Well, Wednesday's also gone and spoiled my
big Monday Media Madness news, leaving me with no other option than to write you a
review, albeit a fairly spoiler-free one.
Using special remote viewing skills I learned from my dear friend
Nino Savatte at the Institute of Electrical Shocks and Psychic Surprises, I watched
the episode in question.
And? It was pretty damned good, actually.
There were a few wobbly bits, and the incidental score was somewhat cheesy and intrusive during the action scenes, but on the whole, it left a favorable impression. As in
the Paul McGann movie, or the
first John Pertwee episode, the Doctor arrives on the scene without a companion. Another similarity to Pertwee's "
Spearhead from Space" is that we don't get to see the Doctor's transformation sequence; yet clearly, from his behaviour, he has just regenerated. We get no explanation of why this has happened; indeed, were it not for the typical
post facto preening about his new appearance, there would be no hint at all that he had just regenerated. Perhaps it happened a few days earlier, and he was still getting used to his face.
At the very least, we can assume that it was a fairly well-ordered regeneration: Unlike, say,
poor Colin Baker's Doctor, he seems in full command of his wits from the very first.
That very first, for what it's worth, doesn't come until several minutes in to the episode. Instead, we are introduced to Our Heroine, Rose, at the start of her morning. The first five minutes or so take her through a typical day as a shop girl at a second-tier department store in London, and are much more like
Bridget Jones's Diary or a Mike Newell film than they are like any previous episode of
Doctor Who ever.
Pretty soon, though, the plot kicks in to gear, and the tone gets a bit more Guy Ritchie. There's some lovely action sequences (modulo your appreciation for BBC special effects, of course), a nice shift of gears back into domestic comedy, and then the horrid action music starts up again, and we're off.
On the whole, the pace is reasonably brisk; indeed, seasoned
Doctor Who fans may find themselves curiously upset at the fact that the whole thing wraps up so quickly. Mind you, all of the setup that
needs to be done gets done: We are introduced to the new Doctor, the new Companion, and the same old TARDIS (nice touch: Rose does not know what a Police Call Box is). A couple of juicy hints about larger matters are slipped in to the proceedings, and a good time is had by many (though not all) of the participants.
On the other hand, the amount of plot involved was just about the bare minimum required to achieve those goals. The result is an episode which seems only barely longer than "
The Sontaran Experiment" or "
Black Orchid", and which features at least four or five
fewer plot twists and reversals of fortune than one would expect from a
Doctor Who episode.
Hopefully, future episodes will return to the larger canvas and longer format that worked so well for the
first twenty-some odd years of the show. And hopefully, they will get some more effective incidental music before "Rose" airs for real.
In the meantime, I'm going to have to remain intensely jealous of those individuals who live in countries where this show will actually be broadcast.
Update: Warren Ellis has a review up as well. He mentions my favorite line of the Doctor's, and he has a slight amount more spoilage in his review than I do above. Looks like he has the same opinion of the incidental music (
"ranges from passable to fucking awful") as I do, though.
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