New Who 5.1: The Eleventh Hour

[strange_complex]

Knowing I didn't really have time to review this properly, I tried live-blogging it. I don't really want to make that a regular habit, as it meant that I missed quite a lot of what was going on on screen while I was writing down the last thing I'd noticed. But it was nice to have a go at it.


The results follow below:

Response to the earlier era - Moffat has the TARDIS avoid crashing into Big Ben, where RTD made a set-piece of alien ship clipping it in Aliens of London

Opening credits - I like the cloudier time-tunnel. It promises a murky, complex series. Music's not bad, too - emphasises the counter-melody (which I've always loved) and tones down the drums.

Amy first appears saying her prayers - will Christianity remain a serious part of her portrayal? (ETA: no, it won't, because she was actually praying to Santa.) It's a classic child's prayer, though - asking for things, 'back in a mo'.

Oh! Broken TARDIS is quite painful to see!

Starting with Amy as a child = reaching out to the classic target audience? An interest of Moffat's to do this - e.g. child in Silence in the Library.

Child!Amy reminds me of pickwick - similar hair, Scottish. :-) A natural choice for Moffat to cast a Scottish actress, of course.

He pops an apple in his pocket for later - like Tennant's satsuma in The Christmas Invasion? (Uses it later to prove to Amy that he is the same person, travelling faster through time than her.)

Amelia has no parents, lives with aunt - just like Dodo!

Doc's time-line different from Amelia's - like The Girl in the Fireplace.

Is the hospital where the patients call on the Doctor the same one as used in Jon Pertwee's first story? Certainly looks quite similar.

Interesting that we meet a female Asian doctor and white male nurse in the hospital - looks like an attempt at positive portrayal of racial minorities, though undermined by fact that she is shown as closed-minded (does not believe what he says about patients).

Amy has star stud earrings just like mine!

Love her anger at his broken promise, 12 years of therapy. But do we really want a companion who is (again) on some level hung up on the Doctor, thinks their life is incomplete without him?

"What? what? what?" when he realises Amy is Amelia - but in a very different tone from David Tennant.

He liked the name Amelia - grown-up Amy says it's 'a bit fairytale'. Rejecting her childhood. Grown-up Amy is much more sceptical and cynical than child Amelia.

Rory resents Amy's interest in the Doctor - please don't be Mickey all over again!

Star-like space vehicle (Atraxi) = ref to Racnoss star?

Prisoner Zero melts and goes down drain - definitely a ref to The Three Doctors.

Amy the kiss-o-gram, Jeff looking at porn, Amy not turning back when Doc changes clothes - please let's not have Torchwood-style 'adult' content...

Conferencing on lap-top, refs to Bebo, Twitter - like Ten's 'outer space Facebook'.

Woman with children who turn out to be monsters - like monster-child in The Empty Child.

Doc wants monster to leave, rather than be captured and killed - moral stance.

Is one of the people on the computer conference Peter Capaldi? Surely not - surely he'd be in a bigger role than this? Or maybe he will recur later?

Solution is technology - computer virus and phone signal.

But monster takes Doc's form - evil twin syndrome! Seems to have tapped into Amy's obsession with the Doc to take form of her dreams.

Doc seems to use psychic abilities to turn her dreams to his advantage. So actually solution is partly his technological skill, partly his supernatural abilities. Nice - I like to see those two sides of the Doctor working together.

'Silence will fall' sounds a lot like a prophecy we should be Taking Note Of.

Shadow Proclamation, Earth as Level Five planet - drawing on past ideas about administrative systems of Whoniverse. Good.

Rory's ref to 'aliens of death' - is that a send-up of old-style story titles?

Summons aliens back to warn them off - definitely like Ten and the Sycorax. Sends them away by saying Earth isn't a threat ('mostly harmless'?), but is protected - again, like Ten saying it is defended.

Ooh - montage of past Doctors! So this new era is explicitly proclaiming from the start that it will respect the series' past - not just through oblique references, but direct on-screen visuals. Not that I'd expected anything other than respect for the past, but good to have it confirmed.

St. John's Ambulance sticker on the TARDIS door of course = One. :-)

Amy can't believe he just ran out on her... again. (Which is then reinforced by showing us child!Amy sitting glumly on her suitcase.)

Aw, but now he's back, and 'sorry about running off earlier'. He's 'run in' the newly-refurbished TARDIS, and she's ready to roll - with Amy on board.

Oops! But he's been gone two years again. Naughty Doc.

"You wanted to come 14 years ago." "I grew up." "Don't worry - I'll soon fix that." Explicit promise of taking us all back to the wonder of childhood.

Lovely play with the 'first time in the TARDIS' trope - Doc has heard it all before. And hooray for repeated refs to wardrobe, swimming pool, library. I love this aspect of the TARDIS, and am dying to see more of it.

Why on earth does she believe he'll get her back in time for 'stuff', given his previous track record?

New TARDIS is kind of H.G. Wells-ish - Victorian mad inventor vibe.

Proclaims, "I'm definitely a mad man with a box" - joy in anarchy. Fantastic.

We see her dolls and drawings - ref to fan-art? But she gets to live it for real. And it's all next to her wedding-dress! Child to adult.

Teasers for upcoming stuff looks fab! Dalek and sand-bags = Genesis of the Daleks ref? And the female Asian doctor returns - good.


In short, definitely looks promising. Moffat is referring to the past, but also positioning himself as having his own new take on the format. And Matt Smith seems just right. It's hard to judge how the adventures will pan out from this - like any opening story, it's really just about introducing the characters. But we've made a decent start.

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Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

I liked lots of it though David Tenant was better dressed and had better hair Matt Smith was very charismatic and makes the role different without being too "mental" especially for a regeneration episode (Peter Davidson, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy were all in different ways, pretty damn whacko or out of it post regeneration).

There were a three or four moments where I was ahead of the plot and that's super rare for me since I tend to not bother to try to think ahead so I guess there's a lot of very obvious clueing (the "that's the little girl", "that's not a real policeman", "it also knows how to look like the doctor" moments at least I think there were a couple more too).

[primitivepeople.livejournal.com]

Yeah - what they were doing seemed pretty obvious in a lot of places at the start, but it got better towards the end.

[diffrentcolours]

There's usually some relation between the violence / expectation of the Doctor's "death" and the instability of regeneration, isn't there? Given that Tennant had time to do all that tedious faffing around at the end of "The End Of Time", and had pretty much resolved all his affairs before choosing to regenerate, I would expect the process to go relatively smoothly.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure really -- here's my summary but I bet Pen can correct it if I get details wrong. 1 died of old age and 2 took straight over. 2 died as a "punishment" and 3 took straight over. (Haven't seen either of those weirdly since I've seen 95% of available episodes). 3 died of spider poison and 4 was springing about like a lunatic within moments after some short initial confusion. 4 died from a fall and 5 took ages to be properly right. 5 died from spectrox toxemia and 6 really has a hell of a time as the regeneration goes wrong. 6 dies rather mysteriously presumably connected to the Rani and 7 is initially a bit confused but not too much. 7 was shot and 8 suffered initial confusion. We never see 8 die. 9 dies of tardis energy and 10 takes quite some time to recover.

Problem is really it's bloody hard to guess whether being shot is a more violent death than spectrox toxemia or tardis energy.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yup, that all sounds about right, though I haven't seen the first two regenerations yet either. I think all we can really say is that regeneration usually causes at least a bit of initial weirdness, but it's hard to plot a direct relationship between how violent the death is and how strong the post-regeneration effects are.

On the other hand, though, Romana's regenerations at the start of Destiny of the Daleks provide a rare example of a non-violent regeneration, and this scene is played as though it's little more than a change of clothes to her. So maybe it's more about how much advance warning the character does or doesn't get? A sudden unexpected death and regeneration has a more traumatic impact than a planned one?

[steer.livejournal.com]

So maybe it's more about how much advance warning the character does or doesn't get?

Heh... so all that messing about with Logopolis could have been avoided if thicky doctor four had realised who the watcher was.

I should have mentioned the Romana one, that's a bit anomalous. Have we seen the Master regenerate?

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I think Four knew very well - he was just trying to ignore the fact.

As for the Master - of course we have, in Utopia (Jacobi to Simms). He seems to have handled it pretty well, actually, despite the fact that he was shot, and so presumably wasn't expecting to die. So I guess that's my theory out of the water!

[steer.livejournal.com]

I think Four knew very well - he was just trying to ignore the fact.

That had never really occurred to me.

of course we have, in Utopia

Heh... god, I keep forgetting. I still keep thinking of the master as either the suave bearded chap or the oozing skeleton version from the Tom Baker years (was it "Deadly assassin"? you know with the horrible creepy skeleton master). I sort of forget the modern one.

[xipuloxx.livejournal.com]

Oh no! You have awoken the Geek!

The Doctor has always been a bit weird for a while after regenerating. 3, 4, 5 and 10 all spent a great deal of time sleeping immediately after (in the case of 4 I think we skipped over most of that time, but the other characters mentioned he'd been out for something like a day). All were somewhat confused; 5, 7 and 8 were amnesiac at least for a while (though 7 had also been drugged which seemed to be at least part of the reason for that). 6 was the most unstable, and it's notable that in The Caves of Androzani 5 is actually holding the regeneration back for a whole episode so he can save Peri, and afterwards isn't sure if he'll regenerate at all.

Apart from that one, though, there doesn't seem to be much of a direct correlation. You'd think the regeneration imposed by the Time Lords would go the most smoothly, but actually this one seems, if anything, to have gone better.

By the way, 3 died from radiation poisoning, not spider venom! He also seemed unable to regenerate without help, having been lost in the vortex for some time before "the TARDIS brought me home", so it's possible he was holding on till he got back and accidentally held on too long. Notably, the result was the second craziest Doctor after 6. So maybe the degree to which the Doctor eases himself into the regeneration, rather than fighting it, affects his next self's mental stability generally, rather than just during the recovery period.

The apparent ease of Romana and the Master's regenerations have caused many to suggest that there's something wrong with then Doctor. Maybe he just didn't pay attention in Regeneration class... ;^)

[steer.livejournal.com]

*grin* Sorry, I thought it was the spiders that got number 3 not the radiation but you're right. In the case of Robot I can only remember him being tired then extremely manic in Unit HQ. According to wikipedia the 1-2 and 2-3 regenerations were pretty peaceful but I've not seen those. The 4-5 regeneration seemed to be the one that actually took longest at least in terms of plot -- poor Peter Davidson spent most of his first story unconscious in a box (or so it seemed).

[xipuloxx.livejournal.com]

Depends what you mean by "peaceful", I guess. 2->3 seemed worse than 1->2 or 10->11, and I think the only reason 6->7 was worse was because he was drugged. 4->5 seemed quite bad, but it was surely exacerbated by having to fend off a deadly trap from the Master while still delicate. (And actually he only really spent less than one episode in that box!)

5->6 was really bad, though, with him trying to kill his companion at one point, in a spectacular display of appalling judgement from the producer. I mean, I know we were meant to be unsure of him, but really!