Review of Spyfall: Part 1
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
I haven’t enjoyed an episode that much in a long time.
After exactly a year’s absence from our screens, Doctor Who came screaming back with Chibnall’s first two-parter since Series Five. Giving its own special take on another British classic, Spyfall has the Doctor and her “fam” taking on a freaky unknown alien adversary in true James Bond style.
Flitting from location to location, the TARDIS team gets the full Bond film experience, including MI6 gadgets, some infiltration work, data decryption, visiting another agent to get intel, crashing a black tie party, and even a chance for our titular hero to intone, “The name’s Doctor. The Doctor.”
Despite the trappings of spycraft and intrigue, though, it never felt like anything other than Doctor Who (with the possible exception of the first appearance of the aforementioned aliens, when they seriously reminded me of the Suliban from Star Trek: Enterprise). There were so many moments that hinted back to older stories that it made my head spin. At various times I wondered if these new baddies were anything like a whole raft of past ones: the Vocs robots from Robots of Death; the 456 from Torchwood: Children of Earth; the ATMOS device from The Sontaran Stratagem; the Host from Voyage of the Damned; the Cybermen from Army of Ghosts; and particularly the Cybermen from The Invasion (where Daniel Barton looked like a 1:1 correspondent to Invasion‘s Tobias Vaughn).