“I’m the Doctor. I’m worse than everybody’s aunt…and that’s not how I’m introducing myself.”
It took almost the full hour for me to adjust to the new Doctor Who, but it did happen. The episode opened with Eleven crashing to Earth in the TARDIS, and while it was an exciting opening shot, I wish they had backed up a few minutes to cover what happened during the final moments of “The End of Time,” because I am forgetful and easily confused, apparently. We also get new opening credits, theme song, title logo, and, as we see later, a new TARDIS interior. I miss the old theme, but on the second listen, the new song wasn’t as bad as I initially thought.
The Doctor lands outside the home of young Amelia Pond, who is home alone and scared of a crack in her bedroom wall. The Doctor is still recovering from his regeneration and Matt Smith gets a chance to show off some great slapstick skills. He’s having cravings, but can’t figure out what he wants, so Amelia makes all sorts of dishes for him. He takes one bite of everything and spits it out. I kept expecting either a cup of tea or a banana to be the solution, but turns out it was fish fingers dipped in custard. Disgusting and surprising, so well done, Doctor Who.
Amelia immediately bonds with the Doctor, who manages to be both childlike and reassuring at the same time. He investigates the mysterious crack in her bedroom wall and discovers that it’s a crack in time and space. An Atraxi prison is on the other side, and they’re looking for Prisoner Zero, who is hiding somewhere in Amelia’s home. They get interrupted by a TARDIS emergency and the Doctor runs off, promising to return in five minutes. Amelia packs her little suitcase and waits for the Doctor, but as we’ve seen before, traveling in the TARDIS can be unreliable. Twelve years pass for Amelia, while just minutes pass for the Doctor.
Amelia has become Amy Pond (Karen Gillan), and she’s spent years trying to convince people that she met a “raggedy Doctor” in her garden one night. She has drawn pictures of him, made her friends dress up like him, waited for him; the Doctor has become an obsession, just as he was for Elton in “Love & Monsters.” Amy has lost her sense of wonder and become cynical, and now the Doctor must work to win back her trust.
The aliens were not the focus of the episode, but they were sufficiently scary. The barking man was particularly disturbing, and I really enjoyed the little girl speaking in her mother’s voice. The true form of the alien (a slithering, snake-like thing) was created with CGI that did not look remotely real, and I loved that. One of the best things about Doctor Who is that the aliens always look slightly cheesy, which allows us to take a step back and think about what we’re watching, to consider how the characters are reacting in these situations. It may be sci-fi, but at its heart Doctor Who is about brilliant characters.
The Doctor, being extremely clever, figures out how to stop Prisoner Zero. Some fancy camera work allows the audience to see how the Doctor’s mind works, but I prefer not to know. The Doctor is usually smarter than everyone in the room, and when he makes his crazy deductions, I want to be taken along for the ride without really knowing where he’s going. It’s what I imagine life is probably like for the Doctor’s Companion.
The end of the episode cemented Matt Smith as the new Doctor. He changes out of the remnants of Ten’s outfit just before facing off with the Atraxi. He warns them that he is protecting the Earth, and through a very Dalek-like lens, we see the enemies from the Doctor’s past, and then the faces of the previous Doctors flicker on the screen. We work up to Eccleston, then Tennant, and then Smith walks through the image in his new jacket and bow-tie and says, “Hello, I’m the Doctor. Basically…run.” That’s perfect.
After one more side trip in the TARDIS causes him to miss two more years of Amy’s life, the Doctor decides that she has waited long enough; she gets the invite to take a trip in the time machine. She says she will, but has to be back in the morning. (Ha! We all know that’s never going to happen.) The camera pans over Amelia’s childhood drawings and dolls, all images of herself and the Doctor, and we see a wedding dress hanging in Amy’s room.
So, we’re left with several things to think about:
- Who is Amy supposed to marry in the morning?
- What did Prisoner Zero mean by “the Pandorica will open, silence will fall”? It does not sound good.
- The same pattern from the crack in the wall in Amy’s bedroom appeared on the screen in the TARDIS. Did the Doctor notice this? Is there something he’s not saying?
I still miss David Tennant and the previous Companions, but I like Smith and Gillan and think this is a promising start. Next week, Steven Moffat continues his plan to terrify us all when the Doctor & Amy face the Smilers in “The Beast Below.”
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