With the Eleventh Doctor's run now just a single episode from its end, watching The Eleventh Hour today proves something of a shame. The monumental brilliance of this introduction to the Moffat/Smith era, setting out a brave new tone and direction for the character and the series, now only serves to highlight how much of its potential ultimately went unfulfilled beyond its first season. From the moment his head pops out of the upturned TARDIS, Smith's Doctor is every bit the live-wire eccentric he is today - bow-ties remain cool - but would only intermittently go on to find material worthy of his talent. Amy, the girl who waited, cuts a fascinatingly broken figure whose attitude towards the Doctor is a cocktail of adoration, distrust and self-doubt. While Gillan's performances allowed the character some steady growth into a confident young woman ready to choose the man she really loved over the one she waited for, the writers never seemed quite so sure what to do with her beyond the standard 'sparky female companion' mould. The sci-fi fairytale tone which clearly delineated Moffat's first season from the preceding Davies era was abandoned soon afterwards as the show steadily started to become too clever for its own good. For all that might seem disappointing about what followed, the episode itself remains a high point of New Who and Moffat's most complete script since his Empty Child/Doctor Dances two-parter in 2005. While the pre-credits sequence is an eminently disposable and nonsensical bit of fluff - the TARDIS must be crashing particularly slowly if it flies all the way from London to the countryside village of Leadworth - the iconic moments start piling up once the story begins in earnest. From young Amelia rushing outside in her red wellies to investigate the blue box in her garden, the conversation over fish fingers and custard, grown up Amy's strippergram introduction (oh, those flowing red locks), Smith stepping through the projection of his predecessors to claim his title, The Eleventh Hour has a clarity of purpose and confidence which sets it apart as the most accomplished introductory episode for a new Doctor or companion in the series' fifty year history. Even the plot, so often left by the wayside when a new character needs to be to brought into the fold, is deftly handled, with Prisoner Zero giving an immediate sense of peril to the 'cracks in the universe' season arc and allowing Eleven the opportunity to showcase his intelligence by saving the world without resorting to the sonic screwdriver's Get Out Of Jail Free card.
28-year old English writer with a borderline obsessive passion for films, videogames, Chelsea FC, incomprehensible words and indefensible puns. Follow me on Twitter if you like infrequent outbursts of absolute drivel.
