Being Belinda

A new episode of Doctor Who quietly premiered on Disney+ on Saturday. It was pleasant enough, I suppose. It's really not hard to see why ratings continue to decline for this show, though.

The story begins with the introduction of Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu), the Doctor's new companion, in a scene that feels weirdly like a Saturday Night Live sketch and is about as funny as modern one tends to be (in other words, not). Belinda and her boyfriend, Alan (Jonny Green), very obviously not teenagers, are meant to be seen as such, sitting on a park bench where he tries to woo her by telling her girls aren't good at math before presenting her with a certificate showing he'd gotten a star named after her. This sets up the episode's lazy, half-assed parody of incels because Russell T Davies remains defiantly woke even if his understanding of wokeness seems to be defined mainly as things that will piss off the Right.

Where's the heartfelt character drama like we had with Rose and her mother? I guess we do have some of the sparkle of untethered, weird adventure like Martha's introductory episode and Martha was another companion who was lacking in much complexity, her episodes succeeding more for their sci-fi/fantasy concepts than for her personal investment in them. Belinda seems as though she may have been inspired by the Fifth Doctor's companion, Tegan, who spent a lot of her time cheesed off that the Doctor couldn't get her home. Tegan's ire was typically more entertaining, though.

The idea of a planet and then a people being named for Belinda Chandra was really cute, though. The Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) continues to be entertaining in his flamboyance though I don't find him as satisfying as Twelve or Ten.

The episode felt oddly rushed at times, as though chunks of dialogue were skipped over in haste, especially in the final scene in the TARDIS. The drama with the rebels and the woman whom the Doctor'd evidently chosen as a new companion also moved much to quickly to accrue emotional weight, also feeling insubstantial for how typical they were for Doctor Who subplots.

The show is better than it was under Chris Chibnall but it's more like a slowed descent than a rise. Maybe what the show needed wasn't Russell T Davies but a Russell T Davies, someone with the passion and daring to take the show in new and surprising directions like Davies in 2005.

Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ elsewhere in the world.