Doctor Who – The Complete Series 5 (Limited Edition Steelbook) [DVD]
Doctor Who – The Complete Series 5 (Limited Edition Steelbook) [DVD]
Sometimes, change is good, as evidenced by Matt Smith’s assumption of the mantle of Britain’s beloved science-fiction hero, Doctor Who, in this stellar series. Replacing David Tennant, who was arguably the most popular incarnation of the Time Lord since Tom Baker, was an unenviable task for any actor. But relative newcomer Smith–the youngest performer to play the Doctor–makes the role his own within the first few moments of the series opener, “The Eleventh Hour,” which introduces his puckish i
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Woo Who!,
How could I not love it? After all the angst about “Who is this young upstart?”, “Who decided to have an incredibly ‘young’ Doctor?” and most of all “Who was the idiot who decided that Matt Smith would be the perfect follow up to David Tennant?” this first series (in my mind) proved all the naysayers to be completely wrong.
This young man, under Mr Moffit’s aegis, has shown us a multifaceted character, a young man’s face that can express such old emotions, that depth of anger that links all three new doctors and a wonderfully whimsical surface that can occasionally make me laugh out loud.
As far as I’m concerned Matt Smith’s performance is the perfect antidote to the doomed darkness of David Tennant’s last days as the Doctor and this first series has been such fun. Okay, many adult viewers have complained that the stories have been simplistic or ridiculous but they certainly showcased the new team’s acting chops whether you liked them or not. Amy is growing into a strong, modern woman and if I had daughters I’d be proud to think that she was as determined, caring and intelligent as Ms Pond. We all thought Rory would be a damp squib that would turn up whenever he was needed but, instead, he became Rory the Centurion: Amy’s guardian, a man the Doctor can trust and, bless him, the man who dies, all the time, over and over… and every time I’m as horrified as the last!
So, yes, remember Chris Ecclestone’s powerful, playful Doctor, weep over the little death of David Tennnant’s demise but don’t belittle young Mr Smith’s performance. Remember that last episode where he sat beside Amy’s bed telling her all those wonderful things, his face mirroring his emotions, the shadows of the old man drifting across his face and then tell me he’s not the right man for the job.
Long live the Moff!
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|The Eleventh Doctor Arrives In Style On Blu Ray,
The 2010 series of ‘Doctor Who’ is, at first glance, very different to what went immediately before. Lead writer and executive producer Russell T Davies has departed, to be replaced by Steven Moffat, and David Tennant has handed over the keys to the TARDIS to Matt Smith, the youngest actor to play the role to date. There’s a look and feel to Series Five that marks it out as different from its predecessors, but ultimately, it’s still cut from much the same cloth as before, mixing exciting adventure with great writing, and still being one of the best things on British television in years.
Matt Smith had a tough job, following in David Tennant’s footsteps, but from his first moments in series opener, ‘The Eleventh Hour’, you know everything is going to be fine. His relative youth seems irrelevant, because he feels so at home in the role of the Doctor that you can absolutely buy into him as a 900-odd year old Time Lord. In many ways, his performance brings back memories of Tom Baker and Patrick Troughton – he’s a natural, juggling the dramatic and the comedic effortlessly. He’s ably supported by Karen Gillan as the feisty Amy Pond, and Arthur Darvill as her sometimes-bumbling fiancee Rory, not to mention a stellar guest cast that boasts names such as Ian McNeice, Sophie Okonedo, Tony Curran, Iain Glen, Helen McCrory and Toby Jones, as well as Alex Kingston making a glorious return as River Song, the mysterious woman whose life keeps intersecting with the Doctor’s.
As usual, there’s a real ambition to some of the stories told here, both in their scale and the complexity of the storytelling – ‘The Eleventh Hour’ takes place across fourteen years of Amelia ‘Amy’ Pond’s life, whilst ‘Amy’s Choice’ slides between a number of realities, only one of which may be real, and season finale ‘The Big Bang’ features all manner of jumping forwards and backwards in time, alternate realities and other such head-spinning concepts. The series has lost none of its epic potential, either – ‘Victory of the Daleks’ is a WWII epic in under 45 minutes, ‘The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone’ by turns a creepy horror and epic sci-fi action thriller, and ‘The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood’ presents an entire underground civilisation living beneath the Earth. For me, the stand out episode was ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ by Richard Curtis, a wonderful character-driven piece treading the difficult ground of exploring issues of Vincent Van Gogh’s terrible depression, whilst also throwing in an invisible giant space turkey for good measure. The fact that it manages to do both of these – and throw in a scene-stealing uncredited cameo from Bill Nighy – just shows how good the series can be when it’s firing on all cylinders. It’s not all perfect, of course – some episodes don’t work as well as others, and the attempts to reinvent Who icons such as the Daleks and the Silurians don’t quite come off as planned. But it’s certainly up there with the best the series, past and present, has to offer.
This Blu Ray release presents the episodes in stunning high definition – as they’re meant to be seen, really. The 2009 Specials didn’t always exploit the potential of HD to the max, but this series really does – whether it’s the space battles of ‘Victory of the Daleks’, the sky lit up with alien spacecraft in ‘The Pandorica Opens’, or simply the gorgeous (and incredibly detailed) new TARDIS interior. The episodes have, quite simply, never looked or sounded better than they do here on BD (though you may need a bit of tinkering with your player settings to get the sound mix right if you don’t have a surround set-up – switching audio output to ‘Bitstream’ may help), and it’s definitely worth opting for this version over the slightly cheaper DVD set.
Extras wise, there’s plenty here for viewers to enjoy – perhaps most notably two new scenes penned by Steven Moffat, exclusive to DVD and Blu Ray. These sequences feature the Doctor and Amy in the TARDIS, and serve as preludes to ‘The Beast Below’ and ‘The Vampires of Venice’ respectively. They’re a lot of fun, and are a nice little bonus. It would be good to see more of these in future, if possible. As with previous boxsets, there’s a bonus disc housing the 15 minute cut-down editions of ‘Doctor Who Confidential’ covering each episode, which offer behind-the-scenes access and insights, and are consistently enjoyable. There are commentaries, too, although disappointingly compared to previous sets, these are only on selected episodes, and are in-vision commentaries, which aren’t to everyone’s tastes. Aside from that, there’s an array of video diaries, trailers, and ‘Monster Files’ focusing on some of the Doctor’s enemies throughout the season.
All in all, ‘The Complete Series Five’ is a fantastic Blu Ray release for a series which not only continues the ‘Doctor Who’ legend in the quality to which we’ve become accustomed, but also reinvents it in style. Minor…
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|That Difficult Fifth Series,
There is a received wisdom that Russell T Davies’ time on Doctor Who divided fans and that he delighted and appalled in equal measure. Well, all that seems a long time ago now, and as nothing compared to reactions to Steven Moffat’s first series at the Who helm. Of course, Moffat has a long and accomplished track record, including the underrated Coupling and, in the last year, co-writing the superlative Sherlock and the screenplay for the upcoming Tintin movie. And this is before we even start to consider his contributions to Series 1-4: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl In The Fireplace, Blink and Silence In The Library/Forest of the Dead. Unlike Davies’ broad emotional sweeps, Moffat seemed more adept at dealing with tricksier elements of plotting and continuity, something which would play a large part in series five’s arc. Reaction to the series was polarised between those who thought that he had trashed the entire franchise to those, like me, who thought he had breathed new life into it. It was not an unalloyed success, but there were many wonderful highlights to justify the rating.
Episode one introduces us to a new Doctor, a new TARDIS, a new companion and, shock horror, new titles! Matt Smith is surprising, looking (as some have noted) like a young man built out of parts of old ones, but sounding as beautifully eccentric and alien as The Doctor should be. Frankly, from the moment of, “Fry something, you’re Scottish” and “Fish custard”, I was sold. It was an episode that took lots of chances, including the wonderful time lapse sequence where The Doctor first meets Rory. And it was a nice touch to position Smith in the canon in his meeting with the Atraxi (who still sound uncomfortably like a brand of handcream to me).
In contrast, the promised thrills and spills promised in episodes 2 and 3 were a bit underwhelming. The Beast Below was a serviceable pot boiler to introduce us further to the new TARDIS occupants, though the much heralded Smilers turned out to be something of a red herring in the larger scheme of the plot. If episode 2 was underwhelming, then the Daleks’ appearance in episode 3 was probably the biggest let down of the entire series, feeling as much of a misfire to me as series 3′s clunking Daleks in Manhattan. The design of the new generation Daleks aroused huge amounts of anger and negativity. These were almost secondary matters compared to the story, which simply did not work. It was also disappointing that the solid Bill Patterson was not that well used in his role.
After this lull, however, things started to pick up again with the Weeping Angels double bill The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone. Reintroducing the high point of series 3 was a risky gambit, but one which allowed both Smith, Gillan and the returning Alex Kingston some time to develop their characters and really let them fly. The second part in particular was stunningly good. In comparison, the following Vampires of Venice could have been a real disappointment, but happily wasn’t, managing to maintain some of the two parter’s momentum. What is noticeable by this stage is the crackling dialogue and the rapidly developing interplay between the Doctor, Amy and Rory: it’s this kind of writing that the Moffat Who really manages to excel at.
Next came the Silurian two parter: The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood. In retrospect, these episodes, while serviceable, are not hugely spectacular. They left me feeling much the same as I had with series 4′s Sontaran encounter: glad that they’d been revisited, but not wedged in the mind in the same way other episodes were. Such things are common in mid-series, where it’s possible for the pace to drop off a little in anticipation for the run-in to the end.
In contrast, Vincent and The Doctor was simply stunning. It’s an episode resonating with colour and real emotional power (though some accused it of being emotionally cheap and manipulative), and possibly my favourite full episode of the run. Tony Curran’s van Gogh is by turns inspirational, irrational and convincingly tortured; it’s a fine performance and does Richard Curtis’s script justice.
I wasn’t expecting much from The Lodger, having a difficult relationship with James Corden. Thankfully for me, the Corden of the The History Boys showed up, instead of the…
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