Doctor Who Season 5 Review

The fifth season of Doctor Who is the most momentous since its first. Everything is changing: it’s now being filmed in HD, we have a new showrunner in Steven Moffat, a new Doctor in Matt Smith, a new companion in Karen Gillan, a new interior for the Tardis and even a new sonic screwdriver (it blinks green now). This is the revival series’ first transition into a new era, its first move into a new set of production standards and narrative approaches. Doctor Who entering a new era is like a kid going to a new school. It can charge forward, bravely asserting itself and its new personality; or it can sidle in while trying very hard not to offend anyone into giving it a swirly. Unfortunately, the first season of the Moffat era opts for the latter path. It does arrive on the scene with its own look and voice, but once it opens its mouth that voice cracks and it retreats from the spotlight, mumbling to itself about all the cool things it never got to say. It’s not a bad season overall, just very middle-of-the-road, very safe, very unassuming and – for a series about a time-traveling space explorer – sadly unadventurous.

The Eleventh Hour epitomizes this. It introduces all of its flashy new characters and toys and then aptly demonstrates what makes them fresh and exciting by doing the same old stuff we saw in the previous era. It starts well though, opening as it does to the newly-regenerated Doctor crashing his wrecked Tardis and meeting a young Amelia Pond, who then helps him try out all sorts of foods to see which ones his new tastebuds like. This sequence accomplishes a number of things: it works through the post-regenerative confusion without beating us over the head with it (Revival series fans have already been taught how regeneration works, so it’s good Eleventh Hour doesn’t go over it again), it establishes the relationship between the Doctor and his next companion and it introduces both the episode and the season plot.

Oh, and it’s funny. From scaling out of his Tardis to his deciding he prefers fishsticks dipped in custard over apples or bacon, the Eleventh Doctor does well to break the ice in this first meeting.

But then we leap ahead into the future and things start to fizzle off quickly. The disappointment begins with the older Amy Pond. I think she would have made a better first impression if she actually were a policewoman, but instead she’s just another Rose/Martha/Donna: a young woman with little to no drive or purpose in life until the Doctor swoops in and gives everything meaning. At least with Rose and Donna there was the idea they were waiting for something, anything at all to get their lives on track; and Martha was just too busy professionally to bother with a social life. But Amy actually obsesses over the Doctor himself in his absence, making dolls and cartoons and even roleplaying with her comic-relief boyfriend (the episode dons yet another old hat). This takes the established companion pattern to an exciting new low, down to a Peter Pan kind of wish fulfillment fantasy where all the pretty girls love the Doctor. This isn’t a new trend obviously, but Amy’s lifelong obsession represents its worst extreme to date.

Getting past that (because most people will neither notice nor care), Amy is still fitting snuggly into a companion pattern we’ve seen thrice before. She would eventually become more (and then less and then more again), but at this point she’s just a prettier Donna Noble (Shouty, bossy, redheaded).

Matt Smith’s Doctor is similarly underwhelming. Amy can be forgiven because The Eleventh Hour isn’t her story, it’s the Doctor’s. This is the episode that needs to sell us the replacement to one of the most popular Doctors ever; and it does that by having Matt Smith do his best David Tennant. As of the end of this episode, we know the Eleventh Doctor is a comedy Doctor with a sense of humor very similar to the Tenth’s, we know he likes to make all the same “I’m the Doctor” and “Oh, the human race” speeches, we know he uses the same timey-whimey cowboy expressions and we know he’s a big motor-mouth again; but what we don’t know is what makes him unique, different or interesting. Well, we do get that weird Doctor vision scene that I hope to God we never have to see again, but even that isn’t unique because Eccleston also had a Doctor vision moment in The End of the World. At this point, the only unique quality of the Eleventh Doctor is that he thinks bowties are cool.

One possible defense of this is the suggestion that the Eleventh Doctor is spending this episode shaking off the remnants of his old self (hence the spitting out of gold dust) and that he doesn’t actually finish regenerating until his big speech at the end. It’s a neat idea, but it doesn’t fly because there is no real change in personality in that speech (Clothes don’t count as personality); characterization remains exactly the same in the episode’s final moments as it did in its first. Compare this to the last post-regeneration story, The Christmas Invasion, where the new Doctor had maybe ten minutes tops of screen time and yet still managed to show us two important things:

1. That he was a very different animal from the previous Doctor and

2. He’s still cool anyway.

Matt Smith pulls off 2, but he’s severely lacking in 1.

As for the plot of The Eleventh Hour, it’s basically Smith and Jones without the moon. Overzealous space police track down a camouflaged criminal and threaten to destroy a human population if they can’t recover it; there’s even a strong emphasis on a hospital setting and the Doctor has no Tardis or sonic screwdriver to help him. The Atraxi are just the Judoon in a fancy eye ship; honestly, they could have been Judoon in a special scouting vessel and it wouldn’t have changed the story at all. Prisoner Zero fares a bit better. It lacks the grim whimsy of the rabid granny sucking blood through a bendy straw, but using the memories of coma patients to blend in is a good concept; and the part where it turns into the Doctor and he doesn’t recognize his new face was a nice touch. Its base form is severely lacking, though; it’s completely CGI, yet it moves like a puppet being dangled from the ceiling.

The resolution worked, but the ending was underwhelming; I could have done without the Doctor calling back the Atraxi just so he can look cool for his new friends. The man just saved the world with an iPhone – that says ‘cool’ well enough on its own – why not leave it there? Instead, we get a big and unnecessary (the Atraxi were leaving with no reason whatsoever to return) “it is protected” speech that has the extreme misfortune of mirroring the Tenth Doctor’s “it is defended” speech to the Sycorax in his first story. But I suspect that was intentional given the episode’s perspective on regeneration.

And that’s the problem with The Eleventh Hour: it tries too hard to cater to the memory of what’s past that it doesn’t do much to move ahead into the future. All we get are superficial changes: the Tardis, the screwdriver and even the two mains at this point. It’s a meek yelp where a bold declaration would have been better. But it does well enough to set up the various arcs of the season while telling its own complete story and explaining all the cosmetic changes; that’s not an insubstantial feat. One question, though, why is it everyone got all up-in-arms about the appropriateness of Elton and Ursula’s “love life,” but nobody seems to care what Jeff was doing with that computer?

Anyway, The Eleventh Hour pretty much sets the tone of a season more interested in repainting the old than in creating the new. The Beast Below, for example, is probably the most Moffatish Moffat episode this year – doing away with traditional villainy and following multiple threads to a unified end – but its Smilers are just the clockwork robots from The Girl in the Fireplace (even using the same sound effects) and the star whale is such a standard sci-fi concept – having been used in at least Star Trek, Star Wars, X-Men, Lexx, Space Cases, Babylon 5 and Farscape (Twice!) – that it’s hard to be impressed by it. What’s next: a future world where we marvel at weapons that fire beams of light instead of bullets?

There are also some whopping plotting issues (surprising for a Moffat story). Starship UK is presented as a rather fascistic society, but there seems to be no reason for it. The whole point of the episode is that people are far too willing to ignore injustice and move on with their lives; for that sort of society, you don’t need an iron fist. Also, the first scene suggests that the ship runs on a rigid meritocracy and that underachieving children are fed to *gasp* the beast below. But everybody in charge apparently knows the beast doesn’t eat kids, so why bother with this whole system? It seems space age Britain has far deeper issues than their treatment of the star whale that neither the Doctor nor the episode bother to address.

Still, Beast Below does have its strengths in its unique setting and in its voting system where the citizens of the UK can elect to forget completely that their nation thrives on the exploitation of those beneath them — a pointed but not forceful reminder of how Western society functions. The story itself relies too much on standards and it is far too predictable, but it does at least rest on a solid foundation. It’s also a lot of fun. It establishes a great chemistry between Matt Smith and Karen Gillan (which is definitely one of the better aspects of the season, actually) that sustains it through all its issues. My personal favorite part being when they are about to be spit up, the Doctor starts laughing and Amy starts screaming. Beast Below is wacky fun, probably the most purely entertaining episode of the season. It may not be terribly original, but there’s enough there to sustain it.

And that’s a lot more than you can say about Victory of the Daleks, which is the worst example of this season relying on superficial changes to disguise an absence of new ideas. The episode is just a toy commercial, a transparent excuse to introduce the new redesigned Amazing Technicolor Dream Daleks: fluorescent, plastic-looking things that stroll out onto the stage and pose for the camera as if to say: “Daleks in five exciting new colors. Collect them all!” Worse still, the explanation for the redesign doesn’t make any sense. The allegedly “impure” Ironside models we meet at the beginning are survivors of the Crucible from Journey’s End, which means they were made from Davros’ own DNA; that’s Davros: the Kaled scientist who made the original Daleks from Kaled DNA. Far from tainting them, shouldn’t that make the Ironsides the purest Daleks ever?

But even getting past the dopey new design and the piss-poor justification for it, the final revelation of the new super Daleks is still disappointing because they don’t do anything. Why exactly is this new form of Dalek so significant? Are they stronger? Smarter? What? Apparently the colors represent a new Dalek caste system, but what any of it means is anyone’s guess because all these new Daleks show us is their remarkable penchant for running away, effectively passing the buck to the next season and a different writer (Well, it worked for the Cult of Skaro). And all we get is a story based around shoddy new Daleks, a man-bomb that can keep himself from going off by remembering a pretty girl (which is counterintuitive if you think about it), a pointless appearance by Winston Churchill (played less like a wartime Prime Minister and more like Santa Claus with a cigar) and spitfires retrofitted for spaceflight in the blink of an eye. Mark Gatiss seems to get worse with each new episode he writes and that’s a bad trait for a guy who started at mediocre.

Actually, the funny thing about Mark Gatiss is that each of his stories have come dangerously close to making a real point, but they always shy away in the end. The Unquiet Dead is at first very Dickensian, with the Gelth being poor lost wretches in need of sympathy from those who have no practical reason to give it. Imagine how much more poignant the episode would have been if the Gelth didn’t turn into standard space monsters at the eleventh hour (sorry), if instead one of the human characters (Probably Sneed, he’s got the name for it) attacked Gwenyth and banished them forever. Similarly, imagine if Tommy in The Idiot’s Lantern had turned out to be gay (which, I understand, was an early intention): his big speech to his father would have served some purpose, as would the constant mockery of fifties family values. It could have used the dated morals of the past to make a point about the present, but instead it just makes the Doctor and Rose come off as complete dicks.

The Daleks were always based on the Nazis, so having Churchill use them in his war brings them back to their roots and could have led to some real discussion about the extremity of war and the things men do to win, but — in true Mark Gatiss form — the interesting stuff is swept away for a generic storyline of evil space aliens and grandscale destruction. Victory indeed.

Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone (or Crushed by an Angel, as it shall henceforth be known) really should be the most maddening story of the season, resting as it does on the high-minded premise: “what would happen if River Song met the Weeping Angels?”. It’s the essence of everything wrong with modern sci-fi: there’s no exploration, no imagination, no adventure: just a bunch of beefy guys with guns finding something scary in a cave and setting off to shoot the shit out of it. The inclusion of River Song and her cast of expendables also makes it very similar to Moffat’s own Library two-parter, but without any of the stuff from the second episode that elevated it. It would be easy write this story off as Moffat’s ultimate security blanket, a simple rehash of his past successes, but it is an atmospheric tale, salvaged slightly by good direction. And the first partat least isn’t content with just bringing back the Weeping Angels; it’s hell-bent on redefining them, taking a very clever one-off and trying to reestablish it as a viable recurring foe.

And it’s intermittently successful. “That which holds the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel.” Apart from sounding appropriately gloomy and portentous, this one little sentence gives the Angels some added versatility and it shows that the essence of the Angel isn’t bound to physical form, which is in tune with the previous Doctor’s description of them as “creatures of the abstract.” The idea that the image of the Angel is itself a source of power also works in a very traditional horror sense. The actual form of the Weeping Angels already has power over the audience simply because we – like the characters – never see them as anything but stone. So the thought that there is something even more terrible than we knew about in that image is a clever way of playing on the imagination. The Weeping Angels become even more mysterious, scary and elusive than they were before.

But by the time we start working through Flesh and Stone, it seems Moffat had completely run out of new ideas for his creatures, requiring him to jump to his last resort scare tactic: showing them move on camera. You see, Blink’s method of never showing the Angels move was a very skillful way of aligning our perspective with that of the characters and having us share their experiences. The implicit is often scarier than the explicit, it’s an old horror truism. Similarly, the idea of the Weeping Angels will always be scarier than the monsters themselves, especially now that so much has been built into the power of their image.

Seeing the Weeping Angels move doesn’t make them scarier – although the direction somewhat saves the scene and plays well on the unexpectedness of it all – it just shows how limited their concept actually is and how much better off they were as a one-time nemesis. They were after all designed wholly and completely for the specific story of Blink; they were never meant to be horror movie monsters lurking in dark lairs. So a lot of what we’re seeing here isn’t so much an expansion on the Angel mythos as it is a rewriting of it. Where they once zapped people back in history and then feasted on the potential they left behind, they now snap necks and eat the life force. They used to freeze into stone when observed — it was “a fact of their biology” — but now it only happens when they think they’re being observed. They communicate and deliver ultimatums and they can now move on camera. They were once creatures of the abstract, but now they’re grounded and traditional. Everything that made the Weeping Angels unique, frightening and evocative has been stripped away and they have become just another everyday bwah-ha-ha megalomaniacal enemy with delusions of grandeur.

And Flesh and Stone doesn’t just get desperate with its enemy, but also with its plot. By the middle of the episode, the Weeping Angel story completely disappears in favor the seasonal plot involving the cracks in space and time (more on this later), so our once simple horror story becomes, fairly abruptly, something altogether more overblown and grandiose. The last half of the episode doesn’t fit with what came before it and while the developments of the season story that had been teasing us for a while now were interesting the first time through, it is still a disappointment that their inclusion required such a wide divergence.

There are some good moments all around, though – the bit with the monitor, the Bishop’s death and Amy being abandoned in the woods. But Crushed by an Angel (Yes, we really are calling it that) isn’t the triumph it’s made out to be. It’s similar in some ways to The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit (or The Doctor Went Down to Georgia), in that it’s traditional to the point of being dull (also has a heavy use of religious imagery), but its direction is atmospheric enough to keep you engaged. It does however lack the sheer forthrightness and gusto of The Doctor Went Down to Georgia, which surprised a little by not having its voice in the dark turn out to be invisible or a random alien or a shouty guy in robes, but an all-out big honking Space Satan. There’s no “Wow” moment in Crushed by an Angel: just some bland characters, clumsy plotting, pointless thematics (the religious stuff) and a careful reinvention of a popular monster followed immediately by its undermining.

Vampires of Venice bares some basic similarities to School Reunion but without any of the character moments or the shining example of mechanized magnificence that is K9. It’s got aliens that look like people and think their evil plan is perfectly reasonable, the current companion’s comic relief boyfriend joining the team with wacky results (seriously, Rory is Mickey at this point) and it’s even got the same author. But this is a somewhat piddling complaint, as the aliens themselves, the setting and the crux of the narrative are all unique. The setting in particular is a welcome reprieve from the usually Britain-centric historicals. It is just another one of those superficial changes, but in this case it’s fairly substantive. Venice is well-realized with great costumes and architecture and an enemy that takes advantage of the city’s unique canal systems.

Also, while the Saturnyne aren’t visually interesting, the vampire fake-out works well enough (even if it is only there because Amphibians of Venice would make a horrible title) with everything fitting nicely into extraterrestrial explanations. Of particular note are the sexual undertones of most vampire fiction (or overtones if we’re talking about modern vampire fiction), which manifest here in the main plot to seduce young girls and turn them into love slaves for the males in the canals… and also as sexual undertones.

All that fake-out really does, though, is create a single “A-ha!” moment, after which the aliens become fairly boring. And we’re left with a tower-climbing climax that looks terrible nearly every time the series does it, but they keep on trying anyway (and by the way, this is the third time they’ve done it). Also, the flood was stopped and the alien leader kills herself, but there are still hundreds of “hungry” males swimming around the canals. Shouldn’t somebody do something about them?

Vampires of Venice does at least gives us time to better acclimate to the previously nonexistent Amy/Rory relationship. I’m not really a big fan of Rory. It’s not his fault (he’s goofy and likable enough), but his presence screws up the great dynamic we had going between the Doctor and Amy. The larger group feels somehow less than it was before; Amy in particular becomes very smug and shouty in the presence of her boys.Worse yet, hers and Rory’s relationship rarely feels real; there’s no chemistry, there’s no attraction and no discernible history. Here, for example, we’re about halfway through the year and not only is it the first time we hear Amy say Rory’s name, but it actually sounds like the first time she’s said it. Their trip to Venice feels like a first date and their entire relationship only seems to achieve any real level of maturity (or believability) in the face of tragedy, as it does in one of the season’s best episodes: Amy’s Choice.

That’s right, one of the best episodes this season. Okay, yes, the switching back and forth between two distinct settings was done before in Girl in the Fireplace (and a bit more elegantly at that), but not knowing which of the two worlds is real helps keep it fresh. And, yes, the Eknodine are just body-snatching reptilian aliens with an emphasis on eyeballs (pretty much running the gamut of monster types for the season), but they’re not the point; in their limited capacity, they are, as the Doctor says, “credible enough.” The Dream Lord is the real villain of this piece and he performs brilliantly, able to be funny and menacing all at once. And, of course, the episode is a tad too predictable for a story that claims to be a mystery. Of the two questions we’re asked at the beginning — “Which reality is real?” and “Who is the Dream Lord? — the answer to the first might reasonably surprise some people, but the answer to the second is painfully obvious shortly after his introduction.

But none of that matters because Amy’s Choice isn’t a puzzle episode, it’s the character story this season has desperately needed. It’s The Edge of Destruction of the Smith era; it’s when our new Tardis crew has a moment to take a breath and start developing their relationships and interactions. Each of the three mains has had an introduction episode – Eleventh Hour for the Doctor, Beast Below for Amy and Vampires of Venice for Rory – but they are all established far better here. Rory is given space to work as a companion and his relationship with Amy is finally explored on screen. This is where we really start to believe that they’re in love, this is where we see how they work together and, frankly, this is the first time their relationship actually makes any sense. It’s also the first time their relationship isn’t irritating, serving some dramatic purpose beyond telling all the hapless boyfriend jokes that were starting to get old in Season 2. Karen Gillan gives one of her best performances of the season, proving she can be a lot more than a pretty face with good comic timing.

Though like I said, their relationship only works in the context of tragedy. In the more lighthearted moments preceding that, we’re given enough evidence to suggest that Rory’s dream life would be torture for Amy. And the only counterpoint comes when she snaps at the Doctor for all his mockery, but that seems borne more of courtesy and loyalty than any real disagreement. Still, they say tragedy can bring out the best in us and I suppose that’s what happens to Amy in the end.

Even the Doctor offers some insight into his new character and this is where I started to get a handle on his latest iteration. Basically, he’s an old man trying to fit in with the kids. He acts all chipper and youthful, but he’s awkward and doesn’t really get things. And then there’s the decidedly dated costume and the constant insistence that “bowties are cool.” People like to say this makes him seem more alien, but I think it just makes him seem out of touch, not down with the young people as it were. And then in comes the Dream Lord, a much older man with the same clothes and a similar – although much more sardonic – sense of humor about dangerous situations. He’s the dark side of the Doctor – we know that – but he’s also in some ways the truth behind the bluster: that under that façade of youth lies a tired old man weighed down by centuries of baggage. That isn’t just this episode, either, it seems laced into Smith’s entire performance and could perhaps offer an explanation for all the visual references to William Hartnell (the First Doctor) throughout the season: he’s the crotchety old coot behind the baby face. Either way, this was the first time I found Smith’s Doctor interesting and while I still have some problems with his performance, I am starting to see some real potential.

Hungry Earth/Cold Blood (Silurians SG-1) is just that: an episode of the first Stargate series dragged out to two parts. Morality is determined by whether or not one agrees with the main characters and nobody’s motives are taken into account when the narrative passes judgment on them. I like Stargate SG-1, but it always struck me as overly simplistic the way episodes would vilify the townspeople who didn’t immediately side with the gun-toting strangers insisting they abandon centuries of tradition. The villains of this story – Restac and Ambrose – have valid reasons for their anger, but the story blows their reactions to that anger well out of proportion and then condemns them rather ruthlessly.

Restac gets the worse treatment of the two, starting as a concerned sister and hardened soldier (though what exactly hardened her during centuries of battle-free isolation is tough to say) and then becoming a clichéd evil commando who kills her own people for really no good reason. Had she gone ballistic after she found out her sister died, that would be one thing, but she first revived her army and then quite conveniently stumbled upon a motive for doing so. Ambrose is handled slightly better, but only because she’s the human one and so her overreaction can lead to a moral from the Doctor about being the best of humanity.

That’s the thing, though, when doing a story like this, you have to balance audience and narrative sympathies on both sides and Silurians SG-1 isn’t very successful in that regard. It does try, though, sometimes much too hard. The character of Malohkeh, for example, was introduced to us as a figure of menace all too prepared to vivisect a conscious Amy, but then he abruptly becomes the humans’ best friend and protector, receiving a declaration of love from the Doctor. Why? Because we learn that over the centuries of abducting and dissecting living people, he never hurt the children. He still captured them of course, but he didn’t torture, mutilate or traumatize them. Somebody call the Nobel Committee. Eldane is a much better example of the likable Silurian, though he and Restac do share a very Stargate dynamic.

The thing that hurts the Silurians in this story isn’t their characterization (clumsy though it may be), but actually their city. Yes, it’s pretty and alien and definitely a sight to behold, but it’s too big. We have one random handful of humans contending with an entire civilization of Silurians, so the conflict becomes lopsided. This same story on a smaller scale with an isolated group of Silurians going against an isolated group of humans would have been like the old Silurian stories in microcosm and may have served this bad apple approach to a morality play much better.

Instead we have a microcosm of humanity going against a macrocosm of Silurian, which is entirely unfair and unintentionally demeans the latter. Consider that summit scene where Eldane – the leader of this nation – is forced to negotiate the future of his society with the random drill lady and a strip-o-gram (sorry, kiss-o-gram). Can you imagine any political leader putting up with that? Of course not, because it’s insulting, not to mention implausible. Would the UN really ratify any treaty because Amy Pond says so?

There really was no reason to revive the Silurians for the new series; they’re not terribly interesting in themselves (and they’re the fourth reptile/amphibian nemesis we’ve had this year). Their popularity was sustained by their stories more than their concept and this story strives to recapture the essence of the Jon Pertwee (Third Doctor) days, but it mucks up the balance. It means well, but still treats humanity as superior to Silurian, which is why Silurians have to bribe humanity into cohabitation and why Ambrose gets a chance at redemption while Restac earns a place in infamy for killing a popular companion. As a result, it doesn’t have a lesson worth learning or a morality worth considering, just a few scary encounters with some reptile people whose only real crime is that they’re boring. Sadly, the most memorable thing about this story is the season arc ending that could have been tacked on to any episode. It raises eyebrows, advances the crack in space narrative and then – like this review – defers it so we can get on with…

Vincent and the Doctor is a single scene with an episode tacked on to fill up the hour. That episode is basically your standard celebrity historical: the Doctor and his companion gush over a famous person from the past, influence some of his greatest works (in this case, The Church at Auvers and Vase with 12 Sunflowers) and then team up with him to fight aliens vaguely influenced by said works. Very “been there done that”, this one.

It’s the ending that makes Vincent and the Doctor stand out and secures its popularity. And I will say this for it: it is the most visually distinctive scene in the series so far. The song playing over this sequence helps considerably because licensed music has a way eliciting almost Pavlovian emotional reactions that a subtler score might actually have to earn, which – one imagines – is intended here to get the audience so teary-eyed during the scene that they miss how dumb it really is. It’s so heavy-handed and sappy that it’s like a Hallmark card pasted with syrup onto the business end of a sledgehammer. Even getting past the basic premise of taking Van Gogh to the future to see he’s really loved after all, you have the museum guy calling him “the greatest man who ever lived.” Really? Really? And then there’s Sunflowers being dedicated to Amy, which is right up there with the CyberKing as the show’s most egregious rewriting of history.

But the real problem with this scene is that it has nothing to do with the episode that preceded it. The ending is about the tragedy that was Van Gogh’s life, but very little of that makes it into the episode. In fact, barring one scene with Van Gogh sobbing into a pillow (that means he’s sad, you see), he never really seems all that depressed. He’s actually taking his bad luck in stride and his poor standing in his own time is generally played for laughs. There is the invisible monster that he fights alone because only he can see it, a sort of metaphor for the personal demons he battles everyday. It’s not a good metaphor, though – nor a good villain. It just shows that Van Gogh has demons, but doesn’t go into any real detail about those demons.

So, I don’t think the ending worked because the episode didn’t earn it. This isn’t drama, this isn’t even tragedy, this is pure sentimentalism, the lowest form of melodrama played solely for sobs. Along with Fires of Pompeii, it stands as evidence of the value of the “pure” (which is to say, alien-free) historical of the Hartnell days. Getting rid of the monster and escaping the formula would have opened up the episode to telling a real story, something quiet and small-scale. If handled right, it could have truly captured the rather pitiable existence of Vincent Van Gogh and could have been an interesting follow-up to the ending of Cold Blood. Or even forgetting the tragedy, it could have focused on the more life-affirming aspects of his work (picture the spirit of that LSD Starry Night scene expanded across the whole episode), which would also have worked as a follow-up to Cold Blood.

Oh, well.

The Lodger is essentially the sitcom approach to Doctor Who. You have the main character moving between a series of… well, situations… all staged for laughs. The Doctor tries to fit in with his new roommate (leading to the obligatory waiting outside the bathroom scene), he discovers he’s good at soccer (sorry, British people, but emphasizing the use of feet and penalizing the use of hands does not make it football) leading to one of those male jealousy stories all sitcoms do at least twice, he takes a job at a call center and eventually he gets around to fighting aliens. The only real problem with this is that characterization follows the sitcom method as well; the Doctor is a bit too over-the-top, with his usual spaciness being far too exaggerated, such as in one scene where he doesn’t know how to use a normal screwdriver.

That said, the episode is overall very well handled, possibly Gareth Roberts’ best effort to date. The alien menace is appropriately menacing (and while it would have been nice to know where it came from, it doesn’t really matter) and the comedy is very often funny (the Vulcan head-butt scene, for example). It’s in some ways Love & Monsters for the masses. It has the same comedic tone and focus on domestics, but it lacks any of the qualities that made Love & Monsters so special (read: ‘unpopular’). Basically, The Lodger is Season 5 in a nutshell: not bad, but simpler, less daring and less ambitious than before. The Lodger doesn’t reach the same zeniths that Love & Monsters did, but is similarly devoid of the nadirs that turned people off of it, and the result is a good, but ultimately inconsequential, little story.

Then we hit the finale with The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang (And They All Lived Happily Ever After), the conclusion of the season arc and the setup for next year. So, let’s finally talk about that season arc. It’s certainly more overt than past years, which likely appeals to those who honestly believe the only connecting thread in previous seasons was a single repeated phrase. The cracks in time and space start out well, though, motivating the individual plot of Eleventh Hour while simultaneously setting up the season story. In Beast Below and Victory of the Daleks, they’re just a repeated motif like the phrases of earlier seasons. In Flesh and Stone, they become a major motivating factor again, but it’s too much too soon. They not only sideline the story being told, but also elevate the cracks from a weird anomaly to a grand apocalyptic portent, which is subsequently ignored by the next episode.

Consider as a counterexample the “Mr. Saxon” arc of Season 3. It too started as a repeated motif, but by The Lazarus Experiment, Saxon was raised from a random name to a shadowy and dangerous figure in the background. There are two things that make this better than the cracks. The first is that the Saxon stuff didn’t derail the episode; it just gave it some flavor and added something interesting to think about during the runarounds with the big gray scorpion thing. And the second is that Saxon’s plot significance was enhanced only for the audience; the Doctor had no idea someone was watching and waiting for him. But with the cracks in space, the Doctor did know something terrible was happening, he knew there was a giant explosion that was at that moment unraveling the universe and he knew when it took place; but rather than investigate, he runs off to Venice. At least the revelation in Cold Blood offers some justification for why he’s intent to run away, but in Flesh and Stone he had no idea the Tardis was going to blow up, so why didn’t he do something about the impending Armageddon?

Well, because it wasn’t the end of the season, that’s why. But now it is and now stuff starts happening, I guess. Actually, Pandorica Opens is a fairly uneventful episode. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it knows exactly where it wants to end and throws in a lot of extraneous stuff to fill the hour: the Cyberman, for example. There’s also an issue with Moffat having apparently inherited Russell T. Davies’ tendency for overstatement. In Flesh and Stone and Cold Blood we’re told that when the cracks consume something they erase it completely from history, that “every moment of [its] existence” will be gone in the blink of an eye, much in the way that the Void of Army of Ghosts/Doomsday (Doctor Who and the Attack of the Kitchen Sink) is completely empty with no matter or gravity or shape or form… except for the background radiation that popped up just when the plot needed it. Now, apparently, the cracks don’t erase someone completely, just mostly, which is conveniently revealed (without any moment of discovery) just when it’s needed.

I’m also not fond of the Doctor’s latest “Look at me, I’m cool” speech. It’s somewhat forgivable for what happens later, but I just can’t see anyone being intimidated by Matt Smith swaying drunkenly at them with a loud speaker, rambling off a lot of nothing like the announcer at a monster truck show. This is what ranks Smith lower than both of his immediate predecessors in my book. When Eccleston threatened an entire Dalek fleet, it was intended as a dramatic lead-in to the cliffhanger; but when Smith shouts down alien fleets, he’s got spotlights all over him and cameras right under him like he’s playing for the audience more than the story.  When Tennant shouted down the Sycorax, he did it to punctuate the point he just made by beating up their leader; but when Smith shouted down the Atraxi he was just showing off for the pretty redhead. The Doctor used to be more a man of action; now he’s just some guy reminding people he used to be a man of action.

On a similar note, the humor of his characterization is considerably more overt now. From the funny run in Amy’s Choice to the fez to all the sitcom-styled witty banter, the show seems to be trying a bit too hard to make the Doctor goofy. For a quick comparison: look at the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors at formal parties. Both are awkward, but Ten dresses in a nice suit and just gets a little too grabby with the hors d’oeuvres, but Eleven shows up in a ramshackle penguin tail tux and dances like an idiot. There’s a simpler, more organic humor to the first, while the second is, again, just showing off. There’s also an issue with the Doctor’s reputation preceding him so often in his travels and with everybody calling him on the phone to deal with their monster troubles. He has become very much the center of his own Whoniverse; everything is revolving around him and trying to focus all our attention on the glory of the sight. And all of the jokes, speeches,  excessive popularity and the Peter Pan wish-fulfillment come off like a new kid kissing up to the in-crowd, trying way too hard to prove he’s really cool. It smacks of a lack of confidence and coupled with the fact that even at this late point, most of Smith’s dialogue could have been read just as easily by Tennant, it creates a fairly unimpressive new Doctor.

But getting back to Pandorica, it’s good. Some of the dialogue this season has hinted at the idea of Doctor Who as a fairytale and Moffat himself has suggested that’s how he always saw the series, but very little of this season had a fairytale feel to it (barring some brighter colors). The Pandorica Opens is the exception, as is the ending to The Big Bang. Knights and wizards and ancient secrets in children’s books — I definitely get a fairytale vibe from this one; and it works well as a backdrop to the character moments that really sell this otherwise empty episode. Matt and Karen seem to have regained their chemistry from Beast Below, making that pointless sequence with the Cyberman arm much more entertaining than it deserves to be; and the inevitable Amy/Rory stuff also works far better than I ever expected it to.

The villain alliance doesn’t make a lot of sense, though. Daleks work as the ringleaders and the Autons certainly prove their worth. And I suppose the Cybermen do too, but exactly how they came to be here deserves a bit more explanation. Silurians were in the neighborhood and I can see Sontarans having expertise that might come in handy (and they provide a non-robot voice for the explanation). But Weevils? Hoix? There are races there that not only do nothing to help, but have never been shown to possess space or time traveling capabilities or, for that matter, the intelligence necessary to commit anything meaningful to the plan. They seem to be there just so fans of Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures can go “ooh.” I believe the technical term is “fanwank” and it becomes even more problematic because the alliance doesn’t do anything but show up, open the Pandorica and then promptly turn to dust.

They serve no purpose in the finale and their role here could have been filled by any one of them individually or by something new and specific. Even the reversal they hint at – where they save the universe from the Doctor who would condemn it – falls flat because we already know (from the scenes with River in the Tardis) that the Doctor has nothing to do with what’s happening. So, this whole villain alliance is a wasted opportunity, but the ending still works. The triple whammy everyone’s dead thing, the stars going into supernova and then everything falling to silence – yeah, that’s some good cliffhangering.

So good in fact that The Big Bang spends a solid half of its runtime trying to explain it away. No, seriously, half the episode is spent on exposition interspersed with a pointless Dalek chase to give the illusion that something is happening. And yet still the explanations manage to be unsatisfying. Take the Pandorica re-opening: it’s based on the premise that it’s easier to break into a prison than out, which isn’t remotely true. But even accepting that, if there’s one thing in all the universe that the Pandorica should have been firmly defended against – from the inside or the outside – it’s what opens it (maybe they should have made it out of wood).

And all of these resolutions come off as a bit too easy for the characters, predestined in fact, because Moffat relies again on the causality loop idea that he does so love to recycle. It wouldn’t be too far a stretch to say that The Big Bang is just a larger scale, less elegant version of Blink. But the thing that made Blink better (besides, you know, elegance) was that none of the characters involved knew their salvation was predestined, so the story retained a real sense of danger. But in Big Bang, every time the Doctor hits a snag, he just zips back in time and sidesteps it, flouting every single one of the series’ established rules of time travel in the process. And you can’t excuse all of it with the collapsing universe because the Doctor pulled the same stunt in The Lodger; he’s just doing it a lot more now, effectively robbing the museum sequence of dramatic tension and making the whole thing come off less like Blink and more like Curse of the Fatal Death.

But once we get around to the scene that inspired the title, the episode shapes up, though why the Pandorica can fly is anybody’s guess. But the quiet rewind that follows is kind of fantastic, particularly the part where the Doctor revisits Flesh and Stone’s much better contribution to the season arc. And as for the final resolution, well it’s The Last of the Time Lords on a smaller scale. Some might consider that a criticism (nay, an insult), but I liked The Last of the Time Lords and its ending. It had a certain fanciful element; it gave the series a magical quality, but a magical quality rooted in the themes established and developed over the season. So, yes, The Big Bang is in that way Last of the Time Lords and, no, that’s not a bad thing. The only thing Big Bang does better is remind you – quite incessantly – how and where its solution was previously established in the season.

Yet I can still imagine people being very confused by it because it is a huge rush of information all at once, with little time given to parse it. I have no problem with complex stories, but there is a difference between being complex and being convoluted. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (Mummy Dearest) was complex (structurally anyway) with all the info dumps spread out effectively and all the different threads converging seamlessly at the end without requiring thirty-five minutes of explanation. And They All Lived Happily Ever After is convoluted. But it’s not too bad. It may be messy, but it gets points for trying to be new. It’s a finale without a main villain (though Daleks are still heavily featured), where the companion saving the day isn’t because the Doctor is useless and where the last scene is an optimistic look forward, rather than a gloomy remembrance of good times gone. And They All Lived Happily Ever After is one of those rare instances of Season 5 trying to be different and adventurous and that’s certainly worth putting up with a little extra exposition.

All things considered, Season 5 is not great by itself. Its lows are every bit as low as previous years (Victory of the Daleks may very well be the worst Dalek story in the new series), but its highs are nowhere near as high (Amy’s Choice is good, but not Human Nature good). Altogether, it’s pretty average. But I don’t think it bodes ill for the future of the Moffat era. The season arc didn’t really work, but with the villain’s identity left open there is still a possibility that this Silence could turn out to be something interesting, instead of the first revival series appearance of Omega (which is pretty much where it was heading). I’m not sold on Matt Smith yet; he’s too much like David Tennant – except that when Smith does that rapidfire speech thing it sounds like he’s talking with his mouth full – but the issues with his Doctor aren’t his fault and he is at least entertaining enough. He and Karen Gillan share a very strong on-screen chemistry, so it’s good to know that they’ll both be back next year. I’m also somewhat heartened that while Smith is treated like a superhero Doctor (what with the speeches and phone calls), his stories reveal that he isn’t a very effective one (he gets a lot of people killed or needlessly endangered) and I’m hopeful that later seasons will call him on that; the Dream Lord was a good start. And while I think he stretched himself a bit thin this year, Steven Moffat is a good writer who knows how to appeal to kids without being patronizing about it. So, while Season 5 wasn’t the bold step into a new era I was hoping it would be, it did quietly set the stage for the possible greatness to come.

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