Who Review: "The Pilot" (Series 10, Episode 1)

WARNING: SPOILERS, sweetie

Amidst the hype over The Last Jedi’s trailer release, a new season of Doctor Who has started. What a time to be alive.

When we last left our dear Doctor number Twelve (played by Peter Capaldi in his final season on the show), he had just had his memory erased of his previous companion, he gave twenty-four years of his life to his wife for a Christmas present, and he teamed up with a superhero to stop the plots of an army of body-snatching alien brains.

So, you know, an average Tuesday.

“The Pilot” starts Series 10 with the Doctor lying low working as a lecturer at a college, where apparently he has been working for the past fifty years. We’re introduced to Bill Potts (played by newcomer Pearl Mackie), a kitchen worker at the university who gains the Doctor as a mentor. He sees something different in her, but he doesn’t necessarily want to make her a new companion. On their first adventure together, they work to solve a mystery involving a girl with a star-shaped defect in her eye and a shape-shifting puddle that is also a spaceship.

This season already has a lot to live up to, since the last season was one of my favorites in recent Who history. With nearly every story being a two-parter, each adventure felt important and bombastic. “The Pilot” doesn’t start off the season with as big of a bang as Series 9’s “The Magician’s Apprentice” did (and really, that’s hard to match, since that episode had the Doctor saving the creator of the Daleks as a child and then going back to that very moment to possibly kill him), but it still shows promise for a good final season for Capaldi and the Twelfth Doctor.

Bill already shows signs of being a great companion. She and the Doctor have a more student-teacher relationship, which is sort of how Clara started off with him before it turned romantic (though I definitely ship Clara/Twelve more than Clara/Eleven). Like many other companions, she shows unfamiliarity with the Doctor’s world. But, like the episode demonstrates, she asks questions not normally brought up by companions, like “If the Doctor is an alien, why are the words in the TARDIS acronym in English?” She even negates the show’s longest running gag by asking “Doctor What?”

This season's arc: A battle of who has the better eyebrows between the Doctor and Bill.

She also already has great banter with Capaldi. Favorite Bill line of the episode: referring to the Doctor’s running as “a penguin with his arse on fire.” Along with her humor, she also shows signs that Pearl Mackie can do emotional moments just fine, with a very touching and realistic scene of Bill crying upon discovering long-lost pictures of her deceased mother.

And as the headlines have been saying for the past week, Bill is Doctor Who’s first openly gay companion on television (if you don’t count Captain Jack). And her sexuality ends up actually being a plot point and crucial in stopping the episode’s monster. Doctor Who’s always been great with LGBT representation, but it is refreshing to see important usage of a character’s sexual preference after the debacles I went through with Beauty and the Beast and Power Rangers recently.

Speaking of companions, Nardole is back. Yes, Matt Lucas (who first appeared in 2015’s “The Husbands of River Song” and showed back up in last years “The Return of Doctor Mysterio") returns as another one of the Doctor’s companions. Though, considering how long he’s spent by the Doctor’s side, he may as well just be called his assistant at this point. And although he’s been on the show for a while now (despite the scarcity of episodes), I’m still not sure if I like Nardole or not. I was disappointed by how little we saw of him in his first episode – considering Matt Lucas is the kind of person you don’t want to waste in a one-off – but now that we have more of him, I still don’t know if I find him funny or not. I do appreciate how the Doctor has decided to keep a familiar element by his side after losing both Clara and River Song, and you can definitely feel that these characters have a long history together. But I still can’t get a read on who Nardole is supposed to be as a character. Is he the Doctor’s exasperated assistant? Is he the only person who knows him well enough to snark back? Is he supposed to be cowardly, yet charming? He flip-flops between these characteristics so much it’s hard to tell. Though it is nice to have a team of companions in the TARDIS again, harkening back to the old days where the Doctor would sometimes travel with three or four companions at once, and even more recent TARDIS teams like Nine’s and Eleven’s. And this way they don’t have to introduce two new companions in one season, so I can’t really complain.

So let’s talk about this episode’s monster: a puddle. Once again, head writer Steven Moffat (also in his final season in the TARDIS) manages to make something in every day life terrifying. Nothing is safe: statues, shadows, that feeling when you walk into a room and forget why you walked in there to begin with. And now add collections of water to the list. Aside from the paranoia that staring into your reflection in a puddle could get you possessed by aliens, the monster is scary itself, especially when it posses Bill’s crush Heather. The dripping water and reflection motifs bring back nightmares of past threats like the Flood from “The Waters of Mars” and the mimicking entity from “Midnight” (one of the scariest episodes in my opinion because WE STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL THAT THING WAS). 

On the Moffat Monster Scare-o-meter™, the Heather-puddle scores 3.5 Moffs out of 5.

So the new Aquaman movie looks dark.

Oh, speaking of monsters, the Daleks are here. And, as rarely seen on this show, they are not the main attraction for the episode. In fact, the Doctor uses them as a weapon to try and rid himself of the Heather-puddle. Granted, they don’t really have an impact on the episode, and I’m pretty sure they were just included to meet that “We have to use the Daleks once per season or we lose the rights to them” thing.

The episode itself plays with the dynamic of the Doctor meeting a new companion. She’s not just suddenly thrown into this world after her first meeting with the Time Lord. She actually gets to know the Doctor for a while before she learns of the TARDIS and encounters her first monster. In addition to scary and funny moments, the episode also has some damn good dramatic moments. Aside from the aforementioned scene with Bill and her mother’s pictures, the ending also has Bill forced to release the Heather-puddle from an unknowingly binding verbal contract, despite the fact that the two could have actually become a cute couple. There’s also an emotional whammy at the end (at least for me) when the Doctor is about to wipe Bill’s mind of their adventure (something that he has apparently taken to doing quite a lot now), but then Bill tells him to imagine what it would be like if someone did this to him. Cue Clara’s theme music. Damn it. That soft piano gets me every time.

And, though it’s a minor thing in the grand scheme of the episode, I love how the Doctor has a picture of his granddaughter Susan on his desk. He even tells it to shut up after he dismisses Bill as a companion. It’s always glad to see that no matter what changes over the years, the show still hasn’t forgotten where it came from.

“The Pilot” also sets up many unanswered questions that will most likely tie into the season’s overall arc and, in typical Doctor Who fashion, will be built up for a while until answered in a hopefully-not-too-disappointing fashion. Why have the Doctor and Nardole been at the university for 50 years? What is that vault underneath the campus that they’re so concerned about? What is the “promise” that the Doctor made to someone, and why is it making him reluctant to take on new companions? How does the Doctor know Bill’s mom, and why did she allow him to take her picture? Are we going to see more of the Dalek’s past war with the Movellans, or was that just a callback to classic Who? Will we ever find out what Missy’s “clever idea” was, and who is the Minister of War? I know those last two were things from last season, but THEY NEVER ANSWERED THEM AND I’M GETTING IMPATIENT.

"Say 'Love & Monsters' was a good episode again and I swear to Gallifrey I WILL DROP YOU."

So, to summarize, “The Pilot” is a good first episode for Bill. It shows off her character well, plays with the typical Doctor-companion first meeting formula, and delivers a monster that’ll leave puddles in your pants.  It sets up a ton of things to come, and I couldn’t be more excited for Capaldi’s (and Moffat’s) last season.

Final verdict: 8/10

NEXT WEEK: A utopian future, and emoji-bots. Yaaay…