By Jessica Holmes

It was with a mix of curiosity and trepidation that I tuned into Doctor Who this month. The character we know and love has vanished forever, and in his place is a stranger– A stranger who calls himself the Doctor. But is it really the same man? Once again, we have to ask the essential question that the programme was founded on. Doctor…who?

EPISODE ONE

The first episode begins with a great deal of confusion as the strange man in the place of the Doctor comes to his senses. Polly takes him to be the same old Doctor, but Ben’s not so sure– and neither am I. For one thing, he looks completely different. Even his clothes have changed. So it’s not as if he’s been ‘de-aged’ or something like that. By the way the stranger himself reacts, testing out his muscles and joints, it’s a wholly new body.

And yet, a familiar face peers back at him in his reflection.

He himself doesn’t seem certain of his identity, referring to the Doctor in the third person despite apparently sharing the Doctor’s memories.

Well, if there’s any quintessentially Doctorish trait, it’s being clear as mud.

Oh, and he plays the recorder now, and has absolutely terrible taste in hats. At any given moment in the episode, I think Ben might be about to snatch the recorder from him and use it as a deadly weapon, and to be honest, I can’t blame him. The recorder is not a musical instrument, it is a torture method designed to torment parents of young children.

The group leave the TARDIS to have a look around, finding themselves in the mercury swamps of the planet Vulcan. The swamps are a dangerous place to be, as the Doctor(?) learns when he runs into a bloke who gets shot halfway through introducing himself as an Examiner from Earth. Ben and Polly run afoul of the mercury fumes, and the Doctor himself gets a nasty crack over the head, courtesy of the other man’s killer. The mystery man plants a button in the Doctor’s hand before dragging the corpse away.

Fortunately for the group, they’re found by a couple of men from the nearby colony: Bragen, Head of Security, and Quinn, Deputy Governor. They’re dressed identically to the assassin, but it’s impossible to tell if one of them did the deed.

Believing him to be the Examiner (the Doctor doesn’t bother to correct them), the pair bring the Doctor and company back to the colony, where there’s trouble afoot. A rebellion quietly simmers beneath the surface, and a mysterious capsule has been found in the swamps.

Investigating further, it soon turns out that the capsule perhaps ought to have stayed there. There are Daleks inside! Dead Daleks, but they could still be terribly dangerous.

And there’s something in there that doesn’t seem entirely dead, but it scuttles away before they can get a good look at it. Whatever it is, it can't be good.

Things get off to a mysterious start in this episode, taking its time to introduce our new leading actor before launching into the intriguing mysteries of the Vulcan colony. Why was the Examiner summoned? Who killed him? What are the Daleks up to this time?  I'm having a lot of fun.

EPISODE TWO

The group soon discover something even worse– not only does it appear that there are Daleks in here, one of them seems to be missing. The Doctor suspects that Lesterson, the head scientist, has been experimenting. One Dalek, a colony in strife… it’s a recipe for disaster.

He confronts Lesterson on the missing Dalek, urging him to destroy it. With Lesterson refusing to yield to his authority, the Doctor goes in search of a meeting with the Governor.

Which he doesn’t get. But he does get some fruit! Sure, there are listening devices hidden inside, but an apple is an apple and reincarnation/renewal is presumably hungry work. Unable to meet with the Governor, the Doctor decides to send a radio message back to Earth. Hopefully there’s some higher authority who will listen to him.

The Doctor finds the radio engineer unconscious and the equipment broken, and a rather suspicious-looking Quinn holding a pair of shears.

Bragen arrives, and when the Doctor shows him the button from his attacker, he recognises it as one of Quinn’s and arrests him on the spot.

In true B-movie fashion, Lesterson and his team try to wake up the Dalek by pumping it full of electricity. It works a little too well, shooting one of his lab assistants. What did they expect?

Quinn’s hauled before the Governor for an inquiry, and the evidence doesn’t look too good for him. Lesterson interrupts proceedings, bursting in to tell them about his new breakthrough. The Dalek is awake, active, and apparently ready to serve.

And it recognises the Doctor. Somehow. Maybe it can see something we can't?

The new Doctor continues to grow on me in this episode, his more serious side beginning to peep through the clownish exterior. The plot’s coming along nicely, and I’m none too sure what to make of the characters. I don’t feel like there’s anyone we can trust here, except perhaps Ben and Polly.

EPISODE THREE

Despite the Doctor’s protestations, the Governor gives Lesterson permission to continue his work on the Daleks. Continuing Quinn’s inquiry, Bragen accuses him of being in league with the rebels. Quinn protests that he was the one who sent for the Examiner in the first place, so why would he attack him? Unconvinced, the Governor strips him of his position and promotes Bragen in his place.

It’s all coming together for Bragen, who it turns out is in league with Lesterson’s lab assistant Janley to take over the colony. Janley’s in league with the rebels, but she’s planning on betraying them as soon as they cease to be useful. She also reveals that Lesterson’s other assistant died of his injuries, but she hasn’t told him that.

So many twists and turns!

Seeing Polly and her inquisitiveness as a potential threat, Janley lures Polly to the communications room where an accomplice knocks her out. She rewards him with the Dalek’s gun-stick.

The Dalek’s curiosity and intelligence continues to impress Lesterson, and he’s especially intrigued when it offers to build him a perfect computer. However, when he leaves the room it immediately increases the power supply to the capsule. Gee, a Dalek being up to no good, who’d have guessed?

The Doctor and Ben arrive to find two more Daleks emerging from the capsule, and wisely decide to run away. Lesterson still doesn’t believe that the Daleks are dangerous, and asks Bragen (who the Governor has left in charge while he’s away) to give him a guard.

Ben reports Polly’s disappearance to Bragen, but the Deputy Governor has bad news for the Doctor: they’ve found the real examiner’s body out in the swamps.

But how would he know that? The only people to have seen the real examiner were the Doctor and the assassin.

With the Doctor having leverage over him, Bragen backs off on arresting him, but orders him to leave Lesterson alone.

In case the Doctor needs any more incentive, somebody slips a note under the door. Polly’s safe…. As long as the Doctor stops interfering with the Dalek experiments.

Final Thoughts

So far, this is an excellent story that moves along at a good pace, delivering some fun twists and turns without becoming too convoluted. I’m looking forward to seeing where it’s all headed.

I’ll save the further ruminations on the plot for next time. The real point of interest in this story is our new leading actor. Patrick Troughton is credited as Dr. Who, but is he truly the same character?

Let’s look at the facts: He has the same memories, and we saw the original Doctor turn into this second Doctor on-screen. With all the strange things that happen in Doctor Who, a change of appearance isn’t too far out of the ordinary.

What makes it more complicated is the change in personality. Troughton’s a younger man, and he acts like it. His Doctor is quite unpredictable, often somewhat childish and playful, undercut with moments of sudden seriousness. The cadence of his speech is also his own, when he does deign to talk instead of tootling away on that blasted recorder.

He’s a different person…and yet, somehow, he still feels like the Doctor to me. There’s a sort of je-ne-sais-quoi, a vague idea of the Doctor, a spirit of mischief and genius that feels in a way like the soul of the character. I think I still recognise that in him.

It’s all a bit philosophical, isn’t it? After all, my personality when I was a child is different in many ways to my personality as an adult, but I’m still the same person. These changes happen gradually to all of us. Perhaps they just happened all at once to the Doctor.

After all, if he has a whole new body, his brain is different too, so who knows what effect his altered brain physiology has had?

In conclusion, I have no idea.

Perhaps the more important question is: do I like this new Doctor?

That’s a lot easier. Yes. I like him very, very much. He is enormous fun to watch. He’s genuinely funny, and utterly compelling when he turns serious.

This is not Hartnell’s Doctor, but it’s not trying to be, either. I think that’s a good thing. I’ll miss him, but I do feel the new chap has breathed new life into the programme. We’ve just opened the door to a whole new world of character development, and opened a can of unpredictability.

I can’t wait to see what’s in store for our second Doctor.

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