On Bits and Pieces
I'm not sure if what I'm describing has a name, other than 'trying to build one thing with the pieces of another'. It's the sort of thing I've done from time to time, starting in childhood with Lego, or trying to build Ace in online doll-makers.
Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't, depending on how flexible the pieces are. And this is one reason why Spyfall part 1 didn't work for me.
James Bond films have a number of pieces (or set-pieces). The casinos, the costumes, the briefing with M and so on. But trying to use them to build a Doctor Who story isn't easy, because a lot of Bond pieces aren't any use in the world of Who. Bond, to state the obvious, is licensed to kill. That's what he's paid for. But in a Who, the heroes aren't supposed to solve problems by killing people[*], so any pieces related to that go on the discard pile. The same goes for Bond's treatment of women: 'Any woman he wants, he'll get / He will break any heart without regret' and so forth. That sort of thing doesn't go down well in a Sunday evening family show. Take it off the table.
So the overall effect, for me, was that Chibnall had tried to use as many 'Bond' pieces as would fit, but that left big gaps where the ones he couldn't use would have gone. So he had a vehicle chase... but a vehicle chase where Barton shoots at the Doctor with no effect, because she's not allowed to fire back. He had a casino... where the Doctor isn't allowed to know what game she's playing, since she's not allowed to encourage gambling. And the closest we got to seduction was the Master putting some moves on Yaz. The Master makes a much better Bond stand-in than the Doctor, because he is the sort of person who kills people until the problem goes away, but it never goes anywhere because seduction scenes aren't really Who's bag either.
(Yaz and Ryan's infiltration did work better for me, because it was playing with a fuller deck of cards; using gadgets and false identities to penetrate the villain's lair and come away with vital clues is a Bond trope that does fit Who characters a little better).
So that's why a lot of the more obvious bits of Bond in Spyfall fell flat for me.
[*] The Doctor has been known to solve problems by killing people, but one is presumably supposed to imagine that they agonize about it afterwards to their companion, rather than brag about it in seedy space-rangers bars.
(Oh, and I now can't stop imagining Stephen Fry's C explaining earnestly to the Doctor that he's decided to call his latest counterespionage push Operation Winkle.)
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