Doctor Who: “The Eleventh Hour,” “The Beast Below”

In which I love Matt Smith, like Karen Gillan, yet have some serious reservations.

As big a fan of David Tennant as I’ve always been, I never really had any serious reservations about Matt Smith. He strikes me as a clever person and a bold actor, so I expected that he’d pretty much be okay. Yet “The Eleventh Hour” shows him to be better as the Doctor than I ever imagined: every line reading a totally logical yet surprising and delightful choice, his energy both lively and tragic — as the Doctor should be. In every moment of every scene, he’s great.

So there’s that out of the way. Yet here’s the thing: though I truly love Matt Smith, and though I found “The Eleventh Hour” to be really enjoyable and possessed of several brilliant scenes, I can’t help but think that both ‘The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below” are technically terrible episodes.

No one is more surprised by this than I am. I love Steven Moffat’s previous Who episodes, and not only do I love them, but I love them because they are possessed of exactly the things that “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below” lack. If you look back on “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances” or, especially, “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Blink,” their most striking feature is what I would describe as clockworkness: all the details in each episode fit together perfectly, with little to no extraneous material and with a stylistic cohesion that, on television, is rare. The internal logic of each episode is fairly flawless, at least enough that it never feels like there are either plot holes or stylistic skips in the episodes. They’re meticulously constructed. Exactly the opposite of “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below.”

The first part of “The Eleventh Hour” is great: a fairy-tale garden, a fairy-tale little girl, a spooky crack in the wall, a mysterious extra room. (Surely someone else was getting a very strong Sapphire and Steel vibe from that sequence.) Yet then there are a shapeshifting escaped prisoner speaking through coma patient, and also giant eyeball ships. And then the Doctor instantly gets in touch with all the Great Minds of the world and writes a computer virus that hacks all the something something I don’t even understand what was going on there or what it achieved, really, except that it was a huge worldwide computer thing that came out of nowhere. And then we’re kind of back to the fairy-tale garden. Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against any of the individual elements that I’ve just listed. But the jumps in pacing and tone (from spooky crack in wall to Prisoner Zero to worldwide computer virus) felt ragged and odd, like two or more stories had been sewn together badly. The change in the scale and range of the story (from Amelia Pond to worldwide space threat) was also peculiar and abrupt.

Still: I understand that it’s the first episode, and there’s a temptation to throw everything in the crock pot. That excuse doesn’t, however, hold for “The Beast Below,” which struck me as an even worse example of the above problems. Here you had a bunch of individually terrific elements: a giant spaceship Britain (with great visual design work), schoolchildren in mysterious peril, strange toy-things turned sinister, a strange nursery rhyme, a Hidden Menace, and the Queen of England as an awesome Robin Hood-style vigilante. Not to mention the very apropos political thread of an entire population choosing again and again to forget the suffering that makes their lives possible. Yet when you throw all these elements together, without attempting to really link or explain them, and without giving sufficient weight to any, it makes no sense and comes off as rushed and shallow. Why are the children being taken? No idea. Are we supposed to care about either child in the teaser? We never really find out anything about them. Why do the Smilers exist? What do they do? What does their design have to do with their function? (Was someone just like: You know what, we’ll design these creepy clowns to use?) Who are all those people in the command room? Seriously, Amy outthinks the Doctor? Also, shouldn’t the Doctor know about the star whale, since it seems to be a major era in human history? I know that one of the tricks of watching Doctor Who is not to ask too many questions, but when nothing in a plot seems to make very much sense, there’s no place to hang your logic hat. It doesn’t help that the time taken away from things-making-sense (logically or stylistically) was instead given over to a very perfunctory, abrupt, and hammer-to-the-head obvious introduction of the theme of “The Doctor as last of his kind.”

Both of these episodes badly needed a story editor/co-writer. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was more or less the job that Russell T Davies did as head writer. I am not a die-hard Davies defender (though I do have great love for his work), but I think if you compare the Moffat-edited-by-Davies episodes with the Moffat-edited-by-Moffat episodes, it’s clear that Davies performed an essential addition or subtraction. Hopefully Moffat will find his own pace– he has the tools at his disposal, with a great Doctor and a good companion.

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