BBC1
We’re always telling children not to walk off with strange men yet Doctor Who hightails in with his schizoid time goon routine, offers his hands to a nine-year-old Scottish girl and off they wonder to her bedroom to see some puppies. He’s, like, a thousand years old but that doesn’t matter to Amelia Pond, oddball infant Jock with a "crack" in her "wall" (that’ll be a tear in the very fabric of space-time, my guess). And as strange men go the man who steps out of the crash landed police box in her garden is one of the stranger ones. Suffering from post-regeneration traumatic syndrome, he’s twitching, babbling and jerking like Judy Finnigan. He flirts with Amelia for a while before leaping into the Tardis and telling her he’ll be back in five. Turns out, he’s back in 12. Years. And he calls himself a timelord?
"She’ll catch some flak for being sexually attractive but her ginger ostrich chasing around in hen night fancy dress shtick was the only entertaining thing about this opener."
Amelia Pond is now Amy Pieond (Karen Gillan), sexy flame haired kissogram with a fiery yet vulnerable heart in La Senza police uniform. Together, they are menaced by a shit monster that looks like the Curious Alien from This Morning with Richard Not Judy. Curious Alien’s alien captors decide to destroy planet Earth for harbouring a multi dimensional criminal. Doctor Poo starts quoting intergalactic bylaws and all of a sudden we’re in Hitchhiker’s Guide.
As the doctor gurns, leaps and gambols, Amy spends most of her time pulling her microskirt down and looking surprised. She’ll catch some flak for being sexually attractive but her ginger ostrich chasing around in hen night fancy dress shtick was the only entertaining thing about this opener. Take out the da-daa-da-da-da-daa-daa incidental music and you’re left with a seriously dull plot, depressingly derivative baddies and a palpable phone-this-in-they’ll-give-us-rave-reviews-anyway attitude that infects everything. It’s all quirk and no substance.
"The deux ex machina employed to defeat the Eyeball of Doom clunked like the Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry dub remix of a chain being dropped down a 500 foot toilet in the centre of the Grand Canyon"
How anyone thinks Matt Smith is some kind of fresh take on the Doctor is beyond my ken. There is not a mannerism, character point or idiosyncrasy that hasn’t been done by Tennant or Ecclestone. It’s not like he does it particularly badly. Few actors do a bad Doctor Who because it’s a showy role requiring little nuance or range, just a willingness to show off. How hard is it a find an actor who likes to do that?
Babble about the breathless pace all you like, Doctor Who stopped being good television some time ago and is now sci-fi by numbers hackwork. There is no subversion, no ingenuity and the deux ex machina employed to defeat the CGI Eyeball of Doom clunked like the Lee "Scratch" Perry dub remix of a chain being dropped down a 500 foot toilet in the centre of the Grand Canyon.
Sparky overwritten dialogue that advances neither character nor story abounds. This was smoke and mirrors to deflect attention away from a dying leader. Brezhnev is comatose. And Doctor Who is done. Remember where you were when you first heard it. Aerial Telly called it.
Welcome return? Get the fuck out of here.
The verdict on Doctor Who Series Five Premiere: Doctor Poo .
Marks out of 10: 5
Imagined: Thursday, April 08, 2010
