We are now six episodes into Jodie Whittaker’s premier run as our iconic Gallifreyian and also Chris Chibnall’s reign as show runner giving us enough material I think to come to some early opinions about the show’s new direction.

In a sentence: I like it.

Chibnall has spilt the series’ episodes between space-based adventures and Earth bound ones. While the previous show runner, Steven Moffat, like to produce grand scale adventures with the entire universe hanging in the balance, Chibnall seems more in tune with small stories that turn on deeper levels of characterization. Of the two approaches I thin, Chibnall’s works better.

I suffered from fatigue over the scale of danger repeatedly thrown at the audience by Moffat’s grand plots. After the first couple of doomsdays it gets rather difficult to invest any emotional weight into the story.  This is very much like the trap the James Bond franchise got it self into, if your stories are more about plot than character, which is often the case in any continuing series, then the stakes in those plots tend to become ‘save the world’ and it is very hard to raise them after you have saved the world a few times.

Another drawback to grand plots is that they also flattened people into faceless masses. In some of my posts about writing I have discussed the difference between hypothetical people and on-screen characters.  Your heroes might be out to save an entire planet but that population is just a number and we are not wired to become emotionally invested in arithmetic. We care about individuals, about characters with lives that connect to our own. The show’s most recent episode ‘Demons of the Punjab‘ displayed perfectly how to handle large-scale stories by drawing us into the troubles of just a few characters. The partition of India was traumatic for millions but giving us one family and the trauma they suffered dramatizes the reality far better than any plot to save the millions. (I also love that title, it’s a misdirect as much as the aliens running around in the story. The ‘demons’ aren’t the aliens but rather the humans there and the ones created the tragic situation.)

Jodie Whittaker is doing a great job as The Doctor. She plays the role with equal parts empathy and manic energy. I am suffering a bit of whiplash as I watch the show because my sweetie-wife and I are also currently watching Broadchurch, a drama about a child’s murder and its reverberations through a small English coastal town, where Jodie plays a very different character.

All in all I am quite pleased with the new direction and the new cast and I look forward to the rest of the series.