I haven’t seen any episodes of season 11 beyond “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” but based on Chibnall’s approach to it, I’d wager that he’s going to write the show as a kind of workplace ensemble drama that just happens to be set across all of time and space. It was a sign that Moffat, who took over as showrunner with that episode just as Chibnall did with this one, was making a break from Davies’s sometimes cheesy but always humanistic approach to Doctor Who, in favor of elaborate structural games and puzzle-solving. That episode started with a human being - Amy Pond, a woman who first met the Doctor as a young girl - but it barely left the Doctor’s side as he tried to work out a mystery that kept drawing him back to Amy over the years. “The Eleventh Hour,” however, came to mind in terms of its contrast. But I was also struck by how Whittaker’s gleefully altruistic spin on the Doctor immediately felt more akin to Tennant’s version than that of her immediate predecessor, Peter Capaldi (who imagined the character as a sort of gruff but good-natured building superintendent for the entire universe). In the case of the former, the story similarities were obvious: Both that episode and this one involve the Doctor struggling to stop an alien menace while in the process of regenerating into a new form. In watching “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” I kept thinking back to two different debuts of new Doctors: 2005’s “The Christmas Invasion” (the first with David Tennant as the Doctor) and 2010’s “The Eleventh Hour” (the first with Matt Smith as the Doctor). It takes a while for the Doctor to show up in the season 11 premiere. Thus, the most welcome element of “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” - the first episode of Doctor Who under its new showrunner, Chris Chibnall, and the first to star a woman in the role of the Doctor - was how both Chibnall and new Doctor Jodie Whittaker pushed the focus just a little bit more back toward the people in the Doctor’s orbit. And over the course of Moffat’s six seasons as showrunner, that approach became exhausting, at least to me. While the humans on the TARDIS were frequently fascinating, it was clear his sympathies were always with the Doctor. Moffat, who took over the show in season five, was far more interested in the Doctor’s ability to solve any puzzle. And during their respective tenures, Davies and his eventual replacement, Steven Moffat, took the show in opposite directions.ĭavies’s Doctor was a whimsical madman, to be sure, but Davies was far more interested in the humans who became entangled in the Doctor’s orbit over the four seasons he ran the series. Prior to now, Doctor Who has had two showrunners in its modern era, which began in 2005 with the relaunch of the series by the first of those showrunners, Russell T. Everything you ever wanted to know about Doctor Who, but were too embarrassed to ask
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