The Eleventh Hour: Ranking - 4

 

The Eleventh Hour

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 3/4/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Adam Smith)

Rank: 4

   'Favourite foods of the other post-regenerative Drs we never got to seeon screen: 

1st Dr: ate Vitalite with the Sensorites 

2nd Dr: Ice cream with the Ice Warriors 

3rd Dr: A time-scoop while reversing the polarity of his nutri-grain bar 

4th Dr: Jelly Babies and custard 

5th Dr: Kinda Egg 

6th Dr: French Toast on Varos 

7th Dr: The Curd of Fenric 

8th Dr: A Sarnie on Sarn 

9th Dr: A 'Rose' chocolate out a tin of quality street 

10th Dr: A spoon of tuna with the Judoona 

12th Dr: Angel Delight with the Weeping Angels 

13th Dr: Lemons Of The Punjab'

When Russell T Davies reluctantly stepped down from running the greatest show in the galaxy there was only one obvious successor: Steven Moffat knew what it was like to run highly successful TV series and had been involved with Dr Who in some form ever since the hiatus, combining the two by having his breakout star Julia Sawalha (from the superlative teenage journalists show ‘Press Gang’ about the redemptive power of the written word, which even featured Michael Jayston playing a Valeyard-like Dr Who character named ‘Colonel X’ – following the revelations in ‘The Timeless Children’ I’m claiming it as canon) appear as the companion in beloved Dr Who skit ‘A Curse Of Fatal Death’ in 1999. Other people laughing at Dr Who felt like bullying, but here was someone who clearly felt the same way that we did and filled his script with as lot of love in between the jokes about the Doctor and master nipping back in time to outdo each other while relaxing on the sofa of reasonable comfort). Moffat had gone on to write some of the most beloved stories of the comeback, with a highly distinctive timey wimey writing voice of his own that still slotted nicely into old friend Russell’s vision for the show as a more emotional, character-driven series than in days of old. He was as close to a second safe pair of hands as a show this big and this unwieldy could ever have. Yet I confess to feeling a huge deal of trepidation at his takeover: we weren’t just changing showrunner but the doctor and had a new bunch of companions to get to know too. The last time Who had tried to change so many things in one go, when John Nathan-Turner took over as producer, it had sort-of led to the 18 month suspension and then the cancellation a few years later and that was over a longer period of time (funny how ‘time’ always seems to turn up in conversations about Moffat); we didn’t yet know in the fickle age of modern television, if audiences would remain patient enough to keep watching without David Tennant in the main role and with such a different vision for the series. 

 The fact that Steven cast a relative unknown in such an important role, an actor younger even than Peter Davison had been in 1982, with an equally unknown actress in Karen Gillan alongside him, made us all incredibly jumpy too (her role in ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ helped calm the nerves a little, but it’s hard to judge somebody from a part that mostly asks them to wave their arms and talk about prophecy. I mean, until tiktok came along and made that sort of thing seem normal, it was just weird). Dr Who fans famously can’t agree on anything, yet every fan I know shared my nervousness in a rare moment of collective breath holding. Apparently every bit as nervous, given the titbits that have come out since, were the BBC: despite Dr Who being one of the most watched and celebrated shows they made in 2005-09 they were all prepared to cancel it after 2010 if this series flopped and had severe doubts about commissioning this one at all. Later stories in the run of series 5 will hint at Moffat’s own jitters, his fears that he can’t possibly do justice to a programme that’s been such a part of his life since childhood, and feature many a plot where he’ll second-guess himself and over-think what he’s doing. Sitting down to write this first story particularly, with the weight of so much history on his shoulders, must have been the single most daunting moment in the show since Russell sat down to write ‘Rose’. And yet there’s none of that self-doubt or angst in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ itself, a debut story which does absolutely everything it needed to do to keep all us fans happy, but from a genuinely inspired place rather than a bit of box-ticking. By the end, when Amy (our surrogate) says that the Doctor seems awfully sure she’ll run away with him he just grins and promises her all the wonderful things out there. Of course she’s going to say yes – and so are we. 

 Another thing Moffat got right from the get go was the casting. Matt Smith just is the Doctor from the first second we meet him: every bit as alien and mad and exciting and brilliant and energetic and puppyish as the 10th Dr but in a very different way, someone whose regressed from confident early adulthood to gawky teenager, with a big goofy grin and the feeling that he’d only just gained mastery over his own limbs. Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond is immediately warm and likeable and feisty, but in a very different way than Donna (it helps that we get to know her as playful child before seeing her as hardened adult – of all the people who’ve written for the series down the years Moffat is the best at keeping his inner child alive and for my money no depiction of childhood in Dr Who is better or more accurate than seven-year-old Amy, for all the deeply weird fairytale like circumstances she’s living in: she isn’t just cute, she isn’t just sweet, she’s tough and used to seeing through the lies told by adults while still secretly believing in magic). Every fan by now probably knows that Caitlin Blackwood, who plays the younger Amy so well, is Karen Gillan’s cousin in real life; amazingly though she was a bit of last minute casting when the producers were tearing out their hair trying to cast her (Moffat always seemed to find the casting process harder than other aspects of his showrunner job) and someone joked to Karen did she know any good actors who happened to look like her; she replied that her cousin was doing a bit of acting and might like to try out for the part, although the producers didn’t know which of the late run of little girls she was thanks to the different family name. Karen and Caitlin had never actually met before filming weirdly enough despite being so much alike – the former was Scottish and the latter Irish and they’d never got it together to go through the palaver of customs and visit their families; rather wonderfully they’re very close these days. So that’s three very lucky crucial bits of casting in the main parts, plus an extra lucky strike in Arthur Darvill as Rory, an old friend of Matt Smith’s whose the ‘Harry Sullivan’ style comedy relief but still has a warmth and inner courage that makes it easy to see why Amy would fall for him as a sort of Doctor-substitute all these years. It helps all the actors considerably making this story a few episodes into the recording block so everyone can work out where they’ll end up and hit the ground running (‘Time of the Angels’ was the first story recorded and you can tell everyone’s that little bit more unsure about what they’re doing by comparison), but that doesn’t always work when they tried it in the past either (they pulled the same trick with ‘Castrovalva’ in 1982 and we still didn’t really know who the 5th Dr was by the end of it; by contrast when the end credits roll around this lot already feel like old friends we’ve followed for years). 

 As for the plot, well. We were expecting many things given Moffat’s highly varied 9th and 10th Dr scripts for ‘The Empty Child’ ‘The Girl In the Fireplace’ ‘Blink’ and ‘Silence In the Library’: something complicated probably, something scary certainly, something imaginative definitely. One thing nobody was quite expecting was how childlike everything is. That’s not a bad thing. There’s a feel that’s very different to the way we ended on ‘The End Of Time’, as if a reboot switch has been thrown from the dark and gloomy and very grown up closure to the 10th Dr era to a new epoch again that could start afresh (what is it with Moffat stories that find me writing about time?) and a story that’s immediately light and fluffy and welcoming, where Dr Who seems fun again.It was a good move pitching Dr Who for a whole new younger audience again, using this story as a re-set button for any fans who want to jump on here, doing everything in its power to snare as many curious youngsters as possible who can grow up alongside Amy Pond (and let’s face it, Who had come a long way from the kiddie-friendly ‘Rose’ five years earlier, it couldn’t get much darker without putting newcomers off and leaving us back where we were with falling ratings and cancellations in the 1980s). Moffat was right to pitch this story slightly younger but at the same time, like Russell, he had experience of writing both children and adult dramas and combines both quite skilfully for a story that knows it can’t afford to talk down to its children’s audience, instead tapping into that sense of magic that got him hooked on the show in the first place. Moffat has always been good at understanding his inner seven year old and can tap into it easier than the showrunners either side of him to judge what ‘works’ and what’s too much or not enough (though even he has lapses). By contrast Russell’s job was slightly different - he had to grasp a family audience all in one go and Chibnall too had to grapple with falling ratings and win every demographic over at once, but Moffat’s smart enough to know most longterm fans will probably stick around if what he does isn’t awful – it’s the new audience he needs to grow if his era of DW is to thrive. 

That’s childlike though and definitely not childish: this is a seven year old’s view of how the world works (and should work) rather than an adult’s and I’m not the first reviewer to call the Moffat era ‘fairytale’ like. But it’s the good sort of fairytales from the brothers Grimm where nothing’s safe and the excitement comes from knowing that enjoying life can go down as well as up and things aren’t always going to be safe, rather than something sanitised. The world goes back to being a mysterious place again, as Moffat makes even the ordinary seem extraordinary as if seen through a child’s eyes, only in this case it will often be the Doctor’s new-born eyes that sees Earth like that. For the first time in a long time ‘The Eleventh Hour’ seems like amazing things can happen with every turn of the page, as Moffat goes back to basics and gets the idea that Dr Who is about extraordinary things impacting our ordinary world better than almost any write the show ever had. In many ways the Moffat era will be full of more psychological horror and darkness than the rest, as he puts his characters through the mill. Even here already the Doctor is shown to be more than just a benign imaginary friend come to life but someone slightly dangerous and scary to be around even when he himself is someone you’d trust with your life, a person who can’t help making promises he can’t deliver, offering up a brave new world to Amy that she just can’t possibly refuse, and then keeps her waiting for it for twelve long years. Perhaps picking up from Russell’s last Who scripts, I think this story has more to do with Moffat’s own relationship with his favourite series, the way Russell T did with ‘Rose’, rather than show off what he can do with the show that no one else can. The first half of ‘the Eleventh Hour’ feels as if it might be Moffat trying to plug into how he felt when he first discovered this mad series, in an attempt to get other people the age now he was then to watch it, and feeling a little hard done by that life didn’t end up being as magical and wonderful as Dr Who promised it would be (being born in 1961 he’d have been the perfect age for ‘Spearhead From Space’ in 1970, a story ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is closest to in many ways). 

 Being offered this job in middle age, after a youth spent writing for other shows because there was no Dr Who on telly to write for, having given that dream up for good, seems to have brought back that feeling to the writer that his inner child was right all along to believe in miracles, not the cynical adult he’d become – that feeling that magic does exist out there and can drop on you from out of the blue when you’re not looking and that sense that fairytales do come true if you’re prepared to wait for them is sprinkled throughout practically every line. It’s such a contrast. The Russell T era was rooted in the real world, with characters you could meet on any street corner (especially if you lived on run-down estates like Rose and her mum), people with aspirations and day jobs and hangovers and cravings for chips and with so much emotional baggage they’d need the extra weight allowance on any ship that wasn’t bigger on the inside than the outside. When the 9th or 10th Dr is dropped into these worlds he’s the ultimate explosion of the extraordinary making the mundane seem amazing, lifting their world and making people believe again. Moffat’s characters though live in a world already sprinkled with magic and fairydust and where anything can happen at any time, bad or good (but generally on the side of good on balance). The lives of Amy, Rory and Clara to come already seem amazing when we first meet them, even later when Moffat starts pinning down characters and giving them jobs and parents and motivations (I mean, Amy’s jobs across the series include working as a kiss-a-gram, then a model then a writer - try suggesting those to your school advisor and see how far that gets you as a career choice - while Rory’s a Dr-in-training complete with his own screwdriver and Clara’s background is so weird there’s a whole series of the Dr trying to unravel her back story). The older Amy though is as tough and cynical as any Moffat character we see, softening with every story (give or take what some of the future plots do to her), until by the end of her time in the Tardis she’s more like her eight year old self again believing in miracles. When the Doctopr boasts that he can ‘fix’ her growing up, he wasn’t kidding: like River Song Amy lives her life in reverse in a way, growing more and more comfortable and less cynical as she learns that she was right to believe in her imaginary friend and imaginary world and every adult who told her she was making up such dreams was wrong. 

 Here as an adult she’s immediately cynical in every way her younger self isn’t, assuming her intruder is a burglar or kidnapper rather than the imaginary friend of her childhood, but still recognisably like her hard-to-lease younger self, as if a little bit of the magic the Doctor imprints on people is there already. She’s a stickler for authority young Amy: as well as praying to Father Christmas she prays for a policeman, which is sort-of what she gets (well, a madman in a police box anyway). There’s a bit of a running theme here actually: the Doctor steps in to do the police Atraxi’s job for them, while Amy dresses as a policewoman in one of her kissagram outfits. However the Doctor is decidedly not your regular policeman; he’s lenient for one thing, acting to the spirit of the law not the letter of the law. He’s a natural rebel from the first, even stealing his clothes and keeping them by the end, because he figures after saving the earth he deserves something. He’s also much the same whoever he talks to, just like a policeman is at least taught to be even if few are in practice. Note that Amy’s relationship with the Doctor doesn’t change his response to her in the slightest: if this was Dr 10 meeting a kissagram who’d chained him to a radiator then you’d put odds on them snogging by the end of an episode, but to the Doctor Amy is forever this little girl. Which is not a put down either: like all the best funnest grown-ups the Doctor recognises that children are just adults without the experience and the knockbacks, people who aren’t quite fully formed yet just as he isn’t, yet every bit as bright and warm and funny as their elders and he treats her with exactly the same respect and admiration in both ages (that’s why his sudden reversion to ‘you stupid humans are all the same’ ranting in next story ‘The Beast Below’ – written for a number of different Doctors first – is so jarring, despite being a similarly fairytale story of huge whales and future Queens on a spaceship). The arc of the Russell T Davies years is that the Doctor gradually becomes more like ‘us’, with a guilt over his past actions and the revelation even a timelord can be ‘only human’, prone to errors and misjudgements, while his companions develop super-powers from simply being around him. William Hartnell used to declare that he saw the part as ‘a cross between The Wizard Of Oz and Father Christmas’ and after detours as a very alien alien and a very Earthly Dr in exile and Russell’s vision of him as someone that’s getting more human by the minute that’s what Moffat brings back here. 

The 11th Dr is magical all over again, the impossible imaginary friend Amy’s family, classmates and therapists all assume is made-up to get attention; it’s a clever tactic of getting the audience on Amy’s side immediately because we know what the people around her don’t, that he’s ‘real’. After a botched attempt to make Ace the Dorothy from the ‘Wizard of Oz’ books (down to her ‘real’ name and ice storm taking her to a magic realm) we get an actual re-creation of Frank L Baulm’s wonderland, but specifically the dark-edged fairytales of the under-rated ‘Return To Oz’ where after yearning to go home Dorothy realises she’s much happier in the Doctor’s mad world that at least has an internal logic better than her real world and refuses to let the psychotherapists burn out her brain trying to make her ‘normal’ (or to put it another way Amy is Wendy made to believe in fairies all over again while the Doctor is Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up and escaped his responsibilities and has somehow grown younger). Amy is, when we first meet her, a ten year old trying so hard to be grown up, an orphan without parents (apparently because of the results in this episode and the time-bending crack in her wall, another very ordinary mundane thing made extraordinary, not that we ever go back to it properly – the key difference between the Davies years is that getting the family back again would be more important than saving Earth) and living with an unbeloved maiden aunt we never see, struggling to be independent because she’s learnt the hard way not to rely on anyone else for anything. For her the Dr’s world is much safer than this one despite all the dangers, a magical place where she can’t get hurt and can go back home in time for tea thanks to time travel and where she gets to be free from her responsibilities (it’s interesting in retrospect that we’re introduced to Rory in this story without quite knowing who he is and what their relationship is, even though they’re clearly engaged already with a wedding on the way; later stories will show Amy to be madly in love but a restless soul at heart, unwilling to be tied down to anyone for the rest of her life, even her soulmate). The Doctor’s mad-cap arrival, in a Tardis that’s out of control and re-setting alongside him before crash-landing in her garden, is the stuff that dreams are made of. 

 Fittingly for the fairytale background, like Goldilocks and her forebears the 11th Dr’s polite unhinged madman is played exactly right: not too mad, not too scary, not too silly, not too dark but definitely not in any way boring. Matt Smith owed his TV breakthrough, rather aptly, to Wendy ‘Zoe’ Padbury, after she saw him in the very Who-sounding play ‘The Master and Margarita’ in 2004 and signed him on to her books during her time as an agent. Smith didn’t know Dr Who very well (he’s two months younger than me – something that felt very wrong at the time given all previous Doctors have been so much older - so grew up in the ‘wilderness years’) but grew to love it when borrowing DVDs during his preparation for the series (the 2nd Doctor was his favourite). Smith felt the Doctor was simultaneously the cleverest and the silliest person in the room and at different times different aspects of those two sides of his personality would show themselves. They’re both on display in this episode where he gets to do lots of what seem to us now like very obvious Doctory things without any of them actually having been in the series before, including showing the companion immediately that he can time travel rather than letting her work it out for herself (the apple with Amy’s name carved in it, not an hour older even though he’s been away eight years, is a brilliant way of explaining the concept of the series to a whole new audience who’ve never seen a series based around time travel before) and with new all new tastebuds that take some breaking in, from a scene Moffat confessed was stolen wholeheartedly from the Winnie the Pooh stories by AA Milne where they try to feed Tigger (there’s a reason the ‘fish fingers and custard’ gag took off with fans, with its brilliantly Dr Who juxtapositions of two things together that shouldn’t go – actually chocolate covered coconut teacakes dipped in custard in real life, the Doctor rejecting apples, yoghurt, bacon, beans on toast and bread and butter along the way while saving his biggest wrath for carrots, which he won’t even try – memories of Mel making him drink carrot juice in ‘The Ultimate Foe’ perhaps?) Rejecting food is a very un-grownup like thing to do; you wouldn’t catch this Doctor reminding you that eighteen planets in the solar system would be glad to have such delicacies or threatening to make you post the remains to the starving people on the Moon of Poosh (although I can see the 1st 3rd and 12th Doctors all doing that); this Doctor feels ‘on your side’ from the first, childish even amongst such sensible responsible regular things as food. The twist of having the Dr make his arrival in his companion’s life, three times because he gets the dates wrong, is very clever and original too, and it’s a surprise no one had thought of doing it before as, like the best Moffat inventions, it feels like something the Doctor should always have done. It’s as if Moffat is asking how we’d re-act if our imaginary friends from childhood came back to us in the adult world and reminded us of how we once viewed it: as a magical place where anything can happen, rather than a place to live, work and die (future Moffat stories have characters doing all of these, grumpily, but not necessarily in that order). For a draft of this story at least though (not up to the 11th Hour exactly but a fair way through drafting), written around the same time as ‘Waters Of Mars’, ‘Hour’ was designed for the 10th Doctor in the hope of getting him to stay on a final year (Tennant was really torn and went back and forth for months, as Moffat’s scripts were his favourites even while he felt loyalty to Russell and felt his arc had been told): the big difference was that the story would have opened with him dying as he first met Amy, the series cycling on a loop until ‘The Big Bang’ caused him to regenerate and he time-travelled back here. That would have been a whole different story though, with a whole different feel: Tennant’s Doctor would have been more naturally fatherly, while the 11th Doctor feels as if he stayed eight years old while Amy grew up. 

 Notably, too, we’re introduced to the rural village of Leadworth, a place that’s about as far away from the gritty kitchen sinks of the urban Powell estate as they come and which feels a little like a fairytale itself (there are very few villages like this around anymore – most of them that are like this are trying too hard to be towns and putting big shops and building estates on the outskirts) and apart from being rare, English villages are places that feel most linked to pre-time and pagan days. The only other time Dr Who itself tried this was in ‘The Daemons’, a story all about white witches and the devil and the only other Who related story was the ‘K9 and Company’ pilot, which is about black witches and the devil). This threat though, is less concerned with the church in the town square than the duck-pond, the hubbub of village life round which everything revolves and where everyone knows everyone else (something that’s a bit of a problem for Prisoner Zero, who relies on people not noticing that the people he takes over are all acting a bit oddly). The location filming picked Llandaff, a village near Cardiff, mostly because it was the nearest to where Who filmed anyway that happened to have the sort of duckpond specified in the script, but without knowing it this is a really apt choice. This is where Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, spent his childhood dreaming up stories just like this one and Llandaff is exactly the sort of place that feels as if it hasn’t regenerated since pagan times. On screen it’s meant to be the bottom bit of England right by the start of South Wales, ‘about 30 miles from Gloucester’, so we’re talking Hardwicke or Tibberton, somewhere near Cheltenham perhaps, where there are lots of English villages that look just like this one scattered about (once again, though, it’s odd that for a series filmed in Wales we get English and Scottish companions but not, as yet a Welsh one; Ray from ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ is still the closest and that was when the series was still made in London). Notably nobody we ever meet from this village has an accent that comes from anywhere near Gloucester. 

 Having our first companion from the country in years, possibly ever given how ambiguous many companions’ backgrounds are in the old series, is all new. Moffat himself was born in Paisley, which might not be the biggest city in Scotland but isn’t exactly this small either (Leadworth was in Scotland for a few drafts in fact, before he worried that a Scottish companion and Scottish village would be too much for English fans and cause problems casting over actors to live there. The line about how the Doctor knows what it’s like to be ‘the only Scottish person in a English village’ is written with feeling at being the odd one out). He’s clearly spent a lot of time round people who do come from villages like this though: as one myself he really nails that sense of community spirit combined with jealousy and the sense that other people are off having more interesting adventures in bigger places. Giving Amy, someone whose been bursting at the seams to travel the world, a space-time machine makes sense: she’s used to limiting her horizons, from her imaginary friend on down. That puts Rory in an uncomfortable position; while it happens more in later stories as we get to know him better you can feel his fear that Amy only got together with him because he was a big-ish fish in a small duckpond; to the end he still worries that she’ll just run off and leave him and his narrow horizons once she gets a sense of how wonderful the world is. Just notice the offhand way Amy introduced him as a ;friend’ before Rory buts in ‘well, boyfriend’, which tells you a great deal about their relationship from the start. 

 Most of all, though, the big change here is that the Doctor gets to be the big kid and its younger Amy who gets to act the role of the parent, which is a lot closer to how most children daydream than lazier writers who just want to make everything involving children a big game. Especially when she’s younger – the older Amy tries hard to act more grown-up and adult, down to the point of dressing up as a kiss-a-gram but she’s slightly bamboozled by life; it’s the younger Amy that takes charge immediately, whose used to life-changing events happening every few minutes (what did happen to her parents? Did she ever know them? It’s interesting in retrospect that we don’t get a ‘Father’s Day’ type story where she at least tries to find out more about them) and getting on with it (most kids are more resilient than adults, still adjusting to a quadzillion new things every day so finding a few unexpected extras part of everyday life – its grown-ups who get set in their ways as the newness and magic slowly seeps out of life; it’s very Dr Who to want to put that element back in and all showrunners/ producers of this series do it, but in very different ways). This episode’s early scenes are such fun you immediately want to leap through the screen and join them, the dialogue in these scenes just sparkle, every line pushing the Dr further out into being a comedy character or scary-seriousness and flicking back again immediately, but so naturally you don’t see the join – a world away from the hard lessons and harsh reality of the 2009 Who specials. The fish custard is the bit everyone remembers but even without that this would be amongst the most beloved scenes, as the Doctor discovers all his tastebuds are new and starts flinging food away like a naughty child. Taste is another thing we think the Doctor changes every regenerations now but only starts here and immediately puts him on the side of children (adults seem to forget that the reason kids are such fussy eaters is because their tastebuds are so new everything tastes stronger than an adult can possibly remember, especially the ones for tasting sour food. Like I say, Moffat remembers well what I was like to be little and knows that if his adult self was put back in a child’s body he wouldn’t be able to last five minutes with so much confusing newness around). While Russell openly nicks from the Dicks/Letts and Hinchliffe years, this story at least feels more like the Douglas Adams/Graham Williams years with a healthy sense of the absurd in between the moralistic storytelling (although it’s a lot more like ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ than any actual story, especially the opening scenes where Arthur thinks he knows how the world works until he discovers there’s an alien about to blow it up and that his best friend is an alien and he’s left saving the world in his dressing gown, just as Amy ends this story in her nightie). 

And yet it isn’t just fun, there’s danger in this story too. The crack in Amy’s wall is this year’s big mystery and it’s there from pretty much the first scene, where all time has broken through, an early sign of just how good Moffat was at making mundane things feel scary. The one part of this script that wasn’t coming together was where Zero might be hiding and how he could fit Amy into the plot. Moffat took time out from banging his head against the typewriter to tuck his son Louis into bed and read him a bedtime story when he noticed a crack on his son’s bedroom wall that looked as if it was a crooked smile laughing at him. Not wanting to draw his son’s attention to it as it was creeping him out, he couldn’t get it out of his head and ended up writing it into the story instead, retrospectively creating the year long arc around it and adding it to the scripts he’d already finished. Moffat also drew, as he did with so many of his scripts, from a recurring nightmare about visiting his grandparents’ house in Wolverhampton and discovering a nonexistent room that was either nice or nasty depending on which dream it was (I have the same feeling on visiting Wolverhampton. Or did before I found a Dr Who group there anyway). The symbolism of hidden room in dreams, by the way, is all about the unknown and discovery of one’s self and points to your subconscious trying to work out how to integrate a new part of your personality you hadn’t discovered before, whether consciously or not it’s a good match for a story about a newly regenerated Doctor who isn’t quite sure who he is yet (Steven may well have had to behave more around his grandparents than his parents, possibly vice versa of course although the Bill Moffat who pitched ‘Press Gang’ and encouraged his son to write it sounds like a fun sort of dad to have). We won’t really know how the crack relates to the series for eleven stories yet but already it feels like something big and scary. 

 You would have forgiven Moffat for taking the soft option, of re-launching the new series with an old monster to keep fans watching, but instead he creates ‘Prisoner Zero’, a character that – like the Autons – we can understand really quickly in not a lot of screentime but who feels like a ‘real’ credible threat in just a few scenes too. This renegade is a neat mirror to the doctor’s circumstance in a story that’s all about identity. Like the Doctor he’s getting used to life in a new body, only the difference is he can take over lots of bodies and switch from one or the other. Interestingly Moffat then moves his regeneration story to a hospital, as if he’s plundering all the ideas from ‘Spearhead From Space’ Russell didn’t recycle for ‘Rose’ (truly that seems to have been the most influential ‘classic’ Who of them all for the new series writers) alongside recent and equally fairytale-like BBC hit ‘Being Human’. It’s a clever choice, a place that’s about as ‘real world’ and dark and scary and human a place, playing to its own different set of rules away from the ‘real’ world as you can get, and hopefully somewhere you don’t have to visit too often it becomes ‘normal’, rooting and grounding these characters more and yet at the same time somewhere you often visit while woozy and out of it, so your experiences of it feel like a bad dream. 

 Zero is a prisoner whose been hiding in Amy’s house, unseen thanks to that time crack, on the run from another new race The Atraxi who feel as if they’re going to be a lot more important to the script than they are. The story could easily have gone downhill at this point, when it reverts back to ‘default Dr Who story’ setting and a chase of monsters, but even here Moffat sprinkles a bit of extra pixie magic: the Doctor doesn’t just ring up the authorities and badger them into doing something the way the 3rd Dr would, he calls all the biggest and greatest minds of the day up on a zoom/skype call (back before a lot of us knew what they were) and gets their attention by doing something impossible and showing off. Well, actually something that always sued to be considered impossible but, after several centuries, was being accepted as scientific fact: Fermat’s theorem thought to ‘prove’ the existence, at least in theory, of faster than light travel of the sort the Tardis might use. First raised by the scientists in 1637, in a note scribbled in the margins of his copy of Greek text ‘Arithmatica’ (and a theory that ‘Star Trek: The next generation’ episode ‘The Royale’ claims still hasn’t been solved by the 24th century) ir porposes that no combination of two positive integers can equal the value of a third integer of the same power if it is of a value greater than two. So now you know if anyone claiming to be a time traveller starts trying to prove who they are to you. It’s very interesting in retrospect as Moffat never tries anything as openly brainy again – its kind of like Russell’s use of TV newscasters to provide information and make vents seem worldwide, but different The Doctor doesn’t just enter the hospital ward by the door, he enters it through the window in a fire engine! Patient Zero doesn’t just do the usual boring ‘body invasion’ thing where we can’t tell whose possessed – he gets things wrong, leaping into the bodies of adults with children and humans with pets and not quite knowing where one ends and the other begins (Watch out for Olivia Coleman, in the days before she was un-missable because she was in everything, being a third of Zero’s final victim – when Chris Chibnall announced the 13th Dr was a woman and someone he’d worked with on his own series ‘Broadchurch’ I was over the moon thinking they’d got Olivia to be the Doctor and more than a tad disappointed to find it was Jodie Whittaker, whose part I couldn’t even remember). The Doctor doesn’t simply hear the villain talk about what he’s up to, he deduces it in a wonderful scene that involved every spare member of the production team taking hundreds of snapshot photos and linking them altogether in stop-frame animation so that they move slightly. I’m particularly sorry we never saw this sort of thing again after this story as it works here really well I think: it ‘fits’ with what we’ve seen the Dr do before, without him ever having actually done it and gives the 11th Dr a gravitas beyond his playfulness that makes the 11th Dr feel even more like the regeneration he’s closest to, the 2nd Dr, the clown on the edges of the action that everyone always underestimates until it’s too late, and helps him peek out from under Dr 10’s shadow). Moffat’s other great literary love is Sherlock Holmes, a series he brought back to life with co-writer Mark Gatiss this very same year, having not realised he was about to get the Who job. There’s a lot of crossover between them (so much so Sherlock author Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’ was written to be the star of ‘The Crimson Horror’ before re-writes, with no discernible difference to what the 11th Doctor does), this Doctor using his brain a lot to work things out at high speed, though sadly it was too costly and time-consuming to keep pulling this ‘trick’ of seeing the Doctor’s observations from his point of view, leaving this an under-rated scene too (his quick eye spotting that Rory is the only person looking away from the spaceship in the sky and staring at a patient he’s just seen upstairs in a coma instead). 

 Cleverly the story subverts all the usual tropes of ‘regeneration’ stories. This Doctor is manic and confused, but gets the worst of that out of his system bedding the Tardis in between visits to Leadworth. Instead of the ‘mirror’ routine where he gets to judge his new appearance he sees a monster disguised in his body (‘That’s rubbish whose that meant to be?!’) in a scene that again feels as if Dr Who has always done but which only started in 2010. There’s one thing the Doctor does the same though, locating his perfect out-of-time costume from the hospital, the exact same way the 3rd Doctor did in ‘Spearhead From Space’ (the tweedy jacket of an ageing geography teacher and the bowtie of the 19th century that would look silly on anyone else but is the perfect hint that, despite looking the youngest, this Dr is now the oldest we’ve seen him so far). The costume was a last minute substitute as Smith was unhappy with the action hero dress Moffat had envisioned and wasn’t too keen on the ‘pirate’ look they tried either. Smith chose the tweed jacket and bow tie himself, which Moffat hated at firstand thought a parody of how the Doctor dresses eccentrically, but with so little time before filming bedgrudgingly agreed to it. Dr Who is said to have single handedly saved the tweed jacket industry and nearly doubled sales of bow ties within the year. Very definitely cool. By the time he calls back the Atraxi for a stern warning about their very Hitch-Hiker’s threat to blow the Earth up, walking through their scanned holograms of his past lives and standing proudly at the end, fully formed at the end of a line of ten, you’re ready to punch the air. Dr Who is back with all the magic and mystery and laughs and drama and above all pixie-dust of the old days, but in a way that’s not like any of the other regenerations. This Doctor already feels like our best friend in a way none of the others ever were (they were kindly grandfathers, dashing heroes or dark and mysterious eccentrics and sometimes our friend but never quite our best friend), with super human abilities but a fallibility and vulnerability that already means he makes mistakes, the sort of best friend you’re always making excuses to cover up for.

 Remarkably, given how new at this everyone still is, very little goes wrong with this story: a couple of oddly ill-fitting lines (more on those below) and I’ve seen better CGI monster and spaceships than Prisoner Zero’s natural worm-like self and the Atraxi vessel with the big eye. That’s it though: every scene, every acting role, every bit of direction, every sub-plot, it all goes swimmingly and the effect of prisoner Zero taking over people is nicely scary (if I’d first seen this story as a seven year old I’d never be able to watch Olivia Coleman without being scared of her ever again!) To be honest, any worry that my favourite show might not survive had gone by the pre-credits sequence. That’s an amazing triumph for a story that had so much resting on it: new showrunner, new producer, new tone, new companion, new new doctor and yet the wonder with ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is that it takes so many risks it didn’t need to; every other showrunner/producer, from Russell on down, has made sure to give us something that feels like the ‘old’ days, even when the old days was John Wiles in 1965 looking back to Verity Lambert in 1963. This story doesn’t even do what we all expected it to and pick up on the ‘clues’ sprinkled in Moffat’s stories for Drs 9 and 10 (I totally thought the young Amy was going to turn out to be River Song instead of – spoilers – River Song’s mum). But ‘The Eleventh Hour’ changes everything and everything, for now, works better than ever. The only sad part is that Moffat never cones even close to matching this story again: he’s written many brilliant ones, with around a dozen 11th and 12th Dr stories inside my top 100 so it would be wrong to say his era was a disappointment. But this story was just so good, so dreamlike, so clever, so magical, so child-friendly, so different to anything that had come before it and yet so in keeping with the spirit of Dr Who, that I hoped we were going to have more stories like this one every week instead of it being just an anomaly. It has to be said the 11th Dr and Amy are a lot more interesting when a story revolves around them rather than having them revolve around a story (the other best ones tend to focus on their relationship, with or without Rory and River Song in there too). I don’t know whether this is true or not but it feels as if ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was a story Moffat crafted carefully and worked on for years, perhaps since his own childhood just in case he ever got the chance to write for Who, stuffed with all of his best ideas, characters and lines (there are lots of classy snappy bits of dialogue here too: I can’t believe no writer thought of the ‘Doctor will see you now’ gag before or had the Doctor call the alien threat back for a stern ticking off, a scene added at the last minute when it was thought the story ended too soon that’s one of the best); by using them all in this story though Moffat had nowhere left to go as interesting, good or clever (it’s worth remembering that the way Russell worked was that he farmed ideas out to other writers and only rarely did they pitch their thoughts to him, so other than the special last-minute case of ‘Blink’ this is the first time Moffat gets to write a Dr Who story that’s completely and utterly ‘his’). Much as the Doctor promises ‘this is just the beginning, there’s loads more’ the biggest problem with ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is that actually there isn’t: Moffat never writers an episode again quite as joyous, mad, inventive, creative or imaginative as this one. 

 The job as showrunner seems to have worn all three men who’ve taken the role so far out quite badly by the end of their time in control but none more so, perhaps, than Moffat whose running on fumes by the mid-Capaldi era (until the great return in series ten, freed by the fact he didn’t expect to be writing it yet and was filling in because Chibnall wasn’t quite ready yet, when once again Moffat taps into his inner child instead of trying juggle plates as a showrunner). As early as ‘The Beast Below’ next story there’s a sense that a bit of the sparkle has gone out of a job Moffat’s waited for his whole life for, one that’s suddenly filled with problems and hard work and late nights and deadlines and difficult complex decisions to be made all the time rather than just being allowed to let his imagination run wild and create imaginary worlds the way he craves. It’s a little like Amy’s character arc from this story in fact: she leaves her real world problems behind for something that seems so magical and fun but which gradually becomes scary and terrifying and full of responsibility. There’s no sign of that tiredness for now though in a story that’s maybe the most carefree of the entire modern run and by the end credits of ‘The Eleventh Hour’ (such a clever title too!) Dr Who is such a magical series again, a Dr Who story that doesn’t just regenerate this show alongside the Dr but rejuvenates it, makes it feel young and fresh and imaginative all over again. Perhaps the biggest achievement of all, though, is that by the end of it you’ve already half-forgotten David Tennant was the Doctor and Russell the showrunner, even though they’re two figures who, if this series gets to run another century uninterrupted, will always be seen as two of the most beloved and important people associated with it. More than anything else, out of all 328-ish Dr Who stories so far, it’s my pick as the perfect introduction to the series, delivering inside an extended 65 minutes every reason why I love this show so very very much and why there’s never ever been anything like it on television at all. You get so many of the concepts central to this show in a short space of time very clearly explained in a way that never seems like exposition or info-dumping but which all feels very natural and organic and the script has the feel of one of those stories that took a monumental effort to shape into feeling so natural as if no effort was going into it at all. This is a series in very new but very safe hands. Worried? Who me? Ha! Never! I always had faith magic would come back. I mean, Dr Who came back didn’t it? That’s the same thing – and no Dr Who story in its entire 60 year run has more magic in it than ‘The Eleventh Hour’. 

 POSITIVES + As brilliant as her two elders are there’s only one actor who steals every scene she’s in. Caitlin Blackwood is so very very very good as young Amy and the perfect casting (if anything the two look even more alike now Caitlin is the age Karen was in this story). I mean Karen Gillan’s superb as the older Amy as well and is instantly lovable and funny and brave in all the best ways, but it’s the younger Amy who gets all the best lines and acts everyone off the screen, a girl all too believably on the fence between a healthy dose of Scottish scepticism and believing in fairies. Most adults can’t write for children for toffee. They either can’t remember what it was like to be a child or hang around children pretending to be adults because they’re around grownups and write them like that when that’s not really who they are at all. But Steven Moffat understands children better than any writer since perhaps Richmal Crompton – the idea that childhood isn’t a terrible place where only dark things happen or a perfect paradise full of fun and sunny days but somewhere in between, that children have all the same insecurities, fears of the future and complexities as adults, together with the secret feeling that adults just like making a big drama out of nothing and that life would be simple really if only they didn’t insist on making it so difficult with the need to be so diplomatic and make such a fuss all the time. I’d love to have seen a whole series or more with eight year old Amy simultaneously embracing the most wild and unbelievable things the Dr can show her but with a cutting honesty that makes her the most cynical and hard to impress companions as well. I totally understand why they didn’t (there’s a limit on the hours children can work outside schooling and sadly most adults won’t watch anything with child leads for very long – and interestingly not many children’s shows have children at the core either – even The Sarah Jane Adventures revolved around, well Sarah Jane) but I’m still sad we didn’t see more of one of the best Tardis team-ups in the show’s history, the youngest Doctor and the youngest companion tackling the universe’s oldest problems. 

 NEGATIVES - If Moffat has a fault as a writer then it’s the fact he can’t write for multiple audiences simultaneously the way Russell can. His stories tend to be either very adult stories with suddenly very childish moments (‘Deep Breath’ swaps a deep, difficult story about the struggle to be good when the world is so bad in a world of killer automatons with a jokey scene with a dinosaur, while ‘Thin Ice’ is a polemic about racism and prejudice in Victorian London that includes a whacking great sea serpent under the ice and a capital city that lives off its poo) or child friendly ones like this with surprisingly adult jokes sneaked in that more usually adult writers would never dream of getting away with (the one about Clara being a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery in a skirt that’s entirely too short’ is the most notorious, as it’s such an un-11th Dr thing to say). The joke here about Jeff, your everyday sporty kid whose never thought about a fairytale world since he was six and plunged into the deep end conversing with the world’s greatest scientists because an alien has just asked him to, is very in keeping with this story and a ten year old child’s idea of a teenager, all bluster and pimples. I liked Jeff, I wish we’d seen more of him – this story kind of implies he’s going to be a regular given he gets more screen-time than Rory here, but he’s never even mentioned again. However the joke about how he should ‘clear his internet history’ and ‘get a girlfriend’ is totally the wrong gag for a story aimed at a whole new young audience and perhaps the most out of character quip we see the 11th Dr make his whole run. 

BEST QUOTE: Amy: ‘I grew up’ Doctor: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll soon fix that!’ 

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