The plot was predictably delirious. There was a crack in a wall that turned out to be – wouldn’t you just know it – a crack in the very fibre of the universe.A prisoner had escaped from another galaxy on to planet Earth, and the alien race who had lost their captive reasoned that the best way to nullify the threat was to incinerate our world in its entirety, like running out a bath to get rid of a spider.
What happened next largely eluded me, but the upshot was that 30 minutes in to the programme there were 20 minutes until the end of the world.
But frankly, the end of the world was small beer compared to the real story here – the establishment of Matt Smith, the most famous newly famous man in the world, as the new Doctor. And Gallifrey be thanked, Smith is a man who could have been born with a stripy scarf round his neck. It’s there in his physiognomy – his face is made up of as many disparate workings as the Tardis. He has a redoubtable cartoon chin offset by a hyperactive quiff, deep-set eyes and an almost Neanderthal brow. Essentially, the Doctor is meant to be a mad alien, and Smith looks like one before he even opens his mouth. By the end of episode one he was bedizened in a suitably daft public-school geography-teacher ensemble of bow tie and tweed jacket.
It was ridiculous but it felt right: mad, alien, brand new but very old. A+ to the casting director. A+ to Smith.
Karen Gillan, as his sidekick Amy Pond, was a fine foil. The role of the companion in Doctor Who is not a million miles away from that of the viewer. Be scared, but essentially trust the Doctor and enjoy the ride. Gillan, to use the X Factor argot, 110 per cent nailed it. Ballsy, bewildered, aghast and simultaneously delighted, she only let the sisterhood down by gambolling around in a skirt the size of a placemat. For everything else, A+ again.
Looking carefully for a nit to pick (if only to stand steadfast against the hype) there was one: this is still high-concept drama done on a comparative shoestring, and at times it showed. In a post-Avatar world, or even in a post-Who Framed Roger Rabbit? world, BBC budgets and the special effects they can pay for are never quite going to cut it. Thus, the squirming alien escapee, which was meant to look like the alien from Alien, bore a closer resemblance to a soiled draught excluder.
But as with any great writer, Steven Moffat (who, lest we forget, returned from working with Steven Spielberg on Tintin to take up the reins on Who) turned a weakness into a strength.
The draught excluder had the ability to assume human form and generally, it did. People who look normal with the merest hint of total insanity are way more scary than out-and-out CGI ghouls. (Ann Widdecombe saw it in Michael Howard.) So as long as the tone is right and the jeopardy apparent, the less CGI the better. For example, I now have the image of Olivia Colman, that nice actress from Peep Show, momentarily opening her mouth to reveal the teeth of an electric eel, singed on my retina. Clever stuff, Mr Moffat.
Amid all the harum scarum there was even time for some emotional heft. The episode began with a seven-year-old Amelia Pond meeting a man unlike any other who promised he’d be back in five minutes. She packed her bag and waited.
And waited and waited. It took him all of 14 years, by which time Amelia had become Amy and was working as a strippogram. Trust, love, adventure and hopes dashed, all neatly summarised by a shot of a little girl sitting on a suitcase waiting for a Police Box to crash-land in her garden once again.
That wasn’t the only stirring scene. In an audacious piece of scripting for a piece of teatime TV, towards the end Doctor Eleven found himself standing eyeball to eyeball, literally, with the forces of total destruction. His response was to summon up the spirit of resistance in the form of the faces of Doctors One to Ten, Hartnell to Troughton to Tennant. It was a magnificent coup, reminding you of the entire legacy of the series and then passing that legacy onto Matt Smith. And it served a purpose both in Saturday’s episode and for future plot lines, too: any aliens thinking about having a pop at humankind were politely reminded that Earth has at least one everlasting defender. If they would like to see what he’s capable of then they should refer to BBC One on Saturdays.
