Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour

Season 32, episode 1.

Regeneration

The episode starts where the last one left off, with the Doctor regenrating. Apparently this now causes him to seeht magic out of his body in all directions and smash shit up. That never happened before, and would be a pretty big design flaw in the whole process (yes, it's designed; it's not a natural Gallifreyan ability. They actually need machines to do it - such machines are built in to TARDISes). And this just serves as a flimsy pretext for smashing up the TARDIS so it can regenerate too!

What the fuck? Since when can a TARDIS regenerate? And if it can, why did its chameleon circuit not get repaired? The outside appearance got changed, but just to a less useful version of the same disguise. Have the people in charge forgotten that the TARDIS only looks like that because it was a disguise? The Time Lords didn't build them all to look like police boxes.

The Doctor: Creepy paedophile

I don't think I could sum this up better than Drakkos did, so I'm just going to paste what he said about it here:

[02:14] <Drakkos> The first five minutes are extremely dodgy

[02:14] <Drakkos> A guy in a box turns up in a girl’s garden

[02:14] <Drakkos> He leaps out, covered in sweat

[02:14] <Drakkos> Looking like a pedo (although that’s not really his fault)

[02:15] <Drakkos> He chats her up for a bit

[02:15] <Drakkos> Forces her to cook things for him

[02:15] <Drakkos> And then takes her up into her bedroom so he can fiddle with her crack.

[02:15] <Drakkos> And then at the very end, she says ‘I’ve grown up since then’

[02:15] <Drakkos> And he says ‘Oh, I’ll soon change that’

[02:15] <Drakkos> Seriously

[02:15] <Drakkos> What the fuck is wrong with him?

[02:16] <Drakkos> That’s leaving aside the whole ‘I’ll be back in five minutes’ thing right at the start where the only thing that stops her being a statistic on the missing child register is that he can’t work his tardis properly. ;-P

Oh good, he still has his magic wand

Or rather, he will have in a minute. First he has to run back to the TARDIS because it's going to explode for some reason. Why? Probably because he just shot magic all round the control room. Who knows. Anyway, he tells the girl he'll be back in five minutes (Why?) and runs off

Unfortunately (I guess), the TARDIS is apparently back to being unreliable and so he ends up going too far and the little girl (Amy) is now grown up. So she dresses as a policeman and hits him with a cricket bat and handcuffs him. Why does she have handcuffs if she's not really a policeman? Probably because they didn't actually think that through.

Anyway, the Doctor spots a hidden door that apparently has been there and hidden the whole time, behind which is a room in which an escaped alien prisoner has been living. Apparently after getting out of jail, it decided to just stay in this room in a village on an alien planet forever or something. It's been years. Surely it could have found something better to do with its time? Made some attempt to get off the planet? It's not like there haven't been a whole bunch of space ships coming and going.

The Doctor tells Amy not to go through the door, but obviously she does anyway, for no apparent reason. And she finds the sonic screwdirver in there. All covered in goo. There seems to be no reason for this other than as a convenient excuse to have it run out of magic later on. It wasn't even hidden or anything, just sitting on the table. The alien basically just stole it, covered it in goo, and gave it back. What the fuck?

It can disguise itself as anything, sort of

So, the alien, which is some sort of creepy serpent, is apparently a shapeshifter. It follows the girl out of the room, looking like a guy with a dog. But for some reason it can't speak, only bark, and it barks with both mouths at once.

Jumping ahead for a moment, it's later explained that the alien can only disguise itself as someone who already exists, and that person has to be unconcious, and it can only disguise itself as that person the way they're dreaming themself. So it's disguising itself as coma patients, and this one is apparently dreaming of walking his dog.

OK, so is this guy dreaming that he's incapable of speech or something? Because in other disguises it can speak. But this one it can only bark?

The Doctor can taste age

Then the jailors make an announcement that they're going to destroy the "human residence" unless the alien gives itself up. So the Doctor and Amy run away from the alien (Prisoner Zero) and get outside, at which point the Doctor notices that the backyard shed has been rebuilt. He then tastes it to determine how long ago it was rebuilt. What? How does that work? Even if you could taste the age of the materials, that wouldn't tell you how old the shed was! And how can you taste the age of wood anyway? This makes no sense!

Anyway, this tells the Doctor that he's 12 years too late, and he figures out that Amy is the girl he met. This has pretty much no bearing on anything other than that a whole bunch of people from this point on recognise the Doctor as the person they thought Amy made up as a child. Which has no impact on the plot.

Magic wands are temperamental

They then notice that the annoncement about Zero giving himself up is actually being broadcast to more than jkust the house, and realise that the jailors actually mean the entier planet will be destroyed. Somehow the Doctor works out that they have 20 minutes before the threat is carried out, so he decides to use his magic wand to tell the jailors where Zero is.

Apparently the jailors are trying to find Zero by scanning for non-Earth technology, so using the sonic screwdriver should work fine. And that would make perfect sense if Zero actually had any non-Earth technology. He was a prisoner. He didn't exactly bring a lot of stuff with him.

But as previously mentioned, alien goo breaks magic wands, so that plan fails.

The universe is in danger! But it's not urgent

So, Zero escaped through the crack in the bedroom wall, which was apparently a crack in time, whatever that means. But he didn't make it, it was made by something else. And apparently, that other thing is called "the Pandorica" and it's going to destroy the universe or something. The Doctor pretty much ingores this, because it's clearly a season-long plot and not requiring immediate attention.

Clocks do not work that way! Goodnight!

Having given up on his sonic screwdriver plan, the Doctor comes up with an even better one! He uses a mobile phone to write a computer virus to set every clock in the world to 0:00. Every clock. Seriously. One of the actual onscreen examples is a mechanical clock setting itself to 0:00. Even just "every computerised clock" would be bad enough, because they don't all connect to the internet, and even those that do don't all use a single operating system. And even if they did, writing and transwitting the virus quick enough to be useful would be impossible. But it's pretty clear the nriters don't give a fuck about making it believable when the Doctor can use a phone to hack a mechanical clock.

Moblie phones can do anything

And apparently the alien jailors are able to spot that all the clocks have changed, figure out why, and trace the virus to the phone the Doctor is still holding. But they can't detect what species Zero is if he's disguised, because that's obviously much more difficult.

Oh, but the mobile phone has pictures of all the coma patients stored on it! So the aliens can just look at that and pick up anyone who looks like the people in the pictures. Pity about any other people whose photos happen to be on there, I guess.

Unfortunately the alien just makes Amy fall asleep somehow and steals her form. Apparently taking a picture of it disguised as her won't work either for some reason, so the only solution is for those still awake to tell her to dream about how the alien looks when it's in serpent form. And of course she's able to do that without any problem, so the alien has to look like that.

The Doctor is a baddass now I guess

So, problem solved, aliens go away with thir prisoner. Only, that's not good enough. So the Doctor calls them back. And pausing only to get a change of clothes, 'cause honestly, that couldn't wait ten minutes, he goes up onto the roof to talk to them.

Well, I say talk to them, He actually threatens them for some reason. And bases this threat on the information about how he dealt with previous alien invasions. Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't have thought that essentially telling someone "I alwaays look for a peaceful solution, kill only as a last resort, and often win only through luck or my opponents underestimating me." was the best way to theraten them. These aliens seem to find it pretty scary though, so they bugger off again. Which is exactly what they were going to do anyway. Good job, Doctor.

The TARDIS looks ridiculous

So the Doctor goes back to the TARDIS, which has now finished regenerating, and looks more conspicuous on the outside (instead of being an old battered blue box it's now a new and shiny one) and utterly stupid on the inside. The controls it had last time were stupid and made no sense, but at least they looked like controls. Now it has ridiculous shit like water taps and other random things from Earth as all its controls. Oh, and it now has a sonic screwdriver dispenser, I guess. Because god forbid you actually get rid of his magic wand. How would he magically remove all tension, suspense and believability from a plet without that?

After a quick "test flight" he comes back to pick up Amy, two years later! Ha ha, iut's funny because he was late again! Fuck you. You used to write Coupling, Stephen. I thought you knew what comedy was?

So even though Amy is supposed to get married the next day, she agrees to go with him on the condition that he gets her back in time. And what's the problem there? After all, he's proven himself so good at arriving on time. What could possibly go wrong?

Bonus shit

Copied directly from Wikipedia:

"Whilst proving Earth is protected to the Atraxi, flashbacks are seen from both the revived and classic series, including every previous Doctor and monsters including the Sea Devils, Sontarans, Cybermen, Ood and Daleks. Some of these monsters, such as the Hath, did not actually visit Earth."

Nice going there, guys.

Also, the new sonic screwdriver has a green light on it. What the fuck is with the lights on the sonic screwdrivers? Do you people know what "sonic" means? Making the light green doesn't make it any less stupid you morons! It works by using sound, not light! Having a light on it just makes it easier to spot, which is a bad thing when you're trying to use it stealthily, as the Doctor is quite likely to want to do!

I'm still going to watch the rest of this season, but my hopes that Stephen Moffat might actually make it decent have been dashed.