The Zero Room #6- The Many Faces of Matt Smith

Whether you're calling it Series One, Series 5 or Series Fnarg (Steven Moffat's suggestion and my own personal favourite), it's difficult not to applaud Doctor Who for recapturing and developing the formula over the course of the last thirteen weeks or so.

Well I was going to do a big retrospective on the series, but I think it's pretty comprehensively covered in my reviews of the series on this very blog, so I'll settle for filling the requisite Wednesday slot with some funny faces pulled by the Eleventh Doctor.

The obvious indomitable force through Series Fnarg is Matt Smith's Doctor. Week after week I haven't thought of a single bad thing to say about him. With some of the awkwardness that always seemed false when Tennant's Doctor was rattling around the cosmos, Smith is shaping up to be one of the best Doctors ever, if he keeps giving us a different expression every week.

So why make a blog post that is dangerously close to making this place a cheese wheel? Well, the tabloids have ran out of news for the summer again, so they've decided to write about how Smith is being axed due to low ratings. Besides ratings being non-stories in and of themselves, overnights don't even particularly matter anymore.

They love that word, don't they? "Axed." What a pointy and pernicious thing the tabloid press is. No one ever leaves or is fired, they have to be "axed". Presumably in all that coverage of serial killers they occasionally splatter the front pages with, there's someone tutting that axe murdering isn't practical anymore, and that axes instead have to be applied to things like Fred Elliot deciding to take time off from Coronation Street.

The coverage of such obsolete stories on this here blog only brings me closer and closer to writing irrelevant stuff. But hey, you're enjoying the funny faces right? To come clean, my puppet spoof odyssey for Writer's Block North East, Doctor Who and the Inky Doom, still hasn't made it onto YouTube, so the planned entry for today fell through.

If anyone feels short-changed, come back on Friday when I promise there'll be worthwhile content. And sometime thereafter for the planned puppet blog. Otherwise, just be assured that Johnny Depp isn't going to play the Doctor in a film, unless you're watching Sleepy Hollow and decide to think creatively. It's Matt Smith all the way- now, everybody do the dance...

The Zero Room #5- What's The Crack?

Matt Smith's first series drew to a close on Saturday night on BBC One, and the last thirteen weeks have been a hell of a ride. This penultimate Series 5 post reviews the romantic comedy episode The Lodger and the epic, balls-to-the-wall final two-fer, The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang (to be referred to henceforth by the former name to save time)

Reviews will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the episode yet, toddle over to the iPlayer, or watch BBC Three at some point in the next century's worth of repeats.

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The Lodger opens on an unexpected incident with the TARDIS, which strands the Doctor on contemporary Earth. He's forced to move into a house on Aickman Road, sharing with a laddish flatmate called Craig. Craig pines after his best friend Sophie, likes playing football, and is suitably charmed by the new lodger because he's weird and can cook well. Just as the Doctor is oblivious to how he's usurping the things that are important to him, Craig is oblivious to whatever is living on the top floor of his house. People go up, but never come down...

The episode 11 slot has been put to various uses since the series returned. It's the slot that gave us fluffy episodes like Boomtown and Fear Her, but was later used for ominous stage-setting episodes like Utopia and Turn Left. What's special about The Lodger is that Gareth Roberts' script seems to somehow traverse both, while still spending more time in the former camp than the latter. It's adapted from a pretty good comic strip that Roberts wrote for Doctor Who Magazine back in 2006, in which the Tenth Doctor lodged with his companion's put-upon boyfriend Mickey for a week or so. The screen translation is even better- Matt Smith's Doctor basically is a fish-out-of-water, most of all in this scenario.

Where David Tennant's portrayal had a reasonably easy grace, Smith plays the oddball well enough to pull this plot off fantastically. He eclipses James Corden's Craig in the acting stakes, and that would usually be a good thing. I really don't like James Corden, see. Here, he's close to being endearing, which makes me realise I simply don't like his overexposure in the media. He's an actor, not a stand-up comic, so I suspect his ubiquity elsewhere makes him seem more annoying than he really is. It is great to finally see the radiant Daisy Haggard in the show as Sophie too.

Karen Gillan takes the backseat for this one, and it's curious to see that we get a "companion-lite" episode in this series while the "Doctor-lite" counterpart is conspicuous by its absence. Maybe Matt Smith really does have the energy to keep bounding around for nine months without an episode to sit back and put his feet up, but it'll be interesting to see where Steven Moffat goes if he does a Doctor-lite episode next year, with a 14-episode filming run to do instead of this year's 13. Moffat previously gave us Blink, so we know how good he can write this show even without the Doctor, but you'll never hear me outright ask for an episode with less Matt Smith.

The obligatory menace of the story sits well with the more comedic elements too, although I think Roberts possibly over-egged the menace upstairs with the number of people we see wander in off the street. What's interesting is that we never get an explanation for just who built the second-storey TARDIS on top of Craig's house. It's a fine twist, and pays off as a conclusion to this particular episode, but it's in this character's retained mystery that you have to wonder if it's going to be important later.

At its heart, The Lodger is a romantic comedy, and a fine one at that. It's actually one of the unexpected pleasures of the series, proving to be warm, funny and the episode that would have sat best in the Davies era. Luckily, it comes with the great comic timing of Matt Smith instead, who gets some great one-liners ("Can I put you on hold? I need to eat a biscuit"), while continuing to develop his incarnation before the big finale.
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After eleven weeks, everything converges as the two-part finale begins with The Pandorica Opens. By way of Liz 10's royal art collection and Churchill's bunker, River Song retrieves one of Vincent Van Gogh's final paintings, for which the episode is named. It depicts the explosion of the Doctor's TARDIS, an event that would be massive enough to crack the skin of the universe itself. In 102AD, the Doctor will find out exactly what the Pandorica is, and Amy Pond's fractured life will finally begin to make sense.

The high watermark of the new series for me was The Parting of the Ways, as far as finales went. I enjoyed Doomsday, Last of the Time Lords and Journey's End too, but they often fell short of their superior openings. The Pandorica Opens bucks the trend in a big way- where Russell T Davies' thirteenth episodes in each series came to give the impression that he'd written himself into a corner each year, Steven Moffat appears to have planned this all along.

With director Toby Haynes on board, the story is certainly the best two-parter since 2007's Human Nature and The Family of Blood, while still being a fundamentally different beast. The stakes have never been more massive, and the universe having been ended at the end of part one trump even RTD's increasingly hyperbolic threats without becoming ridiculous. RTD largely avoided silliness too, but there was still a question of whether or not the Moff would pull it off.

Haynes helps a lot by lending the story the most cinematic direction the series has ever had, moreso than this series' The Time of Angels. His influences are very much worn on his sleeve, encompassing both George Lucas odysseys, Star Wars (see those scene transitions?) and Indiana Jones (everything below Stonehenge) alike. It's his first time on the show, but I actually find it hard to imagine any of the more seasoned directors shooting the monster mash here as well as he does.

To bring in Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans and whatever other monster prosthetics were lying around at the studio may well have been an economic move, but it pays off wonderfully. For one thing, the Cybermen haven't been as effective as this in a long long time. And the scale just doesn't get any bigger than the moment when the Doctor is shoved into the Pandorica, as his enemies hope to prevent him from inadvertently destroying the universe. This massive alliance of monsters is almost apologetic for the comparative lack of monsters in the second part, which focuses much more on character and on the resolution of the series arc.

In the way of other two-parters penned by the Moff, it's definitely a story of two very distinctive halves, and the latter is much more cerebral than you'd expect. We've seen wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff before, but it somehow still seems fresh here. At the same time, there's some beautiful character development for Rory, who's been resurrected as a plastic duplicate by the Nestenes. Arthur Darvill is one of the unsung talents working on this series, and it'll be fun to see where the millennia of experience he has on the Doctor takes him next series. Then again, it's always been easy to overlook him with Matt Smith at the helm.

And what a great Doctor he's turned out to be. He has the full gamut of emotion in this story, and the only time it ever seems tired is when the Doctor believes he's going to die, which we already saw David Tennant do on New Year's Day. Smith still combusts with energy every time he's on-screen, and he plays well against everyone who shares it with him, from Caitlin Blackwood, who makes a welcome return as young Amy, to Karen Gillan, whose Elder Pond comes to the fore as her arc is partially resolved.

Even River Song is more palatable this time around. Even though she utterly divested this story of jeopardy by glibly recalling the Pandorica at the end of her last appearance, the character plays a more interesting role without shedding any of her secrets just yet. That's promised for next year, along with what actually caused the TARDIS to explode and nearly bring about the end of the universe. It should be a lot more disappointing than it actually is, that these threads are left hanging. Trouble is, this story is just too wonderful.

Emotional, exciting and ultimately very satisfying indeed, The Pandorica Opens is the most fulfilling series finale since Christopher Eccleston's swansong back in 2005. Both episodes are fantastic in distinctive ways, with the constant of the central performances holding up through to the tantalising Christmas teaser. The story does its job as both a shameless bit of fan-service and as a quality bit of family drama. And best of all, it has a happy ending, which we had never seen in the new series, up until Rory became Mr. Pond, anyway. The upbeat conclusion makes you long for Christmas and the next series more than ever before.

Bravo Mr. Moffat.
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I'll be back soon with a quick overview of this series of Doctor Who. Until then, why not share your comments below?

Doctor Who will return to BBC One and BBC HD on Christmas Day.

The Zero Room #2- Angels & Daleks

Yeah, by reviewing two-parters as one story, this feature will seem fairly intermittent, but plunging back into the TARDIS, I've got reviews of Victory of the Daleks and the angelic double whammy The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone (to be referred to by the former from here on, for speed).

Reviews will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the episode yet, toddle over to the iPlayer, or watch BBC Three at some point in the next century's worth of repeats.
Picking up from the tease at the end of the previous episode, Victory of the Daleks finds the Doctor facing the metal meanies during the Blitz, with an excitable Winston Churchill ready to deploy them against the Nazis and win the war. The Daleks are generally keeping their eyestalks down, serving tea and submitting to being fitted out with camo-gear and a Union Flag ID tag, but the Doctor knows better. As usual with the Daleks, there's a much bigger plot at work, and Churchill seems oblivious to their true nature. The problem is, matters only get worse once the Doctor actually reveals the truth...

A better title might have been The Daleks Have Landed, because it's the feel of the similarly titled Michael Caine adventure that writer Mark Gatiss has lovingly recreated. It's an interesting spin on the Doctor's oldest enemies, and one that sees them undergo a new paint job and a design overhaul. Ah yes, that redesign. Decried by many as awful shit, I really can't agree. Although people have called them Power Rangers and the like, they reminded me more of the latter day Minis- they're a meaner and somewhat more hefty spin on a classic design. And come on, they look good, really. Embrace change, when it's this good!

The trouble is that Gatiss is terribly eager to get this new Dalek paradigm, which is in no small part responsible for the uneven pacing. In the first 15 minutes, I was impressed by how it was zipping along, but the plot peters out before the last 10 minutes.
Although I really liked Bill Paterson as Bracewell, and appreciated the way his character developed, he's not my idea of a barnstorming climax in an episode called Victory of the Daleks, even if it does make more sense as an ending than some of Russell T. Davies' Dalek episodes. It's great that the Daleks win for a change, but they win far too early. This feels almost like the preamble to the next Dalek story of the Moffat era, rather than a memorable adventure in its own right.

As a result, Ian McNiece's Churchill is also sadly sidelined. What we do see of him is brilliant though, and I think there's real potential for him to be a recurring historical character- he has the Doctor's phone number after all. Karen Gillan doesn't have much to do either, Matt Smith continues to prove his mettle with his indignant attitude to the Daleks- to him, their survival is obscene, and at one point he loses his temper with them altogether. A Doctor can often be defined by how he interacts with his greatest enemies, and he eschews both Christopher Eccleston's outright rage and David Tennant's righteous and weary approach. It's also fitting that Smith's first Dalek story evokes Patrick Troughton's debut, The Power of the Daleks, in having the Daleks pretend to be benign in order to entirely ruin humanity's shit.

To fall short in the most anticipated episode since the Daleks' inception, finally placing the Nazi allegories in a WW2 setting, would be unforgivable if it weren't for the witty script and the great performances. It collapses under the weight of tremendous expectation, but it's certainly not bad. It's an action packed episode that doesn't skimp on story and, despite the more obscure ramblings of fans online, it isn't a merchandising ploy to sell more multi-coloured Dalek toys. Victory of the Daleks could have been an all-time classic, but it's perfectly fine as an enjoyable early entry to the series, evocative of those films on Sunday afternoon telly as much as the Daleks' inexorable progress.The following two parter also has a returning monster of course, but The Time of Angels is head, shoulders and everything else above the previous episode. Opening in a particularly bombastic pre-credits sequence in the first part, the Doctor meets his possible future wife River Song again as she jumps out of an airlock. The ship she's just escaped has a deadly cargo- what is reputed to be the last Weeping Angel in existence- and it later crashes on the planet Alfava Metraxis. The tables are turned on the Doctor and a group of soldiers sent into the wreck to recover the Angel, and Amy Pond is pushed to the very limit as she struggles to survive.

Steven Moffat has said that this story's relationship to the Weeping Angels' debut Blink is as Aliens was to Alien. It expands the monsters while bringing in new, seemingly disparate elements to make it into more of an action story than a horror. The horror is still there for the stone gribblies, whose menace is as indelible as ever. A minor criticism is that they no longer "kill you kindly", as the Tenth Doctor put it first time around. Luckily, the far less interesting modus operandi of snapping necks doesn't weaken their fear factor at all- instead the uncomfortable provision of a voice via a murdered soldier just undercuts the fact that you couldn't negotiate with them before.

That said, we learned here that whatever holds the image of an Angel is itself an Angel. Someone finally decided to create a Doctor Who monster that can come out of televisions to kill you if you look at them- why has no-one thought of this before?!
It's not the Angels' show though, and we still get a great deal of interaction between Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. They each remain note-perfect for the entire series thus far, and Gillan in particular shines out here. She really sells the horror of a blind walk through a horde of Angels just as much as the innuendo of the surprisingly risque closing scene, which threatened to put the "Flesh" in the episode's title if Amy got her way with the Doctor. Less endearing is Alex Kingston as River Song, especially in the first part. For instance, note how a lovely trailer-friendly line about the Weeping Angels is delivered as smugly as the rest of Kingston's dialogue. You'd think any normal person would sound a little more apprehensive about "the most malevolent creatures evolution has ever produced". She knows more than the Doctor does, and thus more than the viewer, but I'd like her more if she didn't bloody act like it so much.

Moffat almost seems to have anticipated that neither River Song or the Angels themselves would leave as much of an impression on their second go around, and it's a good thing he never solely relies on them. To wit, we see the series arc begin to pay off at a point in the series earlier than ever before. Rather than continuing to vaguely pan across the crack in time for the rest of the run, it's embedded at the heart of the story here, and the potential ramifications of its presence will surely loom large for the rest of the series. It also provides a satisfying fan moment when one of the more confusing aspects of 2008's The Next Doctor is explained away, albeit with a mechanism that might allow many more stories to be completely retconned.
His writing continues to bewitch though, whether through one-liners or chills or wonderful character interaction. Here it's best typified in a wonderful final scene for the unfortunate Father Octavian. Even in an angelic headlock, the drama is incredibly potent between him and the Doctor as the two exchange warnings and condolences. The Time of Angels is also brilliant for having been helmed by director Adam Smith, who really makes this one look cinematic rather than televisual. He also delights in terrifying the young audience as much as the Moff does, and keeps the adrenaline going for 90 minutes in a way that the Dalek story couldn't manage for 42 minutes.

The Time of Angels excels as an opening two parter, a slot that's traditionally been a weaker point for the show since 2005, the Series 4 Sontaran adventure excepted. It's as witty and scary as we could expect from Moffat's writing, posturing for a broader story through the entirity of Series 5 without ever disrupting the story at hand. There's an energy here that most blockbusters can't even muster. It's mysterious, atmospheric and truly one of the best two parters Doctor Who has ever given us. Don't blink. Or... open your eyes. Or look at their eyes. Or-- (gets sent back in time)
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I'll be back in three weeks' time with reviews of the next two stories. Until then, why not share your comments below?

The next episode of Doctor Who, The Vampires of Venice, airs on BBC One and BBC HD on Saturday 8th May at 6pm.

The Zero Room #1- The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below

Welcome to the first of the promised occasional feature reviewing the latest series of Doctor Who. I'm a massive fan of the show, so I hope my already very indulgent readers will allow me a little fanboy post every now and then.

This week, the first two episodes, The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below, introducing the new Doctor, played by Matt Smith, and his companion Amy Pond, played by Karen Gillan. Reviews will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the episode yet, toddle over to the iPlayer, or watch BBC Three at some point in the next century's worth of repeats.

So in The Eleventh Hour, following the bombastic ending to The End of Time, Part Two, a newly regenerated Doctor is about to prang his crashing TARDIS in quite spectacular fashion by wiping out a shed in someone's back garden. Luckily, the only person at home is a little Scottish girl called Amy, who's enchanted by the raggedy figure who sweeps into her life. An accident with navigation leads the Doctor to abandon her for 12 years, finally turning up in the small village of Leadworth again to reunite with the grown-up kissogram Amy has become. However, as is custom for Doctor Who, there's a peril lurking in Amy's spare room that may cause the planet to be incinerated in just 20 minutes.

All eyes are invariably on Matt Smith for this first outing, despite the best efforts of the costume department to have us ogle short-skirted Amy. Well that's there as well, but Smith is massively charismatic. There are echoes of David Tennant's Tenth Doctor in this first performance, but that's not without precedent in these post-regeneration episodes. Smith finds his own voice by the end of the episode, replete with student/professor get-up and bow-tie. And legs aside (yes, they're lovely too), Karen Gillan is immediately likable as Amy. Although Steven Moffat has previously written episodes like The Girl in the Fireplace, where a girl waits years for the Doctor's various visits to her life through unstable time corridors, Gillan's performance made it seem fresh.

The similarities to what has gone before don't end there. Moffat has previously expressed how great a script his predecessor's Smith & Jones was, and this opener covers remarkably similar ground. An alien prisoner hides out in a hospital, while big old space police romp about threatening to destroy every human involved if it's not brought to justice. And it's at that stage that you wonder if six episodes of Moffat per series might turn out to be too much of a good thing. Such fears are quickly dispelled by the performances, some marvellous one-liners and a novel solution to the crisis involving Patrick Moore and a porn-surfing tech guy. Yes, really.

The Eleventh Hour closes with our first look at a retooled TARDIS interior- the last of a number of revamps in this opening episode. Like its new crew, it's wondrous to behold and feels fresh even though it's something fans are innately familiar with. It does feel a little drawn out at 65 minutes though. While it's totally understandable that they want the maximum exposure for the Eleventh Doctor, the ticking clock elements would have felt better and tighter in a standard length episode. Nevertheless, a cracking statement of intent that embraces what has gone before while still inexorably pushing forward to a brand new era.

Amy Pond finally hops on-board the TARDIS and in The Beast Below, she finds herself a thousand years in the future on-board Starship UK. The ship is populated by all of the citizens of the UK, escaping until the extreme weather conditions on planet Earth ease off. The trouble is, the Doctor thinks it's not moving. That it couldn't ever move. The menacing Smilers seem to enforce a police state, preventing anyone from shedding light on the mystery except the enigmatic Liz Ten. But when anyone makes any headway, they're given the choice to "forget" or "protest", and almost everyone chooses the former. The Doctor however, has a much harder choice ahead...

Second episodes invariably take a starry-eyed new companion to amazing only-in-a-time-machine adventures, and this is no exception. And if The Eleventh Hour lacked action for Amy in its showcase of the new Doctor, then make no mistake- The Beast Below is Amy's episode. She wanders off to explore, as is the wont of any companion in this series, and gets to the heart of what's going on long before the Doctor. The problem is, she chooses to forget, a mistake that nearly gets her sent home by her outraged companion. Smith pulls back some of the attention here in a truly frightening turn that explores the character's darker side just two episodes into his tenure. But the culmination of the story marks Amy as a truly marvellous character, probably more capable than any companion since 2005, and a best friend to the Doctor rather than a romantic interest or eye candy for the audience.

It's still a very busy episode, with the Smilers and Liz Ten and the voting booth and the Winders and that final tantalising hook to next week's episode. But I'd only really say the Smilers lose out in Moffat's framing of the action around the Doctor-companion relationship. The Smilers are really quite frightening villains that may spook out a lot of the show's younger viewers- and that's what they watch for, of course- but the episode doesn't quite get the mileage from them that you'd hope for. I'd have liked to see more of Sophie Okenedo's feisty Liz Ten too, a character who was variously and very cleverly deployed for comic relief and pathos. The political allegory of the protest or forget choice is somewhat timely, as if Moffat knew there'd be a general election announced this week, and it all leads up to a potent denouement with the Star Whale's release from torture.

Matt Smith and Karen Gillan continue to be the best things about this new series, which is some feat when you have writers like Steven Moffat at the helm. In The Beast Below, we already have Smith beating Tennant with a terrific second episode. In something of a misstep, Tennant's second outing was the sub-par romp New Earth, but this is more akin to a Ark in Space or Four to Doomsday. Indeed, that's what the episode closely reflects- the classic series. It's largely studio-bound and distills the essence of the show into an excellent 45 minute mini-movie, with all of what has been added since 2005 still in there. There's a real fairytale quality to these first two episodes, but I'm not sure if that'll continue with next week's episode, so marvellously teased at the end of episode 2...
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I'll be back in three weeks' time with reviews of the next two stories. Until then, why not share your comments below?


The next episode of Doctor Who, Victory of the Daleks, airs on BBC One and BBC HD on Saturday 17th April at 6.30pm.