Doctor Who: Series 5, Episode 1 – “The Eleventh Hour” (2010)

I’m pretty sure I’ve admitted before that I was prepared to not-love the Eleventh Doctor. I fell into the group of doubters who saw images of Matt Smith and thought, Who’s this child??, and I was sure I needed some convincing before I could believe he had what it took to be the Doctor (this was before I learned that, like Pixar films, Who casting is basically always to be trusted.) Then, “The Eleventh Hour” happened (premise spoilers.)

The newly-regenerated Eleventh Doctor crashes the TARDIS outside the home of Amelia Pond, a little Scottish girl with a mysterious Crack in her bedroom wall, through which she can hear voices from another world. The Doctor’s inspection of the Crack leads to the escape of the shapeshifting Prisoner Zero on the other side, and while the Doctor is hot on the trail, a malfunction in the TARDIS causes him to pick it up twelve years later.

We’ll get the nitpicks out of the way first. I’m not a fan of the adult Amy working as a “kissogram,” and this episode kicks off the first of Moffat’s “companion mystery” arcs, which keeps Amy from feeling as fully realized as some of her predecessors. The creepy repetition from the threat of the week (a la, “Prisoner Zero has escaped,”) gets annoying long before it’s over. And Olivia Colman, who’s since become an Oscar winner with The Favourite, is wasted in a one-scene role.

But there’s so much about it that’s so great. By the time I first saw this episode, even if I was wary about Matt Smith as Eleven, I felt RTD’s showrunner tricks were getting played out and I was ready for Moffat’s (though, as I’ve made clear quite a few places on this blog, his began to grate in time as well.) Young Amelia is a delight, and while grown-up Amy doesn’t interest me quite as much here, the idea of a companion who met the Doctor as a child and has been waiting her whole life to travel with him is a neat concept – I get the notion that it’s just a rehash of “The Girl in the Fireplace,” but it feels different enough to me, and I wish the show had done more with this aspect of Amy. Meanwhile, Rory immediately proves himself clever and observant, although he gets bowled over easily by stronger personalities (between Amy and the Doctor, he doesn’t stand a chance.)

But, as we all know, the big headline here is Eleven. Ten minutes into the episode, I was in complete platonic love with him. From him rope-climbing out of the sideways TARDIS, to his slightly-delighted admission that he’s “still cooking,” to the wonderfully-eccentric way he throws the water out of a glass before using it as a listening device, he is immediately, exquisitely, every inch the Doctor. Simultaneously laser-focused and infuriatingly-distractable, bringing both the excitement of a puppy and the steadiness of a centuries-old near-immortal, he just lights up the screen. You feel the adventure and the warmth radiating from him, and he even makes the doofy outfit weirdly work. I’ll gladly forgive “The Eleventh Hour” for any faults it may have, simply because it introduces this truly-excellent Doctor to us.