Review of The Ghost Monument
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

If I hadn’t bought into Whittaker as the Doctor after her first episode, I would have within the opening minutes of this one.

As part of our cliffhanger resolution, we find the Doctor on the bridge of a ship arguing with its pilot in tones so familiar we don’t even need to hear or comprehend the words fully to get the sense of the conversation in progress: something dire is happening, she’s trying to convince the pilot to take a particular course of action to prevent a tragedy, and he’s wondering where this random person who showed up out of nowhere gets off telling him how to fly his own goddamn ship. It’s such classic Doctor fare as to be cliché. And yet it did my heart a world of good to watch that cliché play out—all the way to her casually stepping out of the wreckage with a witty remark.

Yes. She’s the Doctor.

I suspect winning over the skeptical long-term fans was high on Chibnall’s list of desired outcomes for this episode. He certainly gave it the old college try with such blatant nods to the Classic era as the Doctor’s causal use of Venusian aikido and her exclamation at the end of the episode, “You’ve redecorated!” (even if the following line was a predictable subversion of that trope). I don’t know whether or not he’s succeeding, but so far I’m happy to go along for the ride.

That’s not to say there aren’t flaws. There are pieces of the plot that feel poorly thought out or lazy. For example, why would Epzo, a man skilled enough to make it through the previous 208 terrains on 93 planets and reach the final stage, be stupid enough to miss a laser sensor and trip it on his way up the stairs? Surely he’d be, at the very least, more paranoid than that, wouldn’t he?

And why had the planet Desolation fallen out of orbit and put the Doctor off course in her quest to reach the TARDIS in the first place? If this were Moffat, I’d assume that detail would come back in a meaningful way later in the series (I’m half willing to believe it will even so). But this is Chibnall, whose strengths lie more in character than in plot, quite the reverse of his predecessor.

In a way, then, the showrunners are like their Doctors: each a reaction to their predecessor, swinging the pendulum in a new direction. Where Moffat relied on plot twists and Twelve was “human blind,” Chibnall relies on character development and Thirteen is tuned into her friends’ emotions.

For that matter, most of this new TARDIS team seems pretty emotionally mature. Older white dude Graham is still more touchy-feely than his step-grandson Ryan (who doesn’t want to confront the pain of his nan’s loss), and Yaz quietly waits for Ryan at the bottom of the ladder without comment simply because she knows his dyspraxia makes the activity difficult for him and wants to be supportive.

Ryan, in contrast, suffers from a bit of testosterone poisoning. He ignores the Doctor’s insistence that he put the gun he’s found down and goes all Call of Duty on the robot guards. Of course, his mad rush backfires and allows the Doctor to think her way out of their situation and create a perfect opportunity to hammer home one of the show’s central tenets for new viewers: “Brains beat bullets.”

Regular and new viewers alike will pick up on the portentous moments in Ghost Monument. First there’s the reappearance—in name and aftermath, at least—of the Stenza, the race from which last week’s antagonist “Tim Shaw” hailed. Then there was “the timeless child.” Even if you’ve never heard of Bad Wolf or the First Question, these mentions are likely to make your sci-fi “Spidey senses” tingle. But so much has been made of how Chibnall’s version of the show is going to be “completely different,” I can’t bring myself to speculate about it in more than a casual, “hey, I wonder when that will come back” way.

I do wonder, though, whether the crowd who thought Whittaker’s casting would “ruin Doctor Who” have bothered to watch her yet. There will, of course, be a hardcore faction who will shun the show as hard as they can. But surely curiosity has gotten the better of some of those naysayers. I wonder whether or not the romance and intellect of Whittaker’s Doctor has yet triumphed over their cynicism.

After all, we know that’s what Doctor Who is really about.