The Pilot

Dear Gary—

The Pilot is . . . it just is. It’s bland. It’s vanilla. It’s . . . a show. That’s about all really.

Oh, it does introduce the Doctor’s new companion—Bill. I rather like Bill. She’s very to the point and asks the questions that makes us all say, ‘Oh yeah, why didn’t I ever think of that?’ For example: “If you’re from another planet, why would you name your box in English? Those initials wouldn’t work in any other language.” Except Bill obviously hasn’t watched from the beginning because in the first story Susan claims to have named the TARDIS and presumably she did so while going to Cole Hill School and therefore very well could have used the English language. Or perhaps the TARDIS is translating its name. Perhaps when the Doctor says ‘TARDIS’ he really isn’t saying ‘TARDIS’ at all. (Perhaps he is saying ‘SIDRAT.’)

But I don’t see why the Doctor singles Bill out from all the hundreds of students he sees day in and day out. Other than he’s bored and wants company and she’ll do as well as anyone. I don’t feel much chemistry between the two. Although I find it very sweet for the Doctor to pop back in time to take photos of Bill’s dead mother as a Christmas present for Bill, even if this seems out of character for the Doctor. If Bill continues to elicit this tender side of the Doctor this could develop into a nice companionship—similar to the first Doctor with Susan or Vicki.

The Doctor is bored, by the way, because he has exiled himself to Earth. Now, he has absolutely no reason to artificially constrain himself to our planet because he has tethered himself here since the start of New Who. But the show apparently saw a need to come up with some excuse for keeping him here and so it invented this ‘vault’ that the Doctor is guarding.

Of course, Gary, the vault is housing Missy. I know that for a certainty even without the benefit of hindsight. There is no one or nothing else that could possibly be in that big, bad, scary vault that the Doctor and Nardole (whom the Doctor employs as a nag) are keeping vigil over. For some reason the show decides to keep the contents a mystery as if the audience will really wonder and ponder and scratch their collective heads and debate and anticipate.

And again of course, the Doctor has chosen Earth as this prison’s location because he is irresponsible in the extreme. He doesn’t go to some abandoned planet where Missy could do no harm if she were to escape. No. He takes her to Earth, the one planet that Missy has attempted to destroy/conquer/rule/dominate countless times since Missy was Roger Delgado. And he plunks her down in the middle of a university where he has somehow wrangled a job as a professor who lectures on random topics and who has free run of the campus with no hint of any pesky deans or fellow professors or janitors or anyone with any kind of authority or purpose.

But that’s the theme, really, of The Pilot. It’s devoid of authority or purpose. It’s random.

Like the ‘villain’ of the piece. It’s a blotch of space oil left over from an unidentified spacecraft that apparently landed in the middle of the school grounds with no one noticing. Magical space oil with magical properties that seemingly has hung around for years waiting for just the right restless student, out of a pool of thousands of restless students, to come along with a star in her eye to find the puddle intriguing, and then it (the magical puddle) waits around some more before magically devouring her (the starry-eyed, restless student) and changing her into a magical being who can go anywhere and who can go to any time (she doesn’t need a blue box) and who can form into any shape. And oh yeah, who has a crush on Bill (even though they have said barely two words to each other) and who decides to stalk her.

That is the problem with New Who. It is magic. It is anything it wants to be. It does anything it wants to do. Just because it can. No rules. No form. No structure. No logic. Just because. Just because it can. It is a show. Just a show. It just . . . is.

Anything that is Doctor Who has been slowly bleeding from the show for years. What is left is a magical space blotch with no rules or form or structure or logic.

And oh, Gary, magic bores me.