engine/social network Daniel Batson (Lenny Henry) in San Francisco. The Doctor and Graham meanwhile head to the Australian Outback to meetup with O (Sacha Dawan), an analyst at MI6 who has been documenting aliens and up until now has been dismissed.
The episode is a bit of city-hopping whirlwind. Locations come and go and the plot is overstuffed with spy-fi genre tropes. When the episode leans into the spy-ence fiction, it’s at its strongest. There are fun scenes like the casino house party, Ryan’s inability to keep his undercover identity cool, tuxedos and even a motorcycle chase! The scoring for the episode heavily relies on Bond sound alikes to set the tone as well. And in this, the episode makes for a nice holiday at home romp.
When the episode dips back into the standard Doctor Who fare – aliens from beyond our universe, technobabble and a lot of wildly brandished sonic screwdrivers – it can feel a little uninspired. Never bad, mind you. It’s still an enjoyable episode, but at its worst it just feels like a stock Doctor Who episode. At about the point I felt that way, the episode kicked it into high gear – literally, a plane takes off with the Doctor hanging from it’s rear door – and leaned right back into the Bond stuff. In that sense, it’s a well-balanced outing. It knows when it needs to do which bits.
As with the previous season with Chris Chibnall at the helm, the episode centers some social critique. Lenny Henry plays a Bond villain technologist in league with the evil spy aliens. He’s well-suited to the part, and I hope he gets to do a big speech or eat some scenery in the next episode. When interviewing Henry’s character, Yas tosses out some questions right from the current discussions about Facebook’s role as an information broker and the responsibility of platforms like YouTube or Twitter for bullying and hate speech.
The critique, though, never quite lands as the show shifts back into the Bond-ness and as soon as Lenny Henry pulls a gun out and starts shooting at the Doctor on a motorcycle, something about the metaphor is lost. Oddly, there’s really no critique of espionage or its roles in affairs. Sacha Dawan’s O does offer a quip about handing intelligence over to trans-national corporations but it’s never really followed up on. Perhaps the show was consciously staying away from a story that’s dominated the last few Bond installments.
On a performance level, everyone is doing great work. There’s a naturalistic feel throughout. Graham and Ryan joking about a laser shoe is a small moment that stuck with me. Yas is given more to do than she was last season and Mandip does shine in these few moments. The guest cast all feel part of the world too; Fry’s C feeling like a comedic beat while still playing to the (melo)dramatic. A lot of the location shots feel lush and colorful, you never feel like you’re on a soundstage. The direction feels particularly strong, with great shot compositions and interesting lighting that made the episode feel more filmic in scope. This is part of the visual language change from last season, but this particular episode felt much larger.
The episode is slightly off pace, perhaps to fit the slightly longer than normal New Year’s time slot. But at the point I found my interest waning, the show found a way to bring me back. The biggest moment of the show, and perhaps the one that most changed my feel of the episode, was the reveal of Sacha Dawan’s character. Throughout the episode Dawan played a stock spy-movie tech-guy. But he seemed too well-prepared and in-the-know. As Team TARDIS make their way aboard Batson’s plane, Dawan reveals that he’s not O, but in fact a new incarnation of the Master. Dawan’s performance changes from the second it is revealed until he’s maniacally chuckling minutes later. The reveal feels organic, I didn’t question it or feel it was added in for shock value. And, most interestingly, it was a genuine surprise. I didn’t expect it, I didn’t hear about it and I didn’t see it coming. That Dawan seemed to be relishing the role was even better. There are neat moments in his performance for fans of the series as well, his reveal of the tissue compression eliminator, a tool unseen since the 80s, had me clapping.
The Doctor Who Series 12 Premiere is a lot. It does a lot, it has a lot of players, it’s a lot of fun, you don’t necessarily see how it’s all coming together and then the ending comes and you’re ready for more episode to come but you have to wait for Sunday night. It’s a great return for the show, a good note to start on and it feels like the showrunners are ready to play with the show’s extensive mythology now that they have done a season as their baseline.
Rating: 8/10
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