Doctor Who: Eleventh Doctor
Year: 2010 - 2013
Created by: Steven Moffat
Starring: Jenna Coleman, Arthur Darvill, Karen Gillan, Alex Kingston & Matt Smith
Episodes: 44 (3 Series)
BBFC: 12
Published: 10/08/21
Created by: Steven Moffat
Starring: Jenna Coleman, Arthur Darvill, Karen Gillan, Alex Kingston & Matt Smith
Episodes: 44 (3 Series)
BBFC: 12
Published: 10/08/21
The David Tennant era of Doctor Who was (alongside Torchwood) my favourite TV show of that time when I was growing up. It was something that I watched religiously and talked with my friends about. We had theories and loved discussing the lore of the show. But towards the end of Tennant’s run I was starting to become somewhat disillusioned with Doctor Who and it’s probably because I was entering a time in my life where my interests were changing and anything that wasn’t guns and explosions or horror films kind of fell off my radar. But I persevered for a bit longer, seeing the start of Matt Smith’s adventures in time and space but I never finished it, until now anyway. So, this review has been almost a decade in the making when you think about it. How good is one of the most divisive eras of Doctor Who’s long history?
So first, a bit of contextualisation of what was going on behind the scenes during the Tennant/Smith crossover. Series showrunner and the man responsible for resurrecting Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies stepped down following Tennant’s exit from the show as he wanted to do other things. Tennant had ended the era on a high and Davies had managed to create a finale that not only closed off Tennant’s individual character, but also brought the series full circle with the first episode of the show’s revival by closing off every major character story arc for good. What he left behind was a blank slate, a fresh jumping off point for his successor to do with the series whatever they wanted, whether that be to follow in Davies shadow and create a sprawling multi-series web of interconnected narratives, or do something entirely different.
Steven Moffatt was the man who would take up the reigns following Davies. Moffatt had been part of the team that brought he show back for the revival but had really only ever been in charge of writing special episodes and a few two-parters. He had proven himself capable of writing great Doctor Who, but he’d never had the opportunity to be the man in charge of everything.
He liked the way Davies had done things, big sprawling narrative, but it only ever went that way because everything was so disparate when they started out. They were throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick and then Davies spent the last year on the show tying everything together to make sure it made sense. So, Moffatt wanted to know the trajectory before blast off, have the ending in sight before the journey had begun as such (which makes sense). But the result feels as though he bit off a bit more than he could chew.
So first, a bit of contextualisation of what was going on behind the scenes during the Tennant/Smith crossover. Series showrunner and the man responsible for resurrecting Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies stepped down following Tennant’s exit from the show as he wanted to do other things. Tennant had ended the era on a high and Davies had managed to create a finale that not only closed off Tennant’s individual character, but also brought the series full circle with the first episode of the show’s revival by closing off every major character story arc for good. What he left behind was a blank slate, a fresh jumping off point for his successor to do with the series whatever they wanted, whether that be to follow in Davies shadow and create a sprawling multi-series web of interconnected narratives, or do something entirely different.
Steven Moffatt was the man who would take up the reigns following Davies. Moffatt had been part of the team that brought he show back for the revival but had really only ever been in charge of writing special episodes and a few two-parters. He had proven himself capable of writing great Doctor Who, but he’d never had the opportunity to be the man in charge of everything.
He liked the way Davies had done things, big sprawling narrative, but it only ever went that way because everything was so disparate when they started out. They were throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick and then Davies spent the last year on the show tying everything together to make sure it made sense. So, Moffatt wanted to know the trajectory before blast off, have the ending in sight before the journey had begun as such (which makes sense). But the result feels as though he bit off a bit more than he could chew.
One night whilst investigating a crack in her wall, Amelia (Amy) Pond is visited by the newly regenerated Doctor. He tells her that it’s a tear in the fabric of space, a weak point where something from outside the universe is trying to get in. Several years pass before Amy (Karen Gillan) meets The Doctor again. The two travel together across time and space (I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept by now) and begin to learn more about the crack on Amy’s wall, whispers of the oldest question in the universe, and something called The Silence.
Amy is due to marry Rory (Arthur Darvill) who following the marriage joins The Doctor and Amy in the TARDIS. But time plays tricks with their lives and the two seem to be regularly separated from each other as The Doctor becomes more familiar with River Song (Alex Kingston), a woman who has known The Doctor for her entire life, but the two are travelling opposite directions in time meaning his future is her past.
Amy & Rory are forced to make the choice to grow old together rather than continue adventuring with The Doctor. For years he grieves their loss and throughout this time he meets Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), the impossible girl who keeps cropping up in different places in time and space but never knowing who The Doctor is. A version of Clara joins The Doctor to discover how this comes to be, but when The Doctor is faced with his past and the impossible choices he made during the Time War, he realises he must confront previous versions of himself and defend his home world Gallifrey from entering through the crack he first saw on Amy’s wall.
Matt Smith’s era is generally regarded as the worst run of revival Doctor Who but very few people can ever agree on why that is. Some put it down to Smith’s performance as The Doctor, some put it down to the show feeling distinctly more ‘child oriented’, and some put it down to the poor writing quality. Personally, I feel it’s distinctly the latter that’s the big issue. I have no quarrel with how Smith portrays The Doctor, in fact at times I feel he’s even better than Tennant. He’s far more eccentric but also has the ability to be considerably more sinister when the opportunity arises. He’s difficult to pin down to one type of performance and whilst that’ll definitely be something some people don’t like I feel that makes him flexible enough for the wild tonal shifts that viewers will encounter during this period of the show.
The whole child-oriented angle is a complaint I’ve always found a bit weird because at its core Doctor Who is a family show so it needs to appeal to children. What I think people mean by it is that the ‘horror’ aspect of the show has been significantly dialled back. No longer do you get such terrifying monster designs or genuine jump scares. Instead, the horror comes more in what’s implied rather than what’s shown. I don’t really have an issue with that either, different writers bring different things to the table all the time, even during Davies’ period as showrunner, it just seems like the writers Moffatt oversaw tended to be less favourable to horror centric tales. There’s still a lot of horror in Smith’s era, it’s just less in your face now.
Amy is due to marry Rory (Arthur Darvill) who following the marriage joins The Doctor and Amy in the TARDIS. But time plays tricks with their lives and the two seem to be regularly separated from each other as The Doctor becomes more familiar with River Song (Alex Kingston), a woman who has known The Doctor for her entire life, but the two are travelling opposite directions in time meaning his future is her past.
Amy & Rory are forced to make the choice to grow old together rather than continue adventuring with The Doctor. For years he grieves their loss and throughout this time he meets Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), the impossible girl who keeps cropping up in different places in time and space but never knowing who The Doctor is. A version of Clara joins The Doctor to discover how this comes to be, but when The Doctor is faced with his past and the impossible choices he made during the Time War, he realises he must confront previous versions of himself and defend his home world Gallifrey from entering through the crack he first saw on Amy’s wall.
Matt Smith’s era is generally regarded as the worst run of revival Doctor Who but very few people can ever agree on why that is. Some put it down to Smith’s performance as The Doctor, some put it down to the show feeling distinctly more ‘child oriented’, and some put it down to the poor writing quality. Personally, I feel it’s distinctly the latter that’s the big issue. I have no quarrel with how Smith portrays The Doctor, in fact at times I feel he’s even better than Tennant. He’s far more eccentric but also has the ability to be considerably more sinister when the opportunity arises. He’s difficult to pin down to one type of performance and whilst that’ll definitely be something some people don’t like I feel that makes him flexible enough for the wild tonal shifts that viewers will encounter during this period of the show.
The whole child-oriented angle is a complaint I’ve always found a bit weird because at its core Doctor Who is a family show so it needs to appeal to children. What I think people mean by it is that the ‘horror’ aspect of the show has been significantly dialled back. No longer do you get such terrifying monster designs or genuine jump scares. Instead, the horror comes more in what’s implied rather than what’s shown. I don’t really have an issue with that either, different writers bring different things to the table all the time, even during Davies’ period as showrunner, it just seems like the writers Moffatt oversaw tended to be less favourable to horror centric tales. There’s still a lot of horror in Smith’s era, it’s just less in your face now.
So yes, I feel the problem lies with the inconsistency in tone and quality of writing. Because the overall arc for the three series Smith spends as The Doctor is actually really good. The vision Moffatt had for the series from his first episode to his last is very clear and the major episodes that progress the plot forward do so with purpose. There’s also a lot of great ideas being thrown around; the problem is the writers tend to not know what to do with the great ideas once they’ve had them.
Almost all the alien races seen in these three series are new, or at least new by revival standards. But very few of them actually needed to be new. It often feels like a lot of episode storylines have been copied from Davies’ run during the Eccleston and Tennent eras of the show, and the purpose the alien races serve is equally similar to what has come before. A lot of the time it feels like the writers looked at old storylines and simply thought that they’d rather rehash the old story with new monsters, rather than write something new with old monsters in it.
As I mentioned earlier, the tone is also wildly inconsistent. Whilst Doctor Who has never had a single mood, it seems Davies had the foresight to keep some kind of consistency. Things never got too silly, nor too dark, save for very special occurrences. But with Moffatt as showrunner it seems to swing from Carry On style farce to drab and dreary buzzkill every episode, sometimes even within the same episode!
The storylines too tend to always centre around one of three things whilst Amy & Rory are companions. It’s either that The Doctor is going to die, and everyone needs to work out how to stop that from happening; or that Amy or Rory get separated from the rest of the group and need to wait a very long time to be reunited (sometimes a few days, sometimes a few years, and sometimes a few centuries); or that the story is all about River and learning more about her, which is ok, but she’s not interesting enough to have as many episodes based on her as she does, which is only more evident as a few of her episodes don’t actually serve any purpose or make any plot progress.
Once they’re out the way and Clara enters the fray, she gets very little development before the whole thing wraps up. She’s only in half of the final Matt Smith series and the final two episodes she gets no character development. Sure, she continues as companion for Peter Capaldi, but I feel like her storyline could have been introduced much sooner to allow for a bigger reveal once the pieces fall into place, and that would have cut out some of the nonsense the series wastes time on during this era.
Almost all the alien races seen in these three series are new, or at least new by revival standards. But very few of them actually needed to be new. It often feels like a lot of episode storylines have been copied from Davies’ run during the Eccleston and Tennent eras of the show, and the purpose the alien races serve is equally similar to what has come before. A lot of the time it feels like the writers looked at old storylines and simply thought that they’d rather rehash the old story with new monsters, rather than write something new with old monsters in it.
As I mentioned earlier, the tone is also wildly inconsistent. Whilst Doctor Who has never had a single mood, it seems Davies had the foresight to keep some kind of consistency. Things never got too silly, nor too dark, save for very special occurrences. But with Moffatt as showrunner it seems to swing from Carry On style farce to drab and dreary buzzkill every episode, sometimes even within the same episode!
The storylines too tend to always centre around one of three things whilst Amy & Rory are companions. It’s either that The Doctor is going to die, and everyone needs to work out how to stop that from happening; or that Amy or Rory get separated from the rest of the group and need to wait a very long time to be reunited (sometimes a few days, sometimes a few years, and sometimes a few centuries); or that the story is all about River and learning more about her, which is ok, but she’s not interesting enough to have as many episodes based on her as she does, which is only more evident as a few of her episodes don’t actually serve any purpose or make any plot progress.
Once they’re out the way and Clara enters the fray, she gets very little development before the whole thing wraps up. She’s only in half of the final Matt Smith series and the final two episodes she gets no character development. Sure, she continues as companion for Peter Capaldi, but I feel like her storyline could have been introduced much sooner to allow for a bigger reveal once the pieces fall into place, and that would have cut out some of the nonsense the series wastes time on during this era.
Speaking of the companions I love all of them during this era. Amy & Rory are incredible and probably my favourite companions so far. Both character are given so much depth, and Gillan & Darvill provide fantastic performances for their respective characters. River is definitely an interesting character, and she’s still got more story to come, but I don’t think she’s as interesting as the writers wanted her to be. Kingston does a fantastic job in the role, but the character is one I find I just don’t care all that much about. As for Clara, I feel like Coleman has done a good job so far, but it’s too early yet to tell what I truly think about her. Hopefully Capaldi’s era will give her more purpose.
So, there we have it. I finished Matt Smith’s era of Doctor Who. I’m in entirely new territory now and looking forward to see what is to come. But for anyone yet to watch Smith’s era, just be aware that the quality is extremely mixed. Overall, it’s disappointing really, and it all comes down to the fact that the writing was rubbish! Had Moffatt been a better showrunner, and had the writing been stronger then I feel like this era could have easily blown Tennant’s out of the water. But unfortunately as is the case for a show that’s been running for fifty years, sometimes things are going to go through rough patches, here’s hoping the show recovers from it, took what worked, and moves from strength to strength.
So, there we have it. I finished Matt Smith’s era of Doctor Who. I’m in entirely new territory now and looking forward to see what is to come. But for anyone yet to watch Smith’s era, just be aware that the quality is extremely mixed. Overall, it’s disappointing really, and it all comes down to the fact that the writing was rubbish! Had Moffatt been a better showrunner, and had the writing been stronger then I feel like this era could have easily blown Tennant’s out of the water. But unfortunately as is the case for a show that’s been running for fifty years, sometimes things are going to go through rough patches, here’s hoping the show recovers from it, took what worked, and moves from strength to strength.