"Doctor Who" is back with a new man (young Matt Smith) in the lead role, and a new writer (Steven Moffat) running the show, and I have a quick review of the new regime coming up just as soon as I drink a bowl of custard... "Hello, I'm The Doctor. So, basically... run." -The DoctorAt the time Matt Smith's casting was announced, I said that Moffat's previous "Who" episodes - which tended to be the highlight of each season - made me trust him implicitly, even though I had no idea who Smith was. By all accounts, Moffat had no intention of hiring the youngest-ever Doctor, but was so blown away by Smith's audition that he had to hire him - and Smith's work in "The Eleventh Hour" showed us exactly what Moffat saw in that audition.
Smith's young, yes, but there's a gravity to his performance that made it clear this gawky kid with the Flock of Seagulls haircut had, in fact, been around for hundreds of years and all the previous lives viewers have been watching for the last few decades. And just as David Tennant built on the character as played by Christopher Eccleston and made his Doctor less wounded and more exuberant, Smith's take on the character seems to have the enthusiastic eccentricity of Tennant(*) while playing the character as less reckless and prone to anger. Ten was arrogant, where Eleven is merely cocky.
(*) Smith also, like Tennant, seems to take great joy in saying certain words, here with the way he turned "laptop" into a five-course meal.
Smith also brings a great physicality to the part, not only in the slapstick like The Doctor's first few minutes at Amelia Pond's house(**), but in the odd, alien walk he adopts. Moffat's script certainly plays up Smith's rubbery features - when he asks Amy, "Do I even look like people?," the answer is clearly meant to be "no."
(**) I, frankly, would have watched at least 20 more minutes of Smith's Doctor trying and being disgusted by various foods in Amelia's kitchen.
And after playing Eleven as out of sorts for much of the episode, running around in the tattered remnants of Ten's wardrobe, Smith shows Eleven clearly getting his act together as he assembles a new (stolen) outfit. It's a great build-up for the character, and Smith owns every moment of it.
"Eleventh Hour" is also a great build-up for Karen Gillan's immensely likable Amy Pond, who has by far the most interesting, emotionally resonant backstory of the modern companions. There's an element of Donna Noble in there, in that Amy had to wait a while to get aboard the TARDIS (and in the end turns out to be another runaway bride), but it's one thing for a middle-aged woman to wait, and quite another for a little girl, who grows up with The Doctor at the forefront of her imagination. He has a powerful hold over her psyche, and that's going to complicate her obvious attraction to him (check out the look on her face as she watches him strip) and give this relationship elements of all three previous major modern companions.
For that matter, there were a lot of familiar elements in "Eleventh Hour." Amy's era-spanning relationship with The Doctor isn't dissimilar to the situation between Ten and Madame de Pompadour in the Moffat-scripted "The Girl in the Fireplace," and the Atraxi and Prisoner Zero felt like they could have been villains from a Russell T. Davies episode. (Moffat no doubt deliberately chose some more generic bad guys, so as not to distract from the establishing of Eleven and Amy.)
I know some "Who" fans who were dissatisfied with parts or all of the Davies era and were hoping Moffat would completely clean the slate and take the series in a different creative direction. Clearly, that's not going to be the case (Moffat, unsurprisingly, has nothing but positive things to say about Davies' run on the show), and what changes we see are going to be on a smaller scale. Moffat's both a funnier writer than Davies (here's just one clip from his insanely great Britcom "Coupling") and better at (or more interested in) creating an unsettling level of tension, but overall this is the Davies formula with a slightly different flavor. And as I loved most of the previous four seasons, I'm okay with that.
Very promising start to the semi-new era.
A few other thoughts:
• Moffat brings back a few elements from his previous episodes on the series with Tennant: The Doctor snaps his fingers to open the TARDIS doors, just as River Song told him he could back in "Silence in the Library," and at one point he uses the phrase "wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey," which is a phrase Ten used to explain the time-space continuum to Sally Sparrow in "Blink."
• The design of the Atraxi ships looked very much like the Kryptonian technology from "Superman: The Motion Picture," with bonus giant eyeballs.
• One notable change from Davies: Moffat and director Adam Smith attempt to show us how The Doctor sees the world, being aware of all angles and events everywhere he goes. How do you feel about him suddenly having Matrix-vision? True to what we know about the character, or a crutch in an episode that was otherwise designed to take away The Doctor's crutches (the TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver) to show him saving the world through sheer cleverness?
• In the UK, "Doctor Who" is seen as a family show first and foremost (Moffat once told me, "The entire point of `Doctor Who' is to frighten children"), and so Moffat had to play it safe with Amy's profession, claiming she's a "kiss-o-gram," when her embarrassment in that and other scenes suggests she does more than kiss when she's dressed as a cop, or nurse, or nun.
The UK is a few weeks ahead of us, and I'm sure some of you who live on this side of the pond have already watched additional episodes through extra-legal means, but we're going to stick with the usual "Doctor Who" spoiler policy around here, which means no talking about any episode (on any level) that has yet to air in the United States.
Keeping that in mind... what did everybody else think?
