Doctor Who Review - The Woman Who Fell To Earth

Last updated on 8 January 2025

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The Doctor Who Review - S11E01 - The Woman Who Fell To Earth — Image from BBC.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! Welcome back to the Doctor Who Review, where I recap the week’s episode and give some thoughts and opinions on it. Please do not read if you have not seen this week’s episode. There are major spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

Title: The Woman Who Fell To Earth

Written by: Chris Chibnall

Episode 1 of Season 11 wastes no time in introducing us to the next group of companions, even before we get to seeing the Doctor again. Ryan Sinclair, a young man in his very early 20s (possibly 19?), is learning how to ride a bike on top of a hill with his grandmother Grace, and Grace’s second husband, Graham O’Brien. Ryan gets upsets that he can’t get the balance right due to his dyspraxia, and chucks the bike off the hill.

As Grace and Graham leave to catch a train, Ryan ventures down the hill to find the bike. What he finds, however, is a glowing shape that appears from nowhere, and when he touches it it flies away, and then he spots a Hershey’s-kisses shaped blue thing about the size of a VW mini. Meanwhile, Yasmin Khan, a young police officer is sick of dealing with parking troubles, and gets told to go and check out the weird thing that Ryan finds in the woods. Turns out they went to the same high school, coz Sheffield isn’t that big.

Suddenly the train that Grace and Graham are on jams to a halt, and there’s something moving up the cabins. Then the Doctor comes crashing through the roof and we get our first glimpse of Jodie Whittaker as the still-sort-of-regenerating-from-Twelve Doctor.

What follows is the Doctor sorting out the regenerative energy – “I’m slow coz of all this fizzing inside.” – while trying to do what she does best: saving the world from two alien species who have decided to make Earth their battleground. While the gathered team are reluctant to believe that the Doctor (who doesn’t actually remember who she is until right at the end) is an alien, they follow along and help out where they can.

In short, there’s a tall armoured creature (Tim Shaw of the Stenza race) who emerges from the Hershey’s-kisses pod and is on a mission to find the data (which is actually this boy who was on the train), and who collects teeth from the people he kills and wears them like trophies on his face (only in Doctor Who). There’s also this squiggly electronic wormy thing that is hooking itself into the city’s electricity.

As the Doctor and her new friends race to save the kid from the train from Tim Shaw, the Doctor remembers who she is, there’s a little to-and-fro between Thirteen and the villain, and eventually the monster goes back to his home planet and all is well … except it’s not, because while the Doctor was saving the boy, Grace and Graham were trying to destroy the electric worm thingy, and Graces falls from a height, and there ends her story (for now).

After a funeral for Grace, the end scenes are of Thirteen building a gizmo to relocate the TARDIS (which is lost somewhere), and instead of zapping just herself to her blue box, she manages to zap herself and Ryan, Graham and Yas along with her. Closing scene: all four of them floating in space, no TARDIS in sight.

My thoughts on The Woman Who Fell To Earth

I have a lot of thoughts on this episode, but to kick things off: Jodie Whittaker steps into the Doctor’s shoes so brilliantly and flawlessly that there’s no question that she’s the Doctor from the get-go. Her quirks, her style, her facials, and her little quips of humour are all nods at things to come, and while her version of the Doctor is still developing after episode one, I’m looking forward to how things play out in the coming nine episodes. I’m sure we’re in for a real treat.

I’m a little hesitant about there being a constant three companions in this season, but I’m sure it’s a detail that I’ll get used to and will end up being fantastic. They’ve played with multiple constant companions before, of course – Rose and Mickey for a while with Ten, Amy and Rory with Eleven, Bill and Nardole with Twelve, and various other one-offs or just-a-few-episode characters – but three all the time? We’ll see how it goes. I really like Yas already, and after the initial feeling of ‘okay, he’s not the host of The Chase right now’, Bradley Walsh’s Graham was definitely growing on me. Ryan was … yup. He was fine. I think it’s a bit hard to say at the moment, but time will tell.

The plot of episode one wasn’t that strong, I felt. There are some season beginnings that I have really enjoyed – our introduction to Matt Smith for instance was epic, with a little Amy Pond and the wonky TARDIS in the garden – and others that have been meh. Thirteen’s introduction was just a bit meh, I thought, and there were too many unanswered questions about the plot, and it felt a little bit same-same with two alien races fighting it out on earth. It was obvious from the beginning that Nan/Grace was going to die, though I did think it was going to be in the first quarter, rather than the end.

However, it is just the first episode, and I am definitely looking forward to 10 stand-alone episodes this season. Doctor Who was getting a little bit complicated for a while there, with too many threads being woven throughout entire season, and while I love a good seasonal arc, I also don’t want to have to use my brain too much. You know what I mean? It’s finding that line between great overarching story lines, and you having to have a PhD in neuroscience, astronomy, physics, history and mythology to even begin to understand half of what’s going on. I also didn’t like how every single episode in season 10 was a double – it’s a TV show, not a series of movies, calm down. A season with very few linking episodes will do us all good and will be a nice change for a while.

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but to me there seemed to be nods to previous Who moments, too; Yas in her police uniform reminded me of Amy in her Halloween costume of a policewoman, Thirteen’s reference to wanting a fried egg sandwich also made me think of fish fingers and custard, how Twelve has sonic sunglasses while Thirteen creates a Swiss Army sonic (sort of) out of spoons.

Overall

That all being said, I’m so looking forward to where it’s going, and I hope Chris Chibnall, as the new writer, has created some epic episodes. The new music was also pretty fun, and I’m excited to see if the TARDIS has changed at all. We’ll get that in next week’s episode I’m sure.

Also if we go the entire season without Bradley Walsh’s character Graham saying ‘come and have a go if you think you’re smart enough’ then I’m gonna be well upset.

What did you think of this week’s episode?