Doctor Who fans series 12 has finally started and my god does it feel good to be back doing these weekly reviews for you all. I'll admit that when I first started this episode I had the fullest of intentions of making it a spoiler free post but then something happend if you've seen the episode you'll know full well what that something is and so here is my spoiler filled review of Doctor Who series 12 episode 1 Spyfall Part 1.
The plot of the episode is someone or something is attacking various spies around the world and MI6 call in The Doctor and her companions to find out who's doing it and more importantly why. Now since this is a two part episode the story doesn't get resolved which is understandable and the story really does need two hour long episodes in order to do it any kind of justice and it's a story that really did have me gripped to the edge of my seat all the way through.
Starring as the guest cast are Lenny Henry as Daniel Barton , Stephen Fry as C , Shobna Gulati as Najia Khan , Ravin J Ganatra as Hakim Khan , Bhavnisha Parmar as Sonya Khan , Melissa De Vries as Sniper , Sacharissa Claxton as Passenger , William Ely as Older Passenger , Brian Law as Operative (US) , Buom Tihngang as Tibo , Asif Khan as Sergent Ramesh Sunder , Andrew Bone as Mr Collins , Ronan Summers as Rendition Man , Christopher McArthur as Ethan , Darron Meyer as Seesay , Dominique Maher as Browning and Struan Rodger as The Voice of Kasaavin.
Of course also starring in the episode are Jodie Whittaker as The Doctor , Bradley Walsh as Graham O'Brien , Tosin Cole as Ryan Sinclair and Mandip Gill as Yasmin Khan. The acting from both the regular cast members and the guest cast where actually on point for this two part episode and given who some of the guest actors are that's to be expected and if the acting is good in this episode then it gives me high hopes for the rest of the series.
SPOILERS START HERE SWEETIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You might have noticed that I missed of one name from the guest cast list and that's because I wanted to go more into detail about him in the spoilers section of the review. That name was of course Sacha Dhawan as O / The Master I have to admit during the scene where O reveals himself as The Master my jaw hit the floor and the way Sacha portrayed the character at the end of the episode was just so good he was just ooosing with insanity if that makes any kind of sense.
Altho if you recall at the end of series 10 the John Simm version of The Master shot and killed his future self so one has to wonder how the character survived. Which is the only downside of the episode for me personally just because the character was quite clearly dead at the end of series 10 and it is something that does have to be answered since he's a key character not only to The Doctor but also to this story.
Now as any Doctor Who fan will tell you Yaz didn't really get that much screen time and things to do in the last series and while she did have a bit more to do in this episode what truly shocked me was the fact that she got alot more screen time. Sadly tho that screen time isn't used to develop her character at all so she is still kind if a one dimensional character but it is a sign that the writers have listened and are making some effort to fix that issue.
They also lean in a little bit on Yaz's police career by giving her a Ryan a spy mission which was honestly rather cool and it was good to see Yaz use something the things that she picked from the police force. Sadly tho we don't get to see her use any of those skills for to long which is a shame because like I said it was really cool to see but those to the test and it's a shame that Chris Chibnall didn't take advantage of her screen time to develop her character a little bit more.
As we all knew the title is a reference to the James Bond film Skyfall but oddly enough the references don't really end there. As you all saw in the trailer The Doctor says her name in the same way that Bond would introduce himself and even the music during the party sequence takes on a James Bond style which I honestly thought was a rather interesting way to go about things since the music of James Bond isn't that well known.
Also taking on kind of a James Bond style is the action scene near the end of the episode and the fact that there's pretty much a pre-credits sequence. To me the pre-credits sequence in this episode was much like the pre-credits sequence from Live And Let Die just because they have the same kind of premise with agents all over the world getting killed and as for the action sequence it reminded me of the opening action scene from Skyfall but it was done in more family friendly way if you get what i'm saying.
SPOILERS END HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Overall this was a rather solid debut story altho why they chose to have this episode air on New Years Day is beyond me since episode two is airing in a few days wouldn't it have made sense to have the episodes air a week apart in order to build up more hype for the next episode. So far this does seem to be an improvement over some of the last series episodes but there is one thing in here which really felt out of place i'm not going to say what it is just is just screams of being woke to me and so this episode gets a 7.5 out of 10 from me and yes all the reviews for this series will be spoilers reviews it just makes it alot easier to talk about the episode and I will be mentioning the creatures in the next Doctor Who review. #DoctorWho #Spyfall