Hey, that wasn't bad!

I haven't watched Doctor Who for a couple of years now - the last several ones I watched were so mind-blowingly bad that I just shrugged and gave up on it as a bad job - but I happened to be channel-hopping last week on my new TV in my new house just as the first episode of the new series was coming on, so I decided that fate obviously wants me to start watching again. And the first episode was all right, more or less, but the second one tonight actually really impressed me!

Now, some would say I'm easily impressed - just today, I said "Wow, that's cool" when I saw that group C2 of the Nations League has countries with names starting with E, F, G and H - but when it comes to Doctor Who I'm generally more difficult to please, and this episode successfully did what I've been saying (to myself) for ages that Doctor Who should be doing; specifically, getting them off modern-day Earth and dumping them into a situation where the Doctor doesn't know what's going on and has to settle things armed only with her superior mind. Keep the season-long story arc to a minimum, and try to do something clever with time travel. They haven't done the last part yet, but otherwise it's all good. Also, the new opening titles are much better than the stupid one with the clocks! That's another thing I've been saying - it should ideally look like it's not just done on a computer, and I think this one manages that.

The Doctor's a woman now, obviously, and Jodie Whittaker maybe isn't particularly great, but it's early days yet. Actually, my main problem is that her accent sounds fake, although the internet says she's from Yorkshire and I can't see why she'd put on a not-quite-right-sounding Yorkshire accent to play the Doctor, so probably it's just me. I don't much like the costume, either, if it comes to that, but you can see why they'd want to keep it relatively simple rather than going for something elaborate - until we've had a few years of female Doctors, that's exactly the kind of thing everybody's going to be scrutinizing. Likewise, the gender balance of stories suddenly becomes an issue people get defensive about, and this episode at least showed that they're taking a sensible kind of approach to it. The two guest stars, one male and one female, are both strong characters, and although the female companion was the one not to contribute very much to the story, there's still some kind of personality there and a sense that they can do something less stereotypical-companion with her in future, maybe.

All that is the superficial detail, of course, which you'd hope to find a story underneath, and maybe what impressed me about this episode was that there actually was one. Not an all-time classic, but only a bit similar to the rut of identical plotlines the series had got mired in the last time I watched it, and it really did keep me entertained. I'm certainly hopeful for the future now.

The new TARDIS isn't great, though. I really don't like the police-box-shaped entry hall. The doors should open straight into an impossibly big room, I've always thought. It makes it more wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.