Out with the old and in with the new…well, new from 2010’s perspective anyway. It’s needless to say that Matt Smith had a monumental task ahead of him having to follow David Tennant as The Doctor, who was easily the most beloved actor to ever play the role. Smith’s time as The Doctor as a whole was quite interesting because the type of personality he portrays in series 5 is distinctly different from the rest of his series, but that’s something I’ll discuss as we get to them.
Series 5 was the first chance the show had gotten at a completely fresh start since 2005, with a new Doctor, new companion, new head writer and many new people filling major roles behind the scenes as well. it was time for a completely different style of writing and storytelling and, for series 5 at least, I’d say it was a success.
How much of a success? Well let’s take a look, shall we? As I rank every single episode from series 5.
10 – The Vampires of Venice
This episode ended up having a lot of elements to it that didn’t come together quite in the way I think the writers wanted it to, both from a single episode perspective and also a series-wide perspective.
Firstly, “Vampires, but aliens” is just a lazy premise. Of course, that doesn’t automatically make it bad (just look at what a thrill ride “Tooth and Claw” turned out to be) but the fact of it was that the idea of them being aliens didn’t add any extra layers to the story outside of allowing the writers to give them some more exotic technology, it felt more like a plot device than a story element. Not to mention the main plan of villains was a little bit goofy; “So we’re in Venice…I know, let’s flood it!” I mean, come on, try to think outside the box just a little.
The other main thread, which is more of a series-wide story, is Amy and Rory’s relationship. At this point in the series, it had become obvious that Rory was going to play more of a major role in the series than it first seemed, but it was also clear that Moffat wasn’t entirely sure where he wanted this particular thread to go. Probably down to the fact that he wasn’t sure how long the actors would be staying in the role for, there wasn’t a great deal of long-term planning when it came to telling the story of their relationship, so the conflict they go through in this episode feels like it’s rushing things a bit.
That said, I did like how the conflict was presented. Instead of making it a big melodramatic thing that takes up far too much of the time reserved for running away from monsters, it’s cleverly weaved into the rest of the plot as it goes along. The Doctor and Rory will have conversations about Amy while running away from the monsters which is great for making sure it doesn’t cloud too much of the episode’s story and adding a bit of levity into tense moments.
Ultimately, this isn’t necessarily a bad episode, but with a fairly weak villain and plot threads that seem odd compared to the direction they would eventually go in, this one ends up falling to the bottom of the pile as an episode I don’t particularly fancy rewatching.
9 – The Beast Below
This episode is brilliant at one thing but fairly mediocre at everything else.
What it’s brilliant at is allowing Amy (and by extension, the audience) to get a really good look into the new Doctor’s mindset when faced with tough situations. As great as The Eleventh Hour is (we’ll get to it), it never puts The Doctor on the back foot, he’s always in control of the situation and only suffers temporary roadblocks, so this episode makes sure to do the opposite and sticks The Doctor in a situation where he has no idea what’s going on and is faced with a horrible decision when he finally does figure it out.
Seeing any character at their lowest is always the best way to get a sense of who they truly are and that’s exactly what we see from The Doctor here, but because it’s mostly seen through Amy’s perspective, it means we also get a chance to see inside her head as she figures out exactly how The Doctor works and builds that unbreakable bond between the two of them that becomes so vital later down the line.
Unfortunately, that’s more or less the only thing I really like about the episode. There are plenty of versions of the “decent society with a horrible secret” story out there and this isn’t among the best. For one thing, we get straight up shown one of the main horrible things immediately, so it doesn’t create much of a mystery for the rest of the episode and it takes away a lot of the tension. Also, the elements of this society don’t make a great deal of sense. I can buy the idea that they take children who don’t achieve and put them to work, but the method seems incredibly stupid. So they ban them from taking the elevator? That just seems more inconvenient for everyone involved than anything else, they only get to kidnap them when they don’t do as they’re told anyway, it just seems so weird.
I’m also not a big fan of Liz 10’s character either. It reeks of trying-too-hard if you ask me. Yeah, we get it, she’s a queen who doesn’t act like a queen is supposed to, but the episode is insistent on continuously rubbing that fact in our face and I find her more of an irritant than an impactful character.
Like I said, there’s an absolutely masterful thread buried in this episode, which is why I ranked it so high, but unfortunately, it’s covered by a lot of stuff that I don’t particularly enjoy watching.
8 – Victory of the Daleks
This is perhaps the definition of a 50/50 episode. There’s so much like, but just as much to dislike.
Let’s address the elephant in the room first, The Paradigm Daleks. I’ve always thought the designs were a bit much, gaudy for the sake of gaudy if you will. If they weren’t immediately scrapped as an idea then I could’ve perhaps looked passed the visual design if they became much more interesting as a concept; the idea of Daleks with assigned roles is very intriguing to me. At the end of the day, these designs were immediately shouted down and any plans that may have existed for them were scrapped and they’ve existed as mere background scenery ever since and I can’t say I blame them, the golden Dalek design that had been used up until this point was just so perfect that a change was never going to go over well.
While we’re on the negatives, I’ve never really bought into the idea that Bracewell could be disarmed purely by proving he has human memories and emotions, especially since the Daleks aren’t supposed to even understand any emotions other than hate. It also takes the sting out of the fact that the Daleks outfoxed The Doctor because that should’ve been a big deal for him but immediately gets swept under the rug when Bracewell lives.
Onto the positives now, and straight away a massive thumbs up goes to making the Daleks seem actually intelligent and threatening again. It’s been far too long since we saw Daleks scheming and coming up with a plan outside “bring a massive army to murder everyone”. The way it subverts everything we know about the Daleks to see them acting like helpful robots and the reveal that it was all a ploy to trick The Doctor into identifying them as Daleks was an absolutely genius twist. Not to mention they do it again when they reveal Bracewell was a bomb, forcing The Doctor to stop his attack on the ship so that he can save the Earth instead. As much as that moment does get quickly brushed over, it’s still great when it happens.
I think the main reason this episode gets overlooked is that it ended up making no impact on the Daleks in any way since the only change was negatively received and was promptly never featured again. Innovating with the Daleks is a dangerous game, so much so that the only time I think it’s ever worked in Modern Who was in this year’s Resolution episode, but we’ll get to that later.
7 – The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood
There are many episodes of this show that I would say needed more time in order to fully flesh out their story, this is one of those rare cases where I actually think splitting this episode into two parts was a bit too much.
The pacing of this episode is a bit start-stop. The episode starts out with a very harsh sense of urgency and almost immediately after The Doctor & Co discover what’s going on, Amy gets kidnapped. This is an event that should’ve taken place towards the end of the second act in order to rev the action up towards the climax, but instead, we have to go through a whole bunch of different stages where the pace dies off completely, before suddenly putting the pedal to the metal again in order to give us a decent cliffhanger.
The second part has a great deal of padding to it as well, with people wandering around the Silurian base, getting captured, freeing themselves, getting captured again, escaping again and so on. There are some good elements in there, such as taking a look at what people will do when their family is at stake and how people snap under pressure. The problem with having it here is that we already saw it in the previous series with Midnight, which played that string MUCH better than it’s done here.
I think a huge chunk of the middle could’ve been cut out of this episode, most notably the section where the Silurian’s come to the surface and The Doctor captures one. The only real purpose it serves is to give information to the audience and that could’ve been done some other way when The Doctor got down into the Silurian’s base anyway. If this episode had been a bit more focused, then I think it could’ve been really fun, but it was unnecessarily made into a two-part story which greatly hindered its ability to tell the story it wanted to tell.
6 – The Lodger
I find this episode extremely weird to go back and look at because all of the elements in it are stuff I wouldn’t expect to like very much, but it ends up coming together quite nicely.
I’ve never been the biggest fan of James Corden as a comedian, he fits into much more of the American style of comedian which is a style I’m not overly fond of so I generally don’t find much of his stuff funny. That said, I think he did a great job in this episode and I really like Craig as a character. Being an episode that almost entirely focused on comedy, there was always going to be a handful of jokes that didn’t land, but for the most part, I always find myself laughing when watching this one back.
The way the dynamic evolves between The Doctor and Craig is very well done, although it perhaps goes a bit over the top with The Doctor being better than Craig at everything, I don’t think we needed to watch The Doctor slaughter everyone at football for example. Regardless, the way Craig responds to The Doctor unintentionally wrecking his life and the awkward, apprehensive way that Craig deals with it all is hilariously British.
Where the episode falls a bit flat is in its main mystery, because unlike most episodes where we get drip fed little hints and clues before the big reveal of what’s actually going on, but this episode doesn’t give us anything the whole way through until everything suddenly gets revealed right at the end and it all feels a bit underwhelming, not to mention it’s slightly odd that there’s just this bungalow in the middle of a street of terrace houses, but whatever.
This was an episode that decided it wanted to focus more on its characters than its plot and although that leaves a glaring weak point in the episode, it’s still a fun one to watch.
5 – Amy’s Choice
Amy’s relationships with both The Doctor and Rory were a constant theme during her time in the TARDIS and it eventually became a little bit of a crutch to lean on when it came to creating conflict between the trio, however, this episode was a great example of how that conflict looks when it’s done right.
It’s a classic example of how everything seems so much more dramatic and important when you show instead of tell. So many of these arguments lie on what *might* happen if Amy and Rory live their normal lives together and what *might* become of Amy if she spends too long travelling with The Doctor. Instead, this one drops us right in the middle of both of those potential futures in order to give us a better understanding of how giving one up would affect Amy emotionally.
The Dream Lord is also a great villain, being able to show The Doctor his darker sides without going down the route of lunacy and jealousy that a villain like The Mater gives us. Toby Jones put on a brilliant performance in this episode as being with almost deity-like control of the dream worlds and the way the character was written feels to me like an accurate representation of what The Doctor would be like if he decided to turn to a life of villainy.
While it’s true that both of the worlds the trio were forced to chose between being dreams did retroactively take a lot of the tension out of the episode, the emotional impact and decisions the characters had to make were still very real and that’s what has a lasting impact on them going forward.
Not only did this episode give us a compelling take on Amy’s inner conflict, but it did it through the medium of an intriguing mystery and wonderfully performed & written villain. Very nice indeed.
4 – The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone
Many fans of modern Doctor Who would be quick to tell you that Blink is the only good story that features the Weeping Angels, those people are wrong because this one is brilliant.
Part 1 has mastery over its sense of tension and mystery. Not only do we get the second-ever appearance of River Song, leading us to revisit all of the mystery surrounding her and then we start to dive into an expanded knowledge of the Angels’ powers. The scene early on in the episode where Amy has a close encounter with an image of an Angel that became an Angel – which incidentally, is a brilliant idea – served to ramp up the tension early on and helped to keep us on edge throughout the whole episode.
Having such a large group of people investigating the ruins with The Doctor could’ve been a recipe for disaster, but they’re very quickly killed off one-by-one in off-screen attacks, keeping all of that tension boiling over nicely until the conclusion. The mystery of the first part is brilliantly written because all of the elements we need to solve it are right there from the beginning; we’re told very expressly that the Aplans had two heads and we can clearly see that the statues only have one, but it stares us in the face so obviously that we just can’t see it until The Doctor joins the dots, leading to a rather epic – if a bit cheesy – cliffhanger
The second part of the story moves away from the mystery and instead focuses in on the action. You wouldn’t think there’d be many exciting ways to have a chase scene when the creatures doing the chasing are statues, but this episode manages it and the first half of the episode is very exciting as the crew make their way through the Byzantium. When things slow down again, we get a real look into the mystery box for Series 5 with the crack in the skin of the universe, doing something we never saw during Davies’ era and getting an understanding of exactly what this treat is and what it means before we fully address it in the series finale.
The episode isn’t flawless though. While I’ll admit that the sequence where Amy has to blindly make her way through the forest, with the angels potentially attacking any moment was very tense to watch, when you think about it for any more than a few seconds, you realise that it makes absolutely no sense. I thought the whole point of the angels was that it was physically impossible for them to move when someone was looking, but this concept makes it seem like they don’t actually know when someone’s looking, so they actually could move if they really wanted to? I know The Doctor said the angels were scared, so their instincts would be off, but that doesn’t quite feel like enough to satisfy the problems I have with it.
Ultimately, that is a rather minor complaint when compared to the rest of the episode though, because as a whole this story manages to have a dose of everything that makes Doctor Who exciting. There is a well-written mystery, exciting action and an iconic villain, alongside a little bit of timey-wimeyness to whet our appetites for the season finale. As a sequel to Blink, I think it does a great job of expanding on the lore of the Weeping Angels and shows the full potential how truely exciting they can be when written properly.
3 – Vincent and The Doctor
Quite simply, this is the kind of episode that every “historical figure” episode should aspire to be.
In previous episodes like this, the episode spends so much time with The Doctor fawning over whoever it is they happen to meet, and there is an aspect of that here, but it’s in a very different way. Van Gogh in this episode is written as a character first and Vincent Van Gogh second, which is exactly how these episodes should be done, because it’s all well and good spending time with a famous person, but why should I care about anything that happens to them if I don’t get a good sense of their character.
This episode has a nice helping of mystery to it, with an invisible monster that made for some weird action scenes and was a clever way to save on the CGI budget, but it’s mostly there as a tool to help tell Van Gogh’s story. There are the more obvious parallels of Van Gogh being able to see things that no-one else can, but more than that there’s the sense of him being an outcast from society and feeling like he just doesn’t understand how he fits into the world around him.
All of this leads to the touching ending to the episode, where The Doctor brings Van Gogh to the modern-day, in order to see his paintings, the things he – and everyone from his time period – thinks are utterly worthless, being adored by hundreds, if not thousands of people, as an art expert explains what a brilliant genius he thinks Van Gogh was, showing him how truely appreciated he will become. Only to rip it away from you with the reveal that despite this, he never overcame his demons, but it still doesn’t feel like heartbreak, as The Doctor’s speech reassures us that, just giving him that moment of knowing how loved he will become was enough to change his life in a deep, but unobservable way.
This is an episode that doesn’t rely on the historical figure to carry the episode, but instead tailor-makes the entire episode for that historical figure. It gives us an honest look into the mind of Van-Gogh and takes us on an emotional journey that gives us a slightly bittersweet but still ultimately happy ending.
2 – The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
While it’s true that I do love a series finale that focuses in on the characters and their internal conflicts, sometimes a massive scale thrill-ride to decide the fate of the universe can be just as fun to watch.
The first part of this story is absolutely one of my favourite episodes of modern Doctor Who ever. The way it sets up its mystery is marvellous, quickly and concisely showing us how Van Gogh’s painting came to be in River’s possession, while simultaneously giving us a whirlwind tour of some of the places The Doctor has been throughout the series. The rest of the episode is a tense walkthrough of what the Pandorica is and what could possibly be inside of it.
Although there’s very little in the way of action, there are enough big moments sprinkled throughout to make things extremely exciting as each little bit of the mystery unravels; including one of the best speeches The Doctor has ever given, as he gets all of the armies above his head to argue to each other (even if it turns out that was never the case by the end). The speed at which we get new mysteries, while ongoing ones get answers are paced almost to perfection, as we get little pieces of information bit by bit, keeping just one step ahead of us so that we don’t quite work out what’s going on until it’s time for the reveal. A reveal which gives us an absolutely amazing cliffhanger, by the way.
The Big Bang shifts the focus of the episode from solving the mystery, to fixing the problem. As an episode, it’s much faster and louder, keeping us on the edge of our seat with lots of chase scenes and a healthy dash of comedy. The only time the episode would ever stop to breathe is when it had a big moment or reveal to give us, like The Doctor appearing from the future and “dying” in front of everyone or that really cool moment where River stopped fucking around and straight-up murdered the Dalek.
Normally, I’d call something like “rebooting the universe” a pretty rubbish way of solving everything, but the elements where set up so well throughout both this story and the series as a whole that I think it works really well. The solid character moments come in towards the end of the episode and it ties everything up in a neat little bow, tying in that really confusing scene from Flesh and Stone and cleverly implanting the memory in Amy’s head of how to bring The Doctor back (although I’m not sure how River knew she needed to give Amy the diary).
This story consists of two very different styles of episodes that are both brilliant in their own way – one a slow & tense mystery, the other and fast & frantic action-adventure – but both fulfilled their purpose almost perfectly and created a series finale that not only tied together the main mysteries from the current series but set up some new mysteries for the next.
1 – The Eleventh Hour
Easily the best introduction to a new Doctor we’ve ever had.
While The Christmas Invasion before this did a great job of establishing the new Doctor, it suffered somewhat from being rather lite on The Doctor himself, spending most of the episode in a post-regeneration daze. The Eleventh Hour had that task, only bigger, because not only was this the first episode in 4 years not to feature the beloved David Tennant, but they also had to introduce a brand-new companion to boot.
The episode manages to get everything you could possibly want from such an episode. Giving us the comedy of The Doctor being a bit loopy post-regeneration, but keeping it confined to Act 1 so once the episode really kicks into gear, we can just watch The Doctor be The Doctor and get a real good sense of who this new incarnation really is. It also does a great job with the new companion, introducing us to young Amelia Pond and seeing The Doctor bond with her, only for the rug to be taken out from under us as The Doctor overshoots his timing and re-encounters a fully-grown Amy instead.
As the episode pans out, we get to see these two characters build on that bond with young Amelia, with a character who feels very different, but is still clearly the same person; a lot of credit has to go to both actresses for pulling that off. We don’t have to go through that period of Amy not believing a word The Doctor’s saying because she already went through it as a child, instead, it’s more about Amy learning to trust The Doctor, after he abandoned her and cursed her to a life of seeing therapists because everyone else was convinced he wasn’t real.
While the main threat in this episode – both Prisoner Zero & The Atraxi – isn’t anything special, it’s exactly what it needs to be, because it puts an extreme amount of pressure on The Doctor to solve the problem in a very limited amount of time, which is arguably when The Doctor as a character is at his most awe-inspiring, thus bringing out the best performance in the person playing him. If anything it was actually quite a huge risk to have such a huge task in Matt Smith’s very first episode, it was a real sink or swim moment.
Thankfully, Matt Smith absolutely nailed every moment of it. Later on in his run, I had a lot of problems with this incarnation of The Doctor, but in this episode (and in fact, this whole series) those problems are virtually non-existent. Even watching this as a 10-year-old, I instantly fell in love with Smith as The Doctor and accepted him as a worthy successor to Tennant’s throne, culminating in that epic moment where Smith stepped through the image of his predecessors and declaring that he is The Doctor, a statement I absolutely believed.
This was an episode that managed to perfectly establish a new Doctor, Companion and Head Writer all in one, while still managing to be an exciting adventure that kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time.
So there you have it! Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, please let me know what you thought of this series of Doctor Who, either in the comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo. Finally, make sure you come back this time next week, where I’ll be running down my favourite music from the Pokemon franchise!
The Strong Style Smark 