Deep Breath Review
This review is supported the kind patronage of 140 people at Patreon. If you enjoy it, please consider becoming a patron and supporting future reviews.
If anyone cares, the number one single is Nico and Vinz’s “Am I Wrong.”
Let’s work from Cardiff, shall we? It’s a late summer day, with the temperature peaking at 16 degrees, and not really moving far off of that. The episode starts at 7:50, a carefully chosen timeslot that sits ten minutes before even the earliest of childrens’ bedtimes, making it nearly impossible to keep them from watching. Twenty-nine minutes in, just as the Doctor is realizing that he’s Scottish and the story finally starts to bother with the plot, the sun sets. (In London, it’s twelve minutes earlier, just as Clara is seeing through Vastara’s veil and the Doctor is climbing up on the rooftops.) Fifteen minutes from the end, as the Doctor asks the cyborg what he thinks of the view, civil twilight gives way to nautical twilight. (In London, it’s right as Clara passes out because she can’t hold her breath anymore.) US transmission skews later – I’m typing this bit half an hour before transmission, right as the sun is going down, so it’ll start in civil twilight and continue through to the nighttime proper.
This feels like something that the series, under Moffat, has been working towards and never quite getting. Moffat has been complaining about the problematic relationship between barbecue forks and Doctor Who ever since the end of Season Five, and now, finally, he gets a run of episodes that starts in the dying days of summer and will run right through the height of autumn, before coming back for one last flourish for the solstice. And the first one transmits right across the sunset, starting right in the golden hour. The orange glow of the late day and the coming autumn permeates the episode. So this is our mission statement: a crepuscular series.
The early returns seem largely positive. A fair number of people seem unimpressed with anything that isn’t Peter Capaldi, though virtually everyone is at least on the same page about him, it seems. GallifreyBase’s episode poll is around 72% rating it as an 8-10, with only six people proclaiming that they’d rather listen to a tape loop of leaf blower noise, which is pretty good, but it’s worth noting that of that 72%, 31.87% are picking 8/10. So well-liked but not an insta-classic, apparently.
Which seems fitting. This is an episode with a lot to do. A premiere of a new Doctor is as much about showing the potential of the rest of the season as it is about being brilliant in its own right. Ultimately, more important than whether people absolutely adore Deep Breath is whether they stick around for Into the Dalek. And clearly, this is something the production team is mindful of, as they decided to just drop the inevitable Dalek story into the second slot to try to offer as big an opening one-two punch as they could possibly manage.…