'The Eleventh Hour'
03/04/2010
BBC One
So farewell then, David Tennant. You wowed the crowd though the existential angst was a massive downer and RTD had long passed his sell-by date. 'Look to the future' as your weird two-hearted alter ego might say... And any man who can admit to liking Coldplay and not come across as a total wanker while simultaneously doing Hamlet justice deserves at least some adulation.
And then there was Christopher Ecclestone, whose one series in the role still has a haunting resonance, despite the naff aliens, munchkin Daleks and Captain Bloody Jack.
This leaves us with Doctor Who XI, the curiously shaped Matt Smith, and new turnip-headed showrunner Stephen Moffatt. It's said that the Moff's Nu Who episodes (Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace, Forest of the Dead, The Empty Child etc.) were some of the best, but they all had a tendency to get too caught up in their own cleverness and abandon RTD's never-ending grief-fest for a sort of fetishisation of the Doc which was no more true to the source material than ol' Russell was.
The first episode of this new paradigm thingie is, then, a curate's egg farted out by a conflicted chicken. The annoyances are still there: all the whizz-bangs, overwrought drama, the ADHD-friendly pace aimed at kids (and some adults) with five-second attention spans, the improbable solutions to improbable situations, the wholly unconvincing CGI effects and the inevitable love interest rammed in to keep the morons who actually like soap operas interested too, not to mention the occasional flashes of scenery-chewing melodrama that blighted RTD's work at its worst.
In other ways, what has changed is simply cosmetic. Whilst RTD felt a neurotic urge to keep reminding us that, yes, he was gay and - FUCKING HELL! - there were other homosexuals on the planet (to which a 2005 audience should really have replied - 'who gives a fuck either way'?), so the Moff brings his own neuroses. Yes, he's Scottish, so it is no surprise that the inevitable 'Scotland's Great & England's shit' in-joke is invoked, not to mention a reference to the Jock lust for fried food. It's all horribly self-indulgent attention whoring, like a 14-year-old girl fretting about her weight and insisting on telling everyone about it every 15 seconds. What has been Nu Who's main flaw is its constant self consciousness, which manifests as both a itch that must be scratched and a lazy reliance on its heritage.
Equally cosmetic, if you'll forgive the irony, is Matt Smith as the new Doctor. It's fitting that he spends most of the episode in David Tennant's old costume before donning a new set of clothes that look a bit like... David Tennant's old costume. Obviously every new Doctor must thrash about a bit before they become their own man, but it's telling that whereas poor old Colin Baker nailed it in seconds, Matt Smith still comes across as a sort of tepid tribute act at the end of his first episode, right down to the 'timey-wimey' clichés and the weird Freudian fixation on the Sonic-Screwdriver-As-Magic-Wand schtick.
Of course, much is made of the fact that the Doctor saves the world sans Tardis (which is too busy turning into an expensive and overdone Steampunk pastiche) or the aforementioned screwdriver, like he used to before the BBC started throwing money at its one-time sci-fi Cinderella. But this seems like a drastic over-compensation for over-used tropes, as is the point when XI proclaims loudly that he IS the Doctor mainly for dramatic effect, but in part, one suspects because he hasn't otherwise sealed the deal.
It doesn't help that Matt Smith is faintly insipid. His voice lacks force and his performance is without sparkle or real presence, like there's no real passion for the gig. This is not helped by scripted dialogue that would sound stilted and routine if it wasn't coming out of Tennant's or Ecclestone's mouth, all of which creates an uneasy sense that we've spent the last five years watching a truly monumental turd polishing exercise rather than a decent sci-fi series. Worse, there is nothing remarkable about this Doctor - his costume is staid and unimaginative and his personality is indistinct. Perhaps it doesn't help that Smith's off-stage demeanour is that of a preening, self-satisfied BAPA bollock, right down to the ridiculous 'look-at-me-I'm-an-Ac-TOR' leather trilby he sports when spotted in Confidential, and the lack of personal depth and nuance he brings to the role. Tennant had old man's eyes. Smith does not.
Equally uninspiring is new time tottie Amy Pond, played by an inevitably Scottish Karen Gillan. Leaving aside the absurdity of a little girl growing up alone in a large house with an on-the-run alien criminal hiding in a room she can't notice, whilst somehow retaining a Scots accent AND ending up as a Kissergram (why does the Doctor never travel with any Plain Janes?), she is also far too abrasive and unsympathetic a character. Gillan's performance is also too cold fish and patronising, and there is none of the immediate, easy rapport with the audience that, say, Billy Piper, Freema Agyeman and Catherine Tate - or for that matter, Katy Manning - brought to the table.
Did I mention that the plot has holes you could pilot a battleship through and a cottage hospital setting that is a far-too-blatant retread of 'Spearhead From Space'? (The Doctor even gets his new clothes there a la Pertwee/III. It's surprising he doesn't steal Bessie for good measure, but this being HEAVY HANDED ROARING NU WHO, he settles for a fire engine instead.) Or that the monster (an enormous snake-like shape-shifter with silly teeth, that hangs from the top of the screen like a elephant's penis so they didn't have to put any more thought into its design) is crap?
So are the other aliens - giant eyeballs flying through space in flimsy space ships that look like they were rendered by a 17-year-old graphics student on a knackered Amiga A1200. The big Nu Who delusion seems not to be that it's as good or better than the old series but that its production values are ultimately any better, and in terms of crap monsters, they most plainly aren't. They even had the cheek to feature a montage of the Doctor's past foes, including Sea Devils, who somehow seem start-of-the-art by comparison.
And yet, parts of this episode do actually work. The possibility that Pond is as much psycho stalker as new BFF and groupie is intriguing, but doubtless will be buggered up. Whilst her hapless boyfriend Rory, played with suitably floppy pathos by Arthur Darvill, serves as an effective foil, quite literally Amy's Nurse to Amy's Doctor. His role is no doubt destined to be 'the other woman' in the Doctor's relationship with his new companion, but it would be nice if more was done with an intriguing character. The scene where the Doctor searches his memory (using a gloriously surreal time lapse photography special effect) is inspired, and the plot device of 'the crack' (apparently in a wall, but actually in the fabric of space-time itself) is genuinely ominous. It remains to be seen whether the good bits will outnumber the bad parts to a degree sufficient enough to make it different from the previous four series, but for now perhaps this series deserves just enough rope to hang itself...
...Apart from the pisspoor new rendition of the theme tune, which is in turn overly orchestral to the point of self-parody, has appalling timing and ultimately sounds like Drum 'n Bass meets Ice Cream van. Murray Gold, hang your head in SHAME...
WHOPOINTS 6/10
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