Doctor Who - 'The Eleventh Hour'

He now has the size and surface contours of a planet and one gets the impression that conversing with him nowadays would probably be about as progressive as the orbit of Jupiter, but it was still pleasant to see Patrick Moore on Doctor Who on Saturday. Not quite in some terrifying, disembodied Gamesmaster way but near as dammit. I’m secretly hoping that the ominous references towards the end about some great intergalactic evil are going to be linked by some gordian plot mechanism to Moore’s philandering. Stephen Moffat, the new showrunner, is clever enough. He could pull it off. I trust him – utterly, after watching ‘The Eleventh Hour’ the first episode of his series.

Fairy tales abound in ‘The Eleventh Hour.’ The new companion changes her name from Amelia to Amy to be less fairy tale. The incidental music – certainly when at its best – clearly references the likes of Harry Potter and modern fairy tales such as Edward Scissorhands. The recurring theme is the importance of giving up on the adult world and return to one’s childhood dreams. In the opening minutes the Doctor even says, “I don’t even have an Aunt” like some sort of Peter Pan.

It drives right to the heart of Doctor Who and is the core insight of Moffat’s contributions to the series. Doctor Who may look like a sci-fi programme but it really isn’t. It’s a children’s programme that feeds upon bogeymen and fairy tales and has always endured because of its playing with dark, Jungian archetypes. The normal Who trick is to pick up the tropes of the children’s horror story – hidden doors, monsters under the bed, the dark itself – and give them a cursory technobabble rationalisation before revelling in the fear of it all. The Doctor is, after all, the man the monsters have nightmares about.

Smith was wonderful. His face, which seemed so strange and large in the press photos, now fidgets with raptor-like cunning. He is far more restrained than the reports made out and seems less willing to signal it for the kids than Tennant. It was less of a heroic entrance than ‘The Christmas Invasion’, the episode doing the double duty of a season-opener and post-regeneration story. But it performed its double duties expertly.

Moffat has kept much that worked from RTD’s reign: the silliness, the bombastic music, the sonic screwdriver, the companion-fancies-Doctor subplot, the ersatz-adhoc sense of epic, and the Buffy-inspired series arc. But he also played on his own mythos: the girl who falls in love with a Doctor who exists in a parallel timeline, the hospital setting, the little girl comes from a short story Moffat wrote, even the line “I've put a lot of work into it” was taken from his Comic Relief spoof. He blends these elements relatively effortlessly, justifying his claim that he is as guilty of RTD’s so-called failings.

We were also provided with some inventive visuals (Moffat clearly has a thing for eyeballs); unfortunately the realisation of some of the effects was a bit, well, 1990s bubblewrappy CGI. Nowhere near as effective as the scary dog guy and her-from-Peep-Show. It would be sad if the production team gave up on puppets and models altogether because, to be honest, I much prefer the Skeksis to nu-Transformers. Call this the Lucas Syndrome. But I can see I’m in a minority opinion and eventually some sort of Nuremberg Law is going to be passed to prohibit marriage between those who can actually work out which Transformer is kicking fourteen kinds of Castrol out of which and those of us who loved Jurassic Park mostly for the animatronic sick Triceratops and had our first crush on Miss Piggy or Beaker, so no doubt we’ll eventually die out.

The Doctor is definitely just a mad man with a box. And it was just, simply wonderful. And I bloody love it. I bloody, bloody, bloody love it.

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