Matt Smith as DR WHO - all the adventures reviewed on the SCI FI FREAK SITE

DOCTOR WHO
The MATT SMITH YEARS

BBC 1

The 11th Hour
The Beast Below
Victory Of The Daleks
The Time Of Angels
Flesh And Stone
Vampires Of Venice
Amy's Choice
The Hungry Earth
Cold Blood
Vincent And The Doctor
The Lodger
The Pandorica Opens
The Big Bang

The Doctor -
Matt Smith

Amy Pond -
Karen Gillan

Rory -
Arthur Darvill

OTHER DOCTORS
Tom Baker
Christopher Ecclestone
David Tennant

SPIN OFFS
Torchwood
The Sarah Jane Adventures

TIME TRAVEL SHOWS
Timecop
Life on Mars
Ashes to Ashes
Journeyman
Daybreak
Goodnight Sweetheart
The Flipside of Dominick Hyde

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THE ELEVENTH HOUR transmitted April 3rd 2010

Amelia Pond is a little girl who is afraid of the voicest that she can hear through the crack in her wall, but she's not scared of the strange man who fell from the sky in a box, who likes fish fingers in custard and who calls himself The Doctor. He seals the wall and tells her he'll be back for her in five minutes. Twelve years later, The Doctor returns and realises that whilst he sealed the wall, the prisoner who escaped through it is still in Amy's house and now it is a threat to the whole planet as the jailers are closing in and threatening to destroy the whole planet in just twenty minutes.

It's a new era for DOCTOR WHO as the new-look show gets not just as new Doctor in the shape of Matt Smith, but also a new head writer in the shape of Steven Moffat. Since he's the writer of some of the best loved episodes of the new look show to date, the question is whether he can hack it as a show runner as well as a jobbing writer. On the evidence of this first episode, the answer is yes.

It doesn't start well, though, with a decidedly shonky looking CGI Tardis hurtling through the sky above London with the Doctor hanging out the door and threatening to leave any hope of fathering a new race of Time Lords dangling from the top of Big Ben. Once he crashes down in the back garden of the little Amelia things pick up considerably. OK, so there are all kinds of echoes of previous stories (the escaped convict and chasing police with the humans stuck in the middle of Smith and Jones, the little girl growing up of The Girl in the Fireplace, the woman searching for the Doctor's return and the bridal stylings of The Runaway Bride), but there are plenty of nice touches such as the Doctor going through new foods rather than new clothes, his whole relationship with the little Amelia and the fact that everything he owns is destroyed and renewed before the end, and digs about internet browsing history.

Even with all the (we'll be kind and call them) 'homages', the story rattles along nicely with little in the way of time for the audience to catch their breath and the alien jailers make for an arresting (pun intended and we're sorry for it) new alien. Prisoner Zero, however, is a big let down and never looks real for a moment in its true form. When it is in its disguised form it never actually does anything threatening, which makes you wonder why its escape was such a big problem. I mean, it hid inside a house for twelve years and did nothing more than, well hide.

And so to Matt Smith, the eleventh to carry the key to the Tardis. On this evidence, he will do quite nicely thank you very much. There's a lot of David Tennant's manic energy in his performance, but there is also enough of him to make it different. It's early days, of course, but he seems to have created a chemistry with Karen Gillan as the fiesty (oh, no not another one of those) female companion Amy. There is also a hint about the plot arc as Prisoner Zero hinted at cracks in the fabric of space and time that the Doctor really ought to know about.

So, things are off to a good start for the new Doctor and we can only hope that he can keep this up.

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THE BEAST BELOW transmitted April 10th 2010

The Doctor and Amy arrive on Starship UK in the far future. Following the messing up of the Earth, countries stuck their entire populations into spaceships and went in search of new homes. The United Kingdom and Northern Ireland (not Scotland who went in their own ship, of course) is packed inside one giant space vessel, but something is wrong. There is something 'below', something that is being protected by officials in cowls and menacing fortune teller machines and that anyone who finds out about it votes to instantly forget.

Second episode in for the new Doctor and this is a crushing disappointment following the promising opening. The idea of Starship UK is a good one, but the plot is staccato and seems to have been stitched together rather than coming as a whole, fully formed idea. Why are the horror fortune telling machines there at all? Why are the mysterious officials all dressed in cowls? Bits of it work, such as the kick ass Liz (possibly the coolest queen we've ever had, played with gusto by Sophie Okenedo) and the idea that a whole population will opt to do the wrong thing if the alternative is bad enough, but there are moments that really don't work, such as the monster vomit and exposed brains.

There is plenty here that will appeal to the younger members of the audience, not least because there are younger characters, but older viewers will have a harder time with it.

And fans of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels might find the final shots of the mystery explained look a little too much like a certain turtle.

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VICTORY OF THE DALEKS transmitted April 17th 2010

The Doctor returns to wartime London, this time at the behest of the Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who wishes to show him Britain's new secret weapon before it is used. They are called Ironsides, but the Doctor knows them by a more familiar name - Daleks. These Daleks, though, seem to want to help bring the war to an end. Daleks never do anything without a plan and it seems that this time the plan is the Doctor.

Following the disjointed disappointment that was The Beast Below, DOCTOR WHO returns to its most famous creations, the Daleks and reinvents them. Exactly why it was necessary to do that is uncertain and there will be many who find the new primary-coloured redesigns far less convincing and scary than almost any version of the Daleks that have gone before. Still, prior to that it is fun to see the old style Daleks offering to make the tea and acting subservient.

It's also nice to see the Doctor defeated for a change. Sure, he saved the world, but there is a reason why the title is Victory of the Daleks. They have always been his most formidable enemy and here they prove to be his match. Once they realise that a jammy dodger isn't a Tardis self-destruct device, that is.

The show also has one piece of genius up its sleeve to make the audience laugh and cheer (no matter how stupid it is) and that is Spitfires in Space. The sight of Britain's finest warplane taking on an alien spaceship in space is just sheer brilliance. Ian MacNeice's impression of Winston Churchill isn't half bad either.

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THE TIME OF ANGELS transmitted April 24th 2010

River Song comes back into the Doctor's life and so do the Weeping Angels, when a visit to a museum unearths a relic with a message carved in it specifically for the Doctor. A spaceship has crashed into an ancient temple, a ship that had a Weeping Angel in its hold. Now the Doctor and Amy need to venture inside the temple with Song's army types to find and destroy the creature that can only move when it is not being looked at.

The Weeping Angels became an instant fan favourite when they showed up in Blink, one of the episodes in which the Doctor himself barely appeared. River Song, a woman who knows more about the Doctor's future than is good for him (and delightfully played by Alex Kingston), first appeared in Silence In The Library, comes across as some sort of intergalactic Jane Bond or Indiana Jane, but has hints of a much darker past than she lets on. She is the very definition of the mysterious lady.

And the plot? Well, it doesn't quite hang together, but has enough great sequences for that not to matter. Amy being faced with an angel coming out of a TV monitor is the closest in tone to the scares of Blink and the Doctor talking to the disembodied voice of the dead is straight out of Forest of the Dead, but still carries a frisson. And things are moving at such a nice clip that it's a surprise when the music comes and it dawns on the viewer that this is going to be a two-parter (at least).

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FLESH AND STONE transmitted May 1st 2010

The army of weeping angels is closing in on the small band of humans and one Time Lord that is evading them. As the group dwindles, the Doctor has to work out what the Angels want and what they are afraid of and why Amy is counting backwards.

The second half of this story moves at a fast pace, mainly in the hope that the speed will hide the fact that not a lot of it actually makes much sense. The Doctor creates and escape by altering the artificial gravity, but everyone remains upright instead of crashing onto a new surface; Amy has an angel in her mind and opening her eyes for even a second will let it take her over, but she opens her eyes for much longer than that and when the other angels vanish so does the one in her head, even though it does not suffer the same fate and the Angels can't attack if you're looking at them suddenly becomes they can't move if they think that you're looking at them, negating their weakness since it's just a state of mind and Amy trying to pretend that she hasn't got her eyes closed never looks like anything other than someone who has their eyes closed so how stupid are these angels anyway?

Still, there are many moments to savour, such as Amy slowly counting backwards, the death of the group's leader and the Doctor explaining to Amy what is wrong with her. None of that, however, makes up for the attempted seduction scene as Amy throws herself at the Doctor. This could alter the whole dynamic of the show unless there's a good explanation for it. It's nicely handled by Matt Smith, but it takes the show in a direction that it really doesn't need to go.

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VAMPIRES OF VENICE transmitted May 8th 2010

The Doctor takes Amy and her intended, Rory, back to Venice in 1850, a romantic location where Amy will forget the feelings that made her throw herself at the Time Lord. Things are not well in the city on stilts, however. A aristocrat-run exclusive school for girls who cannot afford to buy an education harbours something very dark, something that doesn't mind being mistaken for vampires.

Toby (BEING HUMAN) Whithouse presents a script that is witty, pacy and full of cracking dialogue for this period story. Admittedly, it all but forgets Amy's behaviour from the tail end of Flesh And Stone (apart from the very funny pre-credits sequence set at Rory's stag night), but it gives all three principals very funny lines and fast-paced interplay. Arthur Darvill makes a welcome addition to the Tardis crew, though it would be nice to see a companion's boyfriend who wasn't a bit of a loser for a change. The exchanges between him and Karen Gillan are very enjoyable.

Vampires of Venice is the story where the new set up all clicks together for the first time. Matt Smith is the Doctor and no longer jars. The plot is great fun with scary bits, funny bits and some running through corridors being chased by something nasty. The vampire make up doesn't go over the top and the CGI effects aren't overused. The fact that the doomsday device at the top of the tower has a simple off-switch is very clever and funny and the alien race's motivation would seem almost acceptable. Lose one city to save a whole race; is that such a price to pay? There are niggles, of course, such as the main alien disappearing whilst the Doctor dismantles her plan. Surely, since her race is at stake and they are all her children, she would have been a bit more active to stop him interfering. Niggles though is all these are.

The time and place are nicely evoked and some of the dialogue exchanges have a bit more depth to them as well (how people act around the Doctor, the Doctor's history of destroying worlds etc).

This is the best episode to date for the new Doctor.

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AMY'S CHOICE transmitted May 15th 2010

The Doctor comes back into Amy's life five years later, finding her happily married to Rory in a sleepy little town and expecting a baby. Falling asleep, the trio find themselves in the Tardis hurtling towards a cold star that has wiped out the ship's power grid. Only one of these worlds is real, but if they die in the wrong one then they die for good.

What starts off as an interesting and original dilemma for the Doctor starts to descend into more familiar lines as the old people of the village turn out to be aliens on the run from a race that destroyed their world. As for the universe in which the Tardis is being hurtled towards a 'cold sun', not a lot actually happens there.

What Simon Nye's story is really about is the inner workings of the Doctor's mind, especially as the 'it was all a dream' resolution (which you should only have when stepping out of a shower, frankly) puts the spotlight firmly on what the Doctor really thinks about himself - and most of those thoughts are less than happy ones. Amy, also, gets her time in the spotlight as she is forced to make her choice, a less than happy one.

There are more happy thoughts about the cast. Matt Smith has settled in as the Doctor now and has been accepted, Karen Gillan's fiesty assistant is now a different kind of fiesty from all the others before her and newcomer Arthur Darvill has made himself well at home in the cast. Long may this trio continue.

Shame about that ending, though.

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THE HUNGRY EARTH transmitted May 22nd 2010

A small family group in Wales have just broken the record for the deepest drilling rig in history, boring down to 21km into the Earth's crust. The Earth, though, starts to fight back, taking first corpses from local graves, but then live humans as well, including Amy. Something is coming up to the surface, something that isn't friendly, something that the Doctor has met before.

This is a straightforward enough story - someone drills down, something comes up and the Doctor tries to create a safe place for the humans. The Silurians are an interesting choice of enemy to bring back (having originally been disturbed in the Pertwee era) although these bear no resemblance to those creatures, something the Doctor dismisses with a simple different branch of the species comment.

The ground swallowing people up scenes, especially Amy, are well done, but the poisonous tongue CGI is particularly dodgy. The underground city doesn't look real either. It's also hard to understand why a threatened civilisation would send only three warriors to counter the attack upon their city.

All of which comes to mind later since Chris Chibnall's story zips along with such pace that the theme music is playing before you realise that this is going to a two-parter.

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COLD BLOOD transmitted May 29th 2010

The Doctor is now the prisoner of the lizard people, but even as the military leader starts awakening her army, a new force emerges, one that is willing to listen to the Doctor's pleas for peace. If only the humans hadn't killed the lizard warrior held prisoner on the surface.

Following a reasonably controlled and almost claustrophobic first part, this story falls apart into a rambling mess of an episode. There's a pompous, portentous voice over that attempts to give the events some sort of importance, but the episode never decides whether it wants to be running and action or talking about being better humans or taking forward the main plot arc about the cracks in time and space.

Everything but the kitchen sink is thrown in, but not that much of it actually sticks. The deaths of the warrior on the surface and the scientist underground have little impact since we barely know them and, in the case of the warrior at least, they were pretty annoying anyway. Stephen Moore's political homoreptilia makes the unconvincing makeup even less convincing and proves to be a fairly dull character, just as his voiceover suggests. The solution to the impending war is too easy (the reptilians just happen to have a convenient failsafe device for allowing the escape?) and the 1,000 year reset and certain characters remaining behind give this an unfinished feeling as though this is a story that the show intends to return to.

Only in the last few minutes when a sacrifice is made and the Doctor learns that the cracks in the universe seem to have been caused by an exploding Tardis does the episode come alive and that is really more about the possibilities for the future than what actually happens here.

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VINCENT AND THE DOCTOR transmitted June 5th 2010

Whilst visiting the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, the Doctor and Amy discover a monster's face in one of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. Going back to meet the painter himself, they find a tormented genius. One of the monsters tormenting him, though is very real. It just happens to be invisible.

It's not often that an episode of DOCTOR WHO comes with a helpline number for those who might have been affected by matters raised. This is not because it's scary (it really isn't, but you wouldn't expect it to be from writer Richard Curtis), but because it touches on Van gogh's self-harming madness, equating it to clinical depression. These are very serious maters and an episode of DOCTOR WHO isn't going to be able to do them justice, but kudos for trying.

Tony Curran makes for a very credible, likeable Vincent who seems to be mainly having a good day (one scene apart) and he enlivens proceedings greatly, which is important because the monster story is clearly an aside and rather tedious. Bill Nighy cameos as a museum guide and it is the museum bookends that provide the best of the story whether it be Vincent seeing how important he will become or Amy learning that you can't save everyone.

There are issues, of course, such as how Vincent is the only person who can see the monster, why nobody but the Doctor picked up the monster's face in the painting or how an invisible monster fails to kill the Doctor several times over when it ha ample oportunity, but they all belong to the monster story and that's not the point. DOCTOR WHO tries something different and that allows it to be only a qualified success.

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THE LODGER transmitted June 12th 2010

Something is interfering with the Doctor's attempts to land the Tardis. When he is ejected by a violent shock, Amy is left alone in the time machine and the Doctor takes up residence in a room being rented out by Craig. Discovering the joys of football, call centre work and matchmaking between Craig and Sophie, he seems almost oblivious to the activities of the other lodger. The one who lives upstairs.

DOCTOR WHO as romantic comedy? That's what this episode is. Popular comic actor James Corden plays Craig who is in love with Sophie, but the pair of them are too shy to admit it out loud. It's going to take several deaths, a Time Lord and the mysterious upstairs neighbour before they finally admit it to each other. Both Corden and Daisy Haggard, who plays Sophie, are very likeable and that sustains events, but there is a definitie feeling that this is a story hung on an episode of a rom com script that didn't get made.

Sure it's fun watching the Doctor be the kind of call centre worker that all call centre workers aspire to be, the kind of sunday morning footballer that all sunday morning footballers aspire to be, the interfering neighbour that all interfering neighbours aspire to be, but it's all very slight and seems disconnected from what's actually going on upstairs. The truth about the lodger upstairs is a lot less scary than we are led to believe by the script and the denoument is just a quartet of people shouting at each other loudly in the hope that nobody will notice that it doesn't make a whole load of sense.

This is again something new for DOCTOR WHO and again there are incidental pleasures, but it really doesn't quite work.

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THE PANDORICA OPENS transmitted June 19th 2010

The mysterious River Song slips her prison and leaves a message that brings the Doctor to Earth in the time of the Roman occupation of Britain. There, she tells him, the Pandorica is opening. Since the Pandorica is a prison reputed to hold the greatest threat to the universe, all the races that the Doctor ever crossed are gathering to find out what lies within. Can the Doctor prevent the opening of the box and stop it from falling into alien hands.

The end is nigh and all of the threads that have been running through Steven Moffat's first season as show runner come together in this penultimate episode, setting up a twist that the cannier viewer will see coming a mile off, but which will leave others astonished at the sudden change around. The cliffhangers are surprising and exciting and mean that the season is, for the first time since the opening episode, utterly unmissable.

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THE BIG BANG transmitted June 26th 2010

Now that the Doctor has been imprisoned in the Pandorica and the Tardis is exploding in every time whole races, planets and galaxies are being wiped out. Only a few remain, but they only have a little time. They are, however, friends of the Doctor and nobody should underestimate what a Time Lord can do with only a few moments of time.

Season finale and there is so much to have explained and impossible situations to get out of. The first issue is dealt with by just ignoring the explanations and racing through the time travel equivalent of a bedroom farce, a be-fezzed Doctor bouncing backwards and forwards in time doing all the things that we had already seen him do, but that he hadn't done yet. Confusing? Not really, but all played at a breakneck speed in the hope that nobody will see all the holes (and there are plenty).

As for the impossible situations, the Pandorica proves to be the solution to every problem that it has caused. This science fiction gobbledygook will lose a lot of people, but works if you take the basic premises at face value. It basically comes down to one big reset button, something that Russell T Davies used extensively in his big finales and which the older fans consistently complained about.

And how does the Doctor survive? Well it's all down to memory. It always has been. The central theme running through the whole series has been the importance of memory. As Deus Ex Machina get out clauses go it's a bit weak, but it does fit with the rest of the series. For the majority of the audience it will get taken on faith anyway. The Doctor says that it's so and that's good enough for us.

Stephen Moffat's first series as show runner has been only a qualified success, but any sort of success is success. Now that the first season is out of the way we can look forward to his first Christmas special and the further adventures of everyone's favourite Time Lord.

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DR WHO INDEX

CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTONE YEAR

THE DAVID TENNANT YEARS

THE TOM BAKER YEARS

THE SARAH JANE SMITH YEARS

THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES