Doctor Who first look review – Ncuti Gatwa will make this show far more fun than it’s been for years | Doctor Who

° СChristmas offers do not count. Intermediate trilogies where David Tennant is the Fourteenth and a Half Doctor or whatever don’t count. The New Era of Doctor Who, p Russell T. Davis again as showrunner and Nkuti Gatua as the Doctor, really kicks off here with the new season. The first double release, featuring Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord, pointed to a stellar future for the Who as a youthfully chaotic playground of the imagination, far more fantastical on foot and bright in outlook than it had been in years. For now, it’s only baby steps to this new destination, but we can see it.

Gatwa immediately establishes himself as a flashy doctor. What obviously perfect casting he is: imperious in his colorful suits and naturally able to express the blinding extremes the Doctor must embody. He shines and the end of the world descends; a nanosecond later he’s smiling and we’re having the most fun in the universe. He’s adorable, but he’s also knowingly more adorable than some of his predecessors, jumping and dancing and on a few occasions here doing a sideways canter when he enters a room, like Kramer from Seinfeld with springs on his heels.

Davies, meanwhile, has always been a writer concerned with big ideas more than precise dialogue or watertight plotting, though he’s capable of the latter. Overwhelmed by the many, many extra dollars that come from Who’s global tie-up with Disney – British viewers must stay up until midnight to tune in to the global premiere of this year’s episodes, timed to suit American households – Davies seems it’s unlikely to win the money just for brighter lasers, bigger spaceships and scarier monsters. The Devil’s Chord spends its budget, for example, on a wonderfully unnecessary and unexpected musical sequence, dozens of dancers telling the world that this show has the green light to do whatever it wants, and what it wants to do will be hard to predict.

Normally, the episode that will open a long-awaited new season would be meticulously polished, but Space Babies bloats weakly despite its absurd efforts to attract new fans. The first 10 minutes are almost entirely devoted to Gatua, who is behind the controls of the Tardis, explaining to his amazing companion Ruby (Millie Gibson) why he is called the Doctor, what happened to his home planet Gallifrey, what the Tardis is, why outside it looks like an old fashioned police box and so on and so forth. Davies subverts all this cleverly with a one-off trip to the distant past that delights in making clear that Doctor Who’s approach to the logic of time travel may be a bit cavalier – but when the Doctor and Ruby arrive at their first port of call, an apparently abandoned spaceship ship, and he’s still scrambling for the Tardis’s automatic translation software, one wonders if all that chore could have been more effectively woven into the action in a few stories.

In the remaining time, Space Babies is a quintessential example of a mid-range Who piece, entertaining but forgettable and ultimately pointless. Try to summarize what follows from the stunning initial revelation that the spaceship is piloted by a gang of babies in prams, and you’ll be wrong. Within such a half-formed narrative, Davies’ usually stirring efforts to pepper his script with political and personal messages feel awkward. He almost gets away with a rousing speech from the Doctor about learning to embrace the unorthodox, but an allegory about the repeal of abortion rights in the US is accompanied by the deafening scraping of a lever. Gatwa and Gibson must muster all their open-hearted energy—which is, in the best possible way, childish—to see the story through.

Much better is a second episode, The Devil’s Chord, which takes the Doctor and Ruby to Abbey Road to witness the Beatles recording their debut album. “Incredible!” says the Doctor when Ruby makes this suggestion, and when the pair arrive in London in full Austin Powers outfits, he puts on a cheesy accent to suggest it’s going to be a lavish madhouse on Carnaby Street.

It’s a changed 1960s though, with the Beatles spewing soulless pizzazz – Gatwa’s disgusted/bewildered face is funny – thanks to the villainous Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon) who has stolen humanity’s ability to find succor in musical expression. If the ultimate message of the narrative is sentimental, amounting to Davies saying, “I love music, me! It’s brilliaaaaant!” Monsoon’s evil witch brilliance gives it a menacing edge. Then comes that song-and-dance number, joyous and ostentatiously random: if the comeback season can find stories to match its creator’s flair and its leading man’s star power, new dimensions await.