This Doctor is more mysterious than the tenth incarnation but he's also a lot more involved with his companions, especially the female ones.
The Eleventh Hour introduces us to the new Dcotor and effectively follows on immediately from the events at the end of the New Year's Day special. With the TARDIS burning up over London the Doctor is struggling to reintergate himself after his regeneration. As the TARDIS came to a halt in a garden, the Doctor is introduced to Amelia Pond aged seven who seems to be a very self assured young woman even then as she is faced with the impossible task of trying to find some food that the Doctor would find acceptable. She also tells him about the crack in her bedroom wall. The one through which she hears voices. With a little bit of help from his new sonic screwdriver, the Doctor manages to close it - it was a crack in the Space/Time continuum, not the wall's plaster and then promises Amelia that he just needs to take the TARDIS for a spin round the Moon to run her back in but he'll be back in five minutes, but, however spiffy the TARDIS is (and it's looking very spiffy in it's own regeneration so far), it's still got a few control issues so it's just a bit later than five minutes before the Doctor returns...
In fact it's quite a few years later and Amelia's long gone and the young lady now living there was having a terrible time seeing all the rooms in the house - apparently something was blocking her perceptions of it. Eventually, a connection is made between the people appearing in two place at once, Amy's lodger and the alien spacefleet that's suddenly invested the planet. After coming back for Amy Pond (for indeed the young woman he'd met in the latter part of the adventure was the young girl he'd left behind before) the Doctor was a couple of years later than he'd said he'd be and he invited Amy out for a ride, to return in time for the following morning - something about a wedding. Rather optimistically all things considered, Amy agrees to go with the Doctor.
In The Beast Below, Amy and the Doctor find themselves far into the future confronted by a huge starship containing all that remained of the population of the United Kingdom after solar flares had burnt off Earth. (It's not explicitly linked to the flares that had destroyed Earth in the Fourth Doctor story The Ark in Space but the implication's fairly clear). As always there's darkness hidden in the depths as the two travellers become involved in the action despite the Doctor's injunctions not to get involved.
The Doctor and Amy got to meet the 10th Queen Elizabeth whose reign had been somewhat longer than even she thought. As Starship UK makes it's way into space, we spot a strange crack in the hull...
In The Daleks' Victory the Doctor and Amy respond to a phone call for help from Winston Churchill during the London blitz. The Doctor finds that he’s arrived only a month after that call during which time Churchill has become more confident of victory, all due to a wonderfully advanced scientist whose mind was overflowing with all sorts of ideas. But his main invention were the ironsides. When an ironside appears we find that it’s a dalek in grey... The Doctor is duly horrified but Churchill is desperate and when the Doctor asks Amy for some backup she denies all knowledge of them. Rather unlikely given what the daleks had done to Earth a few short years before but the Doctor’s a bit too busy to fully investigate at the time. After all, there are daleks to be insulted. However, it seems that the daleks needed the Doctor to declare himself their enemy for they’ve been upgraded once more and the upgrades saw the old daleks as inferior. Rather interestingly the new daleks resemble some old (and less than accurate) dalek models – but they do look rather spiffy.
The spitfires attacking the dalek mothership were a bit silly (and I don’t think they had the union flag on them like these).
Matt Smith was actually quite impressive as his character is forced to make a choice between destroying the daleks or saving the Earth.
The Time of Angels opens in the far future with the Doctor and Amy looking through the exhibits of the largest museum in history. The Doctor is looking through the exhibits seeing which were labelled correctly or not until he comes to the flight recorder of an old spaceship which had High Gallifreyan glyphs burnt into its surface. As the Doctor said, "once upon a time, such words spelt the doom of whole solar systems. Now they said 'Hello Sailor...'". Complete with the flight recorder, the Doctor and Amy retreat to the TARDIS for additional study. Meanwhile, we see flashback scenes of the text being burnt into the recorder and the actions of the exuberant lady doing it as she plans her escape - rather depending on the Doctor's skills in getting the TARDIS to the correct spot in space/time.
Once aboard, River Song, the leader of the team in the Tenth Doctor stories 'Silence in the Library' and 'Forest of the Dead' takes command. The Doctor's (from her point of view) wife utters the immortal phrase 'Follow that Starship' while programming the TARDIS. They find the starship had crashed and River Song tells him there's a Weeping Angel (from the Tenth Doctor story 'Blink') aboard and she'd called in the troops - a squad of the Church Militant were already in orbit.
The interior scenes of the catacombs were rather impressive and the designers managed to create an excellent sense of claustrophobia as the troops hunted for the missing Angel - in a place filled with statues. As the search continued, they realise the starship crashing just there was probably not as accidental as it may have initially appeared...
Flesh and Stone sees the survivors make their way into the crashed ship where they have to make their way to the vessel's control room so they can shut down the powerplant. But Amy's been infected by the Angel and daren't open her eyes. The Doctor, River Song and the Bishop make their way through the forested interior while the Bishop's men remain with Amy. As they wait, the patrol sends out members to investigate the light just beyond the hill. Strangely, the men disappear and the team leader swears that he's never heard of them. Eventually only Amy's left and she has to make her way to where the Doctor and River Song are ensconced in the control room. Only problem is she's got to negotiate her way past the Angels infesting the ship. While keeping her eyes closed....
In The Vampires of Venice the Doctor turns up at Amy's fiance's stag night, much to the disappointment of everyone else and his explanation of why he's there doesn't go down all that well. To make up for a kiss and the spoilt party, the Doctor takes Amy and Rory to Venice where they find the city closed due to fear of the plague, which sparks the Doctor's interest as the plague had more or less died out by this time (the fifteen hundreds) and when the Doctor spots a contretemps across the canal, his interest in the countess and her son is piqued... Rory rather steals the Doctor's thunder when he refuses to be surprised by the impressive size of the TARDIS's interior.
In The Dream Lord the Doctor, Amy and Rory find themselves five years on from their marriage. They've moved up in the world and Amy's expecting their first child when the Doctor reappears to see how things are going (quite well if you must ask). But then, as the birds sing, the trio fall asleep only wake up in the TARDIS, each thinking that they were merely dreaming of an ideal future (Rory's a qualified doctor there). As they compare notes, it's apparent that they've all shared the same dream. Then the birds start singing again and everyone falls asleep only to wake up in the village where the trio find themselves in a rather strange old peoples home. As this swapping continues they are visited by a person calling himself the Dream Lord who tells them they have to decide which of these two realities is the real reality (if you see what I mean) and in both, they will be put in a situation where they will die. In the dream world all that will happen is that they will wake up. In the real world they will die! Just chose the world that is real... The trouble is that a world that has aliens masquerading as OAPs wasn't as far fetched as it may seem but Amy finds a way to make the correct call. Or is there more to things than it seems?
This could have been quite a confusing story, the way it cuts between scenes but things came together reasonably well eventually and not too gooilly.
The Hungry Earth is the first of a second double parter that sees the Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in Wales about ten years into Amy and Rory’s future. Considering that the Doctor had been aiming for Rio Amy reckons this a terrible shot but given the TARDIS’s track record throughout this series perhaps she shouldn’t have been quite so surprised. While Amy demands to get on with the trip to Rio, the Doctor’s attention is taken by the supersized drilling rig that had taken over the local pit. As the Doctor and Amy go off to investigate Rory pops back to the TARDIS with Amy’s engagement ring and on re-emerging he’s taken to be a policeman sent to investigate the disappearing bodies from the local graveyard. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Amy find there are strange things going on down on the drilling floor. Things that Amy gets a good close up look at as the earth turns to quicksand under her. The people in charge of the drilling rig are persuaded to close down their operations at the twenty one kilometre limit but its already too late as the Doctor identifies a trio of pods rapidly making their way to the surface. The Doctor, Rory and the few remaining villagers fort up in the chapel and its here where the Doctor’s immersion in the problem at hand causes the loss of one of the villagers; this Doctor appears to be less concerned with those surrounding him than earlier incarnations. When they take one of the trio of invaders prisoner they find that they are dealing with an old enemy; the Silurians, although their geological age is corrected in this story; the Silurian Geological Age is far too early (about 300 million years ago), they actually come from some period in the Cretaceous (about 65 million years ago) along with their pets the tyrannosaurs (For a detailed breakdown of the various eras see this Wikipedia page: Geologic time scale). On travelling down to the Silurian’s underground haunts, the Doctor is startled to find, not the few dozen or so homo reptilians he’d expected but a whole landscape full of the creatures.
Myra Syall is fantastic as one of the geologists involved in the drilling operations and Matt Smith was stupendous as the Doctor - probably his best performance to date (I can't really say how much of this is due to the fact I was watching it on-line rather than on the TV - it's still far more exciting watching on the computer than the standard TV even allowing for the almost inevitable dropouts on the connection)
In The Cold Blood, the Doctor manages to get the Homo Reptilians and the Homo Sapiens round a table talking peace despite the strong objections of the military leader. Up on the surface, the reptilian prisoner had been tasered to death by the mother of the boy taken prisoner by the reptilians. This leads to a collapse of the peace talks as the dead being is a gene relative of the military leader who then plots a coup against the overal leader of the Silurians. Deciding that the time is not yet ripe for full-scale interactions between the two groups the leader of the Silurians decides that his people should go back into hibernation for another thousand years and with the timing circuits repaired on the cryogenics technology, it looks like the 3010s could be rather interesting...
The two geologists decided to stay with the Silurians and the rest of the humans escape to the surface as the reptilians' city is flooded with poisonous gases to quell the rebellious military. As the Doctor, Amy and Rory are about to get in the TARDIS, a super-sized crack absorbs Rory and the Doctor goes fishing for any shrapnel that might have been caught in the originating explosion. Because Rory's disappearance affected her personally, Amy found herself forgetting that he ever existed.
Vincent and the Doctor sees the Doctor taking Amy to the Orsey Gallery in Paris to visit the Vincent Van Gogh exhibition and they are both seriously impressed by the collection. Especially the one of the chapel with the horrible alien beast in the window. Sensing a conundrum, the Doctor and his companion travel back to visit the artist to see what he'd found. What they found was a reviled artist at the end of his means (Van Gogh, despite now selling for millions, could barely give away his paintings during his lifetime). When he talks of invisible monsters, most people consider he's gone off the deep end, which nearly ends in tragedy for the artist when dead bodies start turning up. Even the Doctor has trouble believing him and finds it near impossible to combat the beast. The Doctor can't resist bringing Vincent to the Orsay to see how successful he had become. You can see the painting that inspired this story here (Wikipedia.org).
In The Lodger, the TARDIS arrives on present day Earth but there are strange disturbances in the Time Stream and as the Doctor steps outside, the TARDIS decides that she ought to be somewhere else and dematerialises leaving him abandoned and it's up to Amy to regain control.
Arriving at a house advertising a room for rent, the Doctor gradually becomes aware that there's something unusual going on with the upstairs lodger so he takes the room and does his best to merge in as a normal human. But will he be successful in finding out the threat?
Amy finds a disconcering item in the Doctor's pockets as she sorts it out for him...
The Pandorica Opens begins back in the late nineteenth century where Van Gogh is having a particularly bad set of dreams after completing his latest piece of work. We then cut to wartime London where Winston Churchill is presented with a rolled up canvas, and finally to the fifty third century where River Song is undertaking one of her terms in prison, but she’s still entitled to phone calls. Unfortunately for her guard.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Amy go to visit the oldest known writing in the universe only to find that someone had scrawled a new message over the top and its quite obvious who that person was. And they’d kindly left co-ordinates as well. So the TARDIS pops over to first century AD Britannia where the Doctor and Amy are, uh, escorted to the command tent of the legionary camp they materialise next to. There they find the person that the guards thought was Cleopatra was in fact River Song and we finally get to see that picture of Van Gogh’s that had started off this whole mad rush; the TARDIS going up in a violent explosion! Not that this was any surprise to the Doctor by this stage. The Doctor, River and Amy persuade the legionary commander to lend them some horses so they could get to Stonehenge, the site of the mysterious Pandorica. For such an important prison, it seems to be rather easily found. As the Doctor analyses its defences, River lists off all the alien races that had been drawn in by the signals. All the usual suspects were there, daleks, cybermen and the nestene consciousness. Rather unfairly in my opinion so were the draconians (Third Doctor opponents of the humans when the series was going through a phase of seeing humanity as the bad guys). A rather dramatic confrontation where the Doctor dared the various races to be the first to pit their overwhelming force against his single unarmed self sees them back off much to everyone’s surprise. A century of legionnaires provide site security, turning up just in time for their commander to save Amy from a desperate cybermen shell. In an attempt to stop the TARDIS from exploding, River Song tries to shut it down but instead finds herself travelling back to Amy’s empty house where she makes an interesting discovery; the legionary squad looking after the Doctor and Amy were all taken from Amy’s book about Roman Britannia. Except their commander who we last saw falling into crack in time. Yes, Rory’s back… of course things aren’t as they seem and as River Song tries valiantly to control the TARDIS, and fail, we learn who is inside the Pandorica.
This was a lavish production with a really beautiful classical music sound track (well done to the BBC’s Welsh Symphony Orchestra) and brilliant effects. There were a couple of niggles – the Romans at that stage wouldn’t have had stirrups with their saddles though Karen Gillan looked unhappy enough just to be on horseback and the ending makes the Tenth Doctor being shot by the daleks look like a mere bagatelle in comparison and it will be interesting to see how they get out of it.
And in The Big Bang, we get to see how this is achieved. Little Amelia Pond awakens to have seen no stranger appear in her garden but still with no parents and living with her aunt. But if Amelia doesn't dream of a Raggidy Man, she does dream of the mythical stars and draws pictures of them in the night sky, which concerns her aunt so much that she takes her niece to the doctor. But it's a stranger shoving notes through the door that send her and her aunt to the National Museum...
Additional notes persuade her to stay behind when the museum closes and then visit the gallery containing the Pandorica to see what was contained inside. As a startled Amy escapes the confines of the prison that had held her for the best part of the last two millennia, we find out how Earth had managed to survive the universal crunch. And as the story continues we find out that not even the Earth will be around much longer unless the Doctor can pull of something really miraculous and this one is fairly straighforward.
All the Doctor had to do was regenerate the exploding TARDIS, currently doing duty as the planet's sun, and travel back to the Big Bang and recreate the whole universe. Only a couple of downsides; these actions would leave the Doctor on the wrong side of the cracked universe and there was a partially regenerated dalek out hunting them. In as far as the BBC didn't try to outdo The Pandorica Opens this wasn't quite a let down but the way they had the Doctor hopping around times was a good example of why the scriptwriters don't let him do this sort of thing on a regular basis. The bit after the regeneration of the Universe, where Amy is getting married and finally gets around to seeing her parents (to the confusion of both herself and them!) as she is getting ready for her wedding was rather well done and the way she and Rory were reminded of the Doctor and the TARDIS was great. All-in-all, an okay reset and the TARDIS gets its first married couple as Companions.
The interseason Christmas Special was 'A Christmas Carol' sees the Williams away on their honeymoon - the Doctor had arranged for them to go on an all expenses paid cruise round the galaxy. Unfortunately, their ship had been caught up in a planet's defensive shield and found itself coming in for a rather violent meeting with the planet's atmosphere.. The Doctor visits the person who controls the system in an attempt to shut down the system. But the person is so cold-hearted that Ebinezer Scrooge would have looked warm and friendly even before meeting the ghosts.
The Doctor plays the part of the ghosts in an attempt to make this man a better person. Unfortunately he succeeds far too well for the machine controlling the defense system no longer recognises him as an authorised user.
The Eleventh Doctor's second season opener, The Impossible Astronaut starts with Amy and Rory sharing the marital home (so they didn't go rushing off with him at the end of the last season after all...). They receive a mysterious envelope with a set of co-ordinates written on a card inside it and the number three on the back. A cut to River Song's prison sees a rather worried prison guard alerting his superiors that "she's doing it again! She's packing!" - River Song had received her envelope..
The next scene takes us to somewhere in the States where the Doctor is waiting for them. As River and the Doctor share their experinces to see where on the time lines they lay, things take a serious turn as an astronaut appears out of the nearby lake and the Doctor orders the three Companions not to interfere in what was about to happen but as the astronaut strikes, Amy has to be held back by her colleagues. To everyone's horror, the Doctor dies a proper death and the fourth recipient of one of the Doctor's letters makes himself known. Rory arranges a Viking funeral for the Doctor's remains - even in death the remains of a Time Lord's body were worth plundering. Dejected by the way things had turned out, Amy, River and Rory return to a nearby Diner only to find the recipient of the first of the Doctor's envelopes - the Doctor himself, only this one was only 900 and some change rather than the 1100 he'd claimed earlier. Under River Song's urging the Companions refuse to fill this one in on what had been going on but he's aware something's a bit weird so he exorts a promise from Amy that she knows what's going on. So they're off to 1969 America, with the TARDIS acting as a fifth vote as she took them to the White House and Richard Nixon rather than Florida and NASA...
Amy finds she's seeing strange aliens that had the power to make people forget they'd seen them. But who was the young girl phoning the President asking for his help?
Day of the Moon opens three month after the last episode with Amy, Rory and River being chased down by Canton and apparently being executed. This was quite an amazing change of perspective for Canton had appeared pro Doctor in the earlier episode. River chooses to jump off a skyscraper. The Doctor is being held in Area 51 inside a prison that would have made the Pandorica a mere play pen (So we won't worry about how they got all this amazing alloy, please) but when the prison is complete we find out that this is a sca..er, scheme to build an area where no-one could listen in and where we learn that the planet has been occupied by beings that are able to make you forget them as soon as you look away.
Soon the Doctor and the Companions are in the TARDIS and on a quick swing through NewYork to pick up River who gets a dowsing in the TARDIS's swimming pool and after the Doctor is officially released by Richard Nixon, the group investigates the child in the spacesuit and an incredibly spooky orphanage - or at least Canton and Amy do (incidently Kerry Shale playing the owner of the orphanage actually seems to have the accent that slips the most here despite being the only American in the sequence). Amy's taken prisoner while Canton takes a creature prisoner and wields Amy's phone to unknown effect just yet.
When the Doctor and the TARDIS comes thundering after Amy, we get one of the biggest shoot outs in Who (not something the Doctor generally resorts to) after the Doctor splices a Silence ordering us to fight and kill them into the video feeds of Neal Armstrong's moonlanding...
The production team has made a strong start on season 6 and they're beginning to tie in a number of loose ends from earlier seasons.
The Curse of the Black Spot was the second outing on a pirate ship for the Doctor but unlike his 1960s adventure this story is as much science fiction as piratical swashbuckling with a ghostly Siren carrying away injured members of the becalmed crew.
Afterr a few false starts the Doctor finds out there are two ships involved in this mess; the pirate ship they were aboard and the alien spaceship in that dimension, just over there, that one, just out of sight! The crew of the alien ship had all sucumbed to an alien virus and were dead with the Siren being the ship's emergency doctor.
Hugh Bonneville as Captain Avery was brilliant, showing that just because something looked strange you couldn't learn how to use it and he stood up to the Doctor's attempts to take control of the situation (incidently the real Captain Avery actually flew a red Jolly Roger not the traditional black one). Amy's sword fight was particularly impressive as this was apparently Karen Gillan's first time with a sword.
The Doctor’s Wife. For the first time since ‘The War Games’, we get to see the Time Lords’ emergency messaging system when a glowing cube come knocking at the TARDIS’s doors. Engraved with a serpent swallowing its own tale, the Doctor recognised it as coming from a particularly close friend, the Corsair so in hope that his old friend is still alive despite Amy’s reminder that all the Time Lords were supposed to be toast he traces its path. Following the device’s path takes the TARDIS out of the normal universe and onto a strange world, home to some even stranger characters, Aunty, Uncle, Nephew and Niece. It quickly becomes obvious that the Corsair, along with many other Time Lords had been executed but with their essences imprisoned. So what was the killer after? Amy and Rory find out after they are sent back to the TARDIS to retrieve the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. In its way this was easily the darkest story as the possessed TARDIS is stolen and the rebodied TARDIS and the Doctor cobble together a TARDIS of their own to track it down. Meanwhile, Amy and Rory are given a horrifying tour of the TARDIS interior as the occupying House messes with that interior and their minds – the first time we’ve been past the main control room since the series returned. Just a pity it was all corridors... The Doctor pulls off a trick to regain control of the TARDIS and expel House. Amy and Rory try and persuade the Doctor to give them a double bed while he's remodelling the TARDIS but the Doctor is adamant that bunk beds are the coolest! Maybe to do with the fact that the TARDIS’s scanner still can’t decide if Amy’s pregnant. As always so far this season the acting was without reproach and the Doctor managed to exude an air of menace that we don’t often see, but is a nice reminder that he isn’t human and has his own agenda.
The Rebel Flesh. When the Doctor and his companions find themselves caught up in a solar storm, they find themselves on 22nd Earth in a strange factory whose workforce is augmented by a form of living flesh. When the second wave of the storm disrupts the factory’s systems, the gangers gain an autonomous existence leaving them scared and unstable as they come to terms with their existence. But gradually they stabilise and it becomes difficult to tell who’s a ganger and who’s real. Unlike many of the current crop of Doctor Who stories so far this story has a really close and claustrophobic atmosphere in an enclosed base and the flesh bubbling away in its vat was suitably creepy. Terror is kept quite close to the surface (it’s supposed to be suitable for kids and in an early evening slot so nothing too extreme) but preys on the generic fear of the doppelganger.
The Almost People sees the conclusion to The Rebel Flesh, with the remaining humans facing the gangers who are rather annoyed over something. As Rory continues his self-appointed mission of mercy, he finds out why. The Doctors attempt to persuade both sides to trust each other but their work is cut out as even Amy, scared for Rory, finds it impossible to trust the animated constructs. However, the two sides are freed from the seriously deranged ganger of the young woman and the survivors of both groups came to an agreement to tell the world what was going on.
The Doctor, worried about the confused scanner results over Amy for a while now, found their time with the gangers pointing to a solution!
A Good Man Goes to War sees the Doctor and Rory go on the trail of Amy who we find has had her baby. As he starts looking for Amy, the Doctor calls in debts from individuals and species to build himself an army throughout space and time. Meahwhile, Rory's off gathering intelligence and has arrived at the 12th Cyberfleet with its wheeled starships - not seen for quite a while. Rory bore a message and requested the answer to a question. The question was 'where is my wife?'. The message? When the cyber leader asks about that, it's to see most of his fleet vanish in a massive explosive...
Back in her prison Amy sees the military forces guarding her assembling to oppose the forces the Doctor is assembling when he decides to appear. As the Doctor's taking his own sweet time to come to Amy's rescue the soldiers hold a morale raising parade at which the Doctor finally makes his appearance effectively forcing them to disarm themselves. though the Headless Monks prove to be more resilient ('Headless' turned out to be rather more descriptive than anticipated...). At all turns it looks like the Doctor has anticipated all the possible actions of his opponents and Amy and Rory's baby is back in her hands leaving the Doctor wondering about those strands of Time Lordian DNA until he realised where little Melody must have been conceived... While Amy and Rory are getting to know their daughter, the Doctor and allies try to work out why the victory had been so overwhelming! It isn't until little Melody turns to sludge in Amy's arms that things become clear, throwing the Doctor from the heights of his victory to the depths of despair. And then River Song turns up with a stunning piece of news.
For once, this actually felt a bit rushed - pacing in the new Doctor Who stories are far faster than their predecessors but they've felt somewhat slight (to me anyway) particularly in this new series. However, the Doctor's alliance was built too quickly to feel realistic within the contraints of a 42 minute story. The tension between Amy and her captors was excellently managed as was Amy's reaction to the loss of her child. This was an excellent cliffhanger - the Doctor leaves our screens for a mid summer break. This was my youngest nephew's favourite story of the season to date.
After the Doctor comes back from his summer holidays the second half of the season's offerings starts off with Lets's Kill Hitler. The best part about this story? It ends. It opens in rural England with Amy and Rory out in the middle of the countryside constructing a crop circle requesting help from the Doctor - not unreasonably after the previous episode, Amy and Rory aren't currently travelling with the Doctor, who's supposed to be off looking for little Melody. As it looks like the Ponds' message is going to bear fruit, they're joined by Amy's best friend, the Melody that had inspired the name of her baby who introduces herself to the Doctor in a decidedly forward fashion. The party then moves to Nazi Germany and the Reich Chancellory after Melody suggests offing the Fuhrer might be fun. Lots of fun and games around just prewar Nazi Berlin during which Melody is shot and regenerates into the familiar River Song (thumbs up to Alex Kingston here in managing to give a performance that made me feel River Song was a freshly minted person.). There's also a shapeshifting robot gunning for Hitler, then the Doctor when he disrupts Hitler's death.
This was a seriously bad episode in my opinion for so many reasons. I just didn't feel as if anyone had any real interest in the story (what there was of it), though there were a few good set pieces.
Night Terrors brings us back to contemporary Erath where the Ponds and the Doctor are attracted to a flat in a housing estate where they sense something weird going on. At first they think that it's just the young boy having nightmares but the truth gradually comes to light as first Amy and Rory, then the Doctor are sucked into the doll's house in George's wardrobe.
This story was actually quite scary as the dolls inhabiting the doll house surround those who have been absorbed by the house. There's also the revellation of George's origins.
The Girl Who Waited takes us back into outer space. The Ponds (I'm following the Doctor's convention of giving the couple Amy's last name) are travelling with the Doctor when they inadvertantly land on a planet where a plague had done a job on the local population. Amy, unaware, enters a room that separates her from the Doctor and Rory. Having identified the plague as one that only affects races with two hearts, it's up to Rory to investigate the facilities while the Doctor isolates himself in the TARDIS promising to follow as soon as Rory had found Amy. Unfortunately, Rory and the Doctor find that they are 36 years ahead of where they should be and, not unreasonably from her point of view, Old Amy doesn't want them rescuing Young Amy, making her point rather forceably when she holds Rory captive. The Doctor promises that he'll do his best to rescue both Amys but ends up breaking his promise to the older version as she's about to enter the TARDIS.
The God Complex takes us to what appears to be a rather cheesy 1980s hotel, though this one is soon revealed to have rather disturbing attributes as the trio are gradually split up as the corridors shift. As they find themselves in the presence of other inhabitants of the hotel, they learn that there's something stalking them, choosing its victims by the strength of their beliefs. Amy thinking herself safe as an athiest finds herself the next snack when her belief in the Doctor makes her vulnerable to the beast hidden in this strange labyrinth. In its way this is the antithesis of the Seventh Doctor story The Curse of Fenric where it was belief that was the defence against the haemovores.
In Closing Time, the Doctor's on his own again - this is the one two hundred years older than our usual Doctor and who knows he's about to die. He's decided he's going to visit Craig Owens (last seen in The Lodger). Since he'd first met the Doctor, Craig's got himself a partner and a baby son. Sophie's gone away for a few days leaving Craig to look after Alfie. Craig's having a hard enough time of it without the Doctor but when the Doctor catches up with him in a department store the trio find themselves involved with a cell of cybermen who had taken up residence in the cellar. We also get to see what Amy's been up to since she and Rory had left the Doctor.
In The Wedding of River Song, we find out the reason for River Song's long incarceration. Knowing his time's up, the Doctor sends out the post cards inviting his former companions to the final meeting. The River Song in the space suit refuses to play ball, though, and not kill him, throwing the timeline into confusion. Amy is a leader in a resistance cell while Rory is one of her soldiers. In order to get things back on track the Doctor and River marry and kiss, allowing the Doctor to die. Once it was all over, River reveals that the Doctor who died was really a Teselecta robot doubling up as the Doctor.
The Christmas Special was The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe. Despite the obvious reference to a certain well known children's book, this was a rather scary story. A woman and her children are sent to an old house that has seen better days, and the caretaker is an odd fellow who's done his best in making the place inhabitable even if his ideas of suitable decore are rather offbeat. The woman's husband is a pilot in bomber command, presumed lost over Europe and the family are busily pretending to each other that things aren't really as bad as they seem. It's almost Christmas and there aren't going to be many presents until the caretaker reveals what's waiting for them in the dining room. But on absolutely no reason were the children, a boy and a girl, to sneak down early to investigate the intriguing boxes. But the boy was unable to contain his curiosity and went down to find that the wrappings on the box had come loose, leaving a strange hole. Unable to contain himself, he sneaked through to find himself literally in a new world. His sister follows him through a few minutes later and the children find their way through the forest as best as they could. When their mother finds them missing, she is eager to follow despite the best efforts of the caretaker to stop her. Eventually the mother prevails and she and the Doctor pass through the anomaly. The Doctor had arranged for the box to take the family through to a winter wonderland, but it wasn't the right time yet and the family found themselves in a world about to be violently destroyed.
The first story in series seven was Asylum of the Daleks. It being quite a while since we've had the daleks, I was wondering how they were going to manage the vast numbers of daleks seen in the trailers but they have really got this sorted now. When we first see the daleks, we're in their parliament (for a destroyed species, there seem to be quite a large number of them knocking about...) and we get to see all the dalek styles from earlier shows as well as the new versions. But we are quickly transported down to the planet surface, where the truly insane daleks (how could you tell?) are kept imprisoned. Here there are two perils to watch out for; psycho daleks of course; and the planetary defence system that converts you to a dalek like creature. As well as these problems, the Ponds' marriage is in serious trouble, the Doctor's probably not the best marriage guidance councilor available.
The next story, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, starts out with the Ponds back on Earth, marriage problems apparently over. When the Doctor finds out there's an unknown alien spaceship approaching Earth, he's shocked to learn that it's going to be blown out of space if it doesn't change course. So it's a quick trip round the time lines - Nefertiti and John Ridell, a big game hunter from the early twentieth century join Rory, Amy and Rory's father as the Doctor investigates the hulk. They find that it's some sort of ark filled with dinosaurs but no intelligent crew. As they explore, the party find that the ship was launched by the Sillurians in another effort to save their culture. Just a slight shortage of Sillurians. The Doctor finds that the ship has been hijacked by a collector who'd spaced the cryogenics chambers containing the frozen crew.
In A Town Called Mercy, the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory do the Wild West. As they made their way into town there were the odd sign or two that the town of Mercy wasn't your average western township - the population sign might have come straight out of the canon but the ring of stones and bits and bobs demarcating the town's border was fairly unusual and the street lighting, clearly jury rigged as it was, was also easily ten years too early for anywhere to have even this level of practical electrical lighting. The Doctor and the Ponds find themselves in the middle of a seige betweeen the locals who had taken in the stranger who had brought such innovations to their town and the thing hunting him. When the Doctor's name is first revealed, the townsfolk think he's the author of their misfortune and throw him over the town boundary where the hunter is revealed to be a cyborg created by the person he's hunting. Getting fed up with the hunt, the cyborg offers up an ultimatum - hand over the correct alien by midday the following day or suffer having the town wiped off the face of the planet. When he learns the full extent of the atrocities commited by the fugitive, the Doctor is all for throwing the man out of town all by himself. Only the Marshall's, um argument, and Amy's disgust persuaded him to come up with another plan. But the Doctor hadn't taken account of another's guilt.
As we've seen, the Doctor in all his incarnations, has had companions in his own home, the TARDIS, letting them share the adventures that make up his life. But in The Power of Three, the Doctor spends an extended amount of time in the Williams' home as he and they study the little black boxes that miraculously start appearing all over the Earth. Seemingly inert, they do absolutely nothing and we have a few fun vignettes of the BBC news team getting some exposure as they make reports on the phenomenum (I can remember when they weren't allowed to do this sort of thing...) and even Professor Cox had his few seconds. We also get to meet Rory's dad again as well. The Doctor finds it nearly impossible to sit down as they wait for the cubes to do something, anything. Cue a few more minutes of screen silliness as the Doctor tries to amuse himself with a variety of activities. Eventually the Doctor gets bored and leaves promising to drop in to see how things are going. As things continue not happening, the Doctor drops in on Rory and Amy's life and they find themselves planning for events in the future as if they were normal. But things aren't normal and a year after they initially appeared, the cubes start showing signs of life. During the Doctor's next visit to Amy and Rory, their house is invaded by some black clad troops and they're invited to a meeting beneath the Tower of London. The Doctor enjoys the fact that UNIT is now being commanded by a scientist but this enjoyment is compounded when he realises that the commander is the daughter of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart...
The cubes are all producing diffferent irritants as they search for humanity's weaknesses until they find what a good sharp electric shock would do to human physiology - it didn't do the Doctor much good either even with his second heart though Amy's desperate actions save him. Can the intrepid trio work out how to reverse the effect of this attempt to exterminate Humanity? Right at the end, Rory's father has a little talk to Doctor on the safety of his companions...
The Angels of New York takes the Doctor, Amy and Rory to New York where the Williams are celebrating their wedding anniversary. The Doctor has found a rather trashy detective novel but it's a rather strange book for it seems to be telling the tale of a trio of travellers, one going by the moniker of The Doctor, while his companions were Amelia and Rory. It seemed that they were on the trail of the angels as was the lead detective, a woman by the name of Melody. As Rory goes for some coffee, the Doctor realises that Amy is showing the first signs of aging and what does the ageless fear most in his companions? The first signs of age. Gradually the pair realise that Rory is being an awfully long time getting back with that coffee and as the Doctor looks through the book, he's realises that the book is actually a thinly hidden guide to their future actions. So its off to 1930s New York where they find the Weeping Angels have infested the city that never sleeps. And there are some very large and iconic statues in New York! Also back in that time zone was River Song who'd been pardoned from her virtually perpetual imprisonment as no-one seemed to know just who it was she was supposed to have killed.
As far as getting rid of companions, this was one of the more emotional settings as Rory realises the only way to breach the paradox presented by the angels was to sacrifice himself... It's always a sad time when companions leave and the depth of Amy's attachment to the Doctor was forged a long time ago. We get to feel an emotional loss that is unusual, but then there was also River to consider as she sees her parents lost in the distant past.
Like last year, the season takes a mid season break at this point coming back in 2013, with the Christmas special to look forward to where we are promised a new companion. I just hope that this is as strong a pairing as bewteen Matt and Karen.
The 2012 Christmas Special was entitled The Snowmen and is set in the late Victorian era. The story opens with a young boy having a bad experience in a boarding school and having his vows to get even taken seriously by an unusual snowman. We then jump forward 50 years later to the grim streets of Victorian London where strange things are happening with the snowmen that spontaneously appear in the streets to the detriment of those nearby. Clara who'd been spending time with her family helping out at the local pub, is intrigued by the tall and mysterious stranger who's driving round the streets as the snowmen appear and disappear and we're introduced to the Doctor still grieving for Amy and not eager to let another companion into his life but there's a collection of associates eager to get him involved in the growing anarchy. Following the Doctor until he disappears in a park, Clara finds herself in a strange place next to a blue box but with no sign of life so she reluctantly returns to her current residence where she's governess to the owner's children where the girl dreams of snowmen attacking. As the story unfolds we learn what the snowmen and their human controller were after.
The story was reasonably intense and the way that the character of Clara was introduced was great. Trying to find new ways of characters to respond to the discrepancy between the outside and inside of the TARDIS is getting rather difficult - new companions have been doing this for the last fifty years after all and Clara's "It's smaller on the outside" is rare (I'm not quite sure it was as unique as the Doctor says, mind).
The first of the second half of the season was The Bells of Saint Johns. The Doctor is mostly over the funk engendered by the loss of the Ponds and he's looking for the link between Clara and Clara who was supposedly killed at the end of the Christmas Special and she's the spitting image of the Junior Entertainment Officer of the crashed spaceship Alaska. But in this episode, Clara's at home when she calls a helpline to help get her online but this call goes through to somewhere a bit further away than India. The Doctor quickly homes in on her call and meets her face-to-face. While he's there, though, something tries to upload the essence of Clara. A quick bit of coding manages to bring her back but he quickly becomes aware of the severity of the situation. Although the storyline did feel rather light, this did actually manage to hold my attention quite well.
In The Rings of Akhaten, Clara finds her dreams of travelling to strange and wonderful places fulfilled as the Doctor turns up and whisks her away from her rather humdrum life in London. The market scenes have a large number of aliens and apparently, the TARDIS's translation circuits are on the blink, or maybe its just that she's not a full time companion yet. But when she spots a young girl running away from a pair of simmilarly dressed older men, Clara follows, finally finding the girl and chatting to her about personal fears. Apparently the youngster has an important song to sing and is afraid of messing it up. Without the Doctor to advise her, Clara persuades Merry to face her fears and make the performance. The concert was going quite well, with some amazing singing from all concerned though I'm not sure it was entirely 'live'... But things don't go as planned and Merry is taken across the void to the pyramid that was the mystical centre of the system. Here we learn what the pyramid was hiding and the Doctor thinks he knows what's going on but he soon finds that he's miscalculated quite badly. This story was relatively intense as all the characters are forced to face up to fears and possibilities.
In Cold War, the Doctor and Clara are supposed to be on their way to Las Vegas but the TARDIS is somewhat off course. Instead, it materialised on the command deck of a Soviet missile submarine. Considering thta this is the early eighties, when the world was at its closest point to nuclear destruction, and the crew of the Soviet submarine were already not having a good day, what with them having suffered a catastrophic engine failure that had them booked with an upcoming appointment with the floor of the Arctic Ocean, the appearance of the time travelling dou did not go down well. Clara's not really sure why, if these people are really Russians, they're all speaking English. Thanks to a rating left alone with that mysterious iceblock containing Brehznev-knew-what and unwilling to wait til the boat got back to port to see what it contained the crew finds itself face to face with the last remaining (or first) Ice Warrior from Mars to be uncovered. This was a fairly unusual story in the new series in that it's set in such a tightly constrained space. It was nice that the Ice Warrior's look hadn't changed too much since their last outing in the Third Doctor's era and the sight of the actual being inside the armour was great and nicely realised.
In Hide, we get a small cast, the Doctor, Clara, Dr Alec Palmer and his companion Emma Greyling, all in another relatively small set. Dr Palmer hadn't had a good war - he'd been something in Intelligence and he was feeling guilty over sending other men to their deaths on the back of the intelligence he'd developed. After the war, he became a psychic investigator and Emma is an empath able to tell when the ghosts are playing games. When the Doctor and Clara breezed in (on a dark and stormy night) Palmer and Emma are getting results at the site of their latest hauning but who is the strange ghost who has barely changed position ever since they had records. The story was scary enough in spots but it did get wrapped up rather too neatly at the end.
Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS is either the smallest set of all time or the largest, with most of the action set inside the TARDIS itself. As a bonding exercise, the Doctor lets Clara have a go at piloting the TARDIS but he's had to switch off the defensive forcefields to let her and as we all know, this is always a bad idea - you can never tell when you're likely to be swept up by a passing scavenging starship leading to all sorts of chaos. Somehow thrown out of the TARDIS, the Doctor persuades the three crewmembers that it would be worth their while to help him rescue Clara but once they're in the rather creepy interior of a ship that's impossibly bigger inside than it was on the outside they have second thoughts so the Doctor resorts to rather unethical means to keep them focused on the job in hand - he sets the self-destruct to just thirty minutes, giving the following action a real-time feel. Clara is moving deeper into the TARDIS as she tries to flee from the creepy beings she's sort of sensing out of the corner of her eye and we get glimpses of such iconic sights as the swimming pool and the library, the latter of which she enters, and it was very impressively created. In this place she finds A Book (big surprise huh?) intriguingly entitled A History of the Time Wars and Clara learns something she shouldn't have. Later, after the Doctor joins up with Clara, the three salvage guys are down to two rather nervous colleagues as they and the Doctor search for a safe spot as the TARDIS reconfigures itself around them. And what are those things following them? The Doctor seems to know but he's being more mysterious and close mouthed than usual. As the party (now with Clara) pass through the heart of the TARDIS, a trapped star held perpetually in the process of collapsing to a black hole on their way to the engine room, the Doctor reveals that the creatures following them are their future selves and there's something strange going on with time - a leak somewhere. Just before the Doctor and Clara reach the engine room, the Doctor rather forcefully interrogates her about who she thinks she is. An ordinary girl as far as she knows. The Time Zombies were really rather scary but eventually rather easily edited out of reality. The story writers are really pushing a higher degree of horror in the main body of the stories but they seem to feel constrained to bring things to a happy ending for as many people as possible.
The Crimson Horror takes us back to the Victorian era and Madam Vastra and her friends are contacted by a man who's concerned about the disappearance of his sister after she'd taken up employment at Sweetville, the company run by the moral crusader Mrs Gillyflower and her reclusive partner Mr Small. Jenny gains access to the mysterious factory where she sneaks behind the scenes to find that the sounds of machinery are just that - sounds. But what's going on with all the recruits? Jenny watches as they're dipped in a red fluid. But what's the Doctor doing all coloured red and frozen solid, and what's Clara doing with the Doctor? She'd died after all... This was a really good story though I did feel the whole thing with the brother fainting whenever he saw something upsetting got old very quickly. At the end of the episode, Clara returned to the kids she's babysitting where they work out that she's been travelling through time.
With Angie and Artie in on the secret, the Doctor reckons that a visit to an amusement park should be fairly safe but the place has definitely seen better days and the children are less than impressed and when they are told to get into hiding by Webly who claims to have been abandoned on the site, they follow fairly quietly but is Webley as straight as he makes out? Of course not - but what is his secret? It can't be the cyberman body that's still able to play chess despite being just a shell (the Doctor really ought to have known better) but this secret is easily uncovered when the diminutive Porridge is uncovered in the machine's bowels. The Silver Nemesis was a reasonably scary cyberman episode, though the Imperial soldiers were a bit of a let down - they claimed to be a punishment battalion but I couldn't really see what sort of crimes they could have committed to be posted to such a battalion. The cybermen got a bit of a make over - not the smoother designs of the altcybermen this time but an updated version of the traditional designs from the earlier episodes. I also liked the cyberworms taking the place of the cybermats.
The Name of the Doctor is the Season 7 climax and by and largely managed to live up to such a momentus event. Madame Vastra and her colleagues have captured a vicious killer who bargains for his life when he reveals that the Doctor's greatest secret was now revealed and the Doctor must go to Trenzalore. As Madame Vastra, Jenny, Stax, Clara and River Song are discussing what to do with this information in a dreamworld, their physical bodies come under attack and kidnapped. The Doctor manages to rescue Clara but he has to go to Trenzalore to find the others and its not just the Doctor who's reluctant to visit this grave filled world for it would mean the Doctor crossing his own Timeline - the Great Big No-No! After a confrontation with the living TARDIS that left them floating above a very dead looking planet, the Doctor gets them down to the surface and the hunt is on for the others. Eventually, we find the remnants of the Doctor - a split in time, which the Great Intelligence has plans to use to eliminate the Doctor a day at a time. But Clara comes to an understanding of how the Doctor had managed to see her in so many different guises earlier in his timeline...
Time of the Doctor is the final appearance for the 11th Doctor and in it we are taken to the planet of Trenzalore before it becomes the graveyard that we had seen in The Name of the Doctor. The Doctor decides to make a stand against the aliens that attempt to land on the planet to kill him so that he won't utter his name and bring back the Time Lords from their hidden dimension. He has no real wish to do this as it would mean that the Time Wars he had done so much to stop would just re-ignite but he tries to keep the innocence of the inhabitants intact as well. As he ages we get to see his deterioration as Clara visits him. At the end, we find the Time Lords breaking their seige just longenough to imbue the Doctor with a fresh regeneration.
Matt Smith is by far the youngest actor to play the role of the Doctor, being twenty seven when he took over the role at the beginning of 2010. This youth has been a bone of contention with fans of the series as many people think that he was too young to play the role and it is certain that he has not had the depth of experience of other actors taking up the role. I can't say that Matt Smith is going to be a classic Doctor like his immediate predecessor, David Tennant or Tom Baker but it is still very early days of course and he is clearly trying hard.
A work colleague has reported that her daughter thinks it's so wrong that a Doctor can be fanciable (the daughter was twelve when she made this statement).
At the start of the twenty twelve season, some news sources reported that Matt Smith was ready to give up the role, but other news stories have had Matt saying that he has no intention of leaving the role just yet, particularly as this would mean he would miss the fiftieth anniversary season (2013). At the end of the 2012/13 season seven, it was announces that Matt Smith would indeded be leaving the series during the now-traditional handover time of the 2013 Christmas Special.
He is being replaced by Peter Capaldi, the oldest Doctor since William Hartnell.
These DVDs are available from Amazon
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