Doctor Who — Series 5

Doctor Who's fifth series takes the strengths of Russell T. Davies' revival and smooths out nearly all the issues that routinely gave me pause. WIth the exception of an unnecessary two-parter and a useless Dalek return (now with Freeze-Pop colors!), the start of Steven Moffat's tenure as showrunner elevates the series from a whimsical but dodgy program to one of the best shows currently on television.

Admittedly, I think just about everyone expected an uptick in quality when Davies handed off the series to its best writer, but Moffat completely overhauls Doctor Who without sacrificing its innate charms. It still feels like the classic space serial it is, but Moffat trades Davies' only fitfully earned "golly gee whiz" mood for a more grounded wonder, one that is a payoff to the adventure rather than the default tone of voice. I'm told the original run of Dr. Who had its moments of darker energy, and Moffat very much targets that side of Who, to the point that the series, while still feeling appropriate for a family, might actually challenge, even alienate, viewers.

But first, let's talk about the casting, because it's as important to the success of Series Five as the tightened writing. David Tennant was spellbinding as the Tenth Doctor, his incessant grin and goofy frame perfectly suited to Davies' vision of the series. Matt Smith had a great deal to live up to when he took on the role, suffering reams of preemptive criticism as if he'd been the one to push out Tennant, but damned if he doesn't shut everyone up from the start.

As I said in my review of the first episode, Tennant played the Doctor as if he wanted nothing more than to be human; Smith's Doctor, on the other hand, is quite content to be a higher being. But he does still admire our potential: in the series finale, he responds to a show of immense compassion from one of his companions by sighing, "Why do you have to be so human?" his voice mixing exasperation with affection in an almost paternal sense. Smith makes for a slier, wittier, more scabrous (if still amiable) version of the Doctor, and while I figured I'd prefer Moffat's time as Who head over Davies', I was most surprised to see how quickly I not only accepted Smith but came to favor him over Tennant.

Backing up Smith's revelatory performance is an equally powerful one from Karen Gillan as the new companion Amy Pond. At once a continuation of Donna's feisty presence and a whole new breed of Companion, Amy is such a fantastic, compelling character in her own right that she's the first Companion I wouldn't mind following around even without the Doctor.

Amy is a bit unbalanced, her own complexes arising from the Doctor himself, who appeared to her as a child and then inadvertently disappeared for years, leaving her to endure ridicule and therapy. This gives her an intriguingly spiky edge with the Doctor, burying some friction between their happy adventures. Davies' Companions always fit into some easy categorization with the Doctor: Rose had an outright romance with him, Martha unrequited love and Donna an almost sibling-like interplay. Moffat gives more depth to Amy: her relationship with the Doctor is Platonic, occasionally suggestive, deeply committed but also occasionally contentious. This is reflected in the Doctor's treatment of her, which isn't always so friendly and supportive.

Moffat uses Smith's and Gillan's total chemistry and rich characterizations to great effect. Neither the Doctor nor Amy ever seems to know where they stand, an ambiguity that weighs even heavier on poor Rory (Arthur Darvill), Amy's fiancé. From the moment we see the sweet but defensive lad, it's clear that he's dealt with Amy's issues (it can't be easy hearing tales about the "raggedy Doctor") but that he loves her dearly, and the zeal with which she joins the Doctor unsettles him. The Doctor invites Rory along too about halfway into the series, but it's amusing that he seems to do so both willingly as a means of preventing Amy from getting to close to him yet reluctantly because part of him maybe likes this gorgeous, loopy lady.

Because Moffat and his writing team create such richer characters, they also have a responsibility to write better, deeper stories. Boy, do they deliver: from the mournful, disturbing first episode to the glee of the Venetian episode, Doctor Who's fifth series connects more fully to both the creepy genre horror and the idealistic elation of the show. In-between, Amy's muddled feelings for the Doctor are drawn out through an adventure that forces her to choose between him and her fiancé, an adventure that also happens to be one of the creepiest bits of TV I've ever seen. Elsewhere, we get a particularly heartbreaking portrait of the kind but troubled Vincent Van Gogh, who might only be driven more mad for the kindness he receives from his new but transitory friends. Also, the series-long arc is woven into each episode with far greater subtlety than the haphazard "Bad Wolf" reminders of yesteryear.

Best of all is the two-parter that brings back the Weeping Angels from Moffat's mini-masterpiece "Blink," somehow making the damn things even more terrifying while simultaneously moving deeper into the overarching mystery of the cracks in space-time. "Time of the Angels"/"Flesh and Stone" work as a two-part episode should, the first establishing the story, defining the characters' roles within it and culminating in a narrative shift so seismic it necessitates a follow-up to address the upheaval. These two episodes were so brilliant, so scary, so well-acted and so unexpectedly poignant that I didn't watch another episode for two weeks afterward so I could mull them over more, and when I resumed the series, I rewatched these first.

Part of what drew me to Moffat when he was simply one of the show's writers was his interest in the actual time element of the Time Lord. Nearly the whole of the series plays on Moffat's fascination with the possibilities of time jumps, and he even makes the fits and jerks emotional. Amy was clearly traumatized by the Doctor disappearing for years, while River Song returns with an even greater air of tragedy to her as the person who lives the reverse of the Doctor's timeline. Moffat likes to bewilder, but he always makes his episodes easy to follow provided one doesn't seek to iron out the very fabric of space-time to understand everything, and part of the reason he never loses sight of the endpoint is that he always gives the audience a reason to care about what's happening.

As I said, not everything in the series is a triumph. I'm somewhat biased against the Dalek episode because I'm frankly tired of them, but "Victory of the Daleks" also irritates for its assumption that the audience will love the WWII throwback despite how uninvolving it is. Worse is the Silurian two-parter, an utterly dull narrative that lacks the plot to even fill a single episode stretched to infuriating lengths. And the fact that it ends with one of the series' most poignant, devastating moments actually made me angrier; after such wonderfully incorporated arc material, the writers just drop in a key moment of the series without any real connection to the uselessness of the two-parter's plot.

But these are hiccups in an otherwise incredibly consistent series. Because the writing and acting is so strong throughout, the finale can go further than I've ever seen the show travel, ripping apart space-time in a way that feels both epic and terribly isolating and small-scale. In response to his critics, Smith, so ruthlessly mocked for being so young, looks older and wearier than any Doctor I've ever seen in his wrenching goodbye speeches to the adult and child versions of Amy, his tone brotherly and fatherly in equal measure and communicating a love that goes far, far beyond "will-they-won't-they" TV tension.

If Davies' Who had the power to occasionally grip me with moving moments of danger and loss, Moffat's show has me so completely wrapped up in these characters that the thought of any of them slipping through one of those cracks in space-time, not only killing them but erasing all memory of their existences from the universe, truly terrified me. I care about these people. I feel their fright when a monster actually scares, their fear of losing each other and their joy when the show's irrepressible optimism peeks through even in the darkest hour. After all is said and done with the series and the Doctor invites his pals to stay on with him, the sense of delight that bursts out of Amy and Rory has been so battle-tested by despair that their undiluted enthusiasm hit me harder than just about any moment of the "Allons-y!"sunniness of the show as it existed. The strong end-run of Davies' tenure warmed my occasionally tepid response to the series, but it was Moffat who made me a true fan.

Doctor Who — "The Eleventh Hour"

So much happens in the first episode of Doctor Who's fifth series that there's no way I could address everything I wanted to in a season-encompassing review, so I'll lay out some thoughts in a separate post.

I had anticipated Steven Moffat hitting the ground running as creative head of Doctor Who; were I to list the 10 best episodes of New Who, all of his penned episodes would make the cut. As I've said in previous Who posts, Moffat's style combines wit, edginess and an atmosphere that relies on suggestion over confrontation to unsettle the audience. His approach was an antidote to the sometimes cloying sentimentality of Russell T. Davies, who stuck to the child-oriented side of the program while Moffat gave kids something to think and fret about.

What I did not expect is that Moffat would find a new Doctor who could communicate the same things through his body language and delivery. Like those who saw this transition happen in real time, I felt sad to see David Tennant go. He was so effortlessly charismatic, so capable of pulling off whatever the writers required of him, that he left his successor big shoes to fill. Matt Smith, however, proves instantly that he's not only capable of the task but perfect for a Moffat-run Who.

When he crashes in his wrecked TARDIS outside the large but rotting home of wee Scottish transplant Amelia Pond, the still-transforming Doctor displays a complete personality shift from his predecessor. If the Tenth Doctor's catchphrase was "Allons-y," the Eleventh's might as well be, "Oh, would you come on, already?" It's not that he's hostile, per se, only so removed from others that his directness can seem edgy. Davies' conception of the Doctor always made him sound as if he'd like nothing more than to be a human; Moffat's Doctor appears to be just fine being a superior creature, thank you very much.


"The Eleventh Doctor" is so simultaneously funny and terrifying (and, occasionally, heartbreaking) that it instantly raises the bar for the series. As the Doctor notes (among frantically and rudely demanding different foods to test his new taste buds), Amelia's calm toward an alien who fell from the sky commanding her must make the crack in her bedroom she fears truly scary. And God is it; it's like the ragged gash from Roman Polanski's Repulsion, a subtly expanding fissure concealing the escape of a prisoner from a cross-dimensional prison.

I'm going to try to stop summarizing there, because if I don't I'll never stop. Like "The Girl in the Fireplace," another Moffat episode, "The Eleventh Hour" splits time between two relative points; the Doctor heads into the split to investigate the prisoner breakout and returns five minutes later, only to find that 12 years have passed and the wide-eyed girl is now a bitter young woman scarred by teases and analysis over her insistence of a "raggedy doctor" who visited her as a child. Amelia, now "Amy," feels anger over sadness, and we see the Doctor's edge reflected in her.

If Smith quickly proves himself in this episode, Karen Gillan does as superb a job in carving out her own territory from previous Companions. She's sharp-tongued, but not in Donna's bromantic sense; Tate formed a solid double act with Tennant, but there's tension between the Doctor and Amy I haven't really seen so far, familiar only with New Who and thus of two romantic Companions and one Laurel and Hardy-esque situation. Amy captures the best of both, still wounded from the pain the Doctor indirectly caused her but intrigued in more ways than one about him. When the Doctor strips before Amy and her fiancé, Rory, she keeps watching, even responding to Rory's snippy question of whether she's going to turn away with a curt, "Nope." Frankly, I'm as interested in seeing how Amy grows as the Doctor.

As far as monsters go, Moffat has always preferred the suggestion of terror punctuated by the fleetest glimpses of full-on, pants-wetting horror. Small wonder, then, that the escaped prisoner is a creature that eludes capture by taking on other forms and manages to remain unseen in its natural form by lingering in the corner of one's eye. Even when all seems to be calm, the slightest flicker of discrepancy grows in the mind until HOLY JESUS WHAT IN THE NAME OF—


There are inherent setbacks to Doctor Who: its family-friendly format and modest budget can only accommodate a certain range of ambition. "The Eleventh Hour" is one of the few episodes, particularly coming off the incredibly uneven Davies years, that really shows what the series can be capable of; its wit—"You're Scottish, fry something"—, suspense and rich characterization (both the Eleventh Doctor and Amy emerge so fully formed this series debut never feels like your basic establishing episode) make for a truly stellar episode of television. Considering just how much was reset this series, as much was at stake with this episode as Davies' resurrecting pilot. But unlike the gradual piecing together of new characters and hinted arcs that defined Davies' largely underwhelming series openers, Moffat's does not set the groundwork for better episodes later. It is simply great TV, fully realized while still tantalizing the audience with promises of further growth. I'm in love all over again.