N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
When I started this Doctor Who marathon, Matt Smith was still, for a few more weeks at least, the Doctor. Returning to the blog after a longer-then-anticipated hiatus, I re-read my original post and was reminded that my intention had been to ‘pick out what I like along the way.’
This has been tricky to do over the past 10+ years, and I have certainly not succeeded in being universally upbeat about the show (especially with some of RTD’s finales and specials), but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded. There will, of course, be plenty of things that irk me in my revisit of the Moffat era: sexism, a casual attitude to violence and a general glibness spring to mind from memory. But I will nevertheless endeavour to avoid comment on all but the most egregious examples.
That said, I’ll start with a pet peeve.
After The End of Time, you wouldn’t have thought Doctor Who could’ve upped the ante on the bombast. Well, enter Series 5’s opening credits: with lightning storms in the time vortex and drums — yes, drums! — thrown into the feem toon, you do wonder if anyone in the production office had heard of the phrase ‘less is more’.
The reason Doctor Who‘s original theme tune is so brilliant is because, despite the complexity of the work Delia Derbyshire did to realize it, it sounds breathtakingly simple. Derbyshire put a lot of effort into making something that seemed effortless.
Yes, there’s a lot of effort gone into this version. But it shows. Ultimately, the more you throw at it, the less impressive it sounds and, for me, the returns have been diminishing since 1980 (nostalgic fondness for Peter Howell’s arrangement notwithstanding).
The additional Meanwhile in the TARDIS “The Beast Below” prequel / prologue scene feels like a deleted scene rather than an especially shot scene, which may sound like I’m disparaging it, but might actually be to its credit, if you think of it as a cut-for-time scene rather than a cut-for-quality-or pacing scene.
Elsewhere, in hindsight, you’d have to say Doctor Who rather wasted having Olivia Colman for the day. Like Carey Mulligan or Andrew Garfield, these days you’d suspect she’d be a tad too busy or expensive (even with a Disney budget top-up).
“You’ve had some cowboys in here. Not actual cowboys, though that can happen.”
The Doctor, The Eleventh Hour
These up-against-the-clock tales rarely live up to the supposed tension, but where it really matters — in introducing the new Doctor — it delivers.
Or rather, Matt Smith delivers.
It wasn’t actually ‘fish fingers and custard’ that won me over first time around, although I do love those early scenes with Amelia.
No, it was the Doctor’s remark about cowboys whilst examining the crack in the bedroom wall that told me Smith had nailed it from the off. I may have said ‘who?’ when I first learned of his casting but, on the strength of this opener, Matt Smith IS the Doctor.
Plot-wise, there are echoes of Hitch-hiker’s — destruction of Earth, travelling in sleepwear, perception filter – and the Doctor’s visits to Amy once again evoke The Time Traveler’s Wife –- and we know how much the Moff likes that story.
But it’s a very solid debut. Yes, there are other dislikes I could have written about in this post, but for now I’ll hold back on those concerns.
