It feels like longer than twelve months since Doctor Who appeared on our screens. While the long gap may have caused viewer interest to wane, the production team appear to used the time well in making a pretty good opening episode.
Doctor Who has done riffs on things before and this time around, it's the spy genre. Agents are being killed off and the Doctor and company are being recruited by C to find things. We get the usual thing of car chases, assassinations and casino scenes. The Doctor and her friends infiltrate a party in tuxes, It's quite good.
Last year's stories had a lot of long talky sequences interspersed with occasional action. This time things were more evenly paced. The car chase stunt is good, though a little reminiscent of the Atmos incident. The bike sequence is slightly less so.
The aliens of this episode are effective energy beings though the voices are slightly generic. They are in the story more frequently than aliens of last year.
The aliens are in leagye with Daniel, head of VOR, played by Lenny Henry. He was good in Broadchurch so there was no question that he would be good here.
Another feature of this episode is the return of the Master, now played by Sacha Darwhan, who spends most of the episode pretending to be the British agent, 'O'. Previous reveals have set up something odd about the character, Professor Yana or Missy, but this comes almost entirely out of the blue. Sacha Darwhan plays the switch well and I look forward to seeing more of him as the character.
Segun Akinola's music is once again a good Bond riff, with the action theme he delivered for Resolution proving well.
Overall, Spyfall Part 1 is a good start to the series. Let's hope Part 2 can build on that well.
8/10
