Just a few quick thoughts on Jodie Whittaker's debut turn as the Doctor -- I won't be doing a proper treadmill run of it until the season is over and I have the BluRay (which I am very much looking forward to for reasons I am about to explain..)

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The good: Jodie Whittaker is amazing as the Doctor. Right from the moment she falls through the roof of the train and into the story, she is absolutely and unmistakeably the Doctor. Smart, funny, strong, compassionate, and steely when the moment of confrontation arrives, the question of gender is not even relevant. The character is in very good hands with her. Her acting style is imbued with such specificity that it is a joy to watch. A little bit of Peter Davison, a little bit of Matt Smith, just a touch of Patrick Troughton, but she is very much Her Own Thing and that's just great.

The bad: I thought there were about two too many speeches that were clearly meta-commentary spoken directly to the audience in order to address the controversy of the casting choice. A bit more subtlety would have been nice in that area.

The truly awful: BBC America can just go die in a fire. Seriously. This "Global Simulcast" ended a full half hour earlier in the UK than it did in the United States because for every two minutes of episode run-time there was a full minute of commercials. Every time the story would start building up a tempo it would be immediately lost because it got interrupted by four minutes of advertising. I get it. The BBC is supported by the national license fee and so doesn't need to rely upon advertising, and of course BBC America needs to pay the bills. I am fine with that. But not only did they stretch a 63 minute program out to a full 90 minutes, I am positive they made cuts as well. They didn't even roll end credits or previews at the end of the episode, they just cut straight to a stupid panel show to discuss it. Maybe they showed the credits/preview later, but the fact is at no point during the show's run time did they even broadcast the new theme arrangement. I am very fearful of the cuts that will be made to the rest of the season, because each of the episodes is a full sixty minutes (as opposed to the forty five minutes length for most of the previous non-special modern episodes). I see that BBC America has put it in a seventy minute time slot, so maybe they will treat it right? I hope so.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Thirteenth
Friend(s): Graham O'Brien, Ryan Sinclair, Yasmin Khan
Episode(s): The Woman Who Fell to Earth
Steps Walked: 0, 3,851,252 total
Distance Walked: 0 miles today, 2,015.21 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 7,411 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 1,029 total
Weight: 256.22 lbs (five day moving average), net change -51.08 lbs