An Hour of Who a Day: 04/20/15

April 20: "The Eleventh Hour"

DVD and Blu-ray releases

So. A new producer and a new cast, but the same show as ever, as "The Eleventh Hour" makes clear in its opening moments, as the TARDIS is crashing towards Earth after the events at the end of The End of Time. Even in this scene you get the sense that things will be OK with this new Doctor, as he struggles back inside the TARDIS and then relaxes for a moment, until the TARDIS goes out of control again.

And then it's straight into the brand-new title sequence, with a new arrangement of the theme tune (although, other than being in a higher key, it's not actually that much different from the last one) and a new logo. The sequence looks oddly retro, with the cloud time vortex and the lightning bolts -- it's not hard to imagine this being the sort of titles Doctor Who might have had in the '90s. The DW TARDIS logo is kind of cheesy, though.

But as I said, other than such overt changes, this largely looks like business as usual for the show. Visually this isn't much different from the previous stories -- we're not talking about a sea change as large as the one between The Horns of Nimon/Shada and The Leisure Hive, and with Murray Gold still providing the music, the sense of continuity between the two eras is reinforced. No, where the differences happen is in the details, the emphasis. Russell T Davies, in some respects, pitched Doctor Who toward teenage girls; Steven Moffat, by contrast, is explicitly targeting children, with the expectation that everyone else will happily go along for the ride.

The most obvious occurrence of this is Amelia Pond, the little girl who encounters the newly-regenerated Doctor after he crash-lands in her garden. We learn almost immediately that this Doctor is incredibly comfortable with children and that children are comfortable with him, and that there's a sense of magic at hand. It's this sense of magic and wonder that sustains "The Eleventh Hour" -- it's only the first episode for the new team (well, all right, first broadcast -- it's actually the fourth episode they made), and already that sense of supreme confidence that pervaded David Tennant's final hours is here in full force. Steven Moffat's given us a great script to latch on to, one that plays with time travel a bit but makes it firmly about the effect of the Doctor on a little girl's life, as this crazy man whirls into her life and then disappears for twelve years. "The Eleventh Hour" is never worried that the audience will have a tough time with any of this, and it's right not to: this makes perfect sense.

One other contrast that's clear fairly early is that Matt Smith is a huge presence in this episode. "The Christmas Invasion" had David Tennant removed from much of the action, but here they know that we're getting a brand new cast, so they wisely make the Doctor front and center and have everything revolving around him -- and while he's "still cooking", he seems more or less settled early on. ("Well, that's much better," the Doctor says at one point, after Amy's hit him with a cricket bat. "Brand new me. Whack on the head, just what I needed.") In this regard it's a lot like Tom Baker's debut, which established the fourth Doctor pretty quickly and then let him get on with it. We get a similar thing here.

And let's be clear: Matt Smith is amazing in this -- he's absolutely the Doctor almost from the word go, and his ability to play both drama and comedy (sometimes at the same time) is perfectly attuned to the show. It's not hard to see why they cast him, but he's incredibly watchable in every scene. It helps that he's been given some good material -- discussing the crack in Amelia's wall, convincing Jeff that he has to be great to help save the world, being incredibly dismissive of Prisoner Zero's attempt to disguise itself as him ("Well, that's rubbish. Who's that supposed to be?" he says. "It's you," Rory replies bemusedly. "Me? Is that what I look like?" the Doctor asks surprisedly), and calling the Atraxi back just so he can tell them to clear off... Matt Smith does it all and makes it look easy.

None of this is to denigrate the other cast members -- Karen Gillan more than holds her own as Amy Pond, and Arthur Darvill is wonderfully grounded as Rory ("Did he just bring them back?" he asks no one in particular. "Did he just save the world from aliens and then bring all the aliens back again?") -- but "The Eleventh Hour" is wholeheartedly about this new Doctor, about the effect he had on a little girl and how he's definitely still the same man he was. The sequence at the end, with all the Doctors in sequence followed by the eleventh, merely confirms what we already know. It's hard to think of a better debut than this one, in terms of doing everything they need to do and doing it with such style. This episode is an absolute knockout -- and it's only the first one!