In Review Of: Doctor Who - The Eleventh Hour

From the costume, I thought that we might be looking at a performance quite a bit like Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor.

But I would have been wrong.

Watched the new Doctor Who episode last night at Wonder Con and was blown away by a couple things. Given that I've been with this franchise since 1980, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the new direction of the series.

First - it feels different with Moffat in charge. Just as "Rose" was such a departure from the JNT series with Sylvester McCoy, and the abortive TV move from the 1990's, this is a departure in tone from the RTD era. After 5 years, its time. Doesn't matter that Moffat wrote most of the best episodes during the RTD era, they were shot with Davie's sensibilities in mind. Makes me wonder how much better the series could have been if JNT had left at the end of Davison's run, instead of being pushed to stay. Colin might have been, would have been a completely different Doctor.

The episode spins in a number of different directions, almost too many, as if, with the biggest and best toy in the universe to play with, Moffat can't help but doing a few spin-outs in the parking lot now that he's been given the keys. That's ok, I like the energy.

Second - Matt is out of the box great as the Doctor. Eccleston is a Doctor that i enjoyed tremendously, simply because he's such a good actor that his emotionally scarred Doctor is all kinds of manic and unpredictable. Much in the same way that Tom Baker was in his first couple seasons, you never knew which way he was going to turn, or how he was going to react. He is, after all, an alien and i prefer him to be unpredictable. Tennant's Doctor, while given some excellent scripts, took a while to grow on me. His early turns in the Christmas Invasion and New Earth weren't quite my taste.

Matt works for me right out of the Tardis... er... box. Now, I'm trying to remain spoiler free, so we'll see how the rest of the season plays out, but right now Matt has something that I've not seen since the second episode of Robot: someone who looks like they've dropped right into the role so quickly that they're already doing all the small things that sell the part.