SHORT TAKE:
Disappointing, lackluster reboot of Dr. Who into the first female incarnation of the main character, in a plot that is a routine set up without any real payoff.
WHO SHOULD GO:
Anyone CAN go see this DR. WHO, but…(to use a different interrogative pronoun)…WHY?
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LONG TAKE:
I went with an open mind, I really did. After all, I was pleasantly shocked to discover that, contrary to my long held opinion, a good superhero could be made featuring a woman when 
Wonder Woman’s Gal Gadot knocked the socks off me with her powerful but feminine portrait of a righteously heroic super woman.
So it was with high hopes that I went to go see the premiere of the very first show featuring the very first woman Dr Who – that is with the exception of The Curse of Fatal Death, the parody filmed for the charity Comic Relief with Rowen Atkinson who ultimately morphs into 
Joanne Lumley in 1999.
If you like the 
cheap waxy chocolate in your Easter basket; 
if you make your milkshakes out of fat free ice milk; if you prefer plain 
unsweetened rice cakes for breakfast; 
if your refreshment of choice is a clear sugar free diet soda (why don't you just drink water?); 
if your musical taste runs to the elevator music version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" — then this is the Dr Who for you. All promise and little delivery.
SPOILERS
To start with, the pronouns present a challenge, but let’s do this – if I’m referring to 
Jody Whittaker’s Dr Who it seems fair to use the feminine. BUT if I refer to any previous incarnation, 
then the masculine grammatical reference should apply.
For those of you NOT familiar with Dr Who, please refer to my previous blog on Dr Who: Twice Upon a Time, which gives a quick "cheat sheet" introduction to the Whovian Universe.
For those of you already familiar with Dr Who, the premise of The Woman Who Fell to Earth, is that the first female Doctor (literally) falls to Earth – and physically – through a train roof, just as the passengers are being terrorized by an energy ball of tentacles. 
Companions happen upon her and follow like dust motes in the wake of a guppy and they decide to figure out what it is and its connection to another alien with teeth imbedded in its face. Meanwhile, an entire more interesting and better acted subplot involving a missing girl and her murdered brother are brushed aside like so much flotsam and the story drags to a conclusion with manufactured tension and a lead who can not even smile convincingly.
None of this is remotely quality Who.
Even the beginning flies in the face of the basic mechanics of the Who-verse. Everyone knows or suspects strongly that Dr. Who’s TARDIS gets him/her to where they are most needed. From the get go, as explained by Whittaker's Who, the TARDIS was wounded and dematerialized 
leaving the new Who to the tender ministrations of gravity. So Who's propitious appearance at the train to save the passengers seems more like coincidence than it should.
Next, while the Doctor has shown himself to be physically resilient, and crashing bodily into Earth like a thrown bowling ball is not necessarily the most injurious event he has ever survived, to fall to Earth from near outer space and crash THROUGH a train roof without so much as mussed hair is a bit much for even my considerable suspension of disbelief.
Tennant, 
having burst through a skylight in The End of Time Part II looks like he's been on the wrong side of a blender.
And her adaptability to her new body misses SO much. 
Tennant noticed new teeth immediately before collapsing from the regeneration effort. 
Matt Smith examined his whole body in a humorous frenzy even as the TARDIS was exploding around him: "Legs! I've still got legs! Good. Arms. Hands. Oo! Fingers. Lots of fingers. Ears. Yes. Eyes two. Nose. I've had worse. Chin. [Noting its size] Blimey. Hair. [presciently] I’m a girl. [feels Adam’s apple] No no. I’m not a girl. [Pulling a lock of hair forward to look at it, grumps] And still not ginger." 
When River Song morphed from young black teen to middle aged but shapely white woman we got more brilliant acting with Alex Kingston as she admires her own new hair then hollars from the bathroom: "Oh, that’s magnificent! I’m gonna wear lots of jodhpurs!"
Jody Whittaker's Dr. Who's only comment is "Brilliant" and we're not even sure she's reacting to her new gender. Granted this is a flaw in the writing, but there's no indication from her acting or movements that she is: awed, amazed, dismayed, confused, curious, intrigued, or turned on by the fact that for the first time she is whole new GENDER! When in the past your previous selves have been surprised and dazzled by hair color and teeth size, and another Time Lord by the size of her own booty, you'd THINK a change in your entire sex would merit SOME attention. Even the spoof skit showed 
Lumley impressed with her new found…upgrades. In The Woman Who Fell to Earth her responses COULD have been tastefully done and REALLY funny. But it was like "Shave and a hair cut…………….." WHERE was the overwhelm? Where was the curiosity?
And her acting is – to put it kindly – bland. To NOT be so kind, 
she demonstrates all the emoting variations of an indulgent second grade school teacher.
Don't believe me? Let's take a trip down memory lane:
Tennant: 
Smith: 
Eccleston: 
Hurt: 
Capaldi: 
Now here's the new Dr Who: Her busy face, 
her studious face 
her surprised face. 
Is she afraid to move her eyebrows? Or show any genuine enthusiasm? Or risk looking silly?
Where is the humor? 
Where is the childlike enthusiasm to which we can all relate? And while, again, this is largely the fault of the script, it's not even that the show takes itself too seriously. I've often told our kids – it's not necessarily WHAT you say, but HOW you say it that makes all the difference. 
And I can't help but nostalgically wonder how a previous doctor (pick one – ANY one) would have done the reading on these same fairly uninspired lines and what desperately needed, resuscitating life they might have given them.
The writing is mundane and pedestrian. The trailer even features a good example: "I'm The Doctor. When people need help I never refuse." This is not only lazy writing but it is said with all the conviction of a PSA.
There's a scene where she jumps dramatically and dangerously (in Capaldi's slippery ill-fitting dress shoes) from one crane to another about 15 stories off the ground, then simply talks and tosses something to the bad guy to win the day. It would have been far more interesting if she had realized she did not have the upper body strength in the female body she now has, admitted that and worked around it. Realistically she could have done exactly what she ended up doing – talking and tossing – only without the death defying leap. This is just manufactured suspense.
Even the title is not particularly creative, merely a take on an old David Bowie sci fi vehicle The MAN Who Fell to Earth. 
There's no connection except the paraphrase.
Her companions are ginned up from what looks like the 
politically correct pool of the week: 
an elderly white man, married to a caricature of the pushy black woman, with a black teen grandson and 
a young woman whose last name is Khan who used to be a classmate of the grandson. 
They are all intimately related to each other yet we are to believe it is all coincidence. It was so unlikely a group of connections that I thought, surely the links must be part of the plot twist. 
But no, again just lazy writing to avoid having to introduce these characters to each other and endure the arduous task of creatively writing ways and events for them to get to know each other. Yet none of them has any real chemistry with either each other or the Doctor. And when one of them dies…..
SORRY – SPOILER – BUT HONESTLY, "WHO" CARES?
…….I wanted to feel badly about it but the show gave us little emotional investment to spend.
The direction was unremarkable but adequate – sort of like a high end shampoo commercial.
There is no vision. There was no rhyme or reason. 
Dr. Who started out over a half century ago as Britain's answer to Mr. Wizard – a science show which presented interesting facts in an entertaining way. It has – up to now – held to the tradition of teaching …. something: how to treat your fellow sentient creature, clever ways to solve puzzles, return evil with kindness, self sacrifice to protect the innocent, theories on effects of time travel, how other creatures from entirely different perspectives might react to the human culture, simply – thou shalt not kill. But I got the impression Mr. Chibnall, the show's new writer, has not yet gotten the memo on this one. He wrote a couple of the mini-shorts 
"The Power of Three" and "Pond Life" as well as some pretty decent other shows: 42, 
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, Cold Blood/Hungry Earth. But being able to pick up a basket of pecans does not mean you have the strength to carry the entire TREE. And carrying a FOREST is what shouldering the work of creatively moving forward with this formerly imaginative show, with more than 50 years of history and backstory demands from WHOever thinks they can captain this ship. 
Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat or 
Russell T. Davies, Chibnall is not.
There IS a lot of running, some red herring puzzles and a so-so denoument with forced tension and nothing to learn in the end. We don't even really find out what happens to the person she set out to save. And when the survivor moves in self-defense she chides him: "You shouldn't have done that." We go to an awkward visual cut to somewhere else on the soundstage and that's the last we ever see of him. Huh?
She preposterously builds a new sonic screwdriver out of dust, gizmos and a bag of metal coffee spoons lying around a cluttered human workshop. It might have been vaguely believable if she had used the tech that WAS potentially available from a discarded space "eggshell" but even that McGuffin wasn't utilized. If they are THAT easy to make why doesn't she make LOTS of them? Hand them out like party favors to her companions?
And to top everything else off they went out of their way to dis Christianity. Mostly, Dr Who, like Star Trek, leaves religion alone. But when one of their crew dies, the funeral is held in a church, but the cross beam of the cross behind the altar area is deliberately covered by carefully placed…balloons! Balloons? At a FUNERAL? And why HAVE the funeral in a Christian church if you are going to cover up the primary symbol of that institution unless you: A. Want to go out of your way to thumb your nose at the Christian faith, or B. You don't want to be bothered to think of any place else and you're too cheap to actually take the cross down. So disrespectful or indolent, take your pick.
And the death was stupid ANYway. The character threw themself into a dangerous situation unnecessarily then died clumsily. The death served no real purpose other than to cut the number of companions from four to three. "Thrift, Horatio, thrift." Fewer paychecks I suppose.
There are a zillion other dumb plot decisions: did she really wear that manky suit to the funeral? She doesn't even TRY to negotiate for the captured sister that one of the subplot characters died horribly trying to find. Since when does a Time Lord stick their finger up their nose to determine when they are going to faint? Did Chibnall think this was funny? Why on Earth would someone touch a glowing grid that appears out of nowhere? How DID he get his bike out of the tree? Did she not even CONSIDER her "friends" might be sucked into space with her using her jury rigged spit and bailing wire transporter? Why would she run on a wet crane in slippery dress shoes a couple sizes too big when she could have at least taken them off? What are the chances ALL the companions, randomly found, knew each other already without that fact being a plot point?
It all felt – as though you were given 
Peter Davison's celery stalk with no dressing as your entire dinner or you were expected to warm yourself with only a bit of fringe off of 
Tom Baker's scarf – underdone, incomplete, ill-thought out, unfulfilling and unfinished (kind of like the way we all felt about the actor 
Christopher Eccleston's career as Dr. Who after he refused to be in the 50th Anniversary Special for no particularly good reason). So watching this Dr. Who I now know how Roger Rabbit felt when 
Judge Doom knocked on the wall and "inquired": "Shave and a hair cut," and he wasn't allowed to yell "TWO-BITS!"
So finally we are left with yet another interrogative pronoun and a burning question: WHERE is the real Dr. Who?! And will SOMEONE please say "TWO-BITS!"
But long before Bridges was old enough to step into John Wayne’s shoes as the eye-patched Rooster Cogburn in the Cohen’s Brothers truly and brilliantly inspirational remake of True Grit, Bridges was more male model than macho with a mustache. One of these gentler outings, in particular, rose above the rest as a sci fi cult favorite – Starman.
Karen Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark) is Jenny, a young, deeply grieving, widow living alone out in the country. An alien space ship crashes near her home. 
The surviving alien force (Bridges) grows a living breathing body from the DNA of her deceased husband, then persuades her to drive him to an unknown destination with SETI hot on their heels. 
Part sci fi, part buddy movie, part romance, Starman is both darkly witty and schmatzy, 
but with enough sci fi to keep the nerd in your relationship engaged in the story.
Meg Foster is Stella, a successful real estate agent who takes in 
Albert (Perry King), an acquaintance, when he loses his job. They begin to become fond of each other as Albert becomes her house cleaner and live-in chef. The “different” part is that Albert is gay and Stella a lesbian. 
But when Albert, who is from Belgium, is threatened with deportation, Stella marries him and they manage to fall in love. 
This is where the real story begins as they learn to tread the waters of a normal marital relationship with all of its acmes of joy and pitfalls of mistakes.
And now for something REALLY different. For those of you under 50 who are probably not aware that a diminutive musician/actor/singer/writer named Paul Williams penned most of the award winning and Top 40 pop tunes of the 1970’s and 1980’s, this is a one-of-a-kind.
Phantom pokes a sharp stick at many of the cliched musical trends of that day: country, hard Goth rock, pop, folk, Beach Boys ‘50’s retro, and rock opera. And keep in mind Phantom PRE-DATED Rocky Horror Picture Show by a YEAR!
Phantom is populated with a number of actors who MIGHT be vaguely familiar, 
INCLUDING the voice of 
Rod “Twilight Zone” Serling, who does a brief narrative intro over Swan’s company logo.
Paul Williams is Swan, a music guru and tycoon, former child music genius and star, who oversees his music empire, Death Records, with “almost” supernatural power, both anticipating and controlling the emerging popular trends. 
William Finlay is Winslow Leach, the frustrated composer of a cutting edge rock opera who is unjustly thrown into prison by Swan. 
Jessica Harper is Phoenix, a beautiful talented songstress. 
Gerrit Graham is Beef, the hilarious scene stealing heavy metal rock star whose tough on-stage persona is the complete opposite of his off-stage proclivities.
Everything was written by Paul Williams. The story is, at turns: tragic, funny, creepy, romantic, grotesque, and philosophical, occasionally all at once – walking a VERY thin tightrope between slapstick comedy and Gothic drama.
Combine The Odd Couple, Beauty and the Beast, The King and I, and The Sound of Music (without – uh – music), make it a comedy and you have this delightful, funny, charming and (mostly) family friendly movie. 
Fran Drescher is Joy Miller, a hair dresser who, mistaken for a science teacher, is hired to be the nanny and tutor to the children of President Boris Pochenko, an Eastern European dictator (Timothy Dalton). 
The yin and yang of the New York comedienne Drescher with the classically trained Shakespearean Dalton blend with adorable chemistry in a perfect example of that old saw about opposites attracting.
