Steven Moffat, quoted in Gareth McLean, ‘The man with a monster of a job’, The Guardian, Media Guardian, 22 March 2010, p. 5. ↩

Steven Moffat, quoted in BBC press release, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/03_march/19/doctor_who2.shtml. ↩

McLean, ‘The man with a monster of a job’, p. 5. ↩

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The Doctor smashes through the mirror in The Girl in the Fireplace. Not, repeat NOT, to be confused with...<\/p><\/div>
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...Chuck Norris arriving to have words with a terrorist in The Delta Force<\/i>.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

The Eleventh Hour<\/em> even signposts connections, as the Doctor steals a line from The Girl in the Fireplace<\/em> as he looks at Amy\u2019s wall: \u2018You\u2019ve had some cowboys in here\u2019. He turns it into a joke (\u2018Not actual cowboys, though that can happen\u2019), but if we remember that episode, it\u2019s slightly disturbing: when he said it to Reinette, he was looking into Reinette\u2019s mind. Is he somehow inside Amy\u2019s mind\/world now?<\/p>\n

The romantic tragedy of The Girl in the Fireplace<\/em> – mutable walls only delivered the Doctor at certain points during Reinette\u2019s life, so that she died waiting for him \u2013 is echoed in Amy\u2019s years waiting for the Doctor\u2019s return, but also in the wall imagery and time as place. In a fanzine piece on The Girl in the Fireplace<\/em> I quoted Richard Gilman, who was writing about the problem faced by Anton Chekhov in writing Three Sisters<\/em>: <\/p>\n

how to write a drama about time, not simply taking place in time \u2013 all plays do that \u2013 but about how we exist in and with it as though it were a place and a being. [Samuel] Beckett\u2019s \u201cdoubleheaded monster of damnation and salvation\u201d, the cradle and ground of all we do, home of our myths, imaginings and actualities. Time as place, place as time, Proustian, Einsteinian, a pact among the tenses, the scene of an appointment for which we\u2019re always too early or too late.15<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The melded spaceship\/France setting of Fireplace<\/em> constitutes \u2018time as place\u2019 and<\/em> \u2018place as time\u2019. The Eleventh Hour<\/em> has echoes of this in the combination of wall-breach and the Doctor\u2019s timekeeping, and the Doctor making Amy see the door (of perception) that she has lived in ignorance of for years \u2013 but which for him, and us, follows on a linear narrative path.<\/p>\n
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\n $\"Carnival_hand\"$ <\/p>\n
Young Amy\u2019s wall also introduces the eyeball motif which runs through the episode. The eye peering through the wall brings to mind the fourth-wall-shattering impact of Carnival of Monsters<\/em>, the realisation that the Doctor and Jo are in a reality-TV-like peepshow exhibit, the collision of realities as a hand reaches into the fiction. But there are wider ideas which again merit comparison with AMOLAD<\/em>.
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\nThere are several pieces of eye imagery in AMOLAD<\/em>: a gaze down from Heaven through a circle, a point-of-view shot inside Peter\u2019s eye in the operating room, and a scene in which Dr Reeves uses a camera obscura to diagnose patients around the village. The first and last are associated with authority figures, with knowledge and judgement (in the episode, judgement awaits Prisoner Zero). Taken together, you have vision in both its senses: vision as in sight and vision as in personal vision, creation: Dr Reeves says that June, via the camera obscura, sees everything clearly and all at once like a poet. Peter quoted poetry earlier, so his \u2018vision\u2019 relates also to creative \u2018agency\u2019, his ability to create, invent, dream, as an individual.16<\/a><\/sup> We\u2019re left to consider the relationship between Amy\u2019s vision, and dreams, with the story as it unfolds, ideally stopping short of not destroying the experience in over-analysis (she\u2019s called Amy Pond, there\u2019s a duck pond without ducks in it \u2013 hmm, is she too an \u2018empty Pond\u2019?). The Atraxi ship, with its eyeball design, is one of the issues the series will return to.<\/p>\n
But the idea of creative vision is vital to this episode, which typically for Moffat explores, according to Frank Collins, \u2018the inner fantasy lives of children\u2019, and Amy in particular, a woman who \u2018grows up and sadly disconnects from her own inner child\u2019.17<\/a><\/sup> As in AMOLAD<\/em>, there is a thin line between seeing and imagining: Amy has spent her youth being psychoanalysed precisely because she is unsure whether she saw the Doctor and TARDIS or imagined them, created them just as she effectively asked Santa to conjure them up at the start and played games with them through stories, fantasies and home-made toys later. As in Rumpelstiltskin<\/em>, a fairytale creature defeated by naming, the cure for her ills seems to lie in identity.<\/p>\n
Staring into eyes convinces her of danger (Prisoner Zero and its pursuers) and the Doctor\u2019s ability to respond, as in the scene in which she traps the Doctor in a car door by his tie, which collides so many ideas from the story: the Doctor trapped by the costume of his predecessor, the use of a door, and Amy needing to stop the Doctor moving, but doing so by trapping him to a usually moving object.18<\/a><\/sup> We too delve into the Doctor\u2019s eye at the start of the stop-motion sequence in which we see the Doctor\u2019s photographic memory, and roam across the village looking for the detail he is sure he\u2019s observed.
\n $\"AMOLAD_4\"$
\nThis recalls Dr Reeves\u2019s camera obscura, but the switch in style also reminds me of the moment in AMOLAD<\/em> when time stops during a table tennis game: film itself is playing with time – as in this episode, we wonder, as Philip Horne said of AMOLAD<\/em>, ‘At times like this, as spectators, are we creators (putting the images together in our minds) or watchers?’19<\/a><\/sup> That’s certainly a question to ask of Amy.<\/p>\n
Amy\u2019s police uniform, kiss-a-gram job and other outfits have led to concerns, for instance on a Daily Mail<\/em> front cover, that Doctor Who<\/em> was being \u2018too sexy\u2019, or that older Amy \u2018was now filling the potentially titillating shoes of 22-year-old Karen Gillan, who was introduced with a lingering shot up her thighs\u201920<\/a><\/sup>. But the dressing up is a central part of the episode\u2019s use of imagery to serve characterisation. Amy is dressed like a police woman just as the \u2018police box\u2019 is dressed as a police box, and she is no more a nun or maid than the Doctor is a Doctor. It\u2019s a lovely shorthand for what Frank Collins calls the child\u2019s \u2018fantasy role playing of adventures with the raggedy Doctor\u2019, along with her \u2018stories, drawings and dolls\u2019 based on a desire to have adventures, which have \u2018become sublimated into an adult life where the yearning for such adventure still exists but hasn\u2019t been acted upon\u2019.21<\/a><\/sup> Dressing up is a key theme of the episode: boyfriend Rory who has joined Amy\u2019s fantasy world by dressing as the Doctor and who tried to become a doctor but became a nurse, and finally the Doctor, who only discovers his new outfit when he is certain of his identity. Undressing in front of Amy serves as a manic version of the Doctor\u2019s divestment of his previous identity in Castrovalva<\/em>, and confirmation to Amy that you can<\/em> reflect or even create your identity in \u2018dressing up\u2019.22<\/a><\/sup> The Doctor, like Amy, is stealing other people\u2019s clothes.23<\/a><\/sup> The connections between them mount up, in ways that are \u2018ripe for psychoanalysis\u2019 as \u2018Amy helped shape the Doctor\u2019s new personality\u2019 24<\/a><\/sup> just as he did for her, potentially problematically for a patriarchal reading.25<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n
It\u2019s fitting that Amy boards the TARDIS in her nightclothes: not only does it connect the adult Amy with the young Amy, it connects to her dreams (if<\/em> we accept that the moment when we see young Amy waiting for the Doctor, and she smiles as she hears the TARDIS, is part of the older Amy’s dream, which is implied by the cut to the older Amy waking). It also relates to the way that the previous Doctor confronted his first story (The Christmas Invasion<\/em>) in his pyjamas. It underlines the fairytale, dream quality of the episode, and confirms the lovely exchange between the Doctor and cynical Amy: \u2018I grew up.\u2019 \u2018Don\u2019t worry, I\u2019ll soon fix that.\u2019 As Moffat has argued, \u2018Although it is watched by far more adults than children, there\u2019s something fundamental in its DNA that makes it a children\u2019s programme and it makes children of everyone who watches it. If you\u2019re still a grown up by the end of that opening music, you\u2019ve not been paying attention.\u201926<\/a><\/sup> Or, more succinctly: \u2018when Doctor Who<\/em> is really working, when it really delivers, the entire audience is eight years old \u2013 whatever age they started out!\u201927<\/a><\/sup> Therefore, The Eleventh Hour<\/em> faced a different kind of challenge from Rose<\/em>: Amy\u2019s behaviour \u2018represents the children who watched Rose<\/em> in 2005, and are affecting or learning more cynicism as they move into their teens\u201928<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n
And yet, aren\u2019t the nightclothes also a sign of innocence, given the sinister undertone to the end of the episode? As Matthew Kilburn notes, \u2018it appears that she is part of or contaminated by the crack in the fabric of space-time which ran through her bedroom, as the crack appeared on the screen above the console in the closing TARDIS scene, and the Doctor seemed keen that Amy should not see it\u2019. This sinister undertone shows story arcs being put in place for the rest of the season: as the season runs on, I\u2019m sure some of my ideas here will be cancelled out. Some elements seem to be deliberately ambiguous. What if the shot of young Amy smiling as she hears the TARDIS arriving isn\u2019t<\/em> part of older Amy\u2019s dream, and he did<\/em> go back? Or forward? Certainly we will have to revisit it, judging by Moffat\u2019s warnings:<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a big twist to come \u2013 don\u2019t assume you know everything, and don\u2019t assume you\u2019ve understood everything you\u2019ve seen.29<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
certain things along the way will take on a significance retrospectively that they didn\u2019t have at the time. You have to watch everything, that\u2019s what I\u2019m saying. Twice.30<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
All in all, this was a triumphant start to the season, mixing old (various fan sites have listed the repetition of story tropes from previous Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat stories, or earlier Doctor Who<\/em> stories, to which I could happily add Moffat\u2019s characteristic references to his earlier Press Gang<\/em> and Coupling<\/em>) and new. There are few dramas in which a change of lead writer gets press attention, not only in listings magazines and newspaper media supplements but also the main news section of a newspaper like The Observer<\/em> which observed that the episode was \u2018the first for the show\u2019s new creative boss, Steven Moffat, who has brought audiences some of the scariest episodes so far, including Blink<\/em> and The Girl in the Fireplace<\/em>.31<\/a><\/sup> Newspapers have drawn the kind of improbable generalisations usually made by fans: \u2018It\u2019s a welcome relief after the absurd self-indulgence of the Russell T. Davies era, when the plots were unfathomable and David Tennant descended into slapstick\u2019 32<\/a><\/sup>. Will Moffat\u2019s \u2018era\u2019 give more weight to plot? Mobile phones, laptops (is it significant that the laptop brand is \u2018Myth\u2019?) and conference-calls are present from the Davies era, although unlike Last of the Time Lords<\/em>, what is broadcast is not belief in the Doctor leading to his messianic resurrection, but a succession of zeroes. The zeroes are probably not a sardonic comment like Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s point that the \u2018O\u2019 in Roger O. Thornhill (in North by Northwest<\/em>) stood for \u2018nothing\u2019. For those of us writing in fanzines two decades ago, such coverage was unimaginable, and yet we live in a world where the anti-Thatcher rhetoric of late 1980s Who<\/em> is deemed worthy of a Newsnight<\/em> feature, surely the only time Newsnight<\/em> has been twenty years behind our photocopied fanzines.<\/p>\n
Last but not least, there is the sparkling interplay between Karen Gillan and Matt Smith, and almost unanimous praise for the new Doctor, a ‘young-old’ Doctor. If BBC executives were worried, \u2018they can relax\u2019 because \u2018Smith is a revelation: a proper Doctor, with elements of both absent-minded Professor and schoolboy\u201933<\/a><\/sup> Fans may have been worried, but they hardly count given the shocking revelation on forums in 2003-5 that some of them didn’t even know who Christopher Eccleston was, and seem blind to the idea that even a 40-year-old isn’t necessarily more convincing at being a 900-year-old than a 27-year-old is. One columnist said, \u2018Thank God I can stop defending Matt Smith\u2019 now everyone has seen him: \u2018For the first time ever we understand what it must be like for the Doctor to inhabit an entirely new body\u2019.34<\/a><\/sup> In the previous Doctor\u2019s first story (The Christmas Invasion<\/em>) the Doctor too defeated an alien and stressed that Earth was defended, but did so through a sword fight and eventual killing with a Satsuma after giving \u2018one chance\u2019, which he attributed to the sort of guy he now is (revealing an arrogance that played out in the bleak finale to The Waters of Mars<\/em>). By that token, and with the unresolved elements of The Eleventh Hour<\/em>, it is clear that Smith and Gillan will be stretched more as performers once story arcs start to play out.<\/p>\n
You are merely the nightmare of my childhood. – Reinette, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Originally posted: 10 April 2010.<\/em><\/p>\n

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by DAVID ROLINSON