Doctor Who preview: It’s time for Thirteen’s first proper adventure

On this week’s episode of Doctor Who, Thirteen and her companions have their first alien adventure together in “The Ghost Monument”.

Well, it happened. We finally got a female Doctor on Doctor Who. (And, spoiler alert: Jodie Whittaker was thoroughly excellent in her debut.) But what happens next?

Proper adventures in time and space, that’s what!

When last we saw Thirteen and her new friends Ryan, Yaz and Graham, the Doctor appears to have accidentally zapped them all into the vastness of space. (This was instead of transporting herself to wherever her missing TARDIS happens to be at the moment. Whoops!)

The new quartet obviously fixes this problem, somehow, since the preview for this week’s episode “The Ghost Monument” shows them all very much alive on an unknown alien desert world.

But where are they? How do they get there? And how will the Doctor get everyone home? That seems to be the mystery at hand, at least for this week. (Maybe even for most of the season, since we still have no idea where her TARDIS might be.)

The official BBC synopsis indicates that our crew is going to face a couple of problems this week.

"Still reeling from their first encounter, can the Doctor and her new friends stay alive long enough in a hostile alien environment to solve the mystery of Desolation? And just who are Angstrom and Epzo?"

My question: Is Desolation the name of the planet? Because that would be an amazing name for a presumably less than great place, if that were what it happened to be called. Desolation could just as easily turn out to be the name of a monster, or a town, or a bizarre puzzle, of course. (Or something totally different, because this is Doctor Who after all.) But that’s the guess I’m going with.

In other news, “The Ghost Monument” will also be the first episode of the Thirteenth Doctor era in which will finally see the series’ new opening credits. If you stuck around for the closing credits of “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” last week, you heard a version of the new theme song, but we haven’t seen the new titles anywhere just yet.

Doctor Who season 11 continues Sunday, October 14 at 8/7 C.T. on BBC America.