Doctor Who: “I am definitely a madman with a box!”

Welcome to the much-anticipated premiere of the new season of Doctor Who! After much speculation and no small amount of hand-wringing by nervous fans, the fifth season of the “new” Who debuted in the U.S. tonight.

After three full seasons and five hour-long specials starring David Tennant as the Doctor, the much-beloved Tennant is out, as is showrunner, executive producer, and head writer Russell T. Davies and much of the behind-the-scenes team that had worked on the show since the debut of the 2005 revival. In is Steven Moffat, the man behind some really excellent episodes over the last four seasons (including the Ninth Doctor two-parter “The Empty Child” & “The Doctor Dances,” and my personal favorite, “Blink”), actors Matt Smith as the Doctor and Karen Gillan as companion Amy Pond, and a whole slew of new producers. The TARDIS has been redesigned and the title sequence revamped. (By the way, for those of us who didn’t mind the bombastic musical score from the Davies era, rest assured that composer Murray Gold is still on board, though the sound mixing seems to have improved so that now we can actually hear the dialogue over the music most of the time.) Everything old is new again, and it’s an interesting behind-the-scenes story – but does it translate into good television?

Let’s find out during “The Eleventh Hour,” written by Steven Moffat and directed by Adam Smith. As always, my comments will include spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the BBC or BBC America broadcasts, you’ve been warned.

“The Eleventh Hour” (a title, by the way, that not only fits the story, but is also a nod to the fact that Matt Smith is the eleventh actor to play the Doctor since William Hartnell first played the role in 1963) begins exactly where we left off in “The End of Time, Part 2”: the TARDIS is in bad shape, the Doctor has just regenerated, and we’re careening through the sky over London with some questionable CGI. Listen, I know it can’t all be that unbelievable bullet-time shot from the season opener of CSI, but the shot of the Doctor hanging out of the TARDIS just looks like something I made in Microsoft 3-D Moviemaker in the fifth grade. (Although I did make some pretty awesome monster movies, let me tell you.) I get why they did it – it might have worked to just cold-open on little Amelia Pond asking Santa to send her a policeman, but when the TARDIS crashes into her garden shed, we wouldn’t really understand the severity of the damage to the little blue box.

Speaking of little Amelia Pond, has there been a more delightful introduction to a companion in the last five seasons? The Doctor is soaking wet – having fallen into the TARDIS swimming pool – wearing half of a torn-up suit, climbing out of a box that crash-landed in her garden, and Amelia’s only question is, “Did you come about the crack in my wall?” She’s completely unruffled by this weirdo in ratty clothes eating fish sticks and custard (ugh) in her kitchen, and the wonderful chemistry between Matt Smith and young Caitlin Blackwood (who is actually Karen Gillan’s cousin) makes the bizarre interaction between child and Time Lord not only believable, but utterly charming, even when the Doctor is being a bit impolite.

Amelia: What’s wrong with you?
The Doctor: Wrong with me? It’s not my fault. Why can’t you give me any decent food? You’re Scottish; fry something.

Anybody who knows me can tell you that I’m not fond of children, so the fact that I’m saying this tells you how much I liked it: is there anything more darling than little Amelia Pond packing her suitcase to go off adventuring with the Doctor? Or anything more heartbreaking, because the moment the Doctor tells her he’ll be back in five minutes, you know he isn’t going to make it on time.

Then little Amelia grows up into Miss Amy Pond. Introduced with a nice camera pan up her legs, and, hey, did you know the show’s run by a straight man now? The nice thing, though, is that Amy is just as great a character as Amelia. She can stand up for herself – she went through four psychiatrists because they kept insisting the Doctor wasn’t real – and demands answers from the Doctor, rather than blindly following. I’d like it a little better if Amy’s costumes didn’t seem to always include a miniskirt, which doesn’t seem particularly practical with all the running (and listen to Donna in “The Doctor’s Daughter” when she tells it like it is: “Seriously, there’s an outrageous amount of running involved”), but still, it’s nice to have an impressionable young woman who isn’t immediately fawning over the Doctor…even if she is admiring the view when he strips down.

One thing I’ve always loved about this show is that the Doctor – the ancient, fantastic alien from a lost world, the very last of his kind – travels in a spaceship that is also a time machine, the kind of technology we’ve only dreamed of, and yet he can never seem to get it to go where it ought to. TARDIS malfunctions and/or miscalculations have set the stage for most of the Doctor’s misadventures, and I’m always more surprised when it hits the place in time it was aiming for than when it misses. Five minutes for the Doctor is twelve years for Amy, and the effect that had on her childhood and adolescence is evident in Amy’s grown-up child/childlike grown-up personality. I don’t think it will be hard for her to slip back into that sense of wonder at this man with a time machine – just look at how Rose and Martha reacted to the Doctor’s world without having had childhood encounters with him that impacted their lives for the next decade. There’s a very Peter Pan-like element to the end of the episode, where the Doctor, looking exactly the same as he always does (as far as she knows, at least) shows up in Amy’s garden after another two years – “fourteen years since fish custard,” in total – and takes her away on an adventure in her nightgown, like Wendy before her. Like Peter, the Doctor is upset by suddenly-grown-up Amy (“You were a little girl five minutes ago!”), and wants her to stay a child:

Amy: I grew up.
The Doctor: Don’t worry. I’ll soon fix that.

We shouldn’t be surprised, of course: Steven Moffat loves fairytales.

What about the Doctor himself? I’ve been saying for years that Tennant’s Doctor is my Doctor; I saw a couple Tennant episodes before going back and watching Christopher Eccleston, and as a result, was always a little more in love with Ten than with Nine. I haven’t seen much of the old series; a handful of the First Doctor episodes on YouTube and clips here and there of the others, but already Matt Smith’s Doctor has a special place in my heart. Perhaps because there are heavy shades of Tennant in the early part of his performance in “The Eleventh Hour,” and perhaps because Smith is clearly a much more talented actor than any of us gave him credit for, I’m already fond of this new incarnation. He may even do the twitchy, nutty side of the Doctor better than Tennant, unbelievably. I think he’ll win over any skeptical fans within the first hour.

Quick things I liked:

• The new TARDIS will take some getting used to, but I love the faucet knobs and the typewriter on the console and the shiny new blue paint job on the outside.


• I liked the rapid-fire frame-by-frame sequence that took us through what the Doctor saw in the little village square – mostly from a technical point of view, but it was a kind of whoa moment akin to that CSI clip I linked above.


• I loved the dialogue; there are some wonderful one-liners throughout the episode (e.g. “No TARDIS, no screwdriver, two minutes to spare, WHO DA MAN?! … Oh, I’m never saying that again, fine.”)

Quick things I didn’t like:

• The revelation that Amy is getting married in the morning: saw it coming a mile away. It does raise the stakes a little because we know that 1) the TARDIS isn’t particularly reliable when you’re trying to pinpoint a date (e.g. Rose gets home six months after leaving, rather than six hours) and 2) we’ve seen what happens when the Doctor doesn’t get the timing right (e.g. Mickey is the prime suspect in Rose’s murder; Harold Saxon wins the election)


• The very Russell T. Davies-like foreshadowing of what will become the season finale plot. The Crack is the new Bad Wolf, and “Silence will fall” is going to get very old very quickly. I understand that this is the season’s story arc, and I agree that this show needs one, but I think we could have waited a week or two before getting the first glimpse of it.

So, what kind of man is the Doctor going to be this time? We get an inkling when he brings the Atraxi back to Earth just to call them out on their bullshit – incinerating the planet, guys, really? – in a “Earth is defended”-type moment. If Ten was the type of man who grimly granted no second chances, then Eleven is the kind who will force you to admit your wrongs, sort-of threaten you, tell you to run, and do it all with a smile on his face. In other words, he’s a little bit nuts.

But, really, isn’t that why we love the Doctor?

Law & Order: Criminal Intent: No nod, no wink

The deeply troubling first part of the Law & Order: Criminal Intent premiere, "Loyalty," aired on Tuesday, and I finally had the time to watch it. Spoilers ahead. You've been warned.

I approached "Loyalty, Part 1" with some trepidation, and rightly so: if any of my other favorite TV shows -- regardless of network or genre -- decided to replace over half the cast in one fell swoop like this, I would be equally nervous (see: Doctor Who's changing of the guard). With this two-part premiere, though, the swoop isn't as fell as it could be; Goren and Eames are still digging into a double homicide as we open season nine, and while Captain Danny Ross is having some unusual discussions about creating a police force in Somalia, he's still around and still in charge...for now. The episode starts out the same way any other would: meet the players, find the bodies, get the cops on the case, visit Dr. Rodgers for the autopsy results, then start digging into the victims' lives. From there, however, we get into arms dealing and East African politics and that's where I start to get a little lost. The breakdown is this: as far as I can tell, there are three things going on here: 1) the Major Case homicide investigation, 2) an FBI investigation that puts Captain Ross undercover with unscrupulous (even murderous) arms dealers, and 3) what seems to be a series of shootings to avenge a sheikh killed by the arms dealers, or to ensure the weapons make it to Africa? The motives of the sheikh's children in New York aren't all that clear yet, but one thing is certain: it is a man connected to the dead sheikh who shoots and kills Captain Danny Ross.

This case seems unusually complicated for Criminal Intent, which often focuses more on the interplay between the suspects and police than on the nitty-gritty of the crime itself. By the end of this episode, Ross is dead, Goren, Eames, and Nichols have lost their about-to-become-cooperative suspect to the FBI, a heat-seeking missile exploded in the middle of New York (or New Jersey, maybe?) without anyone noticing, and I still wasn't entirely sure what was going on.

I was surprised by how hard it was to watch Danny Ross get shot; I've never been particularly attached to his character after being very fond of his predecessor, Captain James Deakins (Jamey Sheridan, who is about 80% of why I still watch Trauma), but it was tough to see him killed so quickly. No fanfare, no sentimentality, and unflinching. As it should be -- that's not what L&O is about. The best-worst part about Ross's death was seeing how upset Dr. Elizabeth Rodgers (Leslie Hendrix) was by it. There was a heavily-hinted-at relationship between Ross and Rodgers in seasons past, and her distress at both his death and being denied access to his body made his death hit home. Hendrix, Kathryn Erbe, and Vincent D'Onofrio were all very good in that particular scene. It was nice to see a little of the old Bobby Goren, fighting for access to his captain and the right to work the case, and it always gets me when the normally reserved Eames gets emotional. There were a few moments in this scene and the rest of the episode that didn't ring true, and there were several times when it sounded to me like D'Onofrio was just reciting lines, but I'm inclined to say the writing didn't quite get to where it needed to be -- one of the things that consistently bothers me about Criminal Intent is clunky dialogue. It's tough to get great performances when the material isn't quite at the same level as the actors.

Finally, there's been a lot said and written about the major cast shakeups going on this season, with regulars Vincent D'Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe (who have been on the show since season one) leaving, along with the Major Case Squad's captain for the past three seasons, Eric Bogosian, and new cast members Saffron Burrows and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio filling in around Jeff Goldblum's Detective Zack Nichols. To be perfectly honest, I was leery of Jeff "Notorious Show-Killer" Goldblum to begin with, but he won me over last season, and I'm dismayed by the fans who refuse to give him a chance. Those who scream in capslock that they refuse to watch the show anymore and will leave with D'Onofrio and Erbe just seem unreasonable to me. A revolving door of detectives has been part of the Law & Order franchise from the beginning. Goren & Eames (and Stabler & Benson on SVU, for that matter) are kind of anomalous when you look at the original series, which has seen plenty of actor turnover in the last twenty years -- just check out the chart of L&O characters from the Wikipedia article. I'm not saying I'm thrilled to see them go: I'm not. I've never been a fan of Saffron Burrows, and Kathryn Erbe's Detective Eames has been my favorite character for the last several seasons, so it's disappointing to know that it will be Burrows as Serena Stevens and not Eames that we'll see around the MCS squad room. In a perfect world, I would have liked to see Eames and Nichols partnered up; I thoroughly enjoyed watching them work together in last season's "Major Case" and "Revolution." However, we don't live in a perfect world, I'm not the Criminal Intent showrunner, and I'll have to live with the changes, just like everyone else. Dealing with writing, casting, and production decisions that make you unhappy is part of being a TV fan. You have to trust that the people in the production offices are doing what they think is going to work for the show (even if those of us on our couches have our doubts).

While waiting for the conclusion of "Loyalty" and with an eye toward the rest of season nine, I'm adopting a cautiously optimistic outlook. I'm hoping that their respective departures will be true to the Goren's and Eames's characters -- since characters are what USA Network is all about -- and that the remaining viewers and the network give Goldblum and Burrows a chance.

LOST, Season Six: The Befuddling

That familiar feeling of utter confusion can only mean one thing: LOST IS BACK!

Warning: there will be many spoilers in the text to follow.

Okay, so what are we dealing with? Parallel universes? Divergent paths that split at the moment 815 started to break up, meaning that we have one reality in which events progressed the way they have over the course of the series and one in which the plane makes it to LAX and things pan out the way we saw them in the premiere? Tough to tell right away. Unlike the flashback/forward device the show has used for the last five years, it's not immediately clear what's going on, and the possibility of there being multiple realities within the context of the show makes my head hurt a little bit. But that's exactly what's going on, according to executive producers and Lost gurus Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. They're calling the device a flash-sideways, since it presents two different universes that appear to be linked in some way. Darlton are, of course, being vague about what the relationship between these worlds actually is, but that's to be expected. If we knew what was going on, it wouldn't be Lost.

A couple thoughts on “LAX, Parts 1 & 2”:

First off, I was Not Pleased that Juliet didn't survive the first hour. As my friend J can tell you, I've been insistent that she and Sawyer get together since way before we, the audience, were ever supposed to consider it. For me, they were meant for each other from the moment she first Tased him. I understand that Elizabeth Mitchell is on V now, but really, Juliet Burke is a much more interesting and compelling character than Erica Evans, and I'd much rather watch the former than the latter. I'm sure there's a show out there that can showcase Mitchell's talent to its fullest, but I just don't think V is that show. Josh Holloway gets some quality brooding, grimacing, and Sawyerly growling out of Juliet's death, but I feel like taking her out of the equation sets him back significantly in terms of character development. He's back to being the bristling, uncouth loner who hoarded all the supplies in camp, had a contentious relationship/rivalry with Jack, and thought he was in love with Kate (because he hadn't met Juliet yet) – and if there's one thing I will not tolerate in this final season, it is the will-they-won't-they Jack-Kate-Sawyer triangle. As far as I'm concerned, Sawyer is Juliet's man forever, and Jack and Kate deserve each other. The two of them can lame off into the sunset together.

One theory that has been posited relates to the message Miles conveyed from Juliet to Sawyer: “It worked.” Referring, presumably, to the detonation of the Jughead bomb and the other timeline, in which Oceanic 815 never crashed. The theory is that Juliet's seemingly nonsensical dying words (“Let's have coffee sometime...Dutch treat”) indicate some kind of connection to the other world, in which Juliet and Sawyer have never met. As she dies on the island, does she have some sort of psychic connection to another, parallel existence in which she and Sawyer meet under different circumstances? It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

Ben gets a lesson in turnabout being fair play; after manipulating, controlling, and using the people around him for so long, Ben gets played by Jacob's mysterious nemesis (who confirms that he is, indeed, the smoke monster). Ben is horrified, terrified, and kind of helpless against the unreal power of this entity that looks and sounds like John Locke, but is obviously something else altogether. It's interesting to see Ben put in a very submissive role after so long as the Others' leader and one of the most dangerous characters on the show. Ben has been very cool and in control for much of his tenure on the show, and it's fun to see him freaked out by the “Man in Black.” I really enjoy watching Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn together, especially now that they've presented O'Quinn with the opportunity to be really, truly creepy and deliver slightly cryptic monologues that make him even more sinister. He played Locke fairly benign (you know, for a knife-toting, boar-hunting believer in the powers of a mystical island), and it's startling to see him be violent and malevolent – startling, but entertaining.

There were some frustrating moments in the two-hour premiere, but ultimately, it looks like it will be a great final season. Former regulars now returning – Claire! – and all the on-island characters finally in the same year – Jin and Sun! – and a parade of dead minor characters brought back to life by the parallel-storyline device (worth it just for Greg Grunberg's voiceover as Captain Seth Norris on the plane – Viva Grunny!) give us the potential for some great mind-boggling TV. Bring it on!