Who Reviews The Eleventh Hour by S.F. Cambridge

 

Staring Matt Smith as The Doctor & Karen Gillan as Amy Pond (Caitlin Blackwood as young Amelia Pond) 

The Doctor: “Can I have an apple? All I can think about is apples. I love apples. Maybe I’m having a craving. That’s new. Never had cravings before” (Takes a bite out of an apple and spits it on the floor) “That’s disgusting. What is that?”

Amelia: “An apple?”

The Doctor: “Apples are rubbish. I hate apples!”

Amelia: “You just said you liked them!” 

After the Tenth Doctor's regeneration and David Tennant’s dramatic exit from the show, the TARDIS suffers some major internal damage from the regenerative fallout and falls out of the time vortex and flies erratically all over the place, very nearly colliding with Big Ben in London, until it crash lands on its back in the garden of a house in Leadworth. The house belongs to a 7-year-old Amy Pond who lives with her aunt Sharon after she “loses” her parents and who at that precise moment was saying her prayers and asking Santa to help her with a rather disturbing crack in her wall. Seeing the TARDIS is actually a police box, she thanks Santa and runs outside to greet the policeman hoping he has come to help her. The Doctor who is now soaking wet and still wearing 10’s ragged torn clothes, climbs out of the swimming pool, which was in the library at the bottom of the TARDIS and drags himself out of the TARDIS looking dishevelled and disorientated because he is “Still Cooking” and after sitting with Amelia in her kitchen and trying out various foods he finds disgusting, he comes to the conclusion that fish fingers and custard is by far his favourite thing to eat. He then contemplates Amelia and after a discussion about her life, family and the crack in the wall concludes that it must be a pretty scary crack as she’s happy to sit with a strange man who fell out of the sky and eats fish custard in her kitchen rather than face what is going on upstairs. The Doctor eventually examines the crack closer and hears a voice on the other side of the wall transmitting the message, "Prisoner Zero has escaped” 

The Doctor uses his sonic to open the crack further and it is revealed that an alien prison lies on the other side with the guards taking on the appearance of a giant eyeball.  He then gets a message on his psychic paper which reads "Prisoner Zero has escaped." He then concludes that the prisoner must be in Amelia’s house somewhere but before he can help her, the Cloister Bell inside the TARDIS chimes signalling to him that there is a major problem and he runs off telling Amelia to wait for him and that he will be back in 5 minutes.

12 years later he returns to the house thinking he has only been gone 5 minutes and is greeted by a grown-up Amelia now calling herself Amy who hits him with a cricket bat when she thinks he’s an intruder. 

It turns out that the TARDIS was more damaged than the Doctor thought and it took him longer to stabilize her within the time vortex where there is no real concept of time. Things have changed a lot in 12 years. Amy is now a kissogram and she has a boyfriend called Rory who is a nurse at the local hospital. The Doctor finds out that as Amelia was growing up, she was referred to several doctors because she kept telling the story of her imaginary friend, the raggedy doctor and her aunt thought she was suffering some trauma from losing her parents. 

Upon meeting Rory, The Doctor finds out that there are several coma patients in his hospital who all seem to have fallen ill at the same time and the prisoner who had escaped 12 years ago was still on the run from an alien race known as The Atraxi. The prisoner was able to hide himself all those years by disguising himself as people within the town, the people who had been placed in a coma and when the Atraxi finally realised that prisoner zero was still on earth, they gave the doctor a 20-minute ultimatum. Prisoner Zero will vacate the human residence, or the human residence will be incinerated. Meaning they would incinerate the earth.

Knowing he doesn’t have long and even though he’s still recovering from his last regeneration, The Doctor hatches a plan using all the scientific boffins across the world with the help of Amy’s neighbour Jeff and his laptop, and sends them all a computer code for them to upload at exactly the right and same time, this would set all the clocks in Leadworth to zero, highlighting the prisoner to them. His plan works, Prisoner Zero has been recaptured but as it is taken away back to its prison, it tells the Doctor a secret. “Silence will fall”, leaving him confused as to its meaning. The Atraxi leave satisfied that they have finally caught their prisoner but the Doctor isn’t happy that they thought to invade the earth in the first place and calls them back. He tells them off for thinking they could just blow up earth and that they are too scan him and see who he really is. They do and all 10 of his regenerations appear on screen which is a nice kind of homage to all the past Doctors and to the fans themselves and the Atraxi run away. 

The Doctor: “C'mon, then! The Doctor will see you now!”

Atraxi: [after scanning The Doctor] “You are not of this world.”

The Doctor: “No but I've put a lot work into it.”

Atraxi: “Is this world important?”

The Doctor: “Important? What's that mean, important? Six billion people live here, is that important? Here's a better question: is this world a threat to the Atraxi? Oh, come on, you're monitoring the whole planet! Is this world a threat?”

Atraxi: [after looking at a montage of world events] “No.”

The Doctor: “Are the peoples of this world guilty of any crime by the laws of the Atraxi?”

Atraxi: [after viewing another montage about earth] “No.”

The Doctor: “Okay. One more, just one: is this world protected?”

[as the Atraxi views a montage of all the aliens who have attacked humanity in some way]

The Doctor: “You're not the first to have come here. Oh, there have been so many. And what you've got to ask is, what happened to them?”

[Atraxi looks at a montage of the past ten Doctors. The Doctor steps through the montage when the 10th Doctor is shown]

The Doctor: “Hello. I'm the Doctor. Basically. Run.” 

This is my favourite Matt Smith episode and a very brilliant introduction to the new 11th Doctor and of course his bow tie. What starts off as a man unsure of who he really is, still ends up as a man doing everything he can to protect the planet he loves. His new companions are Amy with Rory joining them at a later date and unknowingly at this point we have a lot of plot twists and emotional heartbreak coming our way, making the 11th Doctor one of the most successful Doctor Who storylines which I think goes a long way to soothing the uncertain thoughts most of us Whovians had when David Tennant announced he was leaving as to who could take on such a prevalent role. WHO, indeed!