DAVID GOLDING | Matt Smith’s first exciting year as the Doctor repays re-watching.
You are here: Home » Entertainment » TV and Radio » Doctor Who » Review
Doctor Who: The Complete Fifth Series
David Golding
1 December, 2010
The first exciting year of adventures for the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond. Photo: BBC
Reviewer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Reader rating: 5 out of 5 stars (23 votes)
| Genre | Sci-fi |
| Running time | 876 min |
| Actors | Matt Smith, Karen Gillan |
| Production Company | BBC |
| OFLC rating | PG |
| Language | English |
| DVD Release | December 2, 2010 |
Available on both DVD and Blu-ray, the six disc box set of this year’s Doctor Who contains all thirteen episodes starring Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan as companion Amy Pond. From ‘The Eleventh Hour’ to ‘The Big Bang’, it delivers one thrill after another. Yet appropriately for a show about time travel, it also rewards more thoughtful consideration: you will find yourself going back and forth and re-watching segments to search for clues — or simply to see if the season-long story arc holds together.
The adventure starts with the newly regenerated Doctor crashing his burning time machine into the back yard of the young girl who will grow up to become Amy. This at first seems like the latest random event in the time traveller’s haphazard life, but a mysterious pattern soon becomes apparent.
It is in this pattern that we see the signature of new executive producer Steven Moffat. Instead of the cacophony of images and last minute climaxes favoured by his predecessor, Moffat allows many of his weekly stories to end five minutes or more before their running time is up, giving room for his larger ambitions to work — and effectively having his cake and eating it too, as he builds an engaging ongoing storyline without alienating viewers who want something new and self-contained with each episode, whether that is Daleks or vampires.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise then that, with all the universe-threatening danger, two small-scale stories are the best of the season. ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ was written by Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funderal, Love Actually) and features the Doctor meeting Vincent van Gogh. When the alien menace is dispatched early, the story becomes a moving meditation on mental illness and the moments that make any life worth living. Meanwhile ‘The Lodger’ is a funny, sweet domestic romcom featuring comic actor James Corden (Gavin and Stacey).
Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond. Image: BBC
But the real star of the show continues to be the real star of the show, Matt Smith. His turn as the Doctor is genuinely alien, a real thousand-year-old presence in a young man’s sometimes goofy body. When he says, of a plan that could kill van Gogh and rewrite history, ‘This is risky’, he imbues the words with a weight that shatters the illusion that this is just a small screen entertainment.
The box set also includes teasers, trailers, this year’s episodes of the behind-the-scenes Doctor Who Confidential, and a six page booklet. A special treat for fans are “in-vision commentaries”, which are episode commentaries where the video of the speakers is featured picture-in-picture within the episode on which they are commenting.
The box set could make a great Christmas present — giving the dedicated fan just enough time to watch the series once more before the ABC fast-track this year’s Christmas special to air on Boxing Day.
Doctor Who: The Complete Fifth Series is available on DVD and Blu-ray distributed by the ABC from December 2, 2010.
