Apr 06 2010
Nerd In: I’ll stick with Doctor Who
I admit I was worried. Now I admit I was wrong.
The world has not ended.
Before I go any further, I’ll just go ahead and issue a big, bold SPOILER ALERT. Doctor Who Season Five won’t premiere in the US until April 17, so if you’re planning on watching this on BBC America, you may want to skip this post.
I was worried about how young Matt Smith is. I worried that, as an actor, he just isn’t seasoned enough. I worried that I wouldn’t relate to a younger-looking Time Lord. I worried that the 11th Doctor would be….hormonal.
I called Smith a dough-faced tosser.
And frankly he may be all those things, but it all adds up to a Doctor I can believe in: Goofy, wild-eyed, over-confident, totally oblivious and yet wise beneath his baby-flesh face. What really sold me, though, is how head writer Steven Moffat introduced him in The Eleventh Hour.
Each incarnation of the Doctor has its own history, its own gestation, its own social development. Smith’s Doctor is barely born before he’s hurting people he cares about: Amelia Pond, a young, neglected girl just looking for someone who won’t let her down.
The Doctor crashes into her backyard, promises to help, then vanishes for 12 years, leaving Amelia to become obsessed with her “Raggedy Doctor” and undergo years of therapy for her belief in an imaginary friend. After reentering her life as an adult and saving the planet from incineration, he disappears again for two years. He returns the second time on the eve of her wedding night, a detail Amy (as she now calls herself) doesn’t disclose to the Doctor as she joins him in his T.A.R.D.I.S.
Now that is some dramatic conflict: The Doctor has no clue what devastation he’s caused to this girl and how much more he could do while trying to show her the wonders of the universe. And looking so young only compounds the tension.
Overall, the first episode was wonderfully shot and edited, with an extremely charming opening and, later, some stop-motion photographic effects to illustrate how the Doctor sees space and time (more of that I hope).
The only bones I have to pick with the episode:
- The plot revolves over-zealous prison guards who threaten to incinerate the earth if they can’t finda shape-changing fugitive alien who hides in, among other places, a hospital. This is pretty much the same exact circumstances in which the Doctor met Martha Jones. In Smith and Jones, intergalactic cops move a hospital to the moon in order to find a shape-changing fugitive; the staff and patients running out of air is reasonable collateral damage.
- Initially, the Doctor believes Amy’s a cop because of her uniform. She later explains that she’s a “Kiss-o-gram,” and also wears nun’s habits and nurse outfits. C’mon! Kiss-o-gram? Do people even do that anymore? And in a small town? I always thought that was a TV-created euphemism for a stripper. Why not just make Pond a stripper? That would be even more dramatic.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I probably won’t be blogging every episode–but then again, maybe I will.
