Series 5, the first overseen by Steven Moffat, is a true classic reinventing the show for a new decade.
The Review
Here’s the scores for the stories
Vincent and the Doctor: 10/10
The Time of Angels/Flesh and Blood: 10/10
The Pandorica Opens/the Big Bang: 10/10
The Eleventh Hour: 10/10
Amy’s Choice: 8.5/10
The Beast Below: 8.5/10
The Lodger: 8/10
The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood: 8/10
Victory of the Daleks: 8/10
The Vampires of Venice: 7.95/10
Series 5 has four perfect stories, which I think is a record that will stand the test of time. Matt Smith arrives as the Doctor and is at once both the most absurd and silliest Doctor, but one of the most alien and unusual takes on the character. Personally Eleven is not one of my favorite Doctors, but he is used perfectly in this season as the insane genius best friend. Karen Gillan, who unsurprisingly is breaking out as a major movie star, is fierce and flirty, an excellent combination that makes her one of the most entertaining companions. Her suffering boyfriend Rory is one of the kindest most dedicated people in show history, and the whole trio is pitched together perfectly. With a storyline perfectly wrapping up with clues draped along the way, Series 5 is a classic.
Story 212, Episode 768-769, Series 5 Episodes 12-13
Doctor: The Eleventh Doctor
Companions: River Song, Amy Pond, Rory Williams
Never has Doctor Who burst with so much possibility and excitement as in the best season finale in show history, an epic adventure that narratively wraps up Series 5 and leaves tantalizing questions unresolved.
The Review
One of the most sensational speeches in show history
The ‘season finale’ of new Doctor Who is a funny thing. Usually (hopefully) there is some arc going throughout the season, be it as simple as the name ‘Bad Wolf’, or random appearances of Missy. Never before though has every episode in a season felt as completely essential as in Series 5. Everything is paid off. From the start we see Van Gogh, then Churchill, then Liz X. From there the Doctor joins River at Stonehenge in year 102, as the Pandorica, a box containing supposedly the worst monster in the universe is opening. All of the Doctor’s enemies descend on England, but the Doctor (seemingly) tells them all off with just a speech warning them about all the times he’s beaten them before…and wouldn’t they want to see someone else try first? Meanwhile, Rory is back, as a Roman centurion, but Amy doesn’t remember him. It seriously a thrill to see Rory again, and the Doctor not clocking that Rory shouldn’t be here for a full minute is great.
The assemblage of monsters
It all quickly goes wrong. River gets in the TARDIS which takes her to 2010 where she sees an alien broke into Amy’s house, and the whole Stonehenge scenario is dreamed from her mind. Rory, and all the Romans, are Autons, and the enemies were actually here to trap the Doctor in the Pandorica to try and prevent the TARDIS from blowing up the universe. River fails to stop the TARDIS blowing up, the Doctor is imprisoned, Amy remembers Rory just in time for his Auton conditioning to take over and kill her as every star explodes at once leaving only Earth. When we return it’s with young Amelia in 1996 who still imagines stars even though they’ve all gone out. She gets a message to visit the Pandorica in the National Museum, and inside is…herself from the future. The tiny glimpses we get of the 1850 years of Earth without stars are quite fun.
The Last Centurion gets the girl
The Doctor escapes by his future self returning to give Rory his sonic screwdriver. Is it a cheap cop-out? Yeah it kind of is, but it’s done so stylishly we don’t mind. He takes young Amelia’s drink early in her wait at the museum and she later says she’s thirsty so the Doctor goes back and returns her that same drink. It’s Moffat time travel genius at its absolute best. The exploding TARDIS has served as Earth’s sun, and River was stuck within it so the Doctor busts her out. After some shenanigans with him getting nearly killed by a stone Dalek’s gun, the plan becomes clear. The Doctor can ride the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS, which will explode its restoring light across the universe, sealing up the cracks in time. Oh, and I didn’t even mention Rory staying behind those 1850 years to guard the Pandorica, waiting for the Doctor and Amy. The Lone Centurion. It’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done on this show.
Amy wills the Doctor back to life
The Doctor then winds back through the history of Series 5, showing us The Lodger, and then we get the famous scene where the future Doctor tells Amy to trust him in Flesh and Stone. Finally, we’re back at the beginning, with young Amelia having fallen asleep waiting for the Doctor to return in her house. That house turns out to be the key to Amy’s tragedy: why no ducks in the duck pond, where are her parents, why does she live alone in that big house? Because the crack in the wall took them. Now, she’ll have her family, and not need the Doctor. So it goes. Amy and Rory get married, and Amy is overjoyed to meet her parents. With one last little push by River, she remembers the Doctor, and angrily wills him back into existence. Still, what does ‘Silence Will Fall’ mean? Who blew up the TARDIS? Who is River really? Series 5 ties every last episode (yes even Vampires of Venice) into one perfect arc showing how Amy discovered herself and the universe. It’s ambitious, manic, genius, and the show has never felt bigger.
It’s ambitious, incredible, and rip-roaring entertaining. It’s no secret why this season kickstarted the show into an international phenomenon. No finale before or sense has felt quite as satisfying, and left quite as much tantalizingly to explore.
10/10 A true epic of restarting the universe
More River to come. (And the fez was always stupid, the wife is always right)
The Lodger goes for comedy, and I find it not nearly as funny as I did eight years ago.
The Review
The Doctor rules at soccer
Comedy is a funny thing. I remember this story being hilarious, and really enjoyed it in 2013. Watching it today, I thought it was just fine. Sometimes I can’t believe the scores I give stories, like a 8.9 to The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, the most disposable series finale in the new series? A terrible grade to Last Christmas, which foretold the heights of Series 9? The Lodger is a fun story, and gets a lot of mileage out of how supremely weird and alien the Eleventh Doctor is. With Tennant’s charming Tenth Doctor, it’s a very different story. I am starting to tire of Matt Smith’s quirkiness watching this many of his stories in a row, it can get old. I am liking Amy Pond better than I remembered, I loved her sass and attitude toward the Doctor a lot. At the end she finds Rory’s engagement ring, and remembers something.
The TARDIS wannabe on the roof
This story is really about James Corden’s Craig, and maybe it was a lot funnier when I didn’t know James Corden was. His celebrity has probably hurt this story from being as good as it could’ve been. The Doctor comes in and basically ruins his life, showing him up at a football match, telling his crush Sophie to pursue her dreams, even besting him at his call center job. In the end, it’s a love story as the Doctor gets Craig and Sophie to finally realize, duh, they love each other to defeat the evil malfunctioning alien spaceship on the roof. It’s a pretty disposable story, and I am sad to say I did not find it nearly as funny as I remembered. Makes me very worried for Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. That is the danger with the funny episodes: sometimes things just aren’t as funny anymore.
Comedy holds up worse than drama, and sadly for me, this didn’t really hold up. I don’t feel too melancholy right now, but who knows?
8/10 It was very funny once, and thus it still gets an 8.
The greatest historical of all time has the Doctor and Amy, truly, make a difference.
The Review
The Krafayis
There isn’t another story quite like Vincent and the Doctor, one of the most remarkable in all of Doctor Who. Generally the best Doctor Who stories are sci-fi bonanzas but in this story all the Doctor does is meet Van Gogh. We’ve had celebrity historicals before, and none have been knock-outs because there’s only so little you can do with a known historical character. We already know what their character arc has to be. The genius in this episode is breaking the mold. There is an enemy, the giant invisible chicken known as the Krafayis, which is relatively incidental to the story, just there to provide conflict. It being invisible means we don’t have to see it’s dodgy CGI much, and does provide some pathos when he learn its rampage of terror is because it is blind and scared.
The night to Van Gogh
Of course, Van Gogh can see it, because he can see what others can’t. He’s not just a famous person, he is truly different and special in ways we can’t image. Tony Curran is the spitting image of Van Gogh, a performance so incredible you genuinely believe it’s the man himself. He is mercurial, difficult, believes his art is awful, but keeps trying because he knows he sees things others can’t. The set design is astonishing, re-creating a cafe from his paintings, and the genuine shock of seeing his bedroom perfectly recreated. He’s not a perfect man (and tries to convince Amy to have lots of kids together), but you can tell that he is special. So special, there’s no doubt about what the Doctor and Amy must show him.
Vincent sees his art
The story started seeing Van Gogh’s paintings on display in Paris, and so Van Gogh himself is brought there. His whole life he’s been a failure, and thought his art was terrible. Seeing him burst into tears seeing people admiring his art, and especially as Bill Nighy’s pitch-perfect Mr. Black describes Van Gogh as one of the greatest men who ever lived. It’s incredibly powerful, and emotional. The true ending ends up being even more so. Van Gogh is returned home and vows to be a new man, and Amy takes the Doctor back to the gallery convinced he wouldn’t kill himself now. He still did. Even knowing that he wasn’t a failure, Van Gogh’s demons were still too much. It’s a heartbreaking, bold ending, as the Doctor assures Amy that if they made his life just a little bit better, it was worth all the while. And on his painting of sunflowers, it’s dedicated ‘to Amy’.
Maybe the most emotional story of all time, Vincent and the Doctor is the definitive celebrity historical, a true masterpiece.
10/10 This has to be the best Eleventh Doctor story. Incredible
I think Van Gogh is more remarkable than the Doctor any day
Story 209, Episodes 764-765, Series 5 Episodes 8-9
Doctor: The Eleventh Doctor
Companions: Amy Pond, Rory Williams
Chris Chibnall’s first two-parter is a pretty straightforward Doctor Who story that still cannot resolve the Silurian dilemma.
The Review
Amy is ‘dressed for Rio’, which is a cheap excuse to show off Karen Gillan’s legs
Bringing back the Silurians makes perfect sense, with them being one of the most unresolvable moral dilemmas in Doctor Who. Unfortunately, a whole lot of ‘not very much’ happens in this story. The first episode deals with a family living near a massive drill in Wales that has dug twenty-one kilometers underground (which is insanely deep) and now something from underground is coming to the surface. Amy is sucked into the earth early on, leaving the Doctor and Rory to work with the area’s humans to try and defend themselves. The most important are Nia Roberts as Ambrose, a mother who keeps getting her family taken away and Meera Syal as Nasreen, an intelligent scientist who low-key would make a great companion. It’ll pretty straightforward stuff, but it’s fun and the reveal of the Silurian redesign is well done. The Doctor and Nasreen go underground leaving Rory to ensure the other two humans on the surface don’t kill their Silurian hostage so they can do an exchange.
It’s not surprising the Silurian design was polarizing at the time, but I think it has aged excellently
In the second part, everything goes wrong as Ambrose kills the Silurian captive, and her sister Restac is intent on exterminating humanity. For some reason all the female Silurians are shown as warlike and the men as more reasonable, don’t exactly know what commentary Chibnall was aiming for there. Malohkeh, the Silurian scientist, goes from live dissecting humans to turning out to be a cool guy while the elder Eldane is surprisingly agreeable. As everything predictably falls apart, the solution is to try again in a thousand years. There’s a good bit of action in the episode, but there isn’t really any resolution other than Eldane’s voiceovers seemingly confirming in 3020 a deal is reached with the Silurians. Did I mention the episode is set in 2020? That aged poorly.
The death of Rory Williams
The other plot thread of the story is weaved in lightly, and then comes to an explosive conclusion at the end of Cold Blood. Amy and Rory see themselves from the future waving to them at the beginning of the story, and Rory has Amy take her engagement ring off as he’s worried she’ll lose it. Rory gets his most development so far, and we see that he’s just a genuinely kind person who is seriously in love with Amy. At the end of the story the Doctor sees the crack in space-time again, and pauses to pull something out (gasp, a part of the TARDIS). Resnak comes to kill the Doctor in revenge but Rory takes the hit, thinking he couldn’t die because he saw himself in the future. Amy bursts into tears, and then even worse, he’s erased from history completely leaving her none the wiser that she even ever had a fiancé. Amy waves back to her future self, now alone at the end of the story, with a genuinely depressed Doctor watching on. It’s an emotional ending that elevates the average story.
Like a lot of Chibnall scripts, the ideas are good, and then the story happens. Points for daringly killing off Rory.
8/10 Series 5 hasn’t had any clunkers, but yet again a pretty average story. You also don’t have to play ‘I am the Doctor’ in the climax of every story Murray Gold.
Amy is forced to choose between her fiancé and her fairytale boyfriend in a darkly fairytale story.
The Review
The Dream Lord
We’ve only just met Rory really, and already we are at the point where Amy has to choose him or the Doctor. This story is listed by many as one of the best, it’s not near there for me but I appreciate how unique it is. The ‘Dream Lord’ played by Toby Jones has trapped the Doctor and company in two worlds, one a dream, one real. In one the TARDIS is drifting told a super cold star, in the other Amy is pregnant and lives in boring rural bliss with Rory. The TARDIS scene being ‘normal’ doesn’t quite mesh with ‘upper’ Leadworth being a representation of Rory’s perfect life, a doctor, living in a small town with his gorgeous pregnant life. The Doctor’s world just being a freezing TARDIS doesn’t quite measure up metaphorically, but odes on the danger scale. The Dream Lord is a dark version of the Doctor, and Toby Jones does great as essentially the opposite of Matt Smith.
Amy and her boys
The future Leadworth provides most of the drama, including a suitably weird villain in a race of aliens living in old people. Seeing old people shambling around being deadly was pretty amusingly weird. It all hinges when Rory cuts off his ponytail, but then gets disintegrated. Amy decides she isn’t willing to live in a world with Rory, so her and the Doctor kill themselves. Of course, turns out both of the worlds were dreams, which the Doctor realizes as his inner self is behind it all. The Dream Lord being the Doctor’s dark consciousness doesn’t get as much play as it should, but it is about Amy. I just wish that future stories would’ve built off it more. All in all, a solid but unremarkable story for me.
Amy’s Choice is a great idea, but doesn’t quite stick the landing mainly because we just don’t know much about Amy and Rory’s relationship at this point.
8.15/10 Amy choosing Rory is genuinely heartwarming, so points for that. And Toby Jones’ performance of course.
This story turns out to be better than I remembered, mainly with Arthur Darvill crushing it in his first big episode as Rory.
The Review
Rory at his ‘stag party’
I couldn’t remember much about this story, but I ended up having a fair but of fun watching it. The Doctor wants to take Amy and Rory out on a date, and it starts with the hilarious comedy of the Doctor crashing Rory’s bachelor party and saying Amy is a great kisser. Amy is predictably all over the place in this episode, clearly still caring for Rory but put in a very awkward spot of her own making. Rory starts off by not being impressed by the TARDIS being bigger on the inside, and continues to show that although he is still awkward, he is willing to do whatever it takes to save Amy. Matt Smith is great in this episode too, I completely forgot how often he yelled at Amy and Rory in Series 5, and often needed saving from himself. Rory says the Doctor makes people around him dangerous, then gets called out as he volunteers to save the Doctor. Typical.
Creepy vampire stuff
It’s a pretty typical villain story here, it turns out it’s not actual vampires, it’s aliens that are very similar to vampires. The head vampire, Rosanna, is played by the late great Helen McCrory, and she is a suitably menacing villain. The plot is all pretty rote, villains making rain to flood the city so they can take over the world, refugees fleeing something the Doctor is responsible for indirectly (the Time War in the RTD era and now cracks in time). That’s all pretty standard. It’s a straightforward episode, but it works because of good performances from the cast and McCrory as the villain. The ending of ‘silence’ is nice and unnerving, and keeps up the series arc. Let’s roll on!
The Vampires of Venice might be the most average story ever. It gets in, it gets out, it does its job, its filmed on location, the only quibbles are it’s rather forgettable.
7.95/10 I’ll be harsh for once and deny this an 8 solely on its straightforward-ness.
Story 206, Episodes 760-761, Series 5 Episodes 4-5
Doctor: The Eleventh Doctor
Companions: River Song, Amy Pond
One of the best Doctor Who stories of all time brings back the Weeping Angels and River Song in a tense, dramatic, scary story.
The Review
Amy and the Doctor admiring River
It’s easy to forget the opening of this classic story. The Doctor and Amy are in a museum, and he finds an ancient box with ‘hello sweetie’ carved on it. Plugging it into the TARDIS, he sees a recording of River Song leaving the message and ejecting herself out into space and sure enough, one of the Doctors shows up to save her. River is just as fantastic in this story as her debut last series, and establishing that she’s not a professor plus her slightly less mature behavior emphasizes this is a younger version of the character. She’s nearly as capable as the Doctor, and also great at pushing his buttons. Amy has no trouble figuring out that she is the Doctor’s future wife, because River is just that great. She is here on release from prison with ‘the Church’ who are now soldiers led by Father Octavian, played by Iain Glen as the perfect straight man in the story. So, the episode’s supporting characters are great. Let’s get to the villains.
An army of Weeping Angels
Some people think the Weeping Angels are ruined in this story. Those people are wrong. They are even more terrifying, starting with ‘an image of angel is an angel’ with an angel lurching out of a tv recording toward Amy. Next, one of the best ‘oh shit’ moments in show history, as they realize despite the planet’s inhabitants having two heads…all the statues only have one. Then, an angel uses the voice of a dead soldier, Bob, to communicate, which is incredibly unsettling. The final bit of scariness comes when we learn Amy has an angel hidden in her mind itself, which she only keeps at bay by closing her eyes. The most controversial is the brief look at the angels moving, but it is built up so beautifully. I can’t think of another story in the new series that so expertly handles a monster with increasing terror. This is the gold standard of scary.
The Doctor is not used to this
Finally, the main cast. You’d never know this was the first story Matt Smith filmed as the Doctor because he knocks it out of the park. He looks super young, but has all the intelligence and fierceness you’d expect from the Doctor. It’s almost a knock on him that his performance never lived up to his first attempt. Amy is the emotional heart of the story, and tries to get the Doctor to let her die several times, but he won’t let her. After confessing about her wedding, we see a companion finally try and seduce the Doctor then and there. Steven Moffat regrets the scene, but I feel it is very in character for Amy and I love the Doctor’s horrified reactions (separates him from Tennant’s Doctor for sure). The bonus scene of Amy seeing all the previous women in the TARDIS is pretty funny. Still, it’s unfair to Rory, and we’ll get to that.
This story is a complete classic filled with tension throughout up to the finale where the Weeping Angels all fall through a crack in time. Might be in my top 5 of all time, I could watch this story again and again.
10/10 Truly a PERFECT story. Haven’t gotten there yet, but probably the best of the Matt Smith era.
The Eleventh Doctor sans coat in these suspenders is the perfect look
In maybe the most patriotic Doctor Who story of all time, a very good idea is marred by some weird decisions.
The Review
The new Daleks
Victory of the Daleks is a pretty infamous episode, and the reasons why shockingly have nothing to do with WWII era planes flying in deep space protected by ‘gravity bubbles’. The idea of the Daleks pretending to be humanity’s servants facing a brand new Doctor is straight out of The Power of the Daleks. I will say, the scene where the Doctor hits the Daleks with a giant wrench angrily yelling at them is some fantastic acting by Matt Smith. This idea is good and sound, so much so that Revolution of the Daleks eleven years later will basically do it again but in modern day dealing with the conversation about policing. Really the only way the Daleks are ill-served are by the just terrible new Dalek redesigns. Seeing rainbow colored Daleks is not at all threatening, it just looks dumb, and if you ignore the bright colors, the designs themselves aren’t even that good! So really we just come away thinking ‘…are we really going to have banana yellow Daleks?’
Winston Churchill…not the best guy
The other big misstep is Winston Churchill. I’m not one obsessed with cancelling historical figures, and the world at large owes him an immense debt for helping defeat fascism. Even more so, the idea of him having a long relationship with the Doctor (always trying to steal his TARDIS key!) is a quite fun difference from most celebrity historicals. Still though, Churchill was racist, and not a good role model. More frustratingly, this episode comes so close to hitting on the idea that ‘Churchill was so committed to defeating the Nazis he’d ally with other monsters like Stalin and even the Daleks’ to do so. I think him knowing exactly who the Daleks are and not caring would’ve been better. Still, the story is fun in its exceedingly silly way, and Amy getting the Dalek robot/bomb Bracewell to remember his long lost crush to remind him of his love and humanity was a sweet moment. The Smith/Gillan chemistry is already popping.
In another world, this story uses its great ideas to its advantage and produces something with depth. That is not this world.
8/10 Honestly? You could do worse. It’s a fun forty-five minutes and gives the Daleks something to do other than shouting EXTERMINATE constantly.
Really seemed like the Doctor was going to save this woman’s husband from getting killed in the war but nope!
The Beast Below turns out to be a rather underrated story, it isn’t perfect, but I actually think it’s a perfect future humanity story.
The Review
A ‘Smiler’
I think it is essentially impossible to accurately forecast humanity thousands of years down the line, so why not do some sci-fi social commentary? Bad Wolf did this to great effect with its deadly reality tv-shows. Here in The Beast Below we get…a police state enforced by weird ‘Smilers’, almost like fortune telling that have faces getting progressively angry. Upon reflection, it is a bit of a mess, but when the episode is going you don’t really notice it at all because of the excellent chemistry between Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. This is really Amy’s episode, and gives her a chance to shine as a companion. It is her compassion that allows her to piece together all the clues that the Star Whale loves children, and it is entirely unnecessary for the Brits to torture the thing: it wants to be here! Classic humanity, mucking it up.
Liz X, Queen of Britain
The idea that society can vote to either protest the fact that they have to torture a giant creature to survive, or just forget is a good one. It’s disheartening that the vast majority of people forget, and the rest just get eaten. Also, what is going on with children doing bad in school getting fed to the thing? It doesn’t even eat them. Okay, upon thinking about this episode, it kind of breaks down, but it’s seriously a fun watch and the idea of a giant city now encompassing all of Britain (well, not Scotland, but Northern Ireland apparently made it this far) is just fun. The metaphor that the Doctor and the Star Whale are the same is hit over our heads too much, but it’s still a fun watch. Sticking to underrated though, as this story expertly lays out a lot of tenets of the show for new watchers.
It doesn’t exactly work like you’d hope but the chemistry, energy, and pace are all there. It’s a fun story.
8.5/10 CGI is still noticeably dodgy. For some reason that rankles me a bit more than hilariously bad practical effects.
Reviewing Doctor Who from Start to Finish 