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?
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