Doctor Who series 7 (Matt Smith)

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After rewatching the excellent 2011 Christmas special, ‘The doctor, the widow and the wardrobe’ towards the end of April, we embarked again on series 7, the last full series featuring Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor.  We first watched series 7 during 2014; it was originally broadcast during 2012. 

The first episode, ‘Asylum of the daleks’ is a dramatic one. I have never liked the daleks, but they’re probably the most iconic aliens in the series. In this episode, the Doctor is summoned, to his astonishment, to help them figure out a problem with the planet where they have imprisoned daleks who have gone insane. 

They’re worried that they might escape, and the Doctor is the only person who can do what they want. They also send Amy (Karen Gillen) and Rory (Arthur Darvill), who - as we have seen in the first scenes of this episode - are about to get divorced.

It’s an exciting start to the new series, one with several twists and turns and the introduction of Jenna-Louise Coleman as Oswin. She’s a self-proclaimed genius who has somehow survived a spaceship crash and is using her computer to control doors and other features around the plant.

Doctor Who series 6 (Matt Smith)

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We finished watching Doctor Who series 5 at the end of last year. We had become familiar with Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, and with Amy Pond, portrayed by Karen Gillen, as his companion. At the end of the fifth series, Amy married Rory (Arthur Darvill), and both had decided to keep travelling with the Doctor. 

Series 6 opens with a Christmas special entitled ‘A Christmas carol’. It was a good one to see towards the end of the Christmas period; it was first broadcast on Christmas Day 2010. We first saw it in September 2013 and had entirely forgotten the story. It features a very Scrooge-like character, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Gambon, who refuses to allow a spaceship to arrive. Rory and Amy are in it, on their honeymoon, and send out an SOS to the Doctor. 

The writing is clever, with more than a nod to Dickens; and we liked the resulting softening of the character. There are several Christmas carols featured in the background, too, and some amazing singing. It’s all very well done, we thought, with some tension and mildly scary effects - but overall, an excellent Christmas special. It’s an hour long, and then there’s an ‘extra’ on the same DVD, a Doctor Who ‘confidential’, which gives a lot of background to the episode. There are also a couple of brief ‘extra’ episodes filmed for Comic Relief. 

Doctor Who series five (Matt Smith)

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We finished watching the 2009 Doctor Who specials in the middle of October. They were the last ones showing David Tennant as the tenth doctor. In the final episode, he regenerates into Matt Smith - as we knew would happen.

So it was then time to embark on Series Five, which was first broadcast in 2010. We watched the series (on DVD) in 2013. The only thing I could remember from the first episode, ‘The eleventh hour’, was that the newly regenerated 11th Doctor had some strange food requirements. 

I had quite forgotten that the episode begins with a crashed tardis, on fire, followed by the Doctor climbing out looking dirty and tattered, and meeting the young Amelia Pond. Caitlin Blackwood is excellent in this part, though Amelia is evidently not au fait with ‘stranger danger’. She invites the Doctor in to investigate a crack in her wall, from which she has been hearing some strange voices…

It’s an exciting episode, cleverly done, and shows that Matt Smith is well suited to the role of Doctor. Amy Pond (Karen Gillen) is somehow persuaded to travel with him at the end.

Doctor Who, Series 7 (Matt Smith)

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It’s taken us a long time - more than ten months - to watch Doctor Who, series 7. Partly this was because we were travelling for quite a part of the summer; partly because we knew this was the last series currently available on DVD. Series 8 started broadcasting in the UK as we were watching the last few episodes of series 7, but won’t be available as a DVD set for some months.

This is the last season starring Matt Smith as the Doctor, and the first with Clara (Jenna Coleman) as the Doctor’s companion. Each episode is complete in itself. There are no cliffhanging multi-parters. But there’s an overriding story arc about who exactly Clara is. This begins quite early in the season with some interesting and confusing scenarios, and is not resolved until the final episode.

The first part of this season - five episodes - were broadcast towards the end of 2012. The rest were shown in 2013. They followed on from the Christmas 2011 special, ‘The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe’, which ends with the Doctor making a brief visit to Amy and Rory, the Doctor’s married companions from the previous series. They then accompany him in the first few episodes of this series, overlapping with the time when Clara’s mysterious presence begins to make itself known.

There are daleks, aliens, cybermen, weeping angels and dinosaurs in this series, as in previous ones. In a sense it’s more of the same kind of story: aliens threaten, the Doctor saves the world (or, for variation, the Universe). But then, that’s what Doctor Who fans want. I find it astounding that the team continue producing such good scripts with variations on the theme when there’s really only one basic plot.

Matt Smith isn’t, in my opinion, as talented an actor as his predecessor, David Tennant. That doesn’t always matter; there’s an ‘otherworldly’ and somewhat scatty appeal to him which I was finally getting used to as the series came to a close. But in the penultimate episode when The Doctor is playing chess with himself as two distinct personalities, we felt that Tennant could have done this so much more convincingly.

While some of the scenes here and there were over-fast and too tense for my tastes (sometimes I shut my eyes if there was too much suspense), I enjoyed the dynamic between the Doctor and Clara, and I thought the final episode was particularly good. The mysterious story about her origins is very clever indeed; it kept me intrigued and had a very clever explanation in the end.

We learn quite a bit about the Doctor during this series, including the fact that his ‘real name’ is not just a secret but has immense power. River Song (Alex Kingston) makes a couple of brief appearances - I gave up even trying to understand the ‘wibbly wobbly timey-wimey’ dimensions - and all in all, we thought this another excellent series.

Review copyright 2014 Sue's DVD Reviews

Doctor Who, the complete series 6 (Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill)

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It has taken us four months to watch the sixth season of the 21st century Doctor Who. Matt Smith is well established as the 11th incarnation of the Doctor, and Karen Gillan returns as his companion, Amy. She is now married to Rory (Arthur Darvill) who has a brilliantly comic touch at times. This adds some welcome lightness, but also shows amazing depth and loyalty.

The opening episode, ‘A Christmas Carol’, was shown in December 2010. It features a Scrooge-like character, who refuses to let Amy and Rory’s honeymoon spaceship arrive. The Doctor works some Dickens-like magic, and there’s a bittersweet ending; it’s nicely done, if a little twee.

Then the sixth season began properly in April 2011, with a very dramatic episode where the Doctor is shot by a lakeside, watched by Amy, Rory, and the mysterious River Song. Then they meet a younger version of the Doctor, who has no idea what’s going to happen…

It’s a confusing series in some ways, and I almost feel as if I should start watching it over again with the benefit of hindsight. While most episodes are complete in themselves, the idea of a ‘crack in the universe’ continues, as do the mysterious ‘Silence’ aliens, who disappear from memory as soon as someone stops looking at them. Amy announces that she is pregnant, then insists that she is not.. and the Doctor runs scans which are oddly inconclusive.

Other than the Silence, here are not so many evil aliens in this series; the Daleks and Weeping Angels make only brief appearances, as do the Cybermen. On the other hand, there’s a pirate ship complete with singing Sirens, an episode where Hitler appears, and some doppelgangers who impersonate their human counterparts. It was difficult trying to work out what parts of each episode were significant, and I often found my head buzzing… there’s a lot of fast action and tension, neither of which really appeal to me.

Yet Doctor Who is very engaging. Matt Smith has a lot of energy and projects a kind of alien feel to the show. The human - and human-alien - interactions are often revealing, sometimes moving. The heavier, darker episodes are interspersed with lighter ones; I particularly enjoyed the penultimate ‘Closing Time’, where the Doctor pops in to see his friend ‘Craig’, who featured in Season Five, and gets caught up with some very strange things going on in his neighbourhood.

The last episode sees time and eternity bizarrely mixed up, with the clocks and calendars stuck, all history happening at the same time. A paradox has been created, which the Doctor wants to break out of… we see flashbacks to the first episode of the season, and a dramatic finale.

There are plenty of short extras in this season, with prequels and mini-episodes as supplements, although it’s not necessary to watch them.

All in all, a season well worth owning and watching for anyone who is a fan of this long-running series. In the US it may be cheaper to buy in two parts, but note that the much less expensive UK release will only work with region two (or region-free) DVD players.

Review copyright Sue's DVD Reviews

Doctor Who, complete fifth series (Matt Smith, Karen Gillan)

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Having watched our way through the first four seasons of ‘new’ Doctor Who, followed by the 2009 ‘specials’, we had become huge fans of the brilliant David Tennant. We had rather more mixed feelings about his various assistants, but he was, we felt, the ‘true’ Doctor of the 21st century. How could he possibly be replaced by Matt Smith, someone we had barely heard of before his role as the Doctor, and who was apparently only in his 20s. Could a 900-year-old Time Lord really be portrayed by someone barely older than our sons...?

Our sons assured us that we would soon find ourselves accepting the 11th incarnation of the Doctor, even comparing him favourably with Tennant. So I put the fifth series on my wishlist and was given it for my birthday. We started watching it a couple of months ago.

The first episode is quite dramatic, and introduces nine-year-old Amelia Pond. A delightful actress (Caitlin Blackwood) portrays a confident child who seems to look after herself on the whole. But she is becoming quite disturbed by a strange crack in her bedroom wall, and the voices she can hear behind it. She prays for help, and is not surprised when the tardis lands in her garden and the Doctor steps out. He takes her very seriously, then has to leave, promising to return in a few minutes.

Unfortunately the tardis’ time-keeping isn’t great, and he returns twelve years later. He finds Amelia grown up (played by Karen Gillan), now known as Amy, and her boyfriend Rory (Arthur Darvill). An exciting adventure ensues...

Rather than each episode being totally complete in itself, the storyline featuring the cracks in the universe is a theme across this whole series. It culminates in an exciting two-part finale where the young Amelia Pond re-appears, and the universe is threatened with total extinction.

This series marks more changes than just that of the main cast. The production team also changes, being led now by Stephen Moffatt, one of the writers. About half of the episodes on this DVD set are written by him, and reflect a rather more complicated underlying story than some of the earlier ones did. After we had finished watching the finale, my head was spinning. The following day I tried to make sense of it all. Why was the universe imploding? How could someone be erased from memory? Why was the tardis so significant?

The ‘wibbly wobbly timey-wimey stuff’ is quite complicated throughout this series. Various cracks appear in apparently random places, and scenes from past and future impinge on the present with mind-boggling results. I very much enjoyed the two episodes which featured, respectively, Winston Churchill (brilliantly portrayed by Ian McNeice) and Vincent Van Gogh (Tony Curran). 

Some of the Doctor’s old enemies appear too - in particular the daleks - and there’s a two-parter where the ultra-creepy ‘Weeping Angels’ introduced in an earlier series make their reappearance. But on the whole these episodes are more about people, with the aliens or other enemies taking far less significant roles.

There’s certainly plenty of tension - although we know that, one way or another, the Doctor and his companion will come through - and there’s some humour too. I particularly enjoyed the light-hearted episode ‘The Lodger’ in which the Doctor attempts to be an ordinary person for a while, something which he finds remarkably hard to do...

Fans of the series will probably have seen these episodes already when they were broadcast in 2010, but they’re well worth re-visiting in this excellent box set. I’m not one to re-watch films regularly, nor TV shows but by the end - when things were becoming clearer in some respects, if more confused in others - I felt that I would quite like to see this season again from the start, so as to make more sense of the overall story arc about the cracks in the universe.

Series 4 seemed to have rather too many aliens for my tastes, and was rather dark in places. Long drawn out battles and heavy scenes of violence (albeit non-explicit) do nothing for me, so I liked the more thought-provoking approach of this series.

As for Matt Smith... he’s not David Tennant, and doesn’t attempt to be like him, which was probably wise. He leaps into action in the first episode and shows his ability to think fast and move at speed, with plenty of rapid conversation (something which Stephen Moffat seems to excel in) and a light-hearted touch which I appreciated.

It’s fairly typical, I gather, for people to be suspicious about each new incarnation of the Doctor, to compare him unfavourably with the previous one at the start of the series, and then to consider him the ‘best ever’ by around the time he announces his retirement. I’m not sure I shall do that; we loved David Tennant in the role by the time he was half way through the first episode, and I’m not sure he will ever be equalled. But still, Matt Smith makes an engaging Doctor, even if I didn’t quite manage to believe in him as aged time lord.

Definitely recommended.

Review copyright Sue's DVD Reviews