The Pilot

It’s been a good 16 months since the last series of Doctor Who finished although, even with the two intervening Christmas specials, it somehow feels much longer than that. The new series comes with rather mixed emotions for me; on the one hand I am overjoyed to get more of my favourite TV show but at the same time saddened that this will be Peter Capaldi’s last in the lead role. However, this episode was less about him and more about his new sidekick/muse Bill, played by Pearl Mackie.

The title of the episode was originally meant to have been “A Star in Her Eye” but was changed to “The Pilot” as a playful reference to the series reboot. Since this is Capaldi’s third series it is not exactly a fresh start but it definitely does have a new feel to it with the Doctor having spent the previous 50-odd years (since 1963?) as a university lecturer whilst guarding a mysterious vault in the basement and the TARDIS parked up in a corner of his office (in a similar way to how Jon Pertwee’s TARDIS was left in his UNIT laboratory in the early 1970s.) The idea is to give the new viewer a fresh start but there are still references to the older series with a picture of River Song on the Doctor’s desk (for those who have been watching the series for the last 10 years) and a picture of his granddaughter Susan (for those that have been watching for 50-odd years).

The episode starts with the Doctor summoning Bill to his office having been intrigued by the additional student to his lecture theatre and made her an offer that she couldn’t resist of becoming her personal tutor. We also learn more about Bill’s background, an orphan still living with her foster mother and also discovering that she has had a crush on the mysterious Heather (a ghostly Stephanie Hyam) – this was the controversial gay story line but one that was beautifully realised and essential to the plot (no more Doctor-assistant romantic sub-plot here!)

In terms of the story, the plot was rather thin and the monster did rather borrow from a couple of Russel T Davies’s better creations (Midnight and The Waters of Mars) and also featured the inevitable cameo from the Daleks alongside the Movellans (which those of us watching in 1979 will remember – robots that looked like Boney M). However, the plot here was really secondary to introducing Bill and setting up the series arc (what is it that the Doctor and Nardole are keeping in the vault?) I had wondered what Bill would be like after a rather patchy introduction during the half time break in an FA Cup match so this episode needed to up its game quite dramatically.

I needn’t have worried about Bill. Pearl Mackie is bright, funny and wonderfully fresh. She is very much an old school assistant in that she is acting as the eyes and ears of the audience in terms of unravelling the Doctor’s fantastical universe but doesn’t resort to the old parody of incessant screaming and simply being caught by the monsters in the first five minutes. She also has a fun sense of the comic – the scene with her wearing a Christmas cracker paper hat with her afro hairdo sticking out of the top had me laughing out loud. However, by the end of the episode, I felt that not only did I know the character but I also liked her.

Next week sees another episode by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. His previous episode “In the Forest of the Night” wasn’t particularly warmly received by fans but I rather liked it. Anyway, it is called Smile and appears to feature the emoji robots which I had seen previously in the series trailer. Incidentally, a word to the BBC regarding its rather extensive trailer at the end of the episode: SPOILERS, Sweetie!