After more than a year of waiting, we finally have a new Doctor Who episode, under a new (well, semi-new) showrunner, Russell Davies, who wastes no time in this remarkably fun romp in correcting all the loose ends left at the end of his run. Other questions though (such as why the regenerated Doctor looks like David Tennant, previously Doctor Ten) will have to be answered later.
Years after the Doctor wiped her memory of the time they spent together, Donna has moved on and is raising her daughter Rose (hmmm) with her mother. Granpa Wilf is offscreen, in an old age home guarded by UNIT. A massive spaceship lands in their town and of course, Donna misses the whole thing. Rose is more observant and finds the driver of the ship hiding in a garden shed (nice reference to E.T) and decides to protect the cute, fuzzy alien from the bug-eyed green monsters hunting him down.
The Doctor appears on this scene, still presumably confused from his recent regeneration, and although I won't detail it here, the whole Donna/Doctor metacrisis plot is waved away through Rose and Donna simply giving up their powers through a bunch of timey wimey stuff. The Meep, the cute fuzzy alien, is revealed to be evil and swears revenge on the Doctor after his inevitable defeat, ominously referring to his "boss", probably the Toymaker who we already know will feature in the third special.
There's a lot to love here. Every minute Tennant and Tate are together is pure joy. I loved how Tennant plays the Fourteenth Doctor as a more mature version of the Tenth, less battle-scarred by the events of the Time War and more eager to listen to people rather than taking them for granted. The new Tardis interior is wonderful, all flash and little round things. There's even a coffee/tea dispenser in the console!
The upcoming second special looks to be much darker, a kind of bottle episode with the Doctor and Donna trapped in a "corrupted Tardis". There are rumored appearances by the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors as well, which if true would make my inner fanboy very, very happy.
I'll give this episode an 8 out of 10, there's some clumsy exposition and the episode could have been longer, to give Rose's character a little fleshing out, but those are minor points. The series looks like it will thrive under the return of Davies after the fan backlash with Chris Chibnall, the previous showrunner.
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