Nardole still not justifying his place

Amid all the fuss about Bill’s arrival, it was easy to overlook the Doctor’s existing sidekick Nardole (Matt Lucas), who himself made history as the first-ever full-time alien companion of the revived series.

This bumbling butler’s head was lopped off in 2015 Christmas special “The Husbands of River Song” and we’ve never discovered how he was put back together. The robotic arm noises as he showed Bill into the Doctor’s study offered a tantalising clue – as did the metal component that fell to the floor before Nardole hastily kicked it away.

Duffel-coated, scurrying Nardole stole lots of laughs with his sardonic quips (“Banter! It’s good, this. Your go again”) and Lucas’ impeccable comic timing. Yet Nardole still seems a bit like a spare part, especially now Bill has arrived.

Spoiler alert: this blog contains plot details for The Pilot, episode one of the 36th series of Doctor Who on BBC1. Do not read on if you have not watched.

‘What, in the end, are any of us looking for? We’re looking for someone who’s looking for us’

Remember, back in the midsts of time, when Doctor Who last began a new series? The one that started with a young Davros attacked by Handmines in the wilds of Skaro, the Doctor making his entrance riffing on a Gibson while stood on top of a moving tank?

In the new series of the exact same show, a curious young dinner lady wanders perplexed into a dusty old English university office after being summoned by a mysterious professor. She might as well have been wandering into a junkyard …

As regular readers here know, I’ve always been a cheerleader for Doctor Who at its most grand and psychedelic. But even I must admit that the bizarre conclusion of Clara flying off in her own Tardis for adventures in the eternity that would span between her final two heartbeats, might be seen as a stretch. From the knowing wink of the title onwards, The Pilot takes exceptional pains to sell itself as the perfect reboot that new viewers can start with. And it’s typically, adorably Doctor Who that they’re choosing to do this just a year before the entire show gets rebooted anyway, with the arrival of a new cast and production team.

Pearl Mackie makes a promising debut as Bill Potts, unlucky-in-life dinner lady-cum-accidental student. Thankfully she’s not as goofy as her debut in that special FA Cup scene threatened she might be. But her role as an anchor is key. The cliche of the female companion in vintage Doctor Who was that all they really got to do was cry in plummy vowels: “But Doctor, I don’t understand!” Bill certainly spends a lot of the story doing that – but in the way we all would if faced with these circumstances. She comes up with logical challenges to this world she’s found herself in (“is it a knock-through?”) and doesn’t stop asking. The elongated playing out of the well-worn “it’s bigger on the inside” moment was inspired. And her reaction to the full scale of this situation – running to the toilets, splashing her face with cold water and nearly being sick – the most true-to-life we’ve ever seen.

It’s ironic and impressive, for a showrunner who gets criticised for reusing ideas, that Steven Moffat has delivered one of his freshest openers for his final run. It would indeed be a good place to join the show. In fact, I might start my little nephew off right here.

‘That’s the Doctor for you. Never notices the tears’

As Bill finds herself thrown into a world of the unknown, so do we. The Doctor is established as a lecturer at St Luke’s University for reasons unknown, and has somehow installed Matt Lucas’s Nardole as his sort-of robot butler. All we know is that he’s protecting something in the downstairs vault that should really be allowed to escape. And while he clearly isn’t trapped on Earth as such, it’s implied that he’s not supposed to go away for very long – which of course means he does just that in the final moments by succumbing to an adventure with his new human friend. Before all this plays out, I did love the montage that included his lecture – the finest Capaldi soliloquy since that electrifying anti-war speech from the Zygon Inversion. Must we assume that Moffat is similarly re-enamoured with this show as the Time Lord is with his mission?

A note on gayness

Quite a bit was made of the news that Bill is the show’s first out gay companion. Moffat has responded to this with some surprise, declaring “it’s not something we would expect a round of applause for,” suggesting it had been too long coming, and expressing standard liberal shock that this should even be an issue in 2017. “This wasn’t, as some people thought, some kind of press release we made – it was just mentioned by Pearl in an interview, I didn’t even know it was happening. I read it on the internet! It’s not a major plot strand. It’s not even a minor plot strand. It’s just there. She’s not ‘the gay companion’ – she’s Bill Potts. She barely even mentions the fact. It only comes up when it’s relevant.”

It’s an admirable, well intentioned but perhaps optimistic straight liberal’s view of the world. In truth, we are still a long way from where we’d like to be, and representation is still important. So this is a bit of a moment – which Moffat concurred when he recently admitted that it was a deliberate decision to make Bill a person of colour. Which is to say, he’s getting a round of applause whether he wants one or not.

Fear factor

The original title for this episode was A Star in Her Eye. You can see why they changed it – the star in Heather’s eye worked neither in explanation nor in special effects. But here’s something about an episode where the alien mystery was never really the point: one of the most regular lines used to troll this programme is how “love always saves the day”. This time, love – well, lust, or at least a nascent crush – was the problem. I’m not even going to try and completely understand the nature or intentions of Heather-with-the-weather. Flimsy as it felt, series openers do tend to be – don’t forget it was an opener that gave us the Adipose, after all. But when she did her lurching scream, I did certainly have a little palpitation.

Mysteries and questions

Back-to-basics or no, there is so much to chew on here. There are the obvious ones: why is the Doctor holed up at a university, what’s in the vault, why is Nardole with him and how did he fix Nardole’s head back on? We’re promised more from Nardole this year, so he’s one to watch.

Then of course there’s the information we weren’t meant to know until tonight – that John Simm’s version of the Master is returning, alongside Michelle Gomez. (Am I the only person wondering what would happen if those two had sex?) We also have the return of the original 1966 Mondasian Cybermen, the ones with human hands, cloth faces and jingly voices, after much encouragement from Capaldi himself, who regards them as a design classic.

How might these things fit together? My germ of a theory … this version of the Cybermen appeared in The Tenth Planet, the one where William Hartnell regenerated. And since regeneration is soon on the cards for the Doctor himself, does the return of two Masters hint at something big that might rock the idea of regeneration itself? Is Moffat planning to rewrite mythology once more before he leaves, the old devil?

Continuity corner

Not too many points for spotting that the picture on the Doctor’s desk beside the one of River was his granddaughter, the very first companion Susan Foreman. A woman who, despite his promises in 1864, he has never returned to visit. More points for getting that the figures spotted fighting the Daleks were implied to be the Movellans in the 1979 story Destiny of the Daleks.

Deeper into the vortex

• If you missed it, or just can’t remember it, here’s A Friend from the Future, the short that introduced Bill in the middle of last year’s FA Cup semi-final, and that was revisited in The Pilot.

• “Hardly anything’s evil. Most things are hungry. Hungry can look a lot like evil from the wrong end of the cutlery. Do you think your bacon sandwich loves you back?”

• On Bill’s foster mum Moira – who drinks cups of tea in the bath? Is that actually a thing?

• “Poetry, physics … same thing.”

Next week

The very important Frank Cottrell-Boyce returns to writing duties, as the Doctor and Bill meet emoji robots in Smile.

Doctor Who Series 10 Episode 1 review: A punchy outing that covers all the bases

The Doctor is back… and he’s not alone.

Tonight saw the premiere of Doctor Who series 10 and it was a pretty decent outing.

Bedding in a new companion is always tricky, especially when Pearl Mackie ’s Bill was revealed 12 months ago.

Poor Bill has been pre-judged like no other companion so there was a lot riding on her first episode.

This review will contain spoilers so if you haven’t watched The Pilot, go no further.

No, stop reading.

Seriously stop.

You have been warned.

So new series, new companion and right from the start, Steven Moffat is wasting no time in getting Bill front and centre.

In a tongue teasingly amusing opener, Mackie charmingly throws everything that Bill is right out there for The Doctor and the audience to digest. Nervous, geeky, gay, chip serving, naturally curious Bill.

She bounces off Capaldi ’s Doctor with relative ease and you get a good sense of the kind of relationship the two will share moving forward. Student and teacher, off to see the universe.

It’s quite telling that the director pulled focus to a photo of The Doctor’s granddaughter during her introduction – it reaffirms how Moffat sees the new coupling.

Serving as a soft reboot for existing viewers – and a good jumping on point for newbies – we follow Bill as she is quickly swept into The Doctor’s world.

The Pilot is a fairly straightforward story – alien thing found, alien thing chases our heroes, alien thing defeated by new companion who proves their strength and heart to be worthy of companion.

Don’t get me started on the naffness of Bill not once, but twice, figuring everything out from flashing back to Heather’s throwaway lines.

That’s borderline Sherlock.

The threat of the week is a little weak and can easily slip your mind in places, but this episode is delivering on so many other fronts I didn’t mind the relatively weak plot.

We get a new companion, and you see through her eyes the TARDIS life – yet another take on the “biggest on the inside” moment – a mysterious vault that is deffo going to keep being a ‘thing’, and Nardole bringing a few light moments to the mix.

But more importantly, this episode nails the mellowing of the 12th Doctor. Perhaps his 50-year stint on Earth has done him good?

Capaldi’s Doctor is certainly showing his more caring side.

The beauty of going back in time and taking photographs of Bill’s mother for a Christmas present was a moving moment and still very much in the vein of Moffat’s love of timey-wimey.

And the struggle the Doctor goes through in deciding not to wipe Bill’s memory was well played. It shows he’s still troubled from previous dalliances with memory wipes – punctuated nicely with a small touch of Clara’s Theme added to the score.

It’s not perfect but overall, it’s a punchy first episode that’s well paced and covers all the ground it needs. Very reminiscent of Billie Piper’s introduction in 2005’s Rose.

The stakes are high for Series 10. We know Capaldi’s stepping down to make way for Doctor 13 (or 14 if we’re counting The War Doctor), and we know Moffat’s standing down as showrunner so he’ll want to make his final series a belter.

Ice Warriors, the original Mondasian Cybermen, a Missy and Master team up, and a regeneration to plan for? It might all work out brilliantly.

Next week, Episode 2 is on at 7.20pm again and Smile will introduce to evil Emoji robots. Start predicting the poop jokes now…

And for the conspiracy theorists who are already trying to work out what the series is planning, don your tin foil hat and check out the big questions around Series 10.

Doctor Who” returns to Earth Saturday night on BBC America, after a year away (except for December’s traditional Christmas episode). For those unfamiliar with this incomparably long-running sci-fi series-cum-British institution about an alien traveler in time and space, change is baked into its DNA: The Doctor periodically regenerates into a new version of himself, differently played by a different actor, but more or less the same person. (It’s quite quantum.)

But there is a changing rotation too of sidekicks – “companions” – who complement or contrast and in different ways complete the Doctor’s character. This practice is mirrored on the production level by the more occasional swapping out of show runners, which all means that, at any given time, there will be great disagreement on how the show is faring and whether this Doctor or companion is as good as the last.

Most of its faults, at least, are sins of ambition. If the 20th century version of the series was easily mocked as a pasteboard construction in spite of its having helped shape the minds of generations of Britons, the 21st century reboot has thought big and often deep, at times to a fault. Current show runner Steven Moffat has subjected Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor to a surfeit of sober self-reflection, I have felt, when he comes most alive in action or comedy. Fortunately, Moffat has a talent for farce and for packing meaning into a joke.

The title of the new season opener, “The Pilot,” refers to something within the story but also reminds us that (most) every season in this show is a new beginning. Capaldi continues as the Doctor, with the valuable Matt Lucas (“Little Britain”) still around as comic foil Nardole; but Pearl Mackie is new, replacing Jenna Coleman (who left to play Queen Victoria on “Victoria”) as the prime companion. Her Bill is a cafeteria worker at the university where the Doctor has been laying low, after a fashion, for reasons yet to be revealed.

He’s become a popular lecturer there — mixing poetry and physics, which he declares to be the same thing, “because of the rhymes” — with his phone box-shaped time-space machine parked in a corner of his office, a pencil box full of sonic screwdrivers and framed photos on his desk of Susan Ford (the First Doctor’s granddaughter) and River Song (complicated late love interest). This is a show that gives the gift of self-reference.

“Most people when they don’t understand something they frown,” the Doctor tells Bill, whom he has seen sitting in on his lectures. “You smile.” He becomes her tutor, though small visual clues suggest that his interest is not merely academic.

I like Capaldi in the role, his dark Scottish humor; I like that he’s an older Doctor, in the early tradition of the show. That Moffat never successfully defined his relationship to Coleman’s overcomplicated Clara Oswald — who had previously been the companion of Matt Smiths’ much younger Eleventh Doctor – was a drag on their shared seasons, but the new round begins very promisingly, with the Doctor explicitly a mentor to Bill. (Possibly more – but not, in any case, romantically more; Mackie’s character is gay, perhaps in part to get that recurring question off the table from the start.)

We begin the year knowing that it has been announced as Capaldi’s last (and Moffat’s as well) and that there will, therefore, be some sort of death-like reckoning awaiting him and us not too many episodes away. It’s a shame, really, that this particular arrangement of actors and characters won’t last — the new season is running strong out of the gate — but I am set to enjoy them while it does.

★★★★ The agonisingly long wait is over. After a 16-month hiatus, proper weekly Doctor Who is back for 12 episodes, and the fact that the first of series ten is called The Pilot is not to be taken lightly. There’s a reference to a pilot within the dialogue, but you could – if you’ve just materialised from a parallel, Who-free universe – take this as your jumping-on point, your pilot episode. If you’re already anticipating the complete reboot promised for 2018 under new showrunner Chris Chibnall, well it almost feels like Steven Moffat has accomplished it a year earlier.

Through the eyes of newcomer Bill Potts, The Pilot explores afresh the mysteries and joys at the core of this 54-year-old show. She asks all the questions that any normal person would about the incongruous police box and its strange owner and his identity – except, for once, it’s not “Doctor who?” but “Doctor what?”. It may take her a while to work out that the Tardis is bigger on the inside – but thanks to Bill we finally discover the location of the Tardis toilet. Essential information for all novice adventurers with loosened bowels.

From the opening scene, the Doctor is established as a lecturer at St Luke’s University in present-day Bristol. He’s been based here a very long time (perhaps 50 years, perhaps 70) and delivers captivating lectures. He has his own splendid wood-panelled, red-painted quarters adorned with a Rembrandt self-portrait and etchings, while his blue box stands invitingly in the corner. For die-hards, this scenario smacks of Shada, the unfinished and unaired 1979/80 serial written by Douglas Adams, which had Tom Baker’s Doctor visiting a Time Lord professor at Cambridge.

More, it reads like Educating Rita as Peter Capaldi’s prof offers Bill private tuition. A canteen worker with an enquiring mind she’s been slipping into his lectures. Who wouldn’t? Capaldi is a magnetic force. You wouldn’t bunk off or nod off while he’s in full flow. Pearl Mackie is instantly winning as the fledgling companion. She may not have had much education but she isn’t dim; she’s quirky, big-hearted, a 20-something who lives with her foster mother, works on campus and develops a crush on a young woman she’s been serving generous portions of chips.

While The Pilot focuses on building a bond between the Time Lord and Bill, it allows plenty of leeway for Matt Lucas as the Doctor’s batman, Nardole. Lucas has impeccable comic timing, spinning sarky asides, peculiar squeals and amusing lines, at one point quoting Kenneth Williams from Carry On Spying (“I’d give it a minute”).

Inevitably, there are nods to Doctor Who’s past. On his desk, he has framed portraits of loved ones: a snap of River Song and a BBC publicity shot of his granddaughter. Susan has barely been mentioned since her departure in 1964. Carole Ann Ford reprised the role in The Five Doctors (1983), we saw a blur of Susan fleeing Gallifrey in The Name of the Doctor (2013), and of course Susan was An Unearthly Child, the focus of the original “Pilot Episode” in 1963. For now, I’m not reading too much into this sudden reminder of her existence.

Along with Shada, there’s a further allusion to season 17, to Terry Nation’s 1979 serial Destiny of the Daleks and their “interminable war” with the Movellans. Only a glimpse, mind. The camp disco-era androids with beaded hair dash about in the background, not quite in focus. It’s rather sweet to see the Movellans again 38 years later, although as they’re robots, why do they howl with pain during battle?

Back to the now. The Pilot has a lovely visual flair and is given an energetic snap from director Lawrence Gough. The effects of the menacing puddle and the watery transformations are expertly handled. But there’s a simple pleasure to be had in the presentation of our old friend, the Tardis. Never has it looked more stunning than in the gradual zoom-out from Bill at the police box doors as the lights and mechanisms flicker to life. Kudos to designer Michael Pickwoad and the lighting department. I hope this is the one aspect His Chibs does retain when he takes charge. The soundtrack is unusually varied, even encompassing snatches of Beethoven and Joy Division – fittingly, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

What I enjoy most about this episode is that at its heart – partly cloaked in intrigue and menace – is a romance, an attraction that transcends space and time. It’s not just the Doctor who exposes Bill to the delights of space/time travel. The force that has consumed Heather – the girl with a star in her eye – pursues Bill to the ends of the universe. Bill puts her trust in this peculiar liquid lifeform and experiences a mind-blowing cosmic trip. A beautiful and poetic resolution to this new chapter.