Doctor Who 5x04: The Time of Angels

Now that's more like it! After two disappointing episodes I was starting to worry about the direction the Steven Moffat era of the show was going in. Fortunately, The Time of Angels was a far superior production and has restored my trust in the current production team.

The episode hits the ground running with a spectacular pre-titles sequence which reintroduces the mysterious River Song. A guard is hallucinating that he is in a garden but he is actually on a space ship. He's been drugged by River Song who has stolen a flight recorder box and engraved a message onto it. Some time in the future the box is recovered from a museum by the Doctor and Amy who travel back in time and rescue River Song after she escapes the guards by leaping out into space. The constant switching between locations and time zones never feels jarring and its a sign of how good a writer Steven Moffat is that he can pull it off. Only a show like Doctor Who could switch narrative so easily.

The Doctor, Amy and River follow the Byzantium to the planet Alfafa Metraxis where they discover that 'The Byzantium' crash landed. River does not seem surprised by this and the Doctor and Amy discover that she is working with a team of militaristic clerics who are hunting the occupant of the 'Byzantium' vault... a lone Weeping Angel.

From here on. the episode settles down to a more standard scenario of a team of soldier trying to hunt down monsters through dark caves.  It recalls James Cameron's Aliens as well as the Fifth Doctor story Earthshock.

The idea of clerics as soldiers is a nice touch of worldbuilding for this future society. Iain Glenn is good as Father Octavian, the leader of the Clerics. He has a hard time tolerating the Doctor's jibes at him. The others feel a bit like red-shirts as they express very little personality. Their sole purpose is to be picked off by the angel one by one.

The Weeping Angels are a little different this time. Now they can project themselves through images, like Samara from The Ring. They can also feast off radiation and the Doctor and his friends discover that the statues inside the caves are actually regenerating angels. Some might consider these extra abilities unnecessary but it is really no different to the Daleks getting more abilities in The Dalek Invasion of Earth after their first appearance. If Steven Moffat intends to reinvent the Angels as a recurring foe then it helps.

If you've followed the publicity images and set reports then you'll know that this was the first episode that Matt Smith recorded as the Doctor. You wouldn't have guessed it from his performance though as he already seems comfortable in the role. He effortlessly switches between funny, serious and worried in a blink of an eye. It's so obvious now why Steven Moffat cast him: he makes being the Doctor look effortless. It certainly proves that whatever was wrong with his performance in Victory of the Daleks, it had nothing to do with his lack of experience.

Karen Gillian is effective at playing Amy Pond as a feisty young woman, but there's very variety in how the character behaves. She shows cleverness in outwitting the angel, although she still seems a little too quick on the uptake in these science fiction scenarios. Still, the fact that she has an angel inside her means that we may get to see her more frightened and vulnerable than before.

Alex Kingson is great as River Song. She's still an archaeologist, but there's a touch of femme fatale to her in the pre-titles sequence. She is said to have killed someone, but who? Is she really the Doctor's future wife? She has developed into a far more interesting character than the one we were introduced to in Silence in the Library and I can't wait to find out the answers to the questions surrounding her.

Adam Smith had already proven himself as a good director with The Eleventh Hour and that's still very much the case here. He really sells the fast paced excitement of the pre-titles sequence and the creepiness of the cave exploration later in the episode. We're long way away from the flat direction that Andrew Gunn gave in the last two episodes. Hopefully the rest of the series will be more like Adam Smith and less like Andrew Gunn.

Murray Gold also delivered a fantastic score. The use of choir and vocals suited the more divine nature of the Angels and the Clerics that we saw here. His Eleventh Doctor theme works really well int he build up to the cliffhanger.

It is the cliffhanger where this almost perfect episode falters. That final shot makes it all too clear how the cliffhanger is resolved. We see that the Doctor is shooting at the gravity globe so it is fairly obvious he's going to use the explosion to make everyone reach the deck of the Byzantium. Perhaps it would have been better to cut after the Doctor fired the gun? I don't know.

On the other hand, the next time trailer is far more exciting. It seems that the Doctor and Amy are finally going to become aware that the cracks in time appear to be following them. That will be interesting.

Overall, I would say this is as good as The Eleventh Hour and far superior to the other two episodes. If the second part can be as good as the first, we are on to the second brilliant story  of the Matt Smith era.

9/10

Doctor Who 5x03: Victory of the Daleks

Terry Nation grew up in the Second World War, an experience which seemed to influence the development of his Dalek creations. Their "dislike for the unlike" on creed of the Nazis. In The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Doctor and his companions visited a bombed out London not too dissimilar to the city during the blitz. Here, the Daleks were presented as tanks, rolling through the streets of a ruined London. killing people and enslaving others. When Terry Nation finally addressed the origin of the Daleks in Genesis of the Daleks, he presented Skaro was in a war torn planet where the racially impure were rejected. It made sense then, for the modern production team to put the Daleks into the proper World War II setting, taking the monsters back to their roots. Unfortunately, the script fails to deliver on the potential of its premise.

After receiving their summons from Winston Churchill last in the previous episode, The Doctor and Amy arrive at the Cabinet War Rooms a little too late. Winston is no longer worried about the Daleks, who he believes are an invention of Scottish Scientist Bracewell. Winston wants to use them against the Nazis, but the Doctor is convinced that the Daleks are up to something and is determined to prove their manipulative ways to Churchill.

In contrast to The Empty Child, we only ever see the war damage from the safety of the Cabinet War Rooms. There's no sense of how it's impacting on ordinary people. There's a subplot about a WREN who has lost her boyfriend, but this gets quickly buried under all the Dalek plot and is pretty much forgotten about.

The Doctor makes a grave mistake in trying to get the Daleks to reveal their true identity, as he ends up giving them a voice testimony of his identity, which is what they wanted. They reveal that Bracewell is their creation and transmat to their ship.

At this point the Wartime setting becomes completely irrelevant. The Doctor follows the Daleks to their ship where they use the Doctor's testimony to activate a device which generates a whole new race of Daleks. These new Daleks are not particularly good.  I can't say I'm too keen on the new design either. The colours may be gaudy, but what really niggles is the fact that the Dalek casings look like their made of plastic instead of metal. They're more like toys than war machines. The set of the Dalek Spaceship is even worse. It's just a bland white room. It's not a patch on the gaudy ships of the RTD era.

All the plotting and manipulation is tossed aside as the Daleks opt for a straightforward attack on the Earth.
Bracewell is able to make bi-planes fly into space to fight the Daleks.

The Bi-Planes beat the Daleks, but the Daleks have turned Bracewell into a bomb. The Doctor and Amy manage to convince Bracewell that he's human. When Russell T Davies presented an emotional moment he made it convincing. Somehow trying to convince a robot that he is human is not that good.

The characterisation of Winston Churchill was not quite right. He is presented as a straightforward good guy, full of bluster and little else. His alliance to the Daleks is born out of misunderstanding, and it might have been more dramatic to see him accepting the evil of the Daleks as a necessary risk to beating Hitler.

I don't know why, but the new Doctor really grated on me this week. Maybe Matt's performance was a bit off? Maybe Mark Gatiss had written him as a Pertwee clone? Who knows? Some of his dialogue, like the "I've defeated you time and time again" bit, felt like they were written for a classic series Doctor, and didn't have the power of the Eccleston or Tennant Dalek confrontations.

With the focus of this episode on the Doctor and the Daleks, Amy Pond was left just giving a few quips and being feisty in the background. She seemed to be showing an interest in the grieving WREN, but once that subplot had dissapeared, Amy ended up comforting the stupid sci-fi robot guy. Her "have you ever loved someone you shouldn't?" line suggests a possible direction for her character, but that's all.

Mark Gatiss has always been the writer to turn to when the showrunner needs something "British" and nostalgic, whether its Victorian London in The Unquiet Dead or Quatermass references in The Idiot's Lantern. The World War II setting seemed right up his street, with all the British Patriotism and all those scientists and soldiers recalling his other favourite show, Quatermass. However, Gatiss chose to write this story like a Bank Holiday War time movie, which means it's a very straightforward, unambiguous tale.

In conclusion, this episode is the first clunker of Series 5. Still, they've got another ten episodes to show improvement.

Next: The return of River Song and The Weeping Angels!

Doctor Who 5x02:The Beast Below

After a year of specials and an hour long episode to introduce the new Doctor and companion, it's refreshing to get back to an ordinary, standalone 45 minute episode. Having fulfilled the difficult task of ushering in a new Doctor and companion, The Beast Below was Moffat's opportunity to show us the ideas and themes he may have for his era of the series. What would be a "typical" adventure for Steven Moffat's vision of Doctor Who? 

The Doctor takes Amy to Starship UK, a future version of the United Kingdom built onto a spaceship. There are a lot of funny touches involved. Each tower block on the Space Ship is a county. The interior environs, with bunting, ancient televisions and BBC style announcers creates a wonderful parody idea of Britain. If Steven Moffat wanted to prove to the audience that he can do the 'sense of wonder' thing just as well as his predecessor then he succeeded. The design team must be congratulated for their work in creating this unusual environment.

The story starts out promisingly. The Doctor and Amy discover evidence that Starship UK is a police state and are determined to discover the reason why. Evading the puppet like Smilers, they meet the mysterious Liz Ten (Sophie Okonaedo) the monarch who is shadowed by her truth. There appears to be a monster at the heart of the craft. So far the story manages to be mysterious and interesting.

It is in the final act when the episode when the story goes wrong. The Doctor, Amy and Liz Ten discover that Starship UK was built on top of a Star Whale, which the Government are torturing in order to force it to keep on flying through space. When this is revealed, the police state subplot seems to go out of the window. The Doctor and Amy attempt to save the star whale and then just leave the society behind. Even when it is revealed that  the sinister regime which has stealing children for labour and using adults for whale food, the Doctor allows those responsible to go unpunished. It feels wrong.

Matt Smith continues to impress and felt more like his own Doctor. Unlike the cooler Ninth or Tenth Doctor, the Eleventh has an awkward walk and unusual body language. But underneath this he hides a calculating mind, able to sum up the situation on Starship UK within seconds. Like Gamera, he is presented to us as a friend to all children.

I'm still not sure what to think of Amy Pond. So far I've gathered that she's a kissogram with a talent for lockpicking and a smug attitude. It's a far cry from the companions of the Russell T Davies era who viewers were able to relate to. Karen Gillian does her best with this character and makes her as likeable as she can, but it's not quite enough.

All the while, the Doctor and Amy are assisted through this police state by Liz Ten. She is a superbly played by Sophie Okonaedo. It's a great thing for a British queen to be a black cockney and she seems to wield guns like Lara Croft from Tomb Raider.

There isn't really much of a threat. The Smilers look menacing but we never see them dispose of anyone directly. The Prime Minister Hawthorne isn't really a villain either. While I was excited to see Terrence Hardiman int he role, he didn't really get much to do here. 

The Beast Below is visually interesting but the story is not good. Although the episode was less than the sum of its parts, it shows a lot of potential for where Series 5 might take us and what directions Steven Moffat might take the show in. With next week's episode promising Winston Churchill and Daleks, I have high hopes that things will improve.

Episode Score: 7/10

Doctor Who 5x01: The Eleventh Hour

A new era of Doctor Who has finally begun. Fans, casual viewers, and critics have all been wondering if Doctor Who could really carry on after the departure of both its popular lead actor, David Tennant and the showrunner, Russell T Davies. Could the new lead actor, Matt Smith and the new showrunner, Steven Moffat, even begin to fill the shoes of their successful predecessors? On the evidence of The Eleventh Hour, it would seem they are more than adequate replacements.

As if to ease the transition, Steven Moffat has constructed a tale which reuses plot elements from previous successful episodes. The story opens with the Tardis crashing to Earth, much like it did in the Tenth Doctor’s debut episode, The Christmas Invasion. The regenerated Doctor emerges in a back garden in 1996 where he meets his new companion, Amy Pond, when she is still a child, much like how the Tenth Doctor first met Reinette in The Girl in the Fireplace. In order to stabilise the damaged Tardis, the Doctor takes it forward into the year 2008 where he meets the adult Amy Pond, who has grown up resentful toward the Doctor for leaving her behind. The pair is forced to work together in order to stop an alien fugitive, Prisoner Zero, who is being pursued by alien police known as the Atraxi. This is similar to the Series Three opener, Smith and Jones, even down to the fact that the alien fugitives both hide out in hospital. As with the previous adventure, the Doctor manages to trick fugitive into revealing its identity to the alien police, who proceed to terminate their captured felon.

In this instance I can forgive the lack of originality because the point of the episode is to showcase the new Doctor.  The familiar elements work as a contrast with the behaviour of the new Doctor so that we can see how he will compare to his predecessors.  It’s fitting that the snakelike alien fugitive is called Prisoner Zero, because it has zero personality. It’s purpose in this episode is to be a nice and straightforward threat for the Doctor to defeat. The Atraxi, giant eyeballs built into metallic, star shaped frames, are an amusing looking creation, but it’s hard to imagine they’ll go down in history as the best Doctor Who monsters.

So what is the new Doctor, played by Matt Smith, like? Is he any good? In this episode alone, I would say he certainly is good. It’s a really likable performance. Matt Smith really sells the humour and the childish side of the Doctor in the post-regenerative moments. He really has good chemistry with the younger Amy, played by Caitlin Blackwood. Matt also demonstrates that he can be a tougher Doctor, such as when he faces Prisoner Zero or when he forces the Atraxi to leave Earth. All those people who doubted Matt Smith’s claim to the leading role have been proved wrong with his performance here. He has all the gravitas that his critics thought he didn’t have. It looks like he’s going to be a superb Doctor, one of the best.

Although the episode is successful in showcasing its new Doctor, it is less successful in introducing its new companion, Amy Pond.  Unlike the previous companions in the modern series, Amy seems to have been set up as some kind of enigma. She lives in a strange house with only an Aunt who the audience never meet. Her parents are missing and she has been living with an alien crack in her wall from which Prisoner Zero escaped. Caitlin Blackwood is excellent in playing the younger Amy as a girl unfazed by science fiction elements. She is a rare example of a good child actor, never overplaying or underplaying the role. By contrast, the portrayal of the adult Amy by Karen Gillain feels less interesting. To be fair, it’s a hard character to play as she has to be shown to be partly psychotic due to the departure of her Doctor. Her first instinct when an intruder comes to her house is to knock the intruder out with a cricket bat and pretend to be a policewoman when he wakes up. Might it not have been easier to call the police? She works as a kissogram, a more sexualised job than her predecessors and a bit of a step backwards after companions moved away from being pretty but dim like Jo Grant. Amy is also quite secretive, as shown when she leaves with the Doctor to travel through time and space and we cut back to her house where a wedding dress is hanging up. Even we the audience aren’t quite certain of who she is marrying yet. It feels like we’ve already moved a long way away from the more grounded companions introduced in Russell T Davie’s time. Hopefully the future episodes will broaden the character a little more.

Still, even Amy Pond gets more time than the other supporting characters, a fairly uninteresting bunch. Amy’s boyfriend, Rory, is introduced as a nurse, whose main plot function is to uncover Prisoner Zero’s activities in the hospital. He’s not a particularly exciting character. It’s not clear how he became Amy’s boyfriend as he seems more like her comedy sidekick, given menial tasks like  holding her phone for her while she adjusts her hair. Again, I expect he might be back later this series. The other male supporting character, Jeff, is quite funny. He feels like a character from the Russell T Davies’ era, a mere nobody who is given the tools by the Doctor that allow him to be the one to save the world. Annette Crosbie also makes a welcome appearance as Jeff’s Nan, Mrs Angelo. It’s nice to see Nina Wadia, from Goodness Gracious Me, making an appearance in the show but she is somewhat wasted in the small role of Dr Ramsden. She gets angry at Rory and comforts patients but that’s really about it. If it weren’t for the fact that the character has been killed, I would have liked to have seen her return later in the series.  Peep Show star, Olivia Coleman, gets to appear in the human guise as Prisoner Zero. It’s not a particularly big role but at least she gets to have some fun playing a Doctor Who monster.

Adam Smith provides the episode some really good direction. This is especially evident in the opening scene in Amy’s back garden, with the camera panning through the trees, making her garden seem as spooky and strange as any alien environment. It’s very atmospheric. The Doctor’s mind’s eye view, seeing the village in a freeze frame is also nice if strange. The least successful element comes in the pre-titles sequence when the Tardis crashes to Earth.  The Doctor is hanging out of the doors, in what looks like a terrible green screen sequence. There are also two big continuity errors in this sequence. Firstly, the Millennium Dome is visible on the London cityscape, even though this is supposed to be 1996, when Amy was a child. Secondly, the Doctor seems to have lost his pinstripe jacket, even though he was still wearing it at the conclusion of The End of Time. It might have been better if the adventure had just started with the opening titles and from there into Amy’s back garden. This is one link to the previous era that felt entirely unnecessary.

Murray Gold, one of the more renowned remnants of the previous era, has composed a decent score for the new Doctor’s debut. The Eleventh Doctor’s new theme is a masterpiece, at points heavy and bombastic but at other times funny and light, combining trumpets, choirs and pipes. It’s a theme that feels far more suitable for the character of the Doctor than ‘The Doctor Forever’ did. That piece was far too pretentious. Amy’s theme is also a wonderful piece of work, combining piano and choral pieces to create a theme that sounds like it should have come from a fairy-tale. The rest of the music is similar in style to the Russell T Davies era, with a bombastic trumpet piece for the pre-titles sequence and several pieces of music from older episodes of that era, such as the Racnoss approach theme from The Runaway Bride. His new title theme is decent enough, getting away from the more rock heavy piece in the David Tennant years and bringing back some of the strange mystery.

As this adventure is set in contemporary Britain, it is difficult to tell what Ray Holman’s talents are as a costume designer. We’ll probably tell once we get into the more futuristic or historical settings. The look of the Eleventh Doctor is certainly decent. The top half of the costume, with the tweedy jacket and striped shirt, is reminiscent of a Professor. The lower half, with the black jeans and the boots, looks like a punkish student. It shows the two contrasting parts of the Doctor’s personality well. Amy looks like she’ll be wearing a lot of skirts, which suits her role as a kissogram. Hopefully, the sexier aspects of her costume design won’t impinge on practicality. At least those boots should work for running around in.

The new title sequence is alright, though not exceptional. The blue vortex of the past has been replaced by a swirling blue fog. The future red vortex is a blazing tunnel of fire. It’s nice that there’s more texture, but it’s basically just a variation on the previous title sequence than anything original. I think I prefer the ‘sinkhole’ time vortex which was shown in the 3D trailer. The new logo is certainly an improvement on the lozenge shaped logo of the previous era. The colour blue suits Doctor Who more than orange. The only part I don’t like is the ‘DW’ in the centre. It makes it look like the show is called ‘DoctorDWWho’. If they got rid of that part and kept the text then I’d be very happy.

The other notable new thing in this episode is the Tardis. As others have noted, the exterior now resembles the Tardis from the Peter Cushing films, even down to the St John’s Ambulance badge. It looks beautiful. Now we get a chance to see what the inside looks like. It is certainly bigger than the previous one, as the Doctor and Amy now have to climb the stairs to get to the console. The console itself now has switches made from pieces of junk like a typewriter and taps. It’s a nice idea but I’m not so sure about the phallic looking object going up and down inside. It’s also a bit strange seeing the console on the balcony. Let’s hope the ship doesn’t shake too much in flight, otherwise our heroes could fall off the railings and break their heads open. At least, the colour scheme is nice, with oranges, golds and greens, similar to the previous design.

Since the show was revived in 2005, every series has had a story arc which builds towards an exciting series finale. Series 1, 2 and 3 featured recurring phrases, such as Bad Wolf, Torchwood, and Mr Saxon. Series 4 included many threads such as the bees disappearing, Rose’s return and lost planets. This time around we have the mystery of what caused the crack in time found in Amy’s bedroom. Prisoner Zero also dies with the cryptic words ‘Silence will fall’. Time will tell what any of those words are supposed to mean. Hopefully the answers will be seeded across the episode, instead of dumped into the last episode.

Minor gripes aside, this is a solid opening episode for a new era. With a brilliant new Doctor, new companion and new Tardis, it feels like we’re all set for an exciting time. With the promise of returning Daleks, Weeping Angels and River Song, Series Five looks very exciting already. The future of the show looks very bright indeed.

Final Score: 8/10