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Original Transmission Date 3rd Apr 2010
Cast The Doctor Matt Smith
Crew Written by Steven Moffat
Electricians Ben Griffiths Steve Slocombe
Bob Milton Alan Tippets
The episode picks up from the ending of The End of Time. The Doctor has just regenerated and is crashing back towards Earth. After narrowly avoiding a collision with Big Ben, the badly-damaged TARDIS crash lands in the back garden of the young Amelia Pond in the small village of Leadworth. Amelia takes him inside and helps him satisfy his strange food cravings before taking him upstairs to show him the crack in her bedroom wall. The Doctor discovers it is not just a crack in a wall, but a crack in time and space itself, and on the other side is a prison run by the Atraxi. The Atraxi deliver a warning to the two: “Prisoner Zero has escaped”, but before the Doctor can help further he is interrupted by the TARDIS’s Cloister Bell: if not stabilised the engines will incinerate. The Doctor needs to pilot the TARDIS into the future to stop the engines from phasing. He promises Amelia he will return in five minutes, and leaves. She packs and begins to wait for him.
The Doctor returns but discovers that, for Amelia, twelve years have passed. Amelia, or Amy as she is now known, is working as a kissogram and uses her policewoman outfit to ‘arrest’ the Doctor when he first returns to the house. He explains to her that the Prisoner Zero whom the Atraxi referred to has been living in Amy’s house by placing a perception filter on one of the rooms. Prisoner Zero - a serpent creature with the head of an anglerfish - takes on the form of a comatose patient, currently in the hospital where Amy’s boyfriend Rory Williams works, and chases the two out of the house after the Atraxi’s message from the beginning of the episode begins to play through every television, radio and electronic device in the world, adding that the "human residence" will be destroyed should Prisoner Zero not give itself up; the Doctor realises that they are referring to the entire planet. The Doctor deduces that they have twenty minutes before the Atraxi weapons power up and therefore only that amount of time to save the world, however he is unable to access the TARDIS while it is rebuilding itself and the Sonic Screwdriver is destroyed when he uses it to try and attract the Atraxi. He also discovers that Amy has been creating dolls and drawing pictures of him since his crash twelve years ago. Armed with this knowledge, he uses a resident’s laptop and Rory’s phone to transmit a computer virus around the world that sets all clocks and electronic displays to the number zero, therefore notifying the Atraxi of Prisoner Zero’s presence and allowing them to track it to Leadworth as the source of the virus. He explains to Amy and Rory that the "Multiform" or Prisoner Zero need a dormant host and can change into the shape of whatever the host dreams of. Therefore Prisoner Zero has eight disguises because of the eight comatose patients at the hospital. In a standoff in the coma ward of the hospital, the snakelike Prisoner attempts to steal Amy's dreams and memories to use as a disguise - manifesting as the Doctor and Amy's childhood self - but the Doctor prompts Amy to instead think of the undisguised Prisoner (which she saw earlier at the house); thus Prisoner Zero manifests as itself, and is recaptured.
Although the Atraxi are now leaving, the Doctor calls them back and dons his new outfit to have a meeting with them on the hospital's roof. He tells them that aliens have invaded before and to look up how they were defeated. The Atraxi discover who the Doctor is and promptly leave. The Doctor then returns to the TARDIS, which by this point has finished repairing itself. He leaves to perform test runs and again returns to Amy late, this time only two years. He shows Amy the regenerated TARDIS (complete with a new Sonic Screwdriver) and she agrees to travel with him on the condition he returns her to the next day. At the end, her wardrobe is shown to contain a white dress, implying that the next day is her wedding day.
One thing reaction to this episode proves is that you can’t please all the people all of the time. But frankly, I am fed up of watching Doctor Who episodes and worrying about what other people, especially the anal retentive sort who read the Telegraph and Independent, think about it. Personally, I enjoyed it from start to finish. The sight of The Doctor narrowly avoiding singing soprano after a near miss with the top of Big Ben made me laugh, and then I nearly cried at the sight of the new credits. They are beautiful. They are as different as the Third Doctor’s colour credits were to the old black and white ones, as different as the Fourth Doctor’s vortex credits were to those, and the 1980s style starfields were to those credits. And yet, they retained the essential element – the feeling of travelling somewhere beyond known reality to somewhere fantastic. The theme tune is at the same time classic and timeless and given a whole new working. There’s actually a choral voice in there at the end! The tune that began in the Radiophonic Workshop without a single real instrument anywhere near it now has a full orchestra and a choral singer. Talk about evolution. And The Doctor has evolved. I have liked the look of Matt Smith since January 3rd, 2009, when I missed the second half of a crucial FA Cup match between Preston North End and Liverpool in order to see him announced as the Eleventh Doctor. I can’t actually remember how the match went, now, but I do remember being pleasantly surprised by Piers Wenger and Steven Moffat’s choice. And everything I had seen since they started filming confirmed that it was right. Now, at last we got to see what he could do for real, and it was all I had hoped for. He made the part his own from the first moment.
I have to say, having been a parent, I wasn’t too thrilled by the food spitting scenes. Parents of impressionable viewers will not thank The Doctor for that example! And it was rather gross to look at. Heinz and HP must be thrilled to learn that ‘beans are evil’, too! But it was all part of The Doctor’s regeneration process. And at least he was on his feet this time. The Atraxi monster, a sort of serpent with long, thin, very white teeth, has been pointed to by a couple of critics as not being very good CGI. That was my first thought, too. Then I wondered if it was meant to be not quite there, something that belonged in another dimension. If that was the case, it wasn’t clear and the nit-pickers have pointed to it as an example of sloppy production values. I will have no word said about the Atraxi, though. They were fantastic. I couldn’t make my mind up if they were space ships or space entities, but their silver star shape with a huge eyeball in the centre was a stroke of genius. Science fiction has far too many humanoid aliens in it. Star Trek is the worst offender for that, but Doctor Who has been guilty over the years, too, of that lack of imagination. Of course, in the past, an actor had to get into a costume, so humanoid tended to be the default. But with CGI the only limitation ought to be imagination. And the Atraxi were wonderfully imagined.
Amy Pond is shaping up to be a great companion. She pushes The Doctor around and answers him back like Donna Noble and has a sassiness all of her own. As if she hadn’t proved herself already, the moment when she didn’t turn around when The Doctor was undressing was the clincher. Her expression of fascinated interest in the rear view of a naked Time Lord was pure brilliance. She’ll do very well. Somebody at church this morning commented about Matt, and about David Tennant’s Doctor, too, that he didn’t like the way he was always declaring ‘I AM The Doctor, I’m the boss, do as I say’. Well, all I could say was that he is entitled to his opinion. But I like The Doctor like that. I thought the final clinching moment that really made Matt’s Doctor work was when he confronted the Atraxi. Whatever they are, ship or entity, they are big and capable of boiling planets, but he met them, eye to eye – pun definitely intended – and made it clear that he had protected planet Earth from bigger and uglier things than them and would continue to do so.
As for the new look TARDIS, all I could think, apart from ‘wow’, was how much it was going to cost me to buy the new version Flight Control TARDIS, the new version money box TARDIS, to say nothing of the TARDIS Console Playset! It’s comparable to a premiership football team changing both its home and away strip in the same season and making people go out and buy the latest one! I know we don’t HAVE to, but we will! The new TARDIS is fantastic. I want to explore it. The only sad thing is that, to build that huge new set they must have dismantled the Torchwood set that used to be beside it! Another nail in the coffin of that series. Bring on episode two.
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