I survived the cybermen so I thought I'd put myself through the wringer once more and try and get through season five (Matt Smith version) before the start of season six part one (or whatever it's being called). People who know me will know that I wasn't the biggest fan of the season when it aired. People who know me will also know that's something of an understatement. I really didn't like it with a capital REALLY. However, so that I give season six a fairer chance it's probably a wise idea if I revisit season 5 and see if my opinion of it has changed (I've changed myself quite a bit since then so it could potentially be interesting). It also might help me get my brain around what allegedly happened at the end of it. So, starting with the Eleventh Hour...
Short version... make it "The Eleventh Forty Five Minutes" and I might like it. The middle of it is an alright episode but there's so much extraneous crud in there that it detracts from anything worthy. Starting with the pre-credits sequence which seems to have little (if anything) to do with the main episode. Basically it's the team wanting to show off at the start and, to me, well it just doesn't quite work. Especially as there's enough time jumping around in the episode itself without an extra time period at the start (we're clearly post 2000 in the pre-credits thanks to the buildings shown). The spike to the balls joke also suggests we're once more aiming at kids rather than adults... First trim I'd make, get rid of the fly over and start with the young Amelia praying (a superb performance through the episode) and end it with the Doctor's appearance out of the TARDIS. "Can I have an apple" being a very unexpected line to start the theme on.
Oh dear goddess, the theme. Thankfully I watched this one from the DVD which doesn't have the lightning effects all over it, thus making it marginally less painful to listen to. I remember sitting in horror at this disco fanfared version and it's still not really grown on me. It's just a damn good job the effects aren't on top of it on the DVD. And the visuals... let's just say that I'm sure I've seen it before on a colonoscopy. Anyway, back to the plot and one of the most abhorrent scenes I can remember in a long time. The "spitting out the food sequence". I hated it. I still hate it. I think it's an abominable scene that I wouldn't just take a cutting blade to, I'd take blades, flame throwers and acid to it just to get rid of it. First impressions are important and this set the eleventh Doctor up as a rude, vulgar and unpleasant person to panders to racial stereotypes. An abomination that I deeply wish had never made the final show.
The crack then appears properly. Here it's presented as a join between two bits of the universe that shouldn't ever be pushed together. Yes, it then also appears on the TARDIS scanner (more of which later), but it seems to be closed up when the Doctor does his usual wafting of the sonic screwdriver. A very Tennanty wafting. Which is the main problem with a lot of this episode. Smith is playing a second rate Tennant. The dialogue mostly sounds Tennant, there's Tennant in the mannerisms and, although I'm sure it's not the case, there's the air of "we wrote it for Tennant and changed it at the last minute" about things. Except the production values, they're sub Tennant. When the snake Prisoner Zero observes Amy the green screen work looks exceptionally cheap and I just sat there thinking "What is this, the rough cut?".
Sad geek that I am, I made a mental note of when the Doctor first said twenty minutes to death. Give the production team their credit, when the Doctor saves things and says there were two minutes to spare, there really were two minutes to spare. However, the preceding shots don't feel as though they flow uninterrupted. It feels very much like a condensed set of shots and my brain just can't see them as having taken eighteen minutes to complete in real time. Some of the shots also feel as though they're trying to build up to something that we never see. A big thing is made of the duck-less duck pond. Jeff feels as though he's going to become important. Annette Crosby feels as though she should come back in a future episode... but none of this ever gets brought back. Thankfully something else that doesn't come back is the "Doctor's Point of View" sequence. That's another huge no no when it comes to Who. The Doctor's the mysterious one, I don't want to see things from his side, I want to be amazed by him. The almost stop motion sequence did nothing for me and I'm glad that it never came back.
Next issue is the whole virus thing. Yes, it's a neat way of doing it BUT it's one of those things where you've got to think "What were the consequences?" You've re-set all the counters in the world to zero (except for the ones needed to artistically animate big 0s on every handy display screen) which must have done some damage somewhere in the world. Plus there's no indication that the Doctor gives out the cure to it as well.
In the monster clip show, we get a whole load of aliens who have invaded the Earth along with the Ood and it looked like the fishy people thingies from "The Doctor's Daughter". Setting the scene for something ahead?
Two more things that I still don't like about this episode. Firstly, Prisoner Zero clearly has knowledge of both the Pandorica and the Silence. Now, I know at this stage we're not supposed to know what they are (though when it was first shown I really didn't like the sledgehammer subtlety with which the season's arc was introduced!) and when I finally make it to Pandorica/Big Bang then I'll be revisiting this to work out just how Prisoner Zero could have known, if it should have known at all. And finally... the TARDIS console room. Bleugh. Just bleugh. When the TARDIS was supposed to have been the Doctor's home and rebuilt using whatever came to hand I could accept all the weirdness and cobbled nature of the console but here we're supposed to be seeing a console that the TARDIS itself rebuilt. The hot and cold taps, I think, were more than a step too far. My overall feeling of it was that they changed it because they knew they were going to be in HD but wanted to make it bigger than the previous one just because they could and with no real need to.
Overall, it wasn't as bad as I remembered it being. There are some good bits to it. But it feels as though it's a script that was originally going somewhere but got diverted without the original drafts being neatened up. And it needs a serious editing to get rid of some of the pointless and vulgar bits. An hour might be offered but if you've not got enough to fill it then you should decline for the sake of the programme and keep it much tighter. Still, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Then it'll get worse again and again and again...
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