That magazine cover with Ncuti Gatwa on it looks like if you asked a Gen AI to create a magazine cover with Ncuti Gatwa on it.
Like, back off the Photoshop tweaks a bit the guy doesn't need it.
I really, really like Ncuti Gatwa. I think he's a fantastic actor and I really hope he's going to be huge....but I couldn't fucking stomach how terrible and awkward the S1 Ep1 opener was...like, holy shit was it bad.
We had to turn it off about 8 mm minutes in....and that was after weeks of waiting excitedly to see it.
Yeah, at the end of the day it's a standard deleted scene - the information within it was conveyed just as easily by the Doctor explaining the situation to UNIT.