The first batch of Doctor Who novels featuring the Eleventh Doctor and Amy came out not too long ago. I’m a fairly consistent reader of these books, mostly because the bulk of my free time to read these days is shortly before bedtime, and frankly I’m never in the mood for anything too heavy, or too compelling, at that time of night. (I did skip out on the last few batches of Tenth Doctor novels, because honestly, I really don’t care about more adventures with the Krillitane or the Slitheen, especially when almost all of them felt compelled to include a plucky teenage girl as the Doctor’s temporary side-kick. I should probably go pick up that Sontaran one, though, because I guess it has Rutans in it too, and that’s the kind of nerd I am. Anyway…)

In comparison to previous offerings in the line, the new set of books are slightly larger, though still in hardcover. This makes them more durable, especially considering that the primary audience for these books is children, but as an adult reader it does rather make me feel like I’m reading a Perma-Bound book. It’s not exactly infantilizing, since the Torchwood books were in the same size and hard-cover format, but I prefer the cover-stock that BBC Books used for their Being Human tie-in novels. Those are closer to something in between a standard trade size paperback and that elongated mass-market size. On the other hand, with the new season, it does slightly feel like the core audience for the franchise is aging up a bit, and being closer in size to “real” books does have a slight psychological effect, possibly, of making the books seem more grown-up. In any case, moving away from the smaller, mass-market format does make them stand out from the rest of the tie-in novels in a bookshop, and that’s probably not a bad thing.

There’s very little continuity between the three books, or between the books and the television program. Normally, this is perfectly fine, but there are moments in each book here that give off the impression that the books were originally written with a Generi-Doctor and Companion in mind, with sudden declarations of the Doctor’s or Amy’s appearance or mannerisms inserted afterwards. More probably, the authors were writing from a brief, without having seen Matt Smith or Karen Gillan in the roles, and a more natural characterization simply wasn’t possible.

The first book in the set is Apollo 23, by Justin Richards, which also has the distinction of having the best cover of the three books, by far.

The plot involves the Doctor and Amy investigating the appearance of an American astronaut in a London shopping center, conincident with the death of a woman and her dog on the moon. This leads them to discovering an American prison on the moon for “the worst of the worst,” with a strong yet unspoken implication that the prison is housing mostly political prisoners, with again unspoken comparisons to the American prison in Guantanamo Bay. The political subtext is probably subtle enough to escape kids, but it’s mostly forgotten in favor of an alien invasion plot that bears more than a passing resemblance to the plot of “The Idiot Box.” Though the Doctor and Amy end up separated from one another for much of the story, and the American setting is novel for the series, the solution to the problem sounds, from a non-technical stand-point, much like the Doctor endorsing homeopathy. An “I’ll explain later” can go a long way in situations like this.

Next up is David Llewellyn’s Night Of The Humans, which features the Doctor and Amy investigating a distress signal at a planet-sized garbage dump in space, only to get separated from one another. Amy ends up with the Sittuun, a race of humanoids who all adopt Arabic names for themselves, while the Doctor ends up with the humans, savage primitives who worship cowboy films. Again, the political subtexts are probably going to go right past any kids, and the casting of humans in the role of evil aliens is clever and a subversion of the shows usual tropes, the inclusion of Dirk Slipstream, as a criminal Captain Kirk/Flash Gordon/Buck Rodgers type of space hero is gilding the lily somewhat, especially with his occasional references to previous encounters with the Doctor. (His recognition of the just regenerated Doctor is one of those moments that would seem to suggest that the book was written with a previous Doctor in mind.) Night of the Humans is also noteworthy in that it’s one of the very few of the new series book tie-ins to feature a “pile of bodies” ending.

Finally, there’s The Forgotten Army by Brian Minchin, featuring the Doctor and Amy at some relatively contemporary version of New York City that is being menaced by a resurrected albino mammoth. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be a cover for an alien invasion, from tiny beings whose resemblance to troll dolls we are frequently reminded of. They’re a visually interesting idea, and a concept beyond the scope of a reasonable television budget, so they work well as villains here, though the separation of the Doctor and Amy is starting to feel a bit forced at this point, and while the invasion strategy, to make New Yorkers so afraid of nonspecific, invisible and potentially nonexistent threats is cleverly described, once again it feels like some political subtext has sunk in.

Overall, the three books are light, distracting reads. Fun for a fan of the franchise, but probably of little appeal to anyone else. Night of the Humans is probably the best of the three, and also the one that feels most like an episode of the television series. All three books suffer slightly from a similarity in plot, particularly the reliance on the Doctor and Amy being separated for much of each story. To be fair, it is a trope of the series itself, but as a plot device it feels extremely heavy-handed in this set of books. The next set of books, for my own taste, looks to be more promising, with another Gary Russell novel in the offering and the presence of Amy’s fiance Rory as a full cast member. Rory is great, and I’m looking forward to getting as much of him as possible. I even love the “talk to the hand” pose he has on this cover.

It’s good that the show is making use of him and…wait…what?

Really?

Well, fuck.

When, as a viewer, you’re told from the outset of the story that it is taking place in “dreams” you know that you’re in for something fairly consequence free. And that’s the primary problem with this story. Once the notion of anything we see not being “real” for the characters, we know that they’re safe. Nothing’s really at stake.

The attempt to get around this problem by suggesting that one of the “realities” presented to the characters is the really real one fails to be convincing, as an astute viewer will have noted that the antagonist is styling himself “the Dream Lord” and he’s able to manipulate both realities. That it takes the characters forty-five minutes to clue into the fact that this means that both realities are false suggests that episode writer Simon Nye doesn’t think much of Amy or Rory’s intelligence.

It’s safe to say that I didn’t think much of this episode. At least on the plot level, it’s a bit of a cheat, falling into the same traps that all dream menace stories tend to fall into. But apart from that, there are a few things here to like, or to at least find interesting. The ongoing efforts by the production team to scare the living hell out of British children with mundane things are well represented here, with a horde of evil grand-parents who disintegrate people with their breath. And the suggestion that the Dream Lord is a representation of the Doctor’s own dark side, particularly his self-loathing and anti-social personality traits is enough of a call-back to the idea of the Valeyard, the potential future evil version of the Doctor, that I’m going to go ahead and presume that this was the intent all along. It may not actually be fan service, it’s probably not, but at the very least it will keep people arguing on message boards and in blog comments, and the entertainment value of that alone is worthwhile to me.

The real crux of the story turns out to be development for Amy, then. Her relationship with Rory has frequently come across as one-sided, with Rory showing far more devotion to her than she has to him. Her treatment of Rory, her casual approach to their relationship, the way she appears to take him for granted, has been her most notable personality flaw. Establishing that Amy doesn’t consider life worth living without Rory goes some way towards fixing this problem. It makes Amy less flighty, and strengthens the interpretation of her last-minute departure with the Doctor in “The Eleventh Hour” as a sign of her fulfillment of her childhood dreams.

Whether or not devoting an entire episode to clarifying a characterization problem that only existed because of imprecise motivations in previous episodes was a good use of resources is another issue entirely.

Having Toby Whithouse, the creator of “sounds like the set-up to a really painfully bad nerd joke” series Being Human, about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a house, (which is actually really quite good, and I’m not just saying that because it features Russell Tovey in the nude from time to time) write an episode of Doctor Who that features the fourth distinct vampire-like creature in the show’s history, sounds at first like the sort of thing that might potentially be a little too on the nose to really work. Instead we got a very strong episode, and a surprisingly comedy-driven one at that, given the subject matter.

The lighter aspects of the episode are apparent from the beginning, with a pre-credits sequence in which the Doctor interrupts Rory’s bachelor party in a particularly memorable way, and catches the audience up on the cliff-hanger from the previous episode by choosing the exact wrong moment to tell Rory, and every other man in Leadworth apparently, that Amy has been kissing him. Matt Smith has been given a fair amount of comedy work in the series to date, but his delivery here nails a perfect mix of naivete about the faux pas he is committing and a very Doctorly smug satisfaction with having been kissed impressively by a pretty girl. What’s even better, though, is Arthur Darvill getting the chance to make Rory a real character, and not just a rehash of first season Mickey. The interplay between Rory and the Doctor is rather prickly at first, notably with the Doctor’s visible annoyance at discovering that Rory has actually sat down and taught himself about aliens and dimensionally transcendent vehicles, and Amy’s none too subtle comparisons in which the Doctor is clearly favored in her mind don’t help.

The story itself is, well…fish aliens disguising themselves as vampires is certainly a novel approach to inconspicuous infiltration of another world, but it’s not a plan that holds up to much scrutiny. Whithouse seems to have noticed this too, though, and the pretense is dispatched with fairly quickly in favor of a story about the Doctor’s attempts to infiltrate the alien base and undo their plan. The obligatory “tragic sacrifices” necessary to resolve the story end up feeling a little tacked on after that, though, almost as if a traditional Who “pile of bodies” ending was felt to be needed somewhere in the season.

But quibbling over plot feels like a good way to miss what seems to have been the point of this episode. The structure here is on reintroducing Rory and giving us a reason to care about him. From what we see of him here, he’s brave and clever, intimidated by the Doctor but also not afraid to speak his own mind. He’s also stupidly devoted to Amy, a devotion that she may not entirely deserve. The comparison some have made of Rory to Mickey isn’t fair to Rory; Mickey, at least in the first season, was a bit of a prick. He cheated on Rose and tended towards the selfish in his behavior. In a certain sense, then, Rory is the anti-Mickey. However, the Rose/Mickey dynamic, at least from the Rose side, is somewhat replicated in Amy’s attitude towards Rory. She takes him for granted and clearly favors the Doctor and otherwise gives a general air of having somehow “settled” for Rory or simply fallen into a relationship with him out of a lack of other options. It’s still an obnoxious character flaw for Amy.

The first big two-parter of the new season of Doctor Who comes to an end, and there are two notable things about it. It’s a slightly odd set of episodes, because the two-part format feels slightly off for it, like it would be better served as one extra-long story. But, at the same time, it’s one of the most continuity, season-story-plot dependent episodes we’ve had since the season opener.

While the first episode featured multiple and visually varied locations, the second consists mostly of the Doctor and company either running down corridors (even if one of those corridors is a forest on a space-ship, one of the best ideas served up in the show in terms of world-building in years) or standing around in control rooms. It’s like part four of a seven part Pertwee-era story. It’s almost as if Moffat, after spending all that time the previous week to introduce and establish new characters, reintroduce older characters, and give us a visually interesting setting for a story, decided that this week all he really needed to do to keep the audience engaged was, well…have Amy walk through a forest.

It’s dangerous to let expectations for episodes build up too much, and the two-parters are a good example of why. In the first part, the Weeping Angels have their abilities and nature expanded into something quite powerful and quite sinister. Here, when it is explicitly explained that the whole point that they are hiding within Amy’s eye is to scare her to death, because it is fun to do so, comes off not as evil so much as petulantly bullying. There’s nothing wrong with having a bully as a villain, but when the bully is a creature that can’t move when you look at it and kills you by sending you back in time and can steal your voice…it’s a bit banal.

The method used to defeat them is also a bit underwhelming. They all…fall down. Yes, on the one hand, it’s a clever use of the fact that space is not two-dimensional and “up” in a space-ship is relative. But on the other, the Doctor doesn’t have to outwit his enemies…he just has to wait for them to fall into a big glowing time-space energy crack thing. As far as left-field, deus ex machina endings go, it’s not “Tinkerbell Doctor” but it’s still awfully convenient.

And about that crack…this is the first time since the first episode that it has actually featured as a significant plot point. The use of “story-arcs” within seasons of the new series of the show has been controversial with some fans, not least because when every single program on the air has a season long story-arc, it becomes less of an original, unifying element and more of a tedious box that needs to be checked off to make sure that the audience is still paying attention. Apart from the conveniently eating the enemy of the week, the crack’s appearance and Amy’s realization of its significance is well used. That the Doctor is taken aback by it, and by Amy’s behavior at the end of the episode, is at odds, though, with the suggestion in the first episode that the Doctor is aware that something involving Amy and the cracks is afoot, when he turned off the TARDIS scanner before Amy could see it. I think we also witnessed a significant clue for the story-arc in the forest, with the easily missed clue when the Doctor returns to console Amy.

Speaking of Amy’s behavior, it’s a little hard to tell what precisely the final scene, when Amy makes sexual advances on the Doctor, is meant to mean, exactly. The simplest, and most likely, is that it’s the final clue the Doctor needs that something is manipulating Amy, and the date of her wedding is an element of that manipulation. To go further into that invites discussions of fan angst, fan rage and the dreaded “shippers.” I’m not of the subset of Doctor Who fans who think that the Doctor should never ever have any suggestion of a sexual identity. I’m on record as thinking that “Looms” were the single stupidest idea to ever crop up in connection to the series, after all, even worse than “half human.” Heck, it’s pretty much impossible to read the Doctor’s reaction to the departure of Jo Grant as anything other than that of a jilted not-quite-boyfriend. But since I’m also of the school of Doctor Who fans who think that the primary in-story reason why the Doctor keeps traveling with young girls is because they’re Susan substitutes, it was nice to get even a brief in-story suggestion that the Doctor is put off by the suggestion of having a physical relationship with a companion.

Okay, look. Here’s the dirty secret of writing up Doctor Who multi-part stories in a coherent way: you can’t really do it until the stories done. Either you genuinely haven’t seen the whole story, in which case you’re only trying to critique a part, or you have to play coy with the fact that you already basically know how this is all going to turn out.

So, let’s just look at the highlights, shall we?

And, oh yeah, spoilers…

• The return of Alex Kingston as Professor Doctor River Song is brilliant. The character is perfectly conceived for a show like this. She’s mysterious and you’re not quite sure if she’s on the side of the angels (metaphorically speaking) or not, and the central dilemma of her character, which is what and who she is precisely to the Doctor, is one of the most original additions to the show’s history.
• The Weeping Angels, a clear favorite with audiences since their introduction, are brought back and their repertoire expanded in a way that is logical for their illogical nature (they’re really more a monster of horror, downright Lovecraftian even, than of science-fiction, but who ever said Doctor Who was science-fiction?). The idea of them “stealing” the voices and personalities of those they’ve is chilling, even if it harks back to the idea of “data ghosts” from the story that introduced River Song.
• I’m finding that the new Doctor, the angst-free model that’s prone to irritability and makes huge and important gaffes, such as not noticing that the statues in the tombs can’t possibly be of the planet’s inhabitants, feels more like “himself” than the ninth and tenth models did. He feels like the “classic series” Doctor, in other words, but still contemporary and appropriate for the tone that the show has now.

In our first non-Steven Moffat written episode, things suddenly start to get very fan-wanky. Of course, we also finally get an on-screen death. So those two factors probably balance out. The episode itself seems to have been fairly divisive, often hilariously so, judging by online reactions. I like Mark Gatiss as a writer and an actor, and some pacing problems aside, I mostly liked the episode. But it’s certainly one of the more arguable stories.

Continuing on from the cliff-hanger of last week, which gives us five episodes in a row (six if you count “The Waters of Mars”) that carry on directly from the end of the previous episode (a meaningless factoid, really, but like I said, fan-wanky), the Doctor and Amy find themselves in the Cabinet War Rooms in the midst of the Blitz. And our first plot hiccup occurs, as it now seems that the Doctor’s old friend Winston Churchill (cue fan-wank as people rush to figure out how the Doctor and the Prime Minister could have encountered each other before, and why Churchill isn’t bothered by the Doctor having a new face) simply called him over to show off his new weapons. When it is revealed that this entire enterprise is merely the Daleks being clever for once and exploiting a tactic other than “massive and overwhelming show of force to show off how good the computer animation system is at modeling thousands of Daleks at a time,” that just begs the question of how the Daleks knew that Churchill would call up the Doctor. Or did they simply plan to disrupt time enough during the second World War that the Doctor would eventually notice? Or is the Dalek’s plan not actually constructed enough by the writers to hold up to any serious scrutiny?

As for the Daleks themselves, their new/old look seems to have sparked some angry backlash in certain corners. It’s been noted, many times, that for a show that thrives on reinvention, fans of Doctor Who are resistant to even minor changes. I’m going to go on record as being a fan of the new look for the Daleks. I’m even a fan of the new status quo, where each different color denotes a different status and rank. It’s a move away from the “big mass of Daleks” approach that the new series used and in some ways a move back towards the earliest Dalek stories. The color choices are certainly a call back to the sixties. I also thought it was fairly clever that the actual question of which precise Daleks these are that have been resurrected is vague enough to invite speculation. To me, the coloring and the fact that the new series Daleks are explicitly identified as “not real Daleks” suggests that these are the original time-line, pre-”Genesis of the Daleks” Daleks (which would mean, oh hey, fan-wank). And if you’re not an obsessive over Dalek continuity, who they are precisely is mysterious and unsettling, as the big, scary, universe-conquering Daleks of the new series are groveling themselves to them. It was also incredibly refreshing to have the Daleks back, properly, at the end of the story. Not “wiped out from existence for ever and all time. Again.” But back, and out somewhere in the universe plotting. Daleks aren’t supposed to be stupid, and this bit of subterfuge on their part that ends with their return as a constant back-ground menace for all of time and space is long overdue if the show plans to keep using them.

There are really only two distinct elements of the episode that disappointed me. The first is that it is paced very oddly. A big, spectacular outer-space dogfight between spitfires and a Dalek saucer is an exciting, iconic moment for the show. It’s such a pity that it also wasn’t the end of the episode. There’s a bit too much of a “too many endings” thing going on here. It’s especially frustrating because the “real” ending of the episode, the moments when Amy and the Doctor try to bring out the humanity in Professor Bracewell, was the dullest thing about the story. The robot that wants to be human…sorry, but I’ve seen it too many times. Read Pinocchio, seen the Disney film, seen the horror parody, even been to the sculpture garden in Collodi…I’m pretty much done with the “wants to be a real boy” theme in literature.

And while the last shot pan in on a crack moment is repeated from the previous episode, which was a bit of a groan-inducing moment, as far as ongoing plot threads are concerned, the revelation that Amy has no idea what a Dalek is, is more promising. It was hinted in the first episode that the Doctor knows that there is more to Amy than there appears to be, and the question of how it can be that a girl from 2010 hasn’t heard about Daleks and doesn’t remember planets in the sky is one that’s worth exploring.

After having to deal with so many built-up expectations from the audience in the previous episode, it’s perhaps not surprising that Steven Moffat goes a little lower-key for the second episode. Continuing straight on from the previous episode, the Doctor takes Amy into space, in a shot that continues that dream-like, surreal tone from before, with Amy dangling in space, held in place by her foot. A chance encounter with a space-ship housing the entire population of the United Kingdom prompts the Doctor to land and poke around with Amy. Who is still in her nightie.

What the Doctor and Amy find is a population gripped in the fear and paranoia of a police state. Or, well, that’s what the Doctor says, anyway. We see so little of the society in question that we more or less have to rely on his word that things are terrible; opening scene of children being dropped into hellish firey voids aside. The story is far stronger in emphasizing that the Doctor is noticing that something is wrong with the space-ship via the observation that water doesn’t vibrate in glasses-an impossibility for a supposed ship of this size, and the population’s avoidance of the gruesomely over-cheerful “Smilers” that mark another example of Moffat’s use of strange enemies over traditional monsters. The notion that the Doctor is clever enough to have marked that something is going wrong, and in a potentially nasty way, is more convincing than the immediate leap to “police state” that he does actually make.

And that’s where the episode feels a little flat. With all this talk of “police states” and voting booths in the episode, it feels like Moffat is trying his hand at sneaking some political satire into the show. That’s not exactly something new for the series, but when it was done in the past you felt like there was some real bite behind it. It’s not hard to draw a comparison between the Smilers and the proliferation of public security cameras in England that armchair libertarians like to complain about, especially with a voice-over upon the Doctor and Amy entering the market that “you are being observed.” But while state controlled observation of public spaces is creepy and potentially intrusive, it’s a big leap to go from there to “murderous robots that kill anyone who doesn’t meet the completely undefined standards.” It feels like there’s more potential in the voting booths, where every five years the public learns the horrible truth about what is really going on in their home, only to choose to forget about it and go on with their lives for another five years. On the verge of an election with far-reaching consequences for both the United Kingdom and the world, mocking public apathy at the polls is perfectly fine. But it’s also easy and hollow and somewhat adolescent. Maybe if the leadership of Starship U.K. had “sexed up” some intelligence reports to justify a war with Starship Iraq it would feel like it had more bite, or if a media mogul from Starship Australia told the public that they all had voted to protest when they actually all voted to forget.

Luckily, while the heart of the episode is a bit…mushed, the rest of it is still pretty good. A big part of it is the performance of Sophie Okonedo as Liz Ten, a mysterious masked woman who helps the Doctor and Amy in their bid to discover the secret of the starship and turns out to be the Queen. It’s a fun performance, engaging and effortless, and immediately and immensely likable. One of Moffat’s strengths as a writer is creating memorable secondary characters, and she’s one of his best.

The Doctor and Amy relationship develops nicely here, too. Matt Smith’s Doctor comes more into his own, and is less the David Tennant Mark II he comes across as once or twice in “The Eleventh Hour.” While the “the Doctor doesn’t ignore crying children” motif is layed on a bit thick, more definitive and believable character traits emerge. He’s much more impulsive, hitting the protest button in the voting booth more to see what will happen and leaving Amy to wander around the ship on her own. He’s also somewhat less arrogant here. The tenth Doctor would have happily overthrown Liz Ten’s government, consequences be damned. He’d done it before, with disastrous consequences that he never really owned up to. That the Doctor would even consider killing another being for the greater good is a massive change in character, something that the seventh Doctor would have done in the “New Adventures” period.

It was also good to see that Amy started to realize that running off with the Doctor was, perhaps, too impulsive an act. It softens her character and is a good step towards making her less clingy and emotionally dependent on the Doctor. Her sudden flash of insight, that the star whale is just like the Doctor, and thus must be attached to the ship of its own volition is stretching a little too much maybe. It’s a nice thematic comparison and ties the episode together nicely, but it’s a little out of left field. And doesn’t really address the fact that the whale is still, you know, apparently eating people.
Which the Doctor is apparently okay with.
Well, that is a change in tone for this season.

This new series of Doctor Who brings in almost as many changes as the 2005 revival of the series did. New Doctor, new companion, new TARDIS, new theme-tune, new style, new producers and new lead writer. It’s a potentially risky move; arguments have been made that the success of the new series has more to do with certain segments of fandom thinking David Tennant is dreamy than any actual interest in the story of an alien time-traveler who keeps interfering in human history. Fortunately it’s a move that payed off, as “The Eleventh Hour” is excellent both as a continuation of the series relaunch and as a new episode of that show that started in 1963.

The big and most notable change is the new Doctor, played by Matt Smith. He’s manic and gangly and all angles, and it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. He has a face that manages to be both young and old, and he plays the role of the Doctor as a slightly mad, self-aware, oddball of a figure. You’re never quite sure if he’s being deliberately funny or obtuse or just genuinely out of step with the world around him. It’s a decidedly more comic approach to the role, and frankly a welcome relief after the angst that so often infused the performances of Eccleston and Tennant.

Karen Gillan is pretty amazing as new companion Amy Pond as well. She’s strikingly lovely, easily the best looking companion since Freema Agyeman (and before her, Mary Tamm). It’s hard to get an entirely firm grasp on her here. She’s presented as a “feisty” companion, but that’s not particularly new as all the new series companions have pushed back against the classic series stereotype of the female companion as a useless screamer who only exists for the Doctor to exposition at. What’s new here is actually more of a call-back to an older style of companion. There’s no hint of a romantic longing for the Doctor in her, nor does their relationship seem to be as “matey” as it was between the Doctor and Donna. Instead it seems to be more of a fatherly, or grandfatherly, relationship between the two (saucy glances at the naked Doctor notwithstanding). A lot of this comes from the rather clever method that Amy is introduced, not as an adult but as a child who has a brief encounter with the Doctor and meets him again later. It’s a clever conceit; Amy knows the Doctor so the mystery and “trust me” bits can be shortened and the story gotten on with. But it also suggests a certain degree of innocence to their relationship. The Doctor is her imaginary friend come to life, a parent substitute for a lonely little girl. It’s something we haven’t really seen in a companion since Ace, and before her you had to go back all the way to Zoe to find it.

It’s interesting in this context to note that Amy’s occupation is “kissogram.” It’s a rather appealingly cheeky trick that lead writer and executive producer Steven Moffat pulls off with that. It’s a slightly naughty, or at the very least flirty, occupation, the sort of thing that little kids will giggle at and think is very risque, but that adults will recognize as fairly innocent, if not more than slightly corny, despite the seedy connotations some would ascribe to it. It gives an adult edge to that dynamic between her and the Doctor, a reminder that at the end of the day she’s a grown woman, while still keeping the tone fairly innocent. About the only sour note that really strikes with Amy is an unpleasant reminder of the Rose/Mickey relationship when it comes to Amy and her quasi-boyfriend Rory. Mickey, it must be said, started off as more than a little bit of a prick. But over the course of two seasons it became clear that he had grown as a character but Rose was still the spoiled girl she started off as. Rory is not a prick. If anything, he seems a little too devoted, a little too puppy-dog in his admiration and devotion to Amy. It’s implied that Amy is having cold feet over her marriage to presumably Rory when she rushes off with the Doctor on their third meeting. That leaves a slightly sour taste in my mouth, though later episodes have mollified that as it becomes clearer that Amy leaves without any intention of malice, she just forgot herself in the moment (she does run off in her nightie, after all).

As for the rest of it: well, the story was pretty firmly in the tradition of a new series season opener. A threat that exposes the companion to the wonders and the dangers of the universe that the Doctor has to solve with a limited amount of tools at his disposal, with massive stakes even though, in contrast to every other enemy we’ll see this season, the villain here isn’t any great shakes. So it is with Prisoner Zero, an escaped shape-shifting alien that, yes, is putting people into comas so that it can impersonate them, but his/her/its jailers were planning to destroy the Earth to recapture it, which makes Zero’s villainy seem rather low-level by comparison, and not quite worthy of the death-sentence the Doctor apparently dooms it to. And the new TARDIS, well…I’m pretty firmly of the opinion that I never need to see anything that even hints at “steampunk” design ever again, so while the brass and glass console and expanded control room (with corridors! and stairs!) excites me, the hot water taps and typewriter make me cringe. But then, I was never really that enamored of the “coral” style console room either. I understand the necessity of giving the room some size and scale for a modern audience, and that the classical look is far too drab and modest for contemporary television, but the actual design just didn’t work for me. I like this one more, but with reservations. All the little moving bits and bobs on the console were interesting, though.

But the change that works best for me, I think, is the modest change in tone we see here. For a series about a time-traveler, the show rarely uses the actual mechanics of time as a plot device, with the notable exception of Steven Moffat’s scripts. We get some of that here, with the Doctor leap-frogging forward to different point’s in Amy’s life while she has to take the slow-way forward, and deal with the repercussions of that. Structurally it’s good, because as I said, it lets Amy “know” the Doctor without having to drag out the introduction more than necessary, and the introduction we do get with the Doctor and Amelia is easily the best Doctor/companion meeting in the history of the series. Actually dealing with time travel as a story theme strikes me as a good move. There’s a subtle change in story tone as well. While Russell T. Davies often focused on big, dramatic, soap operatic style stories and plot lines, there’s dreamier, more fairy-tale style at work here. There’s a certain surreality to the notion of a crack in time in a child’s wall or giant eyeballs flying through the air, and we’re reminded, twice, that even the name Amelia Pond is “a bit fairy-tale.” It’s also refreshing to see a story that takes place in a small village, a quieter place, that makes the menace feel a bit more personalized than yet another alien rampaging through London with no one really noticing. It’s a promising, exciting start to a new season, with strong hints of what’s to come.

It’s not just fans who come up with incredibly stupid and insane things to be offended by. The general public is just as capable of making themselves look stupid. Take, for example, the recent complaint that the new companion on Doctor Who is too sexy for a family show.
Let’s look at the evidence.

Well, that is a very short skirt, yes. And I guess working as a kissogram is somewhat saucy. And, of course, it goes without saying that in the nearly fifty year history of the show, the producers have never before resorted to trying to use a performer’s sex appeal to get an audience…

Oh. Well, never mind, then.