Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Doctor Who: Series Ten, Part One Blu-ray Movie Review

Who's on tenth?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 19, 2017

For those who enjoy parlor games and who may have tired of trying to get past Madison and/or Monroe in their attempts to list the American presidents in order, here’s a somewhat less daunting but perhaps still challenging task: name the actors who have portrayed Doctor Who in order. Even devoted Whovians may have a moment or two of insecurity about the earlier Doctors at least, but the dozen actors who have thus far portrayed the mysterious and (at least in some depictions) curmudgeonly Doctor are William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith, and the current (if now temporary — more about that in a moment) occupant of the TARDIS, Peter Capaldi. Capaldi has already announced he’s leaving the role at the end of the now running “tenth series”, meaning list lovers are going to have a new name they’ll be required to memorize. But here’s a perhaps even more daunting challenge for Doctor Who fans, and one which is especially salient for the tenth series, maybe even because Capaldi will soon be leaving the title role: name all the performers who have appeared as various “companions” to the Doctor through the many years and incarnations of the show. That may well be an insurmountable task even for those who have a picayune knowledge of Doctor Who, since there are literally scores of characters who have wandered through the series over the decades who could at least arguably be called an “official” companion. As I alluded to in our Doctor Who: The Complete Ninth Series Blu-ray review, a lot of the most effective and affecting emotional content of the ninth series actually involved companion Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) rather than the Doctor himself, and now with the departure of that character, a lot of the tenth series is given over at least initially to the introduction and development of a new acolyte falling under the Doctor’s sway, in this case a young black woman kind of weirdly named Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie).

Bill is frankly introduced in a bit of a haphazard way, something that was probably done to get into the action adventure elements of the series as quickly as possible, but which may arguably prevent the kind of emotion that accompanied Clara’s departure to accrue here. Bill has been secretly attending the Doctor’s university lectures, and in a kind of quick elision, he calls her into his office and more or less agrees to tutor her privately on the spot. That “tutoring” almost immediately segues into adventures with the TARDIS, something that’s of course kind of expected but which isn’t dealt with especially artfully, other than some kind of funny snark coming from Nardole (Matt Lucas), who keeps reminding Doctor Who about the various (supposed) strictures on Who’s activities which the Doctor himself has ostensibly agreed to, but which almost fall by the wayside in any given episode.

The first several episodes of the tenth series set up the dynamic between Bill and Doctor Who, and while at least some of those episodes themselves are frankly probably not going to make the Top 10 of any fan’s lists (in case they’ve tired of trying to do the companion list thing), there is some really interesting content at times, especially with regard to the fact that Bill is both black and perhaps not as firmly ensconced in the middle class ethos that some other companions have been. Probably the best early episode in this particular regard is “Thin Ice”, which finds Doctor Who and Bill traveling to 1814 London, where they plop down in the midst of a “frost fair” on the frozen Thames. Bill is initially freaked out to even be in this time period, when slavery was still an issue, but she’s perhaps even more surprised when she gets out and about into London and actually sees a fair number of black people milling about. That ultimately includes a darling little black girl who (in the Doctor’s verbiage) is “living rough” on the streets. While the episode has an almost bizarre conflation of elements that include a gigantic sea monster that might have been more at home in a series like The Wild Wild West, and a bunch of homeless kids who might have been more at home in a Dickens outing like Oliver! , some of the socioeconomic material, as tangential as it is to these and other plot points, is actually quite fascinating and at least somewhat unexpected for a Doctor Who outing.

There are a number of fun episodes in this first volume of the tenth series, but I have to say for me personally few of them rose to the heights that were at least occasionally achieved in the ninth series. Some offer appealing guest star turns, as in “Knock Knock” which features David Suchet in a decidedly non-Poirot performance. But even this episode has its potential shortcomings, including the fact that the whole premise has nothing to do with the TARDIS or even frankly Doctor Who, but is instead centered around Bill’s attempts to find affordable housing.

Perhaps some of the reason for this arguable if slight downturn in quality may be due to the foreknowledge that Capaldi’s shelf life as Doctor Who is reaching its expiry date (to use an appropriately British term), or perhaps more mundanely is due to the fact that Steven Moffat is on hand as writer for only a couple of the episodes in this particular volume. Also playing into this is the probably understandable and continuing decision to make Capaldi’s Doctor Who a little less curmudgeonly than he initially seemed to be (he’s downright kind and caring throughout several of the episodes in this volume).

It will actually be interesting to see how the show wraps up this tenth series and prepares the way for Capaldi’s exit, and in the final episodes it may very well be that the show is able to capture some of that visceral emotion that made the ninth series so memorable. Interestingly, several online sources state that Moffat himself is moving on after the tenth series, so there will be even more changes in store beyond even a new Doctor Who. Maybe Bill will have to be our anchor for a while.

Doctor Who: Series Ten, Part One Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Doctor Who: Series Ten Part One is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of BBC with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Virtually everything I stated in our Doctor Who: The Complete Ninth Series Blu-ray review holds true for this first volume of Series Ten episodes. The bulk of the imagery, especially scenes with no special effects involved, offer superb sharpness and clarity, and generally excellent detail and fine detail levels. As with the ninth series, however, some CGI can look a bit artificial, to the point that a few isolated moments look positively "animated" (as in cartoon like), while a prevalence of rather dark or otherwise graded scenes in these first six episodes also leads to the same sort of detail deficits at times that I mentioned in that above linked review. A couple of brief moments that look green screened have very minor halos around the real life object in front of the rendered background, but these scenes tend to be very brief indeed, so that they're almost in the "blink and you'll miss them" category.

Doctor Who: Series Ten, Part One Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

While there's absolutely nothing to complain about with regard to Doctor Who: Series Ten Part One's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, I'm "only" giving this a 4.5 to differentiate it from what I felt was a near perfect audio experience with the ninth series release. There's just a tad less ubiquitous LFE in this episodes, some of which don't really venture out that much and which aren't reliant upon TARDIS adventures. That said, there's great attention paid to discrete channelization of effects, and some of the alien environments have some rather nice ambient sounds that help to establish the "otherness" of those locales. As is typical with this series, dialogue is always rendered cleanly and both it and the enjoyable underscore are supported by excellent fidelity and prioritization.

Doctor Who: Series Ten, Part One Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Inside Look (1080p; 16:28) provides six brief making of featurettes for each of the episodes included in this first volume of Series Ten.

Doctor Who: Series Ten, Part One Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fans' reactions to the various iterations of Doctor Who have tended to be pretty widely variant, but my hunch is even long devoted Whovians would place any of these first six episodes of Series Ten at the apex of what the show has achieved over the course of its long and now legendary broadcast life. That said, there's more than enough enjoyment to be had in these episodes, however relatively slight some of them seem, and the addition of Bill, while not especially artfully handled, has given the show a rather interesting new perspective that the rest of this series will hopefully be able to exploit. As is typical of the BBC Blu-ray releases of Doctor Who, technical merits continue to be strong, and this release comes Recommended.