The first episode of the new season of Doctor Who played last night, with the Doctor as a woman.

At the end of the last Christmas special, the Doctor had just fallen out of the Tardis, from a rather great height, and saw the Tardis disappear (disintegrate? time warp?). She was really, REALLY high up when this happened ... and so I was expecting some sort of miraculous rescue, gadget, or something, as has happened in other such scenes. Nope.

Her first scene in the new season is her crashing through the roof of a moving train. And getting right up to confront the new monster/villain/dilemma/problem. The Doctor has never been invulnerable to harm nor invincible, and that fall should've killed her (for yet ANOTHER regneration). That was just really lazy, crappy writing from the creative team.

The episode itself was boring, with too much exposition and not enough 'doing', but it set up the new characters fairly well. I'm keeping an open mind, and hoping that the show doesn't fundmentally change the essence of the Doctor, like they did when the Master became Missy. But this first episode was awfully preachy.

Hopefully future episodes will be more engaging and interesting. Up until now, Doctor Who has not bored me.

*crossing fingers* I've been a Dr Who fan since way way back. I'm going to give her a fair shot. I really detested Peter Capaldi and only toward the very end did he start to win me over. But if we made it through the celery wearing idiot or the @##@*le in the technicolor dreamcoat, we can make it through a female doctor.

Oh, and it's canon that right after regeneration, the doctor is pretty much invulnerable, as he (now she?) has enough residual regeneration left over to heal from most stuff.

They've tried to kill him right after regeneration before and it didn't work.

Sure, I remember when Tennant started. His hand got CUT OFF, and had to regenerate. There was nothing like that here, which just took me out of the episode.