Doctor Who may have just started its 32nd series (or season as it is called in North America) but it remains as good as ever - and still has the capability of making you hide behind the sofa.
The first episode of the great British sci-fi series, with its often bizarre Douglas Adams-style storylines, started last night with a bang - with an Apollo astronaut emerging from a lake in the desert in Utah and actually killing The Doctor by shooting him with a laser gun.
The Doctor warns the others - his current female sidekick Amy Pond, her husband Rory and fellow time-traveller River Song - to stay back and not interfere while he goes forward to talk. He tells the suited figure "It's okay, I know it's you", and it raises its visor (the viewer doesn't see who, or what, is inside the spacesuit). The Doctor says something to the figure as seen from Amy and Rory's point of view several yards away (and therefore we can't hear what he says) and lowers his head.
Before anyone can react, the astronaut raises a gun, shoots the Doctor twice, who begins to regenerate. A third shot disrupts the regeneration process and kills the Doctor. The astronaut then retreats back into the lake, leaving the Doctor's companions stunned and horrified.
Many viewers must have then thought that a Doctor Who without its main character would be pointless, so they must have been relieved when the Doctor miraculously reappeared after his friends had cremated his body (the dead Doctor was from the future and the returning Doctor was his past self).
The episode also featured a new Doctor Who baddy, creepy looking aliens called The Silence who have the ability to make you completely forget about them as soon as you turn your back. And the Doctor's female sidekick, Amy Pond, had a fairly creepy encounter with one in the women's toilets in the White House during which time it blasted a woman to smithereens! It also turned out that it may have been a Silent (singular of Silence) who shot The Doctor whilst wearing an Apollo astronaut's spacesuit (although we do not know for certain).
The episode was the first one ever to be filmed in America, and saw the Tardis landing in President Nixon's Oval Office in 1969, the year of the Apollo moon landings. Doctor Who and his friends watch as Nixon takes a call from a young girl named "Jefferson Adams Hamilton" who is asking for help.
The episode ended with a cliffhanger, with somebody in an Apollo spacesuit walking towards the Doctor and Amy. Amy thinks it's the same astronaut which "killed" the Doctor at the beginning of the episode, picks up a pistol and fires at it, before realising to her horror that the spacesuit contains the young girl who has been calling for help. The episode ends with the bullet still travelling towards the little girl.
Doctor Who, episode 1 (of 13): The Impossible Astronaut, review
Doctor Who expert Gavin Fuller reviews the first episode in the new series of Doctor Who, BBC One.
Alex Kingston as River Song in yesterday's Doctor Who. Photo: BBC/James Stenson
By Gavin Fuller
23 Apr 2011
The Telegraph
- Gavin Fuller is a Doctor Who expert and lifelong fan. In 1993 he became the youngest ever champion of Mastermind, with Doctor Who as his specialist subject.
After a slightly silly pre-credits sequence, Doctor Who’s 32nd season started with a bang – an Apollo astronaut emerging from a lake in Utah and killing The Doctor was an unusual although startling way to open a new series to say the least.
Having thought it a bit odd that the Doctor appeared to have aged about 200 years overnight (although there is the mystery of how he managed to shed 50 years between his seventh and tenth incarnations) the fact this was a future Doctor who was meeting his maker made sense. But writer and producer Steven Moffat is tempting fate assuming a 200-year lifespan for an incarnation given the apparent length of The Doctor’s previous ones if the ages given in previous episodes make any sense!
New Doctor Who Monsters - The Silence
Other Names: The singular form of Silence is Silent
Home Planet: Unknown
Appearance: A ghoulish mixture of the figure in Munch's The Scream and creatures from urban mythology known as 'men in black'.
The Silence are a terrifying race who invaded Earth at an undetermined point in our history. They have powers of telepathy and can kill using a deadly discharge from their hands. But every Silent has a far eerier ability...
Even if you see a Silent, you won't know you've spotted it as Silence somehow edit themselves from an observer's memory. Glimpse one of these creatures and you may feel slightly unsettled the moment it's out of view, but you won't remember anything about it. If and when you next see a Silent you may have a flashback to your first encounter, but again, when the Silent is out of view your mind will not recall ever seeing the alien.
Amy spotted a solitary Silent in modern day America and in 1969 River Song and Rory stumbled across a nest of Silence in a series of tunnels beneath the US. The moment they emerged from the tunnels they forgot all about ever seeing the creatures. They are horrifyingly powerful killers... can the Doctor stop them?
Anyway, on to the episode itself, and again Moffat seems to have created a great concept for a monster with his latest effort, the Silence, a monster who as soon as you look away from them you forget about.
A very useful asset for a species with no doubt unpleasant designs, given their casual slaughter of a member of the White House staff, and one which added a layer of chillingness to the scenes in which they appeared (particularly chilling was the scene in which Amy and an American woman came across one in the women's toilets at the White House).
Yet they were almost an aside to this episode, with the concentration on how Amy, Rory and River cope with the foreknowledge of The Doctor’s death and the fact they cannot tell him about it leading to some great moments of character drama between them. These are topped by the scene with River dreading the day, which we have already seen in Silence in the Library, where she meets the Doctor but he had no idea who she is (each time the Doctor meets River again, the less he remembers her!); Alex Kingston shone in this episode.
Moffat clearly loves the way Doctor who can play around with concepts of time, and this episode was one which dealt in a mature manner with this, aided by some fizzing dialogue as the episode progressed; this was quite a wordy episode which concentrated more on atmosphere than pace and visual thrills.
Giving a prominent role to Richard Nixon, given his reputation post-Watergate, was also a brave move.
Matt Smith still arguably needs to find the right balance between serious and humour. The latter occasionally jarred in such a deeply layered episode as this. I don’t quite see why Amy had an urgent need in the middle of a warehouse to tell him about her pregnancy, unless the Silence’s instructions to her previously in the episode were responsible in some way (tricky though as she’d surely forgotten them after leaving the rest room?).
A Silent kills a woman in the women's toilets at the White House in last night's episode
This minor quibble aside, this was a cracking start to the first part of the 2011 series, with the shocking ending of Amy seemingly shooting a girl making one keen wait for the conclusion of this double episode next week to see how it all resolves itself.
telegraph.co.uk
The first episode of the great British sci-fi series, with its often bizarre Douglas Adams-style storylines, started last night with a bang - with an Apollo astronaut emerging from a lake in the desert in Utah and actually killing The Doctor by shooting him with a laser gun.
The Doctor warns the others - his current female sidekick Amy Pond, her husband Rory and fellow time-traveller River Song - to stay back and not interfere while he goes forward to talk. He tells the suited figure "It's okay, I know it's you", and it raises its visor (the viewer doesn't see who, or what, is inside the spacesuit). The Doctor says something to the figure as seen from Amy and Rory's point of view several yards away (and therefore we can't hear what he says) and lowers his head.
Before anyone can react, the astronaut raises a gun, shoots the Doctor twice, who begins to regenerate. A third shot disrupts the regeneration process and kills the Doctor. The astronaut then retreats back into the lake, leaving the Doctor's companions stunned and horrified.
Many viewers must have then thought that a Doctor Who without its main character would be pointless, so they must have been relieved when the Doctor miraculously reappeared after his friends had cremated his body (the dead Doctor was from the future and the returning Doctor was his past self).
The episode also featured a new Doctor Who baddy, creepy looking aliens called The Silence who have the ability to make you completely forget about them as soon as you turn your back. And the Doctor's female sidekick, Amy Pond, had a fairly creepy encounter with one in the women's toilets in the White House during which time it blasted a woman to smithereens! It also turned out that it may have been a Silent (singular of Silence) who shot The Doctor whilst wearing an Apollo astronaut's spacesuit (although we do not know for certain).
The episode was the first one ever to be filmed in America, and saw the Tardis landing in President Nixon's Oval Office in 1969, the year of the Apollo moon landings. Doctor Who and his friends watch as Nixon takes a call from a young girl named "Jefferson Adams Hamilton" who is asking for help.
The episode ended with a cliffhanger, with somebody in an Apollo spacesuit walking towards the Doctor and Amy. Amy thinks it's the same astronaut which "killed" the Doctor at the beginning of the episode, picks up a pistol and fires at it, before realising to her horror that the spacesuit contains the young girl who has been calling for help. The episode ends with the bullet still travelling towards the little girl.
Doctor Who, episode 1 (of 13): The Impossible Astronaut, review
Doctor Who expert Gavin Fuller reviews the first episode in the new series of Doctor Who, BBC One.
Alex Kingston as River Song in yesterday's Doctor Who. Photo: BBC/James Stenson
By Gavin Fuller
23 Apr 2011
The Telegraph
- Gavin Fuller is a Doctor Who expert and lifelong fan. In 1993 he became the youngest ever champion of Mastermind, with Doctor Who as his specialist subject.
After a slightly silly pre-credits sequence, Doctor Who’s 32nd season started with a bang – an Apollo astronaut emerging from a lake in Utah and killing The Doctor was an unusual although startling way to open a new series to say the least.
Having thought it a bit odd that the Doctor appeared to have aged about 200 years overnight (although there is the mystery of how he managed to shed 50 years between his seventh and tenth incarnations) the fact this was a future Doctor who was meeting his maker made sense. But writer and producer Steven Moffat is tempting fate assuming a 200-year lifespan for an incarnation given the apparent length of The Doctor’s previous ones if the ages given in previous episodes make any sense!
New Doctor Who Monsters - The Silence
Other Names: The singular form of Silence is Silent
Home Planet: Unknown
Appearance: A ghoulish mixture of the figure in Munch's The Scream and creatures from urban mythology known as 'men in black'.
The Silence are a terrifying race who invaded Earth at an undetermined point in our history. They have powers of telepathy and can kill using a deadly discharge from their hands. But every Silent has a far eerier ability...
Even if you see a Silent, you won't know you've spotted it as Silence somehow edit themselves from an observer's memory. Glimpse one of these creatures and you may feel slightly unsettled the moment it's out of view, but you won't remember anything about it. If and when you next see a Silent you may have a flashback to your first encounter, but again, when the Silent is out of view your mind will not recall ever seeing the alien.
Amy spotted a solitary Silent in modern day America and in 1969 River Song and Rory stumbled across a nest of Silence in a series of tunnels beneath the US. The moment they emerged from the tunnels they forgot all about ever seeing the creatures. They are horrifyingly powerful killers... can the Doctor stop them?
Anyway, on to the episode itself, and again Moffat seems to have created a great concept for a monster with his latest effort, the Silence, a monster who as soon as you look away from them you forget about.
A very useful asset for a species with no doubt unpleasant designs, given their casual slaughter of a member of the White House staff, and one which added a layer of chillingness to the scenes in which they appeared (particularly chilling was the scene in which Amy and an American woman came across one in the women's toilets at the White House).
Yet they were almost an aside to this episode, with the concentration on how Amy, Rory and River cope with the foreknowledge of The Doctor’s death and the fact they cannot tell him about it leading to some great moments of character drama between them. These are topped by the scene with River dreading the day, which we have already seen in Silence in the Library, where she meets the Doctor but he had no idea who she is (each time the Doctor meets River again, the less he remembers her!); Alex Kingston shone in this episode.
Moffat clearly loves the way Doctor who can play around with concepts of time, and this episode was one which dealt in a mature manner with this, aided by some fizzing dialogue as the episode progressed; this was quite a wordy episode which concentrated more on atmosphere than pace and visual thrills.
Giving a prominent role to Richard Nixon, given his reputation post-Watergate, was also a brave move.
Matt Smith still arguably needs to find the right balance between serious and humour. The latter occasionally jarred in such a deeply layered episode as this. I don’t quite see why Amy had an urgent need in the middle of a warehouse to tell him about her pregnancy, unless the Silence’s instructions to her previously in the episode were responsible in some way (tricky though as she’d surely forgotten them after leaving the rest room?).
A Silent kills a woman in the women's toilets at the White House in last night's episode
This minor quibble aside, this was a cracking start to the first part of the 2011 series, with the shocking ending of Amy seemingly shooting a girl making one keen wait for the conclusion of this double episode next week to see how it all resolves itself.
telegraph.co.uk
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