I'm not someone who believes that Doctor Who should be an "adult" show, it can and should appeal to all ages, but it should also aspire to a basic level of seriousness and dramatic storytelling. This episode is juvenile, it's frivolous, it's occasionally very puerile, and it doesn't feel serious at all. Perhaps that was the intent but, if so, it wasn't a good idea. It feels almost like a parody of itself.

When it isn't being childish, it's just being bad. The exposition dump at the start is clumsy with none of the elegance seen in Rose and The End of the World, the latter of which this episode pretty conspicuously apes, the humour isn't very good, the political messaging is questionably-handled, and the pacing is all over the place. The only two redeeming features are the set design, which is great, and Gatwa and Gibson, who are instantly likeable and have great chemistry, but those two things are not enough to save this episode.

And extra points have to be docked for the fact that this was the series opener. Had it been broadcast in a later slot, you could forgive it as one of the mid-series stinkers that you usually find in Doctor Who, albeit a particularly bad one. To show this as the first episode of a new series, which itself was supposed to be a fresh start, was an insane choice and one has to wonder how much long-term damage it did to the new era.