Project: Magnus

Matt Smith as the Doc­tor. It still feels wrong. After so many years with David Ten­nant in the lead role and with all the build up to his depar­ture it's hard to imag­ine ever lik­ing another actor in the role again.

I was never wor­ried about Steven Mof­fat tak­ing over, after all he wrote some of the best episodes of the new Series (Blink, The Empty Child /​ The Doc­tor Dances,¬†Silence in the Library /​ For­est of the Dead), but how was this new actor going to fair? ¬†I admit I had some con­cerns when David took over from Christo­pher Eccel­ston but he quickly proved he was more than up to the task which would only serve to make Matt tak­ing over the reins that much harder.

So now with Rus­sell T. Davies gone, and David Ten­nant no longer the Doc­tor, there were some extremely large shows to fill.

Then I watched Eleventh Hour.

Let me get the bad out of the way right off the (cricket) bat. ¬†I HATE the new intro. ¬†Not so much the visu­als but the theme song has been changed so much as to be un-​​recoginizable. ¬†If I had closed my eyes it would have been hard to be sure I was watch­ing a Doc­tor Who intro.

And the behav­ior of the new Doc­tor at first was bor­der­line repul­sive. ¬†He was about as rude and insen­si­tive to a child as one can be with­out phys­i­cal con­tact. ¬†Call­ing her an idiot and insane, mak­ing her cook him food in the mid­dle of the night, and then spit­ting said food all around the room.

Seri­ously, lose the bowtie.

The 'Run.' com­ment could have been deliv­ered bet­ter. ¬†Almost no facial involve­ment in that what­so­ever. ¬†No menace.

Now the good. ¬†The new Doc­tor has a very play­ful per­son­al­ity. ¬†I absolutely loved when he meets Jeff for the first time and while talk­ing to him is bob­bing up and down on (what looks like) his toes. ¬†There is a moment just before that when he's exam­in­ing the speak­ers and radio in the ice cream truck and searches and touches and spins around. ¬†It's fun!

He's also very car­ing. ¬†This is evi­dent when he first mets Amelia and tells her every­thing is going to be fine. ¬†Then again when Amy tells him she doesn't believe him and he asked her to for 20 min­utes. ¬†You can see the con­cern all over his face.

He's clever. ¬†Granted it's the Doc­tor and he's super smart but how often have you seen him solve the 'Cri­sis of the Day'™ with­out either his TARDIS or his sonic screw­driver? ¬†And writ­ing a virus on a cell phone and using it to solve the cri­sis? ¬†Ingenious!

I'm torn on the new inte­rior of the TARDIS. ¬†One the one hand it's kind of cool, but on the other it looks like peo­ple ran out of ideas and just grabbed what­ever they could find and shoved it in. I imag­ine this is a nod to the older series, it feels like as he gets closer to 12 the more 'retro' the series seems.

It seems that each regen­er­a­tion in the new series has had prob­lems. ¬†Pos­si­bly because each trig­ger­ing event has been fairly vio­lent and involved a mas­sive amount of energy (the Time Vor­tex in Series 1 and the radi­a­tion at the end of Series 4). ¬†Or maybe as he reaches the end of his 12 regen­er­a­tion cycle it gets harder. ¬†Either way the first few minutes/​hours have been less than encour­ag­ing for each new ver­sion, only to work itself out by the end of the first or sec­ond episode.

Mean­ing I need to give this new incar­na­tion a while before a deci­sion is made on whether I like him or not.

So far how­ever, he's a great Doc­tor. ¬†So I guess I like him, but he's no David ;)

I'm start­ing to won­der if the 'death' of the Mas­ter at the end of Series 3 was planned. And by that I mean planned by the Mas­ter him­self. We know his wife is return­ing, and we know he was on Earth 18 months before the events of the series Drums, and we know the Doc­tor didn't met him before that. So what if the Mas­ter planned that if things went wrong (because they always do) he had an escape plan. He was killed. And fail­ing any­one else to do it, his wife would step in and take the shot. Per­haps he wasn't really dead but drugged or something.

It might be that his res­ur­rec­tion is a result of being brought back by the TimeLords dur­ing the Time War. There is so much we don't know about the TimeLord abil­ity to regen­er­ate that it is pos­si­ble that he is able to delay the regen­er­a­tion and when it does occur he is bet­ter able to con­trol it and keeps the same face but with some phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics dif­fer­ent. (blond hair).

Remem­ber, we never see who is actu­ally wrapped in the white cloth on the funeral pyre. We just assume it is the Master.

A stretch I know but it's the only thing that makes sense to me and accounts for all the odd variables.

I could also be way the frick off base and it's some­thing totally off the wall. ¬†Remem­ber, in Doc­tor Who, they have to be able to explain it, but it doesn't have to actu­ally make sense ;)