Hello. I'm the Doctor.
The first appearance of the Eleventh Doctor premiered in the UK this weekend, as well as several showings at San Francisco’s WonderCon. It doesn’t technically premiere in the US until April 17th, but I saw it and was just blown away, so to heck with the US release date. As Doctor Who is also on my List of Giant Things, I’m taking this opportunity to write up an unscheduled LoGT entry.
Doctor Who has actually undergone several significant shifts since its last Christmas special episode. David Tennant’s reign has come to an end, so a lot of “The Eleventh Hour” was about introducing the new Doctor, played by Matt Smith, and trying to cross the tricky transition from one protagonist into another. Doctor Who is such an odd, unique form of storytelling in this respect – every once in a while, a new actor shows up to take over the main character’s role, and the whole fiction has to continue in the same universe with this new player in its midst. Switching actors happens a fair amount on long-running film mediums, but it’s almost always on the James Bond model: exit Sean Connery, enter Roger Moore, with little comment and very little difference in the essential character. Instead, Doctor Who fictionalizes the new actor’s entrance, usually with great moment and aplomb, and takes each version of the Doctor as an opportunity to start all over again.
Matt Smith and Karen Gillan as the new Doctor Who and his companion, Amy Pond
Err… sort of. The incredible thing about the Doctor Who system of New Actor Playing the Protagonist is that somehow, each new Doctor brings something different and novel to the fiction while also retaining something essential about the character. The First Doctor, played by William Hartnell from 1963-1966, was quite old, occasionally snappish, forgetful, knowledgeable, and grandfatherly. When Hartnell left, he was replaced by Patrick Troughton, whose Second Doctor was younger, changeable, child-like and much less careful about his clothing. And as the Doctors changed, technology changed, and the landscape of television production changed, so too did the forms of storytelling, the enemies, the companions, and the visual style. It’s a show that seems most notable for its mutability, and yet, the things most crucial about the Doctor have always remained somewhere at the core of the show. He’s mysterious, lonely, he loves humanity, hates oppression, is nearly infinitely powerful and deeply frustrated when his capabilities fail to prevent injustice or tragedy.
The transition is always tricky, especially if the previous incarnation has been around for a while, and so I was ready to accept some rocky starts on the first introduction of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. He’s young – much younger than any of the previous iterations – and I was concerned that Smith would have trouble pulling off some of the more tortured aspects of the Doctor’s persona. And yes, the opening scenes were full of abounding silliness, culminating in the Doctor ravenously dipping fish sticks into a giant bowl of custard. The silliness somehow managed to be hilarious and just ever-so-slightly disturbing, though, and by the end of the episode, I was completely sold on Smith’s performance. By the time he got around to that iconic scene where the Doctor selects his new clothing, I was ready to find the bowtie completely charming rather than alarmingly twee. Even more impressive, he’s scary, or at least just scary enough to be believable when he chases off an entire Giant Eyeball Alien ship just by telling them his name.
Mmm, fish custard
As enormous and important as the new Doctor will be, “The Eleventh Hour” is as much about the show’s new producer as its new protagonist. Last years’ Christmas specials were the last hurrah of Russell T. Davies, who has been responsible for the new series of Doctor Who since it premiered five years ago. The reins are now in the hands of Stephen Moffat, who’s written several of the best episodes of Doctor Who over the last few years, and whose style of storytelling is distinctive. The beginning of “The Eleventh Hour” is a gorgeous set piece for Moffat’s aesthetic, and it establishes a solid, unmistakable foundation for his own Doctor Who.
Without question, the newly reborn Eleventh Doctor crash-lands in the middle of a fairytale. The bright blue box lands in front of a dilapidated house surrounded by thick green vegetation, out of which steps an adorable little girl with red hair, an apple-red cardigan, and a Scottish accent. Curiously, the Doctor sets down in a small village rather than the usual urban London setting. The elaborate offering and refusing of food follows a familiar fairytale ritual (“not to hot, not too cold”), the Doctor is mysterious and blunt, and he instantly treats orphaned Amelia Pond as an equal (and notes, quite rightly, that she has a fairytale name). All of the colors are intensely saturated, so that the TARDIS is blue and Amelia’s sweater is red in the manner of abstractions, flashcards, or children’s books.
And then there’s the crack in Amelia’s wall, which more than anything else telegraphs “fairytale.” It’s not the Disney-fied version, of course, but the original Grimm’s stories, where scary things are truly frightening, and horror lurks immediately underneath the everyday. The crack in the wall is such a classic, believable terror – it’s the house that threatens to become unheimlich, the completely mundane object that mysteriously attains power. Where previous Doctor Who stories reach toward cheesiness, as in the opening of the first episode of the new series, where Rose is attacked by plastic department store mannequins, the cheese factor here has been adapted into something deeper and more universal. Even when the show shifts several years in the future and we encounter Amy Pond as a much older Kiss-a-gram, the fairytale remains a strong, palpable undercurrent.
A very creepy disguise for Prisoner One, the villain of "The Eleventh Hour"
This type of storytelling has appeared in Stephen Moffat episodes of Doctor Who before, most notably, “Blink,” where weeping stone angels lurk in every corner, waiting to attack the moment you turn away. (To this day, that is one of the scariest episodes of television I have ever experienced. Oh my god.) I’m thrilled to see it playing such a big role in this new rebooted version of the show, because I think it taps into something that Doctor Who has always been uniquely suited to do, and that is almost entirely absent elsewhere on TV. Unlike any major American television show I can think of, Doctor Who is still made to be family television in Britain. You watch it with your dad, and you both enjoy it. American television for adults is constantly reaching for narrative complexity and mature subject matter as way of endlessly pointing at its own grown-up-ness, and the idea that you could make something more appealing to a wider audience by moving toward simplicity and universality rather than complexity and niche status has never taken hold here.
I wish it would, because the new Doctor Who is, as the Ninth Doctor would say, fantastic.