After a long wait, series five of Doctor Who is with us. The first episode — The Eleventh Hour — debuted over the Easter weekend in the UK, bringing with it a new Doctor and a new production team. But brilliant as the whole shebang was — and it was a thoroughly enjoyable hour — I couldn’t help feeling I’d seen it all before!
No one was surprised at all when Steven Moffatt was announced as the successor to Russell T Davies as head writer on the show. He had become a fan favourite writer with a strong pedigree whose episodes always seemed destined to win awards. I love all of his episodes, so imagine my surprise to find myself watching them again last weekend! Yup, The opening episode of Moffatt’s tenure plays more like a greatest hits package of his best moments and favourite plot devices. To any of you yet to see the episode, beware – spoilers follow.
Deja Vu
So, what is this episode about then – apart from the bizarre food choice of fishfingers and custard as a midnight snack? In a nutshell…
The Doctor talks to a young girl – twice
The Doctor accidentally ends up in a young girl’s bedroom at night and saves her from an alien threat crossing time and space. The girl is immediately struck by the Doctor, treating him like an imaginary friend. However, the Doctor returns at other points later in her life, not having aged a day as he has only travelled through time about five minutes. He defeats the alien threat that has been stalking the girl over the years before inviting her to join him aboard the TARDIS.
Yes, that’s the basic plot of last Saturday’s episode, but it also is a neat summary of The Girl in the Fireplace from four years
ago, my favourite episode in the entire forty seven year history of Doctor Who. Written by Steven Moffatt for the 2006 series, I have watched and rewatched the episode many times. Beautifully written, it has won awards and in some ways reinvented what the show could be.
Warnings from another time – on a wall
But wait – there’s more…
The girl discovers a mysterious crack in a wall linking two time zones and carrying a warning message.
Replace the crack in the wall with a rip in some wallpaper — not much of a leap — and we have the opening set up from Moffatt’s 2007 episode, Blink. The warning may be different — “Prisoner Zero has escaped” instead of ”Beware of the weeping angels” but as setups go, it’s pretty similar. Even more so when you consider that this sequence in Blink is based on Moffatt’s own short story from the Doctor Who Annual 2006 — What I did on my Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow — in which Sally is not an investigative young woman, but a young girl of about the same age as Amelia Pond is here.
The Blink warning also contains the first appearance of the “Duck” gag – more later.
“You’ve had some cowboys in here.”
The Doctor says this as he examines the crack. Thing is, he says virtually the exact same line in the opening scenes of The Girl in the Fireplace.
The girl packs a bag ready to travel with the Doctor, who promises to return in five minutes — only for the TARDIS to overshoot by years.
Yes, this echoes the closing scenes of …Fireplace again. The Doctor tells Madame de Pompadour to “pack a bag. I’ll be back in a minute” as he returns to the future to check on Rose, Mickey and the TARDIS. Of course, when he returns five minutes later, years have passed and he is too late to take her with him.
Again in this latest episode, he promises to return in five minutes. Amelia hurriedly packs a bag, only to become disappointed as the TARDIS doesn’t return for twelve years. In fact, he pulls the same gag on her again at the end of the episode with another short jaunt causing a further two years to elapse before Amy finally gets aboard the TARDIS.
Hospital wards are a magnet for alien shape changers!
A shapechanging alien presence causes the comatose patients on a hospital ward to start behaving in near unison and saying the same words over and over.
In 2005′s The Empty Child — again by Moffatt — we saw a World War II hospital ward filled with comatose patients being controlled by alien nanites to repeat the same phrase over and over again. So there was definitely a sense of deja vu to see a present day ward of coma patients all begin to start calling “Doctor, Doctor” over and over while under an alien influence.
The shapechanging alien presence attempts to recreate the human form but gets it wrong by incorporating the wrong elements and becoming confused.
Again echoing The Empty Child, Prisoner Zero isn’t very good at replicating the human physical form and makes mistakes — incorporating a dog on a chain and talking out of the wrong mouth. Yet back in The Empty Child, the alien nanotechnology also makes a pig’s ear of recreating the human form, by replicating the gas masks and injuries as part of the body. Both these mistakes help the Doctor determine the true nature of the threat.
“Duck”
Yes, even this gag is a repeat from Blink, with the Doctor sending the message via his wallpaper scribblings in the old episode and by text message in the latest.
Time after time
A couple of these repetitions by themselves would barely have been noticeable or remarkable. After all, who’s to say “Duck” isn’t designed to become a running gag in the same way as “Wibbly wobbly timey wimey” has – another Moffatt invention from Blink that reappears in The Eleventh Hour as well as in the Moffatt scripted Time Crash? But with so many repetitions and similar themes clumped together – including major plot points – the episode does seem extremely keen to retread old successes rather than create anew.
With a whole thirteen episode series to fill – including six by Moffatt and another seven commissioned and shaped by him – I hope we aren’t about to see a talented writer running out of the time or inspiration to produce the fresh and brilliant ideas and scripts he achieved when only required to submit one or two a year.
The magic and wonder was definitely still present in this first episode, despite the deja vu, but how many times can the same trick be performed before the magic begins to wear off?