The Eleventh Hour vs. the Eighth 90 Minutes

I watched the new Doctor Who episode “The Eleventh Hour” last night.  Judging from other on-line reactions, I seem to be in a minority in that I didn’t enjoy it all that much.

Maybe it would’ve worked as a two-parter, but the trouble was, it was trying to do far too much in one hour: introduce Matt Smith’s new Doctor, introduce the new companion, introduce the new semi-regular supporting cast, introduce the new TARDIS interior, establish the rest of the new set-up for this season, and do a story about chasing an escaped alien villain that can take the form of an unconvincing CGI snake.

Now normally I have a soft spot for Dr Who stories whose only failing is that they accidentally try to squeeze in far too many potentially good ideas to do any of them justice.  I’m more willing to forgive these types of stories than those with hardly any ideas but lots of padding, which tend to be more popular among mainstream DW fans.  After all, I'm the only person who’s willing to say a good word about “Fear Her”!

So why didn’t I like this one?

Possibly because it was practically a remake of an earlier Dr Who story.  Paul McGann’s only televised episode as the Eighth Doctor struggled to introduce the new Doctor, introduce the new companion, introduce the new potential semi-regular supporting cast, introduce the new TARDIS interior, establish the rest of the new set-up for his potential future series, and do a story about chasing an escaped alien villain that can take the form of an unconvincing CGI snake.  Both stories even had scenes where the Doctor gets his new costume from a hospital locker.  Coincidence?  Unlikely!

Now, although I've got a soft spot for it, the Paul McGann episode is a bit of a mess.  In fact it's one big mess.  It tries to do too many things in just 90 minutes and never manages to do any of them properly.  So why did Stephen Moffat think it would be a good idea to try squeezing it even further down to just one hour?  It’s hard to forgive him for trying something that he should’ve known would never work.

If that wasn’t bad enough, “The Eleventh Hour” dumbs down the previous episode.  Paul McGann’s new companion was a medical doctor; Matt Smith’s is a stripogram.  Can’t have the viewers identifying with a moderately intelligent human character, can we?  And while McGann’s big action sequence  was a chase scene that fitted neatly into the plot, the sequence of Smith clinging to the flying TARDIS was just random and didn’t serve any purpose at all.  And at least McGann didn’t spend 10 minutes of trying on different shoes for comedy effect before finally finding the ones that fit perfectly.

OTOH if I'd never heard of McGann’s brief stint in DW, then maybe I'd see “The Eleventh Hour” as just a well-meaning attempt to do an episode that just happened to pack in too much stuff.
 
So, maybe the real problem is with me.  In many ways, I’m more of a Dr Who historian than a normal fan.  Perhaps it’s even time for me to quit watching new DW episodes altogether.  After all, I’m not exactly their target audience.