Doctor Who (2005) 5-01: The Eleventh Hour

Episode:

757

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Serial:

203

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Writer:

Steven Moffat

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Director:

Adam Smith

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Air Date:

03-Apr-2010

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Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing words about The Eleventh Hour: the first episode of series five, the Steven Moffat era and the Eleventh Doctor's four year run.

This is the first time we've been introduced to a new Doctor, companion and producer at once since Rose. In fact it's only happened five times ever: An Unearthly Child, the TV movie, Rose, The Eleventh Hour and the upcoming Girl Who Fell to Earth. It's become a tradition in the revival series for each new producer to get a bit of a clean slate but that wasn't the case in the classic show.

It's also the first time the Doctor's number has been referenced in the episode title. The Eleventh Doctor was played by Matt Smith who remains the youngest actor to take the role. He was 27 at the time, almost 30 years younger than William Hartnell was when he first stepped into the Tardis. This wasn't Smith's first time playing the role though, as besides his cameo at the end of The End of Time, he also filmed both episode of The Time of Angels first. So he'd had a bit of practice by this point.

The episode was originally going to be called The Doctor Returns, but Moffat decided to come up with something else because the Doctor hadn't actually gone anywhere. He finally got a chance to use the title for the 2016 Christmas Special after the series took a year off, but he gave it a bit of a Spanish twist, turning it into The Return of Doctor Mysterio.

One last first: this was probably the first episode of Doctor Who that I decided to watch properly, from the start, and I think I even watched it the day it aired. Well okay, I also saw the TV movie, but that's not an episode so it doesn't count.

Warning: There'll be SPOILERS below for the episode and perhaps earlier ones. No spoilers for later stories though.

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The episode begins in space, with... wait, this is the same bloody shot they used to open Rose and The Christmas Invasion! I know this for a fact because I just reused an old screencap, the actual scene in the episode doesn't look like this. But it looks really similar! My guess is that it's a homage to the opening of Spearhead of Space, the first of the 'it's a new era and everything's different now' stories.

It starts with the camera looking at the moon, then it swings around and dives all the way down to London, just like in the other two episodes. Except this time it doesn't look so great in still screencaps, which is a shame because it's all HD now. Also, it's night-time when it gets to London and instead of zooming down to Rose's flat, it zooms to the Tardis which is currently zooming around the sky with the Doctor hanging out of the door.

The End of Time ended with him putting the Tardis in motion and then regenerating in the console room like he's done several times in the past, but this time it had fun and explosive consequences! It seems that holding off the regeneration for so long might have been a mistake.

Every time I see this I wonder how the hell he's managing to hold on to that sloping edge, especially as the Tardis is flying away from him. It seems much more likely he would've gone sliding out through the door without finding anything to hold on to and then found himself plummeting through the sky to the city below. But I can see why Moffat decided not to permanently kill the hero before his first story.

The internet tells me this sequence was added after principal photography to give the episode more of a connection to the conclusion of The End of Time and to put some action at the start. So if it feels a bit daft and redundant, that could be why.

It's a shame that the CGI in this scene doesn't look so great. The Tardis and the Doctor I mean, not the city. I believe the background was filmed with a helicopter out above actual London, with all its actual landmarks. Funny how whenever we get a new Doctor they always find a way to fit a shot of Big Ben and the London Eye into his first episode. In this case, he nearly collides with Big Ben's spire, which would be a nasty, but fairly original, way to go out.

I think I've figured out what bothers me about the CGI for the Tardis: I can see it. Every building in the shot is either pitch black or lit with floodlights, so the Tardis and the Doctor should just be black silhouettes. Probably better that they're not though.

The previous episode ended at the start of New Year's Day 2005 so you'd presume this is taking place then, but the time on Big Ben says 9:45 so it's a few hours early for that. The Millennium Dome's there though so it seems safe to say that the teaser's taking place sometime this millennium at least. Anyway, it's not important as it's over now. Short teaser.

New titles, with a new theme and a new fluffy cotton wool time vortex!

I'm not sure what I think about their decision to rename the series 'DOCTORDWWHO', but I do like the DW twirling around like Wonder Woman to turn into the Tardis. There's not much I don't like about this opening, with its fiery storm-like vortex and chunky metal credits, though I feel that the new arrangement of the theme is a bit of a step down. I do like it, I just liked Ten's final version better. Because it was awesome.

By the time the credits had finished the episode had found a new protagonist to follow for a while: a young girl praying for Santa to send someone down to deal with the scary crack in her wall. She's asking for a lot, seeing as it's Easter, but it's an emergency.

She doesn't get Santa himself, this isn't a Christmas special, but she gets the next best thing: a mysterious man in a torn up shirt climbing out a box soaking wet. Apparently, that's due to an incident involving the swimming pool not being where it should be. The way he had to climb out with a rope makes me think that it's wasn't the actual pool that moved, just the water, but who knows?

The Eleventh Doctor gets a heroic fanfare as he pops his head up, but then he kinds of spoils it by falling off. In his defence, he hasn't had a rest since all the crap he went through in The End of Time and he's still breathing out regeneration pixie dust like Ten did in The Christmas Invasion so he's not done cooking yet. He seems much more stable than Ten did though and only slightly mad. His main issue is that his taste buds have changed and now he has to figure out what foods he likes all over again.

I wasn't sure what to think about the episode the first time I watched it, as it's been plenty childish so far and my perception of the series being a kids show is what kept me away from it for so long. But it's a Roald Dahl kind of childish, so I was soon won over to the Doctor's toast throwing antics. Not that I've got any business saying what is or isn't like a Roald Dahl story as I haven't read one since I was 8 or whatever. Though I did watch that Bond movie he wrote, You Only Live Twice. This isn't like that.

Man, I love how this shot looks. They got a real cinematography upgrade for this episode and it just doesn't look like the same series anymore. It feels different too, with the clever dialogue and the slightly fairy-tale tone. I love the way Steven Moffat writes dialogue, especially when he writes it well, as he did here. He came from writing sitcoms and you can tell by how every exchange is crafted with the precision of a joke. Like, he notices that young Amelia Pond is kind of fearless, as she just invited a complete stranger into her house in the middle of the night despite his demands for insane food combinations. The punchline: it must be a hell of a scary crack.

She believes his crazy bullshit, he believes hers, so they may both be nuts but at least they're on the same page. The Doctor hanging out with a young kid seems like such a natural thing for him as he's often a big child himself, but I don't think it ever happened before this, in the classic series at least. Maybe it just took them 47 years to find a child actor as good as this one.

By the way, there was a (probably accidental) clue up on the wall earlier. The clock currently says 9:30, but it was 8:30 when they began trying to find a food he liked, which is earlier than the time shown on Big Ben. Therefore, he time travelled after the teaser! Either that or the clock's wrong. It's not a different time zone as this is an English village... which meant that Moffat had to change a few lines when he decided to cast an actress with a Scottish accent to play Amelia.

Anyway, it turns out that the 8 year old kid was right and the perfectly normal looking crack actually was a bit of a cause for concern, as all normal things are in modern Doctor Who. Though it's not really in her wall at all as it's a crack in reality, and the Doctor's able to open it wider to take a peek through.

The last time the Doctor came across a giant crack like this (in The Awakening) it had a giant creepy face behind it, but this time he finds a prison and a giant eye. Also his reflection in the giant eye, but just pretend you didn't see that and neither did he.

They hear voices saying "Prisoner Zero has escaped," and the Doctor receives a message on his psychic paper saying... "Prisoner Zero has escaped." It's like they're trying to tell him something. Opening the crack was exactly what was needed to make it seal itself up properly, so that's solved that problem, but it seems that a prisoner has crossed through somehow. And probably not one of the nicer prisoners, as when you number convicts I imagine you generally start with 'one' and go up from there, unless someone's a really special case.

Unfortunately the Doctor's forced to postpone the plot for a bit as the Cloister Bell's ringing so loud that even I noticed it for once. So he has to go sort out the Tardis' engines before an 'end of the TV movie' scenario happens again, or whatever. He thinks that a five minute jump to the future should stabilise it, and Amelia wants to come, but he tells he it's too dangerous and to wait for him to come back.

Amelia takes that to mean 'he's going to take me on a time travel adventure' and maybe she's right, so she packs some things in a suitcase and waits in the garden. And waits. Meanwhile, inside her hous, a door has been left open and something moves past the window.

The Tardis rematerialises at daytime, so that's a clue that maybe more than five minutes has passed, and the Doctor rushes back inside the house to warn Amelia about the horrible fate potentially awaiting her. He didn't foresee his own horrible fate though as he gets surprised by a cricket bat across the face and everything goes dark.

Cut to an ambulance rushing to hospital... but it's a cheeky editing trick to make us think that we're going to get the "This man has two hearts," "It's just a double exposure" routine again.

When it cuts to inside the Doctor's nowhere around and the scene's actually about a nurse who feels that the doctor should know that the coma patients have been calling out for her. She doesn't believe him, but then they immediately start doing it again so she has to eat a bit of crow there. She's absolutely not going to believe him that they've been out walking around though, even though he's actually got photographic proof on his phone right there. All she has to do is look downwards, but she's not going to do something as absurd as give the guy the benefit of the doubt, so he's told to take some time off.

There's a couple things I can point out about these scenes in the coma ward: there was a suspicious close up of those photos back there of the coma patient and his dog, so that seems like a bit of a clue, and one of the other coma patients is award-winning actress Olivia Colman. Also the actor playing the nurse has a habit of showing up as time travelling heroes, as he's Rip Hunter in Legends of Tomorrow and Rory Williams in this very episode of Doctor Who.

I feel like a time traveller myself watching all these stories so close together, as in the last few days I've seen the Fifth Doctor needing money for a payphone in the 80s, Grace Holloway getting beeped on her pager in the 90s, Rose Tyler calling her mother on a mobile phone in the 2000s, and now they're using smartphones with cameras. I've nearly made it to the present day!

Back at Amelia's house, the Doctor wakes up to find that he's been chained to a radiator and Nebula from the Guardians of the Galaxy is standing there dressed as a police officer. There are sci-fi icons all over the place in this story.

The policewoman informs him that Amelia doesn't live here anymore and kind of implies that she may have gone missing six month ago. Also she lives here now, which seems strange, but okay. The Doctor asks her how many rooms there are on this floor and she humours him by counting all five of them, which is a problem as there's actually six.

It seems that someone's put a perception filter up around the sixth door to stop the owner from noticing it and wandering in, and the Doctor recommends that she doesn't start now. So she immediately decides to go inside and finds the sonic screwdriver lying on a table... slimed.

The Doctor then tells her not to look directly at the monster inside, giving strongly worded warnings of extreme death if she does, and she goes and does that too. She's very good at taking instructions and then doing the exact opposite.

The Doctor, on the other hand, is pretty bad at escapology today and the policewoman lost the key to the handcuffs, so neither of them are in a great position right now.

Prisoner Zero chases the policewoman out in disguise as a man walking a dog, which is actually really clever I reckon. You rarely ever see a shapeshifter turning into two creatures at once. Plus it was well foreshadowed earlier with all the photos of the guy's dog in the hospital and the two of them do a good job of moving in sync. Though the man doing the barking does sort of spoil the disguise.

The Doctor thinks quickly and comes up with a halfway convincing argument why it shouldn't kill them... which the police officer immediately exposes as being a cunning lie intended to save their lives. Turns out that a good way to make a hero likeable in a hurry is to have everyone ignore his good advice and hit him with cricket bats so that you feel really sorry for him.

Fortunately backup arrives in the form of a giant eyeball from outer space which demands that Prisoner Zero leaves the human residence or else it'll be incinerated. Though that's also bad because the heroes are trapped inside the house. But the handcuff lock proves to be no match for the (slightly faulty) sonic screwdriver that the policewoman found in the room she wasn't supposed to go in, and they escape to safety!

It took me way too long to remember that there's a bit of a Hitchhiker's Guide situation going on here, as the heroes are understandably concerned that it's the house that's going to be destroyed, when it's actually the planet they need to be worried about. I did figure it out before the story told me though.

Also, the police officer drops her English accent and reveals that she is Amelia, all grown up and furious with him. Though that was immediately obvious to anyone who looked at her as the resemblance is pretty amazing. Funny how she still has her Scottish accent though despite growing up in an English village (filmed in Wales).

Also, she's not a police officer. She had to choose a costume to wear after knocking out a trespasser and decided that a sexy policewoman would be more intimidating than sexy nurse. She works as a kissogram at the moment, which is the family friendly version of a stripper who goes to parties and keeps their clothes on. Also she's called Amy Pond now, as Amelia sounds like a fairy tale character and she's not doing that anymore.

So the Doctor has ended up in another Girl in the Fireplace scenario where he keeps meeting a woman at different times in her life. But instead of having to protect Madame de Pompadour from clockwork robots from the future, he has to figure out why the ice cream truck is blasting out a warning about the human residence being destroyed.

He decides to invite himself into the first house he sees to check on their TV to see if it's getting the signal too, and it turns out to belong to Victor Meldrew's wife!

Here he discovers two things: everyone seems to know Amy in this town, and they all recognise him as well. Turns out that she was a little bit obsessed with him as a child and drew a lot of cartoons, so everyone knows about the Raggedy Doctor. In fact she kept biting her psychiatrists because they told her he wasn't real, and I don't blame her! Rory should go bite that doctor as well.

He also discovers Jeff (the guy on the left), who lives here and has a laptop and is of no consequence to anything.

The Doctor figures that there's a spaceship in orbit and in 20 minutes or so they'll be incinerating the planet to kill Prisoner Zero and, as a side-effect, everyone else. Hey The Christmas Invasion had a super weapon charging up during the episode as well!

Turns out there's a bit more than one spaceship up there. Man, and I thought the CGI in that earlier shot wasn't great. Still, the design is pretty original; you don't see many eyeball snowflakes flying around in Star Wars or Babylon 5.

The Doctor has just 20 minutes to save the Earth, so it's a pretty fortunately that he's not asleep or insane like he often is after regenerating. Well, maybe a little insane, but that's fairly normal for him. The trouble is this story's set in a village called Leadworth, not London for once, so he doesn't have an airport or a nuclear power plant handy, which would have apparently been a big help for reasons he doesn't elaborate on.

Then the sky goes dark as the aliens put a force field around the Earth, because... I dunno, it makes it easier to incinerate it? It also makes everyone pull out their phones to take a photo of the sun. This leads the Doctor to realise that he's noticed something, and the camera goes on a trip around the village green as he tries to work out what it was.

The camera flies around all these poor extras who had to stand perfectly still as the cameraman walked around them taking photos

I remember a few viewers at the time being concerned that this frozen time Doctorvision sequence was a gimmick we'd be seeing over and over throughout Moffat's time as producer, but it was actually isolated to this story and I think it does a great job of illustrating how the Doctor's regenerating brain is working. He's got the solution to the eyeball threat right there and he knows it, he just needs to take a moment to figure out what he's just figured out.

Plus I love the shot of the camera flying into the telephone box window and back out again; it's very Panic Room (and probably done with the simple technique of just bringing the camera inside and continuing to take photos from there). But it does raise the question...

...why someone is taking a photo of the sun from inside a phone box... with a phone? Or trying to anyway, as the camera looks right at the phone at one point and it's not pointed at anything.

Hey there's Prisoner Zero in the background on the left there, portrayed in part by the world's most patient dog. It moves his head during the scene but otherwise it's as still as anyone. You know who isn't in the shot though? The Doctor and Amy. But then why would the Doctor have seen himself?

Turns out what he'd noticed was nurse Rory pointing his phone at Prisoner Zero while all around him had theirs pointed to the sky (or a phone box). But before the Doctor can go over to him he first has to convince Amy to help him save the world in an extremely limited amount of time.

Amy decides that what she actually wants to do is lock his tie in a car door and tell the owner to go get himself a coffee, which he does. Because she's scary I guess. Maybe he's one of the psychiatrists she bit. One thing I do know is that he's played by the bloke from The Dominators, who helped Jamie blow up Quarks in a quarry.

Amy wants to know who the hell he is and she's not letting him out until she gets a good answer. So the Doctor explains that he's a time traveller and pulls an apple from his pocket, just like Ten did in The Christmas Invasion, but this time it's the companion who's shocked. So shocked that everyone's gone all JJ Abrams lens flare and glowing hair for a second. The apple's got a face carved into it you see, the face that she carved before giving it to him 12 years ago.

He tells her to believe that he's the Doctor for just 20 minutes (and that goes for all of you at home as well). Personally I was sold on him being the Doctor from the moment I saw the clip of him checking that he still had legs at the end of The End of Time, but I can imagine some fans were annoyed that he wasn't David Tennant's identical clone. He definitely won't be wearing Ten's tie again after this, considering how easily it was used against him.

With Amy on his side the Doctor runs over to Rory, who also recognises him as the Ragged Doctor. Plus it turns out that he's Amy's boyfriend! Small village.

Also, they've got an epic Marvel/DC/Doctor Who crossover going on right here and they didn't even realise it.

The Doctor asks Rory why he's photographing a man and his dog and gets the info about the coma patients from him. Turns out that Prisoner Zero can disguise itself as anything, but like the Autons in Rose it needs the original around. In this case it needs a psychic link with a living but dormant mind. So it can be any of the coma patients, it just chose to be the one with the dog because... it wanted a challenge?

It's standing right there still, but it can't actually make a move on them though because it'd give itself away to the eyeball ship scanning the area. So the Doctor decides to give it away himself by using his screwdriver to activate everything in the area...

...but it explodes.

I'm not certain, but I think that screwdriver had survived all of Nine and Ten's lives. And now it's dead, all because Ten just had to have it in his pocket while explosively regenerating. Plus Prisoner Zero sliming it earlier probably didn't do it any favours either. So now the Doctor has no sonic screwdriver, which isn't good because the last time I saw him lose one he didn't get another for 14 years.

Prisoner Zero still can't kill them, but it's able to melt into the sewers and gets away. So that plan failed. But fortunately the Doctor has three things he didn't have three minutes ago: Rory, Rory's phone and Rory's car. But he needs someone else, so he sends the nurse and the fake policewoman to the hospital while he goes off with Rory's phone back to that house he was in earlier. The other one, not Amy's house.

He's come to see his new best friend Jeff, who's currently watching kissograms on his laptop. Or something; this aired too early in the day for them to elaborate, it's not Torchwood.

The Doctor uses his laptop to invite himself to a video chat of the world experts discussing the eyeball snowflake threat.

Though I’m not sure why they're consulting the Games Master on this, I don’t think cheat codes for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Mega Drive are going to be much good in this situation.

The Doctor first uses his UNIT connections to verify his identity... actually no, introducing UNIT would be too much continuity for a pilot episode like this, so he just shows them a few scientific concepts to convince them he's a genius and then leaves Jeff to explain why they should go along with his plan to infect the world with a computer virus from his phone.

Hang on, did he just give Earth the secret of faster than light travel just then? Or did they just get a glimpse of it on a screen? Because that seems like a big deal if he did. Also while I'm complaining about things, the joke about the Games Master being interested in Victor Meldrew's wife didn't work for me. I guess I have just have too much respect for the late astronomer and TV presenter...which is why I'm going to start calling him Sir Patrick Moore from now on.

I love that Jeff is just a complete nobody in this story by the way. He wandered into the background of a shot earlier and that was enough to get him tangled up in the Doctor's scheme and inspired to greatness. Poor baffled Jeff, saviour of Earth.

With the experts (hopefully) getting to work on spreading the Doctor's virus, the Doctor commandeers a fire engine and goes to meet the others at the hospital. I've no idea how he knew which way to go, maybe he's just following the road signs. He also puts the sirens on, because he is a child.

Amy uses the power of her kissogram outfit to enter the hospital (because it makes her look like a policewoman, she didn't seduce anyone), and is told that the doctor's dead and all the nurses too. Though considering that the source of this information is Olivia Colman, who was shown to be in a coma earlier, and her voice is coming out of her daughter's mouth, I'm taking it with a grain of salt.

I feel like Prisoner Zero is the type that would scare a bunch of people away and then claim to have murdered them all afterwards (possibly because it hasn't killed a single person on screen yet). Plus merely killing that doctor wouldn't be enough to keep her down. She could be lying in a pool of her own blood with a giant gash across her torso and an arm missing, and she still wouldn't believe she was dead. She'd just get up and move on to the next patient.

By the way, I would not have expected that Olivia Colman was going to be the surprise main villain of this story. Little girls in matching costumes were already scary but Moffat has made it so their mum’s scary too.

Amy and Rory make a run for it and barricade themselves in the coma ward, but Prisoner Zero is right behind and breaks in easily. But because it's been spying on Amy for years it decides to taunt her a bit about the Doctor not returning. But the Doctor does return (oh, so that's why the episode was going to have that title), as he smashes the fire truck's ladder through the window and climbs inside with three minutes to go.

This is a really green set. Well actually it was filmed in a real hospital, but you know what I mean.

Prisoner Zero taunts the Doctor a bit about him not knowing what caused the crack, saying "The universe is cracked. The Pandorica will open. Silence will fall", but the Doctor's too busy winning to acknowledge arc words right now. The clock on the wall hits zero, along with every other clock and device connected to the internet in the world, and the virus can apparently be traced right back to phone he wrote it on... somehow. Now the eyeball snowflake aliens know exactly where Zero is!

He just took the countdown to doom and inverted it so that the clock reaching zero was the solution!

Then he uploads photos of all the coma patients from Rory's phone... somehow. Did the eyeball snowflakes send him their phone number when they traced him down? Are they just intercepting everything he sends now? Either way, Prisoner Zero requires months to form a psychic link and imitate someone, so it won't be finding a new disguise for a while.

Oh right, it was hiding in Amy's house for 12 years.

Prisoner Zero's psychic link knocks Amy out and her messed up head lets it appear as little Amelia and her Ragged Doctor. Such a cunning way to get around the fact that Rory almost certainly had a photo of his girlfriend on his phone too. But hey, it means the Eleventh Doctor got an evil doppelgänger in his very first story! Though the Doctor doesn't actually know it's supposed to be him at first because he's never seen his own face. You'd think he'd recognise the tie though, it's pretty distinctive.

Little Amelia starts putting a guilt trip on the Doctor, talking about how this is the image of the person she hoped would return and save her... but the Doctor immediately figures out it's the image of the person she can hear talking in the room. I expected him to do a telepathic Time Lord thing to get into her dream, and maybe he does that too, but he tells her to think of what she saw when she totally ignored his instructions and stared right at the monster in her house.

And so Prisoner Zero becomes a perfect imitation of an angry worm creature, the eyeball snowflakes grab it, happy ending. I love how the Doctor took a pair of setbacks (Amy ignoring him and looking at the creature, and Prisoner Zero knocking her out and stealing her identity) and combined them to make his ultimate weapon.

I love Doctor Who episodes with a proper clever logical solution at the end, something that's been earned; that's what I'm here for. And it did all take less than 20 minutes of screen time, I checked (not that it took place in real time). Not bad for a guy who walked into trees and ate fish fingers and custard a few hours ago... or 12 years ago, whatever. Man, imagine if the classic Doctors could've saved the day in less than 20 minutes.

But this is a special hour-long episode with 10 minutes left, so the Doctor gets on Rory's phone and calls the aliens back down for a bit of a chat (despite Rory's concerns about them being "aliens... of death"). He can apparently do that now, despite having to hack every networked device in the world and give it the Millennium Bug just to get their attention a minute ago. All I know is that he's given Rory one hell of a phone bill to pay.

The Doctor begins to head up to the roof to look the aliens in the eye, but feels that it's time for him to get out of his raggedy chrysalis so he grabs some new clothes along the way (Three and Eight stole their outfits from a hospital too, they're a good source of iconic clothing). All the other Doctors chose their costumes soon after the change or after the action was over, but Eleven puts his jacket on just in time at the end of his hero speech, at the point where he finally finishes finding himself and becomes the Doctor.
 
He also decides to change right in front of Amy and Rory, so the episode finally got itself a proper stripper in the end... much to Amy's delight. By the way, Rory is really good at catching clothes. I bet he puts the unused clothes back where they came from afterwards as well, because he is a true hero.

Once it arrives, the Doctor encourages the eyeball snowflake to analyse the world to see if it has any business destroying it, which it has to concede it does not.

Then the Doctor does the "you're in a library, look me up" thing from Forest of the Dead and asks the alien to do a bit of research and see what happened all the other times that someone threatened the Earth. This is only time the episode indulges itself in a bit of mythology, as the eye projects a holographic image of all the Doctors in sequence... giving Eleven the opportunity to walk through the Tenth Doctor's face once he's got his bow tie on. Thankfully no one at the hospital had question marks on their collar or a cricket uniform so he came out looking like a professor instead of someone trying to hard to look wacky.

He ends his speech by saying "Basically, run," and the eyeball does. Hey that's basically the first thing that Nine said in Rose! It's also what Ten thought he should've said to the aliens in The Christmas Invasion. The Doctor's reputation will be a big part of upcoming arcs so this works better in retrospect, but to be honest I didn't have a problem with him doing this at the time either. Especially as it was his encore and he'd already beaten the villain using cleverness (and absolutely no violence).

The Doctor suddenly feels something hot in his jacket pocket and reaches in. Then there's a shot of Amy. Then the Doctor suddenly feels something hot in his jacket pocket and reaches in... it's the Tardis key! There's a really subtle Tardis materialisation sound to explain how it got in there, but I'd rather believe he just put it in there. Means there's one less Tardis capability for the series to never mention again.

Anyway, the Doctor's so keen to see his new Tardis that he basically runs all the way back to Amy's house on foot.

It's a bit more like the First Doctor's Tardis now, with the white window frames and the St. John Ambulance sticker on the door, and it looks much less battered and dirty than it ever has before. It's owning its police box shape now, not trying to disguise itself so much, but I have to admit that if the actual design's changed at all then it's too subtle for me to tell the difference.

The Doctor opens the door and the episode pulls a Rose, showing his reaction without letting us see what he's seeing. Then he vroop vroops away just as Amy and Rory arrive. In a Russell T Davies script there'd be a scene of Amy sharing her feelings with Rory, crying and giving him a hug. In this there's just a silent close up of her face that tells us everything we need to know.

But then there's a shot of Amelia sitting on her suitcase in 1996 still waiting for the Doctor to arrive. It's apparently Amy's dream, as it ends when she wakes up to the sound of the Tardis materialising in her garden. Turns out he's been gone for two years this time, so she's a little bit furious about that, but he finally invites her inside to take a look.

And now we get the reveal of the new console room! It's bloody weird is what it is and near impossible to build a mental image of. Seems a bit smaller too maybe, but much more complex, with walkways going off all over the place and a console covered in junk. It even has hot and cold taps on it!

It's like it was designed for 8 year old Amelia and the accidental time jump screwed that up, it's very fairy tale and whimsical. The Eleventh Doctor too now that I think about it. His new screwdriver's much more sensible and stylish though... plus it's got a green light on this time.

Adult Amy's response to finally seeing the inside of the police box and finding out that it really is bigger on the inside: "I'm in a nighty." She explains that she grew up. The Doctor replies that he'll soon fix that.

The Doctor wants her to travel with him, because he's lonely. Nothing more than that. Definitely nothing to do with the crack appearing on the scanner than looks just like the crack on her wall. He's a bit of a liar, this Doctor.

Amy's fine with going on a trip, as long as he's absolutely sure that he can get her back before tomorrow morning. The last two trips he took he missed by 12 years and then 2 years, and it really screwed her up, but she's willing to trust him this time. Though she doesn't trust him enough to go back into the house and put some clothes on, maybe pack a few things, as every time she's let him out of her sight he's disappeared. Which explains the handcuffs earlier.

Then the episode ends by panning across her bedroom, with all her homemade toys and pictures still lying around. She's going to have to update them now as they're all dressed like the Tenth Doctor.

But why are we panning across all of her old stuff? Is it just to reinforce how travelling with the Doctor has been a dream of hers since childhood?

Oh, it was leading to the wedding dress hanging up. Still, she said she wanted to get back by tomorrow morning so it's not like she's getting cold feet and running away. But companions always leave forever when they fall in love and decide to get married, it's been a Doctor Who tradition since season two! She's got it backwards.


CONCLUSION

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The Eleventh Hour is basically a remake of Drop Dead Fred, as it's about a woman tormented by the imaginary friend she had as a child, who's come back to tear her life apart. Possibly. I haven't actually seen Drop Dead Fred to be honest, which is a bit strange seeing how much of a Rik Mayall fan I am.

Now I'm imagining what Rik Mayall would've been like as the Doctor, or trying to anyway. My mental image of him just won't stop screwing around and overacting long enough for me to get an impression of what he would've been like in the role. And now it can never happen. Oh well, at least I got to see Adrian Edmondson play an evil admiral in Star Wars, which is something I didn't realise I wanted until it happened.

The Eleventh Hour is basically the story of the Doctor pulling a reverse Ace and giving his future companion plenty of childhood issues to get over. Or contributing to them at least. It's also the story of him trying to finish regenerating and not getting a break as he's caught in an escalating series of crises, with all his gadgets exploding and his companion locking his tie in a car door.

A lot of post-regeneration stories put more focus on the companion or recurring characters so that the audience has someone familiar to follow while the new lead actor slowly wins them over. Some stories, like Spearhead from Space, Castrovalva and The Christmas Invasion, even take the Doctor out of the action for a while as he recuperates in bed. This, on the other hand, makes the new Doctor the protagonist from the start and he's rarely ever off screen. He's not a mystery this time and you really sympathise with him as everything conspires against him to make saving the world even harder.

Matt Smith is my Doctor, the one that got me into the series, so I’m a little biased when I say that he’s bloody amazing here and completely personifies the character. It’s always nice seeing a Doctor at the beginning of their run while they've got all the enthusiasm, with the previous Doctor’s decades of accumulated losses and traumas semi-wiped clean. It’s not a universal truth, Nine actually ended up happier than when he started, but man Ten was mopey at the end and Eleven dropped all that baggage immediately and hit the ground running. He does the friendly manic genius thing like Ten, but he's crazier and more childish, like an eccentric professor. His companion's pretty strange this time as well, as she's a fearless lunatic who bit a lot of people as a child. Not quite the normal London teenager from the flat next door who works in a shop.

Amy's an adult who never got the chance for Doctor Who adventures as a kid and feels that she's maybe too old to enjoy them now, so in retrospect I can see why I was able to relate to that. And it's creepy how well the dates in the story line up with my own experience of watching the series:

• The Doctor first meets Amelia in 1996, the same year the TV movie came out, which was my first proper exposure to the series. Then Doctor Who just disappeared again for me. I was the opposite of obsessed with it though, as it didn't impress me much.
• That's why I didn't watch the new series when it first aired, but I feel like I must have caught a bit of Steven Moffat's Forest in the Library two-parter in 2008 and thought 'if this guy's taking over the series maybe I'll give it another shot'. Incidentally most of this episode is a Steven Moffat story taking place in 2008.
• The Doctor returns in 2010 and finally takes Amy away on Doctor Who adventures, the same year this episode got me watching the whole season.

I’ve been around almost the entirely of televised Doctor Who now, classic and modern, and I was relieved to find that this episode's just as good as it was when I first watched it as an ignorant newbie. It wasn't a bad place for me to jump on I reckon, as the series got a bit of an upgrade in its cinematography at the end of Tennant's run due to the new HD cameras and it visually it's relatively fantastic. Plus holy shit the Eleventh Doctor's theme is fantastic. I can't think of many heroic TV themes, but even if I could this would likely still sit near the top of my list.

Though I couldn’t spot all of the references and in-jokes that I missed first time around, because there pretty much weren't any. There’s two types of stories written by fans: the kind that gets to the heart of what they love about the series and puts their own spin without missing the spirit of it, and the kind that keeps throwing in references for other fans to catch to the point where it gets obnoxious. Russell T Davies first episode was definitely column A, and aside from a flash of faces at the end so was this. Which is nice.

It wasn't Steven Moffat's first Doctor Who episode, but it was his first as producer and it feels like a real break from what came before. It was funny watching this right after Rose and The Christmas Invasion because it feels like a different series, in look and tone, more cinematic and whimsical. Still a step removed from reality, but in a slightly different direction. The story is pure enthusiasm, spilling out of the keyboard of a sitcom writer who'd likely been thinking how he'd kick off a Doctor Who season since he was seven years old. Steven Moffat's kind of like the Joss Whedon of Doctor Who as he's fairly divisive due to his quippy dialogue and idiosyncrasies and... stuff, but I consume fun and witty dialogue to survive so I was pleased by how snappy the script is. The words were placed in the correct order to put a smile on my face and it's hard for me to find fault with that.

I'm not sure it's my favourite ever episode of Doctor Who, but it'd make it onto the shortlist. The trailer they stuck on the end is pretty good too!

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COMING SOON

Doctor Who continued with The Beast Below, but next on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm reviewing Deep Breath! Or Don't Breathe, it's one of those two, I can never remember.

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