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.

A New Man Saunters Away...

Although your Mad Prophet is typically concerned with blogging about film, he's also a rabid Whovian (fan of Doctor Who , for the unacquainted). With the series about to move into a new era under producer and head writer Steven Moffat, it's time for a blog about the show.

18th June 2005. Over the last thirteen weeks, I've been transfixed by an 900-year-old alien who talks like he's from Manchester, whisking Billie Piper around in time and space. She's been put in mortal peril during a fight with his nemeses, the Daleks, and he's seemingly given his life to save hers. I knew this was coming though, and that someone else would be playing the Doctor by 7.45pm. Because Doctor Who is the kind of show I really wish had been around when I'd been the same ages as the target audience (i.e. 8 years old), I had really got sucked into it, and I was certain this new fella couldn't possibly be as good as Christopher Eccleston had been. The show had been fantastic, and d'you know what? So had he.

A volcano of golden light erupted from the neck and sleeves of Eccleston's jumper and David Tennant entered the building. You can probably guess where this story is going. I still wasn't convinced by his first few seconds that the Tenth Doctor would be as good as the Ninth, but in the six months between the end of the first series of Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who revival and David Tennant's first episode proper, I went back over the series' rich history a little and grew accustomed to the idea of different Doctors. William Hartnell's irascible charm and warmth, Patrick Troughton's mischievousness, Jon Pertwee's tech-fetish, Tom Baker's eye-boggling Bohème and Peter Davison's exasperated observation of a chaotic universe, Colin Baker's pomposity and slight insecurity, Sylvester McCoy's wily machinations and Paul McGann's unfortunate brevity. I realised later that David Tennant was the first bonafide fan of Doctor Who to take the lead role.

The news media frequently reference Tennant's accolades as the best Doctor from opinion polls and the like, and I'd actually agree. That's mostly because Tennant really properly loves the show. This is the man who answered 100% correctly with the show as his specialist subject on a Comic Relief special of Mastermind. The man who asked an audience on The Graham Norton Show if they knew the name of an extra from 1969's Troughton serial, "The Mind Robber". And aside from being a brilliant actor in any case, he's taken on the best parts of all his favourite Doctors in his own portrayal, creating the Nation's Favourite Doctor (TM).

Of course, all things must end, but between the announcement of Tennant's departure from the role in October 2008 and his final episode on New Year's Day 2010 was a long hard emotional slog. OK, so we got two fun romps at Christmas and Easter respectively, The Next Doctor and Planet of the Dead, but the TARDIS cloister bell was tolling all the way through the specials in the gap year of 2009. There was a promise that someone would knock four times, and that, as the Tenth Doctor put it in one of those specials, a new man would saunter away from the Doctor's death.

Enter Matt Smith, who was cast as the Eleventh Doctor and announced to the nation in January 2009. My honest first impression- that he looked slightly like one of those Easter Island heads. I reserved judgement on what he'd be like in the role, because all I really had to go on was a semi-lucid recollection of his supporting role in the Sally Lockhart adaptations. Certainly I didn't think it was a bad thing that he's the youngest Doctor to date- he's not a teenager, and his early interviews were instantly endearing. A shroud of secrecy surrounded the filming of the next series of 13 episodes, not only out of Steven Moffat's notorious enmity for spoilers, but also because the Tenth Doctor was still very much in the public eye in the run-up to his closing trilogy of episodes- The Waters of Mars and The End of Time, Parts One and Two.

David Tennant is a tremendous actor, and is my second favourite Doctor. Yep, second. Because as good as Tennant is, no one really trumps Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor for me. He's mercurial, cheeky and utterly brilliant in that role whenever you see him, and it's the greatest tragedy in television history that so many of the videotapes containing his serials were wiped by the BBC in the 1970s. Now just six survive in complete form, with an extra serial completed using animation on DVD, which makes me and many other Whovians desperately sad. His was a wonderful portrayal and it's a shame we can't see more of it.

The point where I was really convinced Smith was going to be great was not around any of the clips released in advance of his first full episode, to be broadcast on BBC One tonight, but when I heard how he'd researched for the role. Back in January, he professed that he hadn't really watched the series before. By the time he started filming, he was clad in a bowtie and bumbling around his TARDIS in homage to his new favourite Doctor- none other than Troughton. While I'm sure the Eleventh Doctor will have his own identity, it heartens me to think that in Smith, we have a chance to see more of the Second than ever seemed likely once those tapes where wiped.

Tennant is still typically "my Doctor", having gone through much of the show with him in the lead role, and it was of course heartbreaking to see him go to his death at the start of the year. Opposite John Simm as a ravenous and mad Master and the sublime Bernard Cribbins as Wilf, knocking four times and causing the death of the very man he wants so much to live, Tennant gives a wonderful final performance to cap his tenancy of the TARDIS, with the audience agreeing with him all the way as he sadly utters his last- "I don't want to go."

In typical TARDIS fashion, I'm going to skip back to just before and after this moment to let you know exactly why we should be looking forward to "The Eleventh Hour". Before the mortally Tennant finally makes his way back to the police box he's called home for so long, he encounters a vision of an Ood, a prophetic and telepathic race who reassure him that his death will not be the end. And there are few better summaries of the show's ethos through regenerating Doctors these past 46 years than the Ood's solemn "This song is ending, but the story never ends".

Directly after "I don't want to go", the score swells as the Doctor explodes with golden light once again, revealing Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. With Tennant's popularity, this is effectively a parallel with the transformation from Tom Baker to Peter Davison back in 1981. Davison was restricted by poor writing to spend his first two episodes moping around the TARDIS after something called a Zero Room, but Smith is immediately pitched into a new life in a crashing spaceship, hurtling towards the Earth. His priority? "Legs! I've still got legs! Good!"

The show has survived many regenerations in the past, and after a year of following the Tenth Doctor's final sentiments right up to the point he actually voiced them, I can't wait for Doctor 11. Daleks, living statues and vampires all await an eager audience in the next 13 weeks, as the new man doesn't so much saunter from his TARDIS as bring it hurtling towards planet Earth, screaming and aflame. Geronimo!


The new series of Doctor Who begins with The Eleventh Hour on BBC One and BBC HD tonight at 6.25.

I'll be reviewing the latest stories, generally fortnightly, here on the blog throughout the series' run.