DOCTOR WHO 7.05 - The Angels Take Manhattan

Scanners indicate an absence of spoilers

So then, here we are at the mid-series finale, or rather the the mini-season climax as I think of it. After this, there's no more Doctor Who until Christmas. But what a fine choice of adversary for this final episode! Following in the footsteps of both the Muppets and Jason Voorhees, the most iconic of monsters that new Who has spawned, the Weeping Angels, return for a third momentous outing!  

Now I must confess, in what seems to be a somewhat traditional fashion for this series, the title did give me pause for thought. For this isn't the first time, that the TARDIS crew has visited the Big Apple. However the last time was the less than fondly remembered Daleks in Manhattan. Of course, considering their previous appearances, Blink and The Time of the Angels/Flesh And Stone, some the better adventures the series had delivered since its triumphant return in 2005, I really shouldn't have worried. 

Well, not about that at least...

...What I should have been fretting about is how in the name of Sutek am I going to review this without spoilers! For, of course, this final episode sees showrunner Steven Moffat returning to scripting duties. And as long-time readers know, his episodes always give me a headache reviewing sans spoilers! 

So then what can I tell you? Well, the Angels are on top creepy form as per usual, New York looks fantastic, the performances are great and the scripting is Moffat on good form... And that's it, thank you and goodnight! 

What you want more? Who do you think you are? An extra in Oliver! ?

Oh alright then... but be warned....

POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR ANYONE WHO HAS SUCKED BACK IN TIME BY ANGELS, IMPRISONED ON A PYRAMID ON MARS OR OTHERWISE BEEN OBLIVIOUS OF WHAT IMPORTANT EVENT THIS EPISODE CONTAINS

Still with me? Ok then...

 ...*deep breathe*...

... This episode sees the return of River Song! 

Right that'll teach you to skip ahead, oh impatient one! 

ABSO-FLIPPIN -UTELY LAST SPOILER WARNING FOR ALL THOSE LIVING IN A CAVE WITH THE TRIBE OF GUMM AND HAVEN'T SEEN A SCINTILLA OF WHO NEWS IN THE LAST NINE MONTHS

Right then, no messin' about, in this episode we bid the Ponds a fond farewell. And this departure has been billed by all concerned as 'heart-breaking'. And indeed, judging by the amount 'ahm fine... I jus' got somefink in mah eye...' style twitterings on my time-line, I think it's fair to say that this was no mere hyperbole! 

Of course, the big question is HOW they go and one I won't answer here. However what I will say is that I thought is was a very satisfying departure. It's a very fine, and yes rather touching (look I jus' got somefink in mah eye...), conclusion to the whole of Amy and Rory's story arc. Definite thumbs up (and hanky in the other mitt) from me. 

And I also think it's fair to say, that in that light, it does seem like that this has been a little complete series on its own, rather than a half-season. Furthermore, having got the conclusion, I do think my initial suspicions were correct - namely, that this set of stories are as unconnected as we were lead to believe. 

Now then I know many of you have been missing the spoilerific second reviews I've done for series past of Doctor Who and so therefore I've having a marathon rewatch of this quintet of adventures in the coming week and will deliver a suitably epic, no spoiler left unturned, end of season round-up, and test the above hypothesis... probably to destruction! 

But for now, I'll round this off by saying that this series has been a rather strong run. It may not have been biggest, or best, and it may have been rather light-weight much of the time, but it's certainly been fairly solid, without a single episode I've not enjoyed. The show's been ticking along nicely, and while some may feel it's been idling, I would point out that next year is the big 50th anniversary and I suspect they are saving the really big guns for then...

DOCTOR WHO Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon Spoiler Zone

Shhh! Spoilers!

Well, it certainly was a wild way to open your new season! The Doctor it would appear is dead, killed by the mysterious astronaut, River Song definitely seems to his (future) wife, there’s an enigmatic little girl would may or may not be in the space suited figure that slays our Time Lord hero, and Amy would appear to be potentially pregnant (and I’ll explain that later). Last summer, Moffat promised us that the mid season finale would be a “a game changing cliff-hanger that will change everything” and Series 6 of new Who has clearly begun with the kind of almighty set-up that such an epic storyline would need…

Now first of all, let me nail my colours to the mast (Getting ahead of yourself there Mr Jim, the pirate ship’s next week! – Ed) – this brace of episodes really impressed me. Cunningly plotted and equally packed with scares and wit, this opening stories hits all the right marks for what I want from Doctor Who. But aside from all of that, I have nothing but admiration for the Grand Moff for kicking off the new season at the level most other series only climb up to for the closing episodes.

For example, the final cliff-hanger in Series 4 was the Tenth Doctor seemingly exterminated by the Daleks. However being an RTD story there was a convenient deus ex machine suddenly popping up in the form of some hitherto unknown wrinkles in the regeneration process to quickly tidy it up. However Moffat has significantly raised the stakes – the Eleventh Doctor is dead with no hope of regeneration and, more to the point, rabbit-from-the-hat solutions just aren't his style.

So therefore, I wasn't at all surprised that the Doctor’s demise wasn’t reversed by the end of Day of the Moon. However from sampling various reviews here and there across the net, it would seem a fair few were somewhat disgruntled that everything wasn't neatly tied up. Well sorry folks, we’re in a new age of Doctor Who now where’s there’s going to be proper story arcs, with episodes linked by a lot more than just dropping in a token reference here and there. And this is a good thing! No, honestly it is! Let’s address the various concerns…

The one I'm hearing the most is that “it’s going alienate causal viewers”. Well despite the now annual exercise in lazy journalism that claims that Doctor Who is falling in the ratings, if you visit the Doctor Who News page which regularly reports the stats, you’ll see that the figures are actually very, very healthy. Yes, the guesstimated overnight numbers are lower than usual but that is a combination of hot weather and both episodes falling in Bank Holiday weekends. However the properly calculated figures are a different matter demonstrating that the show is respectably holding its own, competing with those ratings heavy weights, the soaps, gaining a large share of the viewing audience and scoring very high on audience appreciation.

And all of this despite being screened after the TV train wreck that is Don’t Scare The Hare - if you are looking for a show that is really is well and truly failing, seek no further!

Plus The Impossible Astronaut is well on the way to breaking the record for most watched/downloaded show in iPlayer history and Day of the Moon in just fours days has clocked up over a million plays – and that’s nearly double the hits the Royal Wedding has got.

So can we finally put this one to bed? Next time some idle fuckwit at the Daily Mail or whatever starts bleating about how Doctor Who is dying, just remember there’s more chance of finding a Yeti in the loos at Tooting Bec than discovering a true fact in such vacuous scare-mongering rags!

But the figures, which you can check for yourselves, also effectively counter the other most heard complaint about Series 6 “that it’s getting too complicated for ordinary viewers”. As I stated in my review of Day of the Moon, we forget that the general public like serials; those oft despised reality TV shows only succeed because they are edited to make an on-going story line. And soap viewers are used to dealing with the kind of labyrinthine continuities that rival the complexities of the Marvel and DC Universe. So I doubt that more closely linked stories in Doctor Who are going to prove too much of a problem.

And it’s also worth paying close attention to what Mr Moffat says in the interview linked above. He clearly says that the epic cliff-hanger he’s planning is possible because of the two halves structure of Series 6. He understands very well that setting up big mysteries that don’t get resolved for ages is a sure way to alienate viewers.

For this whole business of long story lines in genre shows causing the ratings to haemorrhage like an impaled Cyberman in The Five Doctors isn't down to the general populace being too thick to appreciate scifi or any such nonsense, it’s due to shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica treading water and testing even genre fans’ patience by not developing the on-going plot lines swiftly enough. Now I'm not saying they were terrible shows here, but I can understand why viewers drifted away after being kept dangling for so long at certain points in their histories.

Rather there’s a fine balance between developing a satisfying story arc and telling individual stories, and Moffat understands this well. Consider, for example, how the last season played out – instead of the Cracks just being a repeated visual equivalent of past seasons’ catchphrases like ‘Bad Wolf’ or ‘Mr Saxon’, we actually continued to learn more about them and what they signified steadily throughout the series. So it’s safe to say that more will be revealed in the coming weeks and there will be some answers to the big questions by the June break rather than a big reveal in the final episodes in the autumn.

Now with all of that out of the way, let’s move onto the meat of the episodes themselves. Now to address another common issue, quite a few folk have remarked on the swerve Day of the Moon opens with – we rapidly jump from the cliff-hanger to ‘Three Months Later’. And naturally this has prompted a good deal of head scratching. Yes, the episode does give you enough detail to work out that Canton hunting down the Doctor and his friends is a ruse to fool the Silence, however many have felt that it was insufficiently explained.

And initially this was my reaction too. However having seen the rest of the episode and discovered exactly what is resolved, I’d have to say that why this start is a little jarring, it’s fairly clear that this missing chunk of time is going to be revisited later in the season. Remember how in the Weeping Angels story last year, we had the mystery of the Doctor’s reappearing jacket and the revisiting of those scenes at the conclusion? Well I think Moffat is doing much the same here as there is a lot still to be explained that we can’t pick up from Day of the Moon…

…The big one being the Doctor’s Area 51 cell being made of dwarf star alloy. Now this is an alien material and there are questions therefore on where it came from. Viewers with long memories may recall that the Tenth Doctor chained Father Of Mine with chains made from this substance in The Family of Blood, but long-time Who watchers will be thinking of the Tom Baker era tale Warriors’ Gate…

Now in this story featured a race called the Tharils, who could cross time lines at will, and also looked like contemporary popster (and later urban reformer) Daryl Hall … Well, it was the ‘80s!

Daryl Hall

A Tharil

But aside from cheap gags, the point of mentioning this tale is that it might have a clue or two for the current story line. You see the Tharils could cross time lines at will, and where being enslaved to use their innate abilities to power spacecraft across hyperspace. And they were being contained by dwarf star alloy which inhibited their abilities to cross into different dimensions of space-time. Furthermore this whole adventure took place in another universe called E-Space. Now obviously all of the above raises some interesting possibilities for resolving the Doctor’s apparent death…

…But of course it might not! It could just be one of Moffat’s call-backs to the classic series – the Doctor’s mention of being present at the Fall of Rome wasn't just a bit of showing off; he was there and we saw this in the William Hartnell adventure The Romans. But certainly there will more detail on the dwarf star alloy I'm sure. Moffat plays a long game!

Amy’s pregnancy is a case in point. Of course, there’s the obvious possible foreshadowing in Amy’s Choice in which one of the dream realities has her with child (quick aside: the mysterious Eyepatch Lady in Day of the Moon says “she’s still dreaming” - does this signify the hand of the Dream Lord at work?). But there’s another more sneaky reference in The Hungry Earth - if you care to recall the Silurians had sucked Amy down to their city and then scan her… And this is what results…

Yes, that is a heart beat appearing when they scan her stomach! Now I clocked this at the time and expected it was setting up getting her out of harm with the old “we will not hurt you as you have young” alien cliché, but the story didn't belabour that old saw and I promptly forgot about it… until last week that is!

You see, looooooooong game! Therefore the missing three months in this opening tale isn’t sloppy writing like RTD resurrecting the Master with a load of never to be explained smoking potion hugger mugger, it’s a deliberate omission; a piece of narrative sleight of hand.

Now I'm not going to speculate on the many mysteries this story presents. There are endless theories online as to what the regenerating child is, who River Song is and how the Doctor will escape – my favourite is the tongue in cheek suggestion made by Mike in the Bigger on the Inside podcast that River Song is the TARDIS - but as the wonderful Nuts4r2 sagely remarks in his own reviews of these episodes, it’s almost pointless to speculate as we don’t have enough pieces on the board yet. However I do think it’s worth mentioning the fact that the TARDIS scanner can’t seem to decide whether Amy is Pregnant or not. And this would suggest that perhaps the time-lines are currently in flux…

Similarly I'm not convinced we’ve seen the last of the Silence. For a start on a technical note, just having the Silence turn out to be just some skull faced aliens in suits is too much of a let down. Admittedly they were superbly scary but not quite big or bad enough to justify the previous season build up. And I'm not sure they are the Silence – they may be part of it but they are not the full deal. Remember what they say to Amy - “You are Amelia Pond…We do you honour…. You will bring the Silence….”

Perhaps we should be calling them the Silents… And also bear in mind that we never did discover what their plan was. And certainly they didn't build the mystery ship we saw in The Lodger or the dwarf star alloy – they definitively state that they use the technology of other races.

It’s an intoxicating brew alright! But the big questions aside, I’ll wrap this rambling up with a final point. If you have any doubts about Moffat’s plotting, consider how clever the resolution to Day of the Moon was. An on-going problem in the Doctor Who universe is that present day Earth has to remain very close to our own real-life continuum yet you have to wonder after all the invasions why the world in the series hasn’t become an alternate universe where every one knows that aliens are real. Yet for this most virulent infestation presented in this tale, Moffat has a very intelligent twist – we repelled the Silence but because of the way they operate no one remembers doing it. It deftly presents a global threat without destroying credibility or continuity, and is also wonderfully ironic dramatically.

Now next week, it would seem we have something of breather with a high seas adventure featuring “a stroppy, homicidal mermaid”. But I’m not ruling out a few more clues surfacing amid the cutlasses and tricorne hats! And if not, who cares – it’s the good Doctor tangling with pirates and Lilly Cole! All board? Yes, indeed!

DOCTOR WHO 5.12/13 - The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang

Spoilers will fall!

(Apologies for any typos but this was written at high speed after the credits rolled! And I'll probably revise this after I've had some more time to reflect on it...)

Well it’s been a glorious three and a bit months, but all good things must come to an end. This series of Doctor Who has had many mountains to climb; a new production team and, more importantly, a new Doctor have all had to win viewers’ hearts. And for my money, Moffat and Smith have largely succeeded; we’ve had a season that has been the most solid yet – true not every story is a gold plated classic, but across the board the stories have been stronger, the writing tighter and the budget better spent. However the final test remains – can this series deliver a truly satisfying grand finale?

Previously the pattern generally has been a great set up followed by an irritating conclusion. And largely this has been due to Russell T Davies being on script duties; while he has many strengths as a writer, delivering proper conclusion that make sense has always been something of a weak spot for him. Even before he landed the job of bring back Doctor Who, his previous work showed this; indeed my main reservations on hearing he was going to take the wheel of the good ship Who was that I’d found the endings to Queer As Folk and The Second Coming deeply unsatisfying affairs that didn’t do justice to the exemplary scripting of the rest of the shows. And unfortunately his Who finales have been more of the same, hammering the reset button with a huge deus ex machine and serving up sentiment and spectacle in lieu of any proper narrative sense.

However Steven Moffat is a very different kettle of Saturnyians, and this can be clearly seen from the way in he has approached not just the finale but the plotting of the series’ on-going storyline. While the Cracks appearing in most episodes (and in the real universe too it would seem) has been similar to the old RTD method – i.e. drop in a reference (e.g. ‘bad wolf’, ‘torchwood’) and call it an story arc – there has been a lot more going on to that ties all the episodes together and to brings us to the finale. To begin there have been other recurring motifs; the talk of perception filters and the appearance of the First Doctor, but more importantly there has been a greater sense of continuity between the stories, with the consequences of the previous adventure visible in the next.

All in all, rather than the anthology of adventures that have a few hints of the series end we have previously received, this series actually possesses a proper over arching plot. The extended opening sequence of The Pandorica Opens makes this clear – and I’m sure that like myself, many of you readers took the hint and have been rewatching the previous episodes this week. And what a rewarding experience that has proved to be – there are lots of clues and thematic goodies to pick up on; we have numerous references to fairy tales, the Doctor and boxes, how time may be rewritten and a running thread that there is something very wrong with Amy Pond’s life.

Now, true to form, the opening part of the finale was a cracker, full of surprises and building up to a massive three pronged cliff hanger. When the credits rolled we have the Doctor imprisoned, Amy dying and all the stars in the universe going nova. Better still though, there was no ‘Next Time’ trailer and the teasers that surfaced later in the week consisted solely of shots from what we had already seen. Fan speculation on the interwebs went crazy with all manner of bizarre theories being debated – is River Song a future incarnation of the Doctor? Or is she the Doctor’s daughter now grown up? Or does Amy grow up to be River Song? Plus everybody has been wondering about the mysterious voice heard in the TARDIS – is it Davros, Omega, The Beast, Sutekh or some other big bad from Who history or just an echo of Prisoner Zero?

But although it’s been fun to explore such speculations, another running theme of this series has been misdirection and so when the credits for The Pandorica Opens rolled, the only firm prediction I was willing to make would be that The Big Bang is going to deliver surprises that few will have seen coming… However having rewatched several episodes, I was fairly sure that we would be revisiting some scenes for a second time and I was praying that the issue of the returning jacket in Flesh and Stone wouldn’t just turn out to be a continuity error…

Right then so how did everything pan out in the end? Well for me, The Big Bang nicely resolved the situation that The Pandorica Opens had set up. While some may say the concept of rebooting the universe from the restoration field is a little on the rabbit from the hat side of plotting, but really we knew he was going to do it somehow and it would have to involve a plot device that verges on the magical. But the arcane properties of the Pandorica technology are neither here nor there, the key thing is how it was utilised in the tale itself. And on that front, this finale gets a pass, for rather than a quick reset button at the end that undoes everything that has gone before - Last of the Time Lords I AM looking at you - as this particular restoration is carefully worked up to throughout the episode. Everything that has happened, stays happened, and it comes at the cost of the Doctor’s place in history.

Of course he doesn’t get erased, and the solution to this other dilemma had been seeded throughout the preceding dozen episodes. And this is why this finale was so satisfying - it wasn’t just a last big, high octane adventure to end on, it was the conclusion of the entire series, of all the hints and motifs that had been built up over the last three months.

As I’ve said before this has been a very solid series in terms of quality, but as it turns out this run of episodes actually fits together beautifully into one huge narrative. It has been so dexterously plotting that I’m really looking forward to watching it all in sequence now, as there will be lots we missed or didn’t realise were as relevant as they’ve turned out to be. For example, I’m seeing the end of Victory of the Daleks - namely the power of Bracewell’s memories - in a whole new light now.

Alright we didn’t the answers to the questions of who River Song actually is or the enigmatic Voice and Silence, nor was there anything about perception filters or the First Doctor. But I half expected that some things would be left unsolved - the level of detail in the plotting of this series led me to believe that some of the hints in this series would be Moffat laying down the beginnings of future plot lines. After all, in many ways the plot arc of this series actually begins in Tennant’s last series with his Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead episodes.

But this series has been more than just a story arc, for as well as the plot points, there has been character development and an almost literary approach to the themes in the stories - Moffat hasn’t just been telling stories but reflecting on their importance, on the value of fairy tales and fables, of imagination and on the stories we chose to tell ourselves.

DOCTOR WHO - THE ELEVENTH HOUR

The Shadow Proclamation decrees this to be a class IV protected review and is certified spoiler free.


The first episode of a new era of Doctor Who has literally just aired – credits rolling as I type – and so here’s my instant review…

First off the bat, there has been a fair bit of fan muttering about the youth of new leads Matt Smith and Karen Gillan and since the trailers and teasers started to appear, I have heard more than few opine that Who has been turned into Twilight by the new production team.

Now before I get what the episode actually delivered and weigh up the merit of this accusation, there are a few important points to be noted. Firstly the casting of Matt Smith would have been decided at the same time if not before as the first Twilight film was being released, certainly well before the screen incarnation of Stephanie Meyer’s books became a bona fide phenomena.

Secondly, young Doctors are not a new thing - and no, I’m not talking about that kitsch ‘80s soap from Down Under either. Doctors 1 to 3 – Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee – were all older chaps and Tom Baker appeared to quite the young whippersnapper in comparison; in fact I recall much proto-fanboy moaning in the playground that he was too young for the role. And the same ‘too young’ argument kicked off again big style with 5th Doctor Peter Davison but we all got used to it and indeed, bar the blip of the older Sylvester McCoy, the world’s favourite Time Lord has been considerably more youthful than the initial trio of incarnation. And come to think of it, the ‘too young’ thing reared its head again when David Tenant was cast… and we all know how well that turned out.

Finally though and most conclusively, Doctor Who had already done the romance between an immortal and a human girl thing back when Edward was still Cedric Diggory. And although it’s a little early in the season to speculate on the twists and turns of the new Doctor’s relationship with Amy, I really can’t see Steven Moffat rerunning the Rose/10th Doctor romance. The defence rests m’lud!

Now onto the episode itself!

Well, I am quite stunned - that was a truly frenetic hour and five minutes! Don’t fret the TARDIS is in safe hands and the new boys are going to turn out just fine.

Of course what you really want to know is how is the new Doctor?

Well, as I expected this episode doesn’t gives us an entirely clear picture of what the new Doctor will be like. Whenever a Doctor regenerates there is always the now traditional period of flapping confusion until his new character stabilises and The Eleventh Hour is no different. However with the extended running time of this episode he actually gets plenty of time to get to grips with his new self.

Now rather than the usual excuse for acting strange and mugging comically, in this bout of post-regeneration trauma you get a clearer sense of the new character emerging. And what he like? Barking, mate. I think we could well be in for the most alien doctor since Tom Baker - he has that same balance for shifting between appearing mad as a brush and the sanest man alive at the same time.

But the real acid test for any new actor in the role is how long does it take them to convince that the are not the new Doctor but they ARE the Doctor. And personally speaking, Matt Smith had me by the halfway point.

We don’t get to learn very much about Amy Pond due to the frantic storyline but I suspect we’ve been introduced to key players in her life throughout the episode that will more significant later in the series.
But despite the lack of biography, we do get a strong measure of what kind of girls going to be and it’s safe to say she’s no drippy Bella - “feisty” is the word that going to be on everybody’s’ lips. Yes it’s a cliché but in this case it is bang on for once. And performance-wise Karen Gillan displays a great chemistry with Smith. Sparks are going to fly, mark my words!

Now story-wise, essentially what we have here is almost a brand new pilot, but we tend to get these very time there a new companion, never mind a new Doctor. And as such the story line is less about the threat of the week to be foiled than throwing the new characters together. However, I’d say The Eleventh Hour is best the bunch. Streets ahead of Tennant’s debut which he slept through most of, and showcasing the Doctor better even than Rose.

The plot itself is fairly typical menace to the entire planet that RTD was so fond of. And I suspect that’s deliberate - Moffat’s bringing in the new but reassuring us with the sort of story we all know the shape of. For example, The Atraxi are right out of Big Russell’s Big Book Of Retro-pulp Sci-Fi but Prisoner Zero is pure Moffat and I can already hear a media studies thesis being written exploring the aliens in this story are culturally symbolic of the aesthetic ethos of the old and new production regimes.

Now I wouldn’t be going that far this early into the new run you’ll all be relieved to hear. But I do think that my prediction of this story functioning as a bridge to the previous era holds up. Moffat delivered exactly what people expect of Doctor Who but is doing it in a somewhat different way - the show seems a lot more energised and yes, it did seem to have a slightly darker feel to it.

Really though it’s too early to tell how the season is going turn out stylistically. As this is a fresh start for the Doctor, I’m wary speculating on the rest of the series based on what is effectively a pilot, because as every fanboy knows pilot episodes are living proof that children don’t always resemble their parents.

What I can say though is that no matter whether the show’s approach changes significantly or not, the quality level will be remain as high as we are used to. And if the remaining episodes simply continue with the same sort of fare as the RTD days I suspect the team will be serving it with a higher level of elan.

But shifts in the tonal direction of the show aside there are all of cosmetic changes. The first swish of the new broom comes with an all new title sequence which is really liked. However there is also a new theme tune which frankly just didn’t impress me. It’s a lot more electronic which is good but they seem to have blunted the tune somewhere in the ambient noises. It might grow on me but I think it’s going to be unpopular. Personally I think they should just admit defeat and go back to the Delia Derbyshire renditions of score. Beef up the production a little maybe, but basically you are never going to get another arrangement that will ever come close to those original radiophonic arrangements. Even today they still sound like they are beaming in from the future.

Now we don’t get to see all the new kit until the close of the episode but you get to see it all onscreen long enough for a good look.

The new TARDIS is a definite improvement in this old Who head’s book. Don’t get me wrong I liked the revamped version sporting the coral desktop theme introduced for the RTD era, but this version is has it all. While clearly retaining much of the aesthetic stylings of the former console room, the new design also incorporates a lot more of the classic series TARDIS in its decor. The roundels that bedeck the walls are closer to the original design and the huge concentric silver rings and attendant gubbins are right out of the very first console room design back in the William Hartnell days (have a gander here and see for yourselves!).

And while still on the hardware, I was particularly taken with the new look sonic screwdriver. We only get a glimpse in this episode but having just a good look at some stills, again like the TARDIS refit, it’s pleasingly closer to the classic series version. Although in the case of the Doctor’s famous multi-purpose tool I’ve never really seen what was so wrong with the original design. But that said, I do like that the new sonic screwdriver looks more like a proper tool than a space age magic wand. And I can only hope the scripts follow suite.

The Doctor’s new togs work pretty well too - there’s aren’t many men who can wear a bow tie and not look a plonker but thankfully Matt Smith is one of their hallowed ranks. Although have raised eyebrows over the new garb, I personally quite like the Time Team chic his outfit has. Plus the tweedy absent minded professor helps to remind us that although he may look young, the good Doctor is just well over nine hundred years old.

So in conclusion, the Doctor is back and his future is in safe hands. If the show keeps up this level of energy then we are in for the best season yet. Now in all honest, I start every season with that hope when you see a preview, however it’s the first I’m still entertaining such high hopes after the close of the first episode.

My only real concern at this point, other than that bloody new theme, is that if Karen Gillan is going to continue wearing such short skirts, by the end of the season a goodly proportion of the male population are going to have palms hairier than Larry Talbot and all be shrieking “MY VISION IS IMPAIRED! I CANNOT SEE!!!!”