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skye_writer) wrote2024-05-15 04:17 pm
skye_writer) wrote2024-05-15 04:17 pm
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Doctor Who Review: S1/S14 E01 - Space Babies
After a quartet of specials last year to ring in Russell T Davies' second term as showrunner, Doctor Who has returned for a regular season at last! With Ncuti Gatwa helming the TARDIS as the Fifteenth Doctor and Millie Gibson joining him as companion Ruby Sunday, Season 1 (or as I like to think of it, Series 14) got started last weekend with a double premiere, the first episode of which was "Space Babies."
"Space Babies" finds the Doctor and Ruby landing on an abandoned space station, with a mysterious monster in the basement and a bunch of babies--space babies--manning the controls on the upper floors. But not everything is as it seems, as our heroes soon find out.
To be honest, I only had a couple of real problems with this episode, one of which is down to my personal taste, and the other of which is due to the editorial choices made for the episode.
The issue of personal taste is this: I have never liked talking babies (or talking animals, for that matter) as characters in live-action films. I remember seeing ads for the 1999 film "Baby Geniuses" as a child and being freaked out by them. Something about the digital effects used on these characters just twigs my Uncanny Valley sense a little too hard. I won't deny that the effects used on the babies in this episode were pretty good--that's RTD putting Disney's money to good use again--but as a matter of my personal taste? I couldn't really stand to watch the babies talking. And I know that this is the digital effect that drives the whole conceit of the episode, but... I personally didn't like it.
On the other side of things, there's the fact that the episode really transparently is missing scenes. The most obvious sign of this occurs about three-quarters of the way through the episode, when Ruby mentions that a computer told them that "babies need fiction", among other things. There is no such scene in the final cut of the episode. We also don't see why, exactly, the babies are concerned for the Bogeyman monster at the end of the episode, when they seemed terrified of it earlier on. From my perspective, it seems that RTD and Bad Wolf/BBC Studios were aiming for a 60-minute premiere, but then had to cut things when someone higher up or someone on the distribution end of things nixed an hour-long episode. (My inclination is that it was maybe the BBC? Given that they had to fit Doctor Who into a television timeslot on Eurovision weekend, whereas Disney+ is a streaming outfit that doesn't have a schedule that things have to fit into perfectly. But that's just speculation on my part.) At any rate, the episode still made sense, but I feel like it might have made more sense had we been able to get the context of those missing scenes.
As far as the main plot of the episode goes, I mostly don't have any issues with it! I'm adoring the Doctor and Ruby's chemistry so far; they play off each other really well, and it's entertaining to watch. The various twists and turns of the story were interesting and amusing, particularly the pun concerning the Bogeyman. There were a few heartfelt moments in there too! The Doctor's conversation with Captain Poppy was a standout for me, a scene where the Doctor felt perfectly in character. (Something about the Doctor interacting with kids is just catnip to me; I always love it and it's always so good.) The resolution of the episode's main problem with an enormous fart was, to my mind, extremely amusing. (Fart jokes work best, I feel, when they don't come at the expense of somebody else. "Aliens of London", I'm looking at you.) And yes, the snot jokes and the fart joke are kind of juvenile, but! Doctor Who isn't just a show for sci-fi fans, it's meant (by and large) to be a family show. Ever since the revival started in 2005, there have been occasional juvenile jokes, and no doubt there will be more.
All in all, it's a perfectly cromulent episode! I enjoyed it enough that I've watched it 4 times already! But I've got something else to talk about, because there are some season plot threads that come up as well, and I've got to speculate about them.
Ruby's story and, to be honest, her whole existence intrigues me. Like, a lot. Millie Gibson's performance is wonderful so far, and she brings a lot of spunk and heart to the character, but Ruby herself is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Her memories seem to be warping reality, what with the snow appearing when the Doctor invokes the church on Ruby Road. She keeps blinking out of existence in butterfly paradoxes (both the one seen here, and the climactic one at the end of last year's Christmas special). Even the Doctor seems extremely discomfited by almost everything about her--look at his face when he hugs her after the snow appears. ("Never trust a hug. It's just a way to hide your face," the Twelfth Doctor said. But that may be why Fifteen hugged her in the first place.) The fact that he runs a DNA scan on her at the end of the episode, the fact that he soft bans her from finding out who her birth mother is (at least on Christmas 2004); he knows something is going on, and he seems intent on finding out what it is. It's strange, because in some ways Ruby doesn't seem real--she's yet to take charge and save the day, when most modern companions would have by this point in the season. And given how much RTD is a character writer, it's really odd that Ruby doesn't seem all that fleshed out yet.
Obviously I've got my theories about what's going on, but I will leave them out of this review for now. Nevertheless, "Space Babies" is a good piece of fun, and while it's not a total standout for a Doctor Who episode, or even a Doctor Who season premiere, it's still delightful in a lot of ways. It's not perfect, obviously, but it's still enjoyable, which is all that matters to me.
"Space Babies" finds the Doctor and Ruby landing on an abandoned space station, with a mysterious monster in the basement and a bunch of babies--space babies--manning the controls on the upper floors. But not everything is as it seems, as our heroes soon find out.
To be honest, I only had a couple of real problems with this episode, one of which is down to my personal taste, and the other of which is due to the editorial choices made for the episode.
The issue of personal taste is this: I have never liked talking babies (or talking animals, for that matter) as characters in live-action films. I remember seeing ads for the 1999 film "Baby Geniuses" as a child and being freaked out by them. Something about the digital effects used on these characters just twigs my Uncanny Valley sense a little too hard. I won't deny that the effects used on the babies in this episode were pretty good--that's RTD putting Disney's money to good use again--but as a matter of my personal taste? I couldn't really stand to watch the babies talking. And I know that this is the digital effect that drives the whole conceit of the episode, but... I personally didn't like it.
On the other side of things, there's the fact that the episode really transparently is missing scenes. The most obvious sign of this occurs about three-quarters of the way through the episode, when Ruby mentions that a computer told them that "babies need fiction", among other things. There is no such scene in the final cut of the episode. We also don't see why, exactly, the babies are concerned for the Bogeyman monster at the end of the episode, when they seemed terrified of it earlier on. From my perspective, it seems that RTD and Bad Wolf/BBC Studios were aiming for a 60-minute premiere, but then had to cut things when someone higher up or someone on the distribution end of things nixed an hour-long episode. (My inclination is that it was maybe the BBC? Given that they had to fit Doctor Who into a television timeslot on Eurovision weekend, whereas Disney+ is a streaming outfit that doesn't have a schedule that things have to fit into perfectly. But that's just speculation on my part.) At any rate, the episode still made sense, but I feel like it might have made more sense had we been able to get the context of those missing scenes.
As far as the main plot of the episode goes, I mostly don't have any issues with it! I'm adoring the Doctor and Ruby's chemistry so far; they play off each other really well, and it's entertaining to watch. The various twists and turns of the story were interesting and amusing, particularly the pun concerning the Bogeyman. There were a few heartfelt moments in there too! The Doctor's conversation with Captain Poppy was a standout for me, a scene where the Doctor felt perfectly in character. (Something about the Doctor interacting with kids is just catnip to me; I always love it and it's always so good.) The resolution of the episode's main problem with an enormous fart was, to my mind, extremely amusing. (Fart jokes work best, I feel, when they don't come at the expense of somebody else. "Aliens of London", I'm looking at you.) And yes, the snot jokes and the fart joke are kind of juvenile, but! Doctor Who isn't just a show for sci-fi fans, it's meant (by and large) to be a family show. Ever since the revival started in 2005, there have been occasional juvenile jokes, and no doubt there will be more.
All in all, it's a perfectly cromulent episode! I enjoyed it enough that I've watched it 4 times already! But I've got something else to talk about, because there are some season plot threads that come up as well, and I've got to speculate about them.
Ruby's story and, to be honest, her whole existence intrigues me. Like, a lot. Millie Gibson's performance is wonderful so far, and she brings a lot of spunk and heart to the character, but Ruby herself is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Her memories seem to be warping reality, what with the snow appearing when the Doctor invokes the church on Ruby Road. She keeps blinking out of existence in butterfly paradoxes (both the one seen here, and the climactic one at the end of last year's Christmas special). Even the Doctor seems extremely discomfited by almost everything about her--look at his face when he hugs her after the snow appears. ("Never trust a hug. It's just a way to hide your face," the Twelfth Doctor said. But that may be why Fifteen hugged her in the first place.) The fact that he runs a DNA scan on her at the end of the episode, the fact that he soft bans her from finding out who her birth mother is (at least on Christmas 2004); he knows something is going on, and he seems intent on finding out what it is. It's strange, because in some ways Ruby doesn't seem real--she's yet to take charge and save the day, when most modern companions would have by this point in the season. And given how much RTD is a character writer, it's really odd that Ruby doesn't seem all that fleshed out yet.
Obviously I've got my theories about what's going on, but I will leave them out of this review for now. Nevertheless, "Space Babies" is a good piece of fun, and while it's not a total standout for a Doctor Who episode, or even a Doctor Who season premiere, it's still delightful in a lot of ways. It's not perfect, obviously, but it's still enjoyable, which is all that matters to me.
no subject
>> I'm adoring the Doctor and Ruby's chemistry so far; they play off each other really well, and it's entertaining to watch.
And I‘m loving that it‘s been consistently like this so far!
no subject