“The Eleventh Hour” is the Series 5 opener that introduces Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, under new showrunner Steven Moffat. The newly regenerated Doctor crash-lands in young Amelia Pond’s garden, promises to return in five minutes and comes back twelve years later, just as an alien prison ship threatens to burn the Earth unless its escaped prisoner is handed back.
The review finds the debut lives up to its promise despite a few hiccups, with Smith still settling in and trying slightly too hard, and singles out Karen Gillan and the young Amelia as the stars. It rates the episode 3.5 out of 5.
Doctor Who is finally back, with a new Doctor, a new companion and a whole new team behind the scenes, and after The End of Time that’s a lot to live up to. David Tennant was immensely popular, and Matt Smith has some very big shoes to fill. “The Eleventh Hour” picks up right where the regeneration left off, with the TARDIS on fire and plummeting towards London and the new Doctor hanging out of the door. There were definitely some hiccups in this first episode. Overall, though, it lived up to the promise, and if Matt Smith was perhaps a bit wooden in places, his new companion was stellar.
Fish fingers and custard
The TARDIS crash-lands in the garden of a little girl called Amelia Pond, and the best stretch of the episode is the Doctor trying to find out who he is now. He’s starving, and every food she offers him is wrong, until he lands on fish fingers dipped in custard, which is a very funny sequence. It shows that while each Doctor keeps the memories and feelings of the one before, the body really is brand new, and he has to discover its limits like anyone else. The little girl playing Amelia is excellent, by the way, completely unfazed by the strange man in her kitchen and taking him entirely on trust. It’s the fairy-tale tone Steven Moffat has clearly decided his era is going to have, and it suits the show.
Amelia has a crack in her bedroom wall, and through it she can hear a voice warning that Prisoner Zero has escaped. The Doctor hears it too, and it’s genuinely unsettling, a scar in the fabric of the universe that he says should never have been there. He dashes back to the TARDIS to stop it exploding, promising to be back in five minutes, and doesn’t return for twelve years. It’s a heartbreaking little turn. Amelia spends her childhood being laughed at by the whole village for her story about the Raggedy Doctor, and it’s clear she never really got to have a normal life after that night.
Twenty minutes
When the Doctor finally does come back, the girl he left behind has grown into Amy Pond, and she’s furious. Karen Gillan is fantastic from her very first scene, strong and feisty and more than a match for the Doctor’s manic energy, and she handles him in a way I don’t think we’ve seen from a companion before. Prisoner Zero turns out to be a shape-changing alien that has been hiding in the local hospital disguised as its coma patients, which is a lovely creepy idea. Its jailers, the Atraxi, arrive in orbit and give the Earth twenty minutes to hand it over before they burn the whole planet. With the TARDIS still rebuilding itself and his sonic screwdriver fried, the Doctor has nothing but his wits and a borrowed laptop.
There’s a nice introduction for Rory too, Amy’s boyfriend, a nurse at the hospital who has noticed that his coma patients keep turning up around the village and has the photos on his phone to prove it. Nobody believes him either, which rather fits. The best creepy moment is a man out walking his dog, where it’s the man who barks, a tiny detail that tells you something is badly wrong before anyone says so out loud. The Doctor’s scene on the village green is great as well, standing still for a few seconds and noticing every wrong detail around him in a way that sums up how this Doctor works. It’s all very Moffat, small and domestic and then suddenly unsettling.
The Atraxi are a striking bit of design, giant eyeballs inside spiky crystal ships, and hearing their warning boom out of every radio and television on the planet at once is a good way of making a village-sized story feel global. They don’t get much personality, but they don’t need it, because the real threat is the clock. Twenty minutes is a lovely device for a new Doctor, since it forces him to show us everything he can do in a hurry rather than telling us about it. By the time he’s calling them back, I was firmly on his side.
That’s where Matt Smith really starts to win me over. He saves the day after a string of close calls, and then calls the Atraxi back and makes them look at who they’re dealing with, the faces of every Doctor before him flickering past. “I’m the Doctor. Basically, run.” It’s a great moment, and it’s also where he steps through the projection in his new outfit for the first time, bow tie and all. It felt like the show honouring the old guard while the new one took over.
A new era, with some hiccups
My only real negative is that Smith is perhaps trying too hard at times. The pressure on him must have been immense, and he needs to relax into the role a bit more, but that’ll come with time. He’s got a unique look, which is a necessity for the Doctor, and I think he could play the part very well once he settles. The story itself doesn’t have huge ties to the wider universe yet, apart from that crack, and in some ways it plays like an introduction more than a standalone adventure. As an introduction to two new characters, though, it does a very good job, and the reaction I’ve seen so far seems fairly positive.
The end is lovely. The Doctor offers Amy a place in the TARDIS after another two-year gap that you really have to see to enjoy, and she accepts, running away with him the night before her wedding, which is a thread I suspect they’re going to pull on. The TARDIS interior has been completely redesigned, and it looks radically different from the one we had in the David Tennant years, more storybook than coral. There’s a new green sonic screwdriver to go with it. It’s a proper fresh start, and it made me want to see where this Doctor and this companion go next, which is exactly what an opener should do. Put it next to the way Rose relaunched the show in 2005 and it holds up well.
Rating: 3.5/5. A confident, funny and genuinely magical opener with a few hiccups, a new Doctor still finding his feet and a companion who’s brilliant from the first minute. Karen Gillan and the young Amelia are the stars, and the fish custard scene alone is worth tuning in for. I’m looking forward to seeing Smith relax into it.
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