by Karen Kalbacher

Created on: April 06, 2010

The Eleventh Hour
Stephen Moffat

A crash landing and Matt Smith is off and running as the newly regenerated Doctor in the fifth season series opener of Doctor Who. Mr. Smith – as ever an ironic name for a man playing Doctor who as you could get – jumps in with both feet and within five seconds his performance had me roped in and wanting more.

The Doctor in a damaged TARDIS crashes into the backyard of Amelia Pond, a small Scottish girl with a frightening crack in her wall. Still a little muddled from his recent regeneration, the Doctor is in full on discovery mode and in a whimsical scene from a rather dark writer like Moffat, spends several minutes taste testing food and there’s a cute little throwback to the old show in his apparent hatred for carrots. Colin Baker’s Doctor was tortured by one of his companions with constant threats of carrot juice and the reference was the first indication that this season was feeling more connected to the old series.

The plot is pretty basic on the surface. An alien is hiding on this side of a scary crack in a small girl’s wall. The creatures on the other side identify him as Prisoner Zero. Then it becomes the Doctor’s job to help catch the killer alien before he kills people. Even the Doctor seems aware that this is pretty basically him saving the world from the big bad again and he seems cheery about it.

Interspersed is Amelia Pond. He meets her when she’s a little girl with a scary crack in her wall and ruins her life for years when adorably, he screws up the time when he’s supposed to come back and five minutes becomes twelve years and he meets Amelia Pond again. Then again he attempts to return and overshoots it by two years which leads me to believe the TARDIS is back to working at factory standards.

The TARDIS got a makeover as well this season and the design was less the new slick TARDIS and more a  hybrid return to the original console room. Portholes returned. The center console now has a different center that lifts and falls as in the classic television show and the faces of the old Doctors were even featured in a scan made by the aliens.

What does this mean for the show? Are stronger ties being created between old and new? Will the Brigadier make an appearance? Daleks and Cybermen were shown in the preview but I wonder if more characters from the original series are on their way.

But whether they’re sewing together the old and new, the Eleventh Hour was loaded with all the elements needed to be a perfect episode of Doctor Who: Alien baddies, crazy humor, creepy hints at things to come and a wonderful speech about how the Doctor will always save our human butts from the fire. I feel warm and fuzzy inside and perfectly comfortable with Mr. Smith.

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