Doctor Who – Spyfall Part 1 Review

The twelve series of Doctor Who starts with a two-part adventure that sees The Doctor and her companions getting recruited by MI6.

Around the world, spies have been attacked when they were on missions. The global espionage community is so worried that MI6 finds The Doctor and the companions and brings them to London. When briefed the team split up: Yazz and Ryan go to San Francisco to investigate a tech entrepreneur whilst The Doctor and Graham head to Australia to meet a man who The Doctor thinks might know what’s going on.

This episode was designed to be Doctor Who’s homage to the Bond franchise. The title, “Spyfall”, was a reference to Skyfall, arguably the best film of the Daniel Craig era. The episode itself featured usual scenes from the Bond series like the mission briefing, getting gadgets, and infiltrating a high-end party. When The Doctor and her companions go to Daniel Barton’s (Lenny Henry) birthday party the composer, Segun Akinola, gets to his copyright-friendly version of the Bond theme. However, due to Doctor Who being a sci-fi fantasy show, the spy aspects of the episode were more like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Alias, and the big set-pieces in the episode made “Spyfall” look like a British version of these big American shows. However, being a British show, the action set-pieces looked cheap.

A smaller influence was Black Mirror. Daniel Barton was essentially a Mark Zuckerberg/Steve Jobs type figure and his company was Google. His role in the episode was to provide some of the show’s social commentary because Barton is super rich, and his company was argued to be more powerful than most countries. As O (Sacha Dhawan) states that most governments are ignorant about tech issues so outsource it to the private sector: giving them power.

One of the biggest changes Chris Chibnall made when he took over Doctor Who increased the number of companions. This was an issue with the previous season because Yazz got little character development and at times seemed like a third wheel. Four people in the Tardis felt like too much. The first part of “Spyfall” makes use of the bigger crew by having them go to two locations at once. The spy story allows for international travel, even if it’s obvious “Spyfall” wasn’t filmed in California or Australia.

The biggest selling point of “Spyfall” was getting Stephen Fry to play C, the head of MI6. But Dhawan’s O was the more important character. O was shown to be intelligent but awkward and acts as a Doctor fanboy. At the end of the episode, it was revealed that O was really The Master and he was really the mastermind behind all the events.

This isn’t the first time Doctor Who has done this ‘shock’ twist. The episodes “Utopia,” “Dark Water,” and “World Enough and Time” also had a revelation that a character was secretly The Master. Like “Dark Water,” “Spyfall” showed The Master to be in control of an alien force.

The Master was brought back for two reasons. The first was to address a criticism that was levelled against Series 11: the lack of classic villains. The Master is one of The Doctor’s greatest villains, so he was an excellent candidate to reassure fans that classic villains can come back. The other reason was even more subtle: to let fans know the Doctor can regenerate into a man again. The previous version of The Master was Missy. Although Dhawan has an unenviable task because he’s living in the shadow of John Sim and Michelle Gomez.

The Master other role in the episode was the set up the larger plot of the season because he says everything The Doctor knows is a lie. This was another attempt by Chibnall to make the show more like the Davies/Moffatt eras because the previous showrunners liked to use the mysterious box and have a long-running storyline throughout the season.

“Spyfall Part One” had a solid mystery setup and the episode had potential. But Chibnall seems to make the episode as dull as possible. Yazz and Ryan ended up doing all the James Bond stuff whilst The Doctor goes to O to find out what he knows. The Doctor doesn’t go to the locations of the attacks and investigates, and uses has sci-fi tech that MI6 doesn’t have. Chibnall has the reverse Midas touch because he makes decent ideas boring.

Under Chibnall’s tenure of the show, the run time of the episodes has extended from 45 minutes to 60 minutes. That extra 15 minutes makes a big difference because it kills the pacing. “Spyfall Part One” was meant to be a mystery where there’s meant to be an investigation and a sense of threat, but the episode focused more on talking and exposition. This made the episode into a drag. The only picks up during the last five minutes when the twist was revealed and there was a sense of peril.

“Spyfall Part One” was a classic example of a decent idea that was poorly executed. The end does make the second part enticing but the first part was a slog.