The good doctor has returned for a fifth series! This time he’s bubblier, obnoxious, smart and (most of all) adventurous. Played by Matt Smith, this series covers an entire gambit of oldies and newbie adventures. Packed with 13 episodes in this series, you get to see some weird, wacky and downright scary situations for the Doctor to find a way out of.
In this series of Doctor Who you get a wide variety of new things. The best of the best starts out with the new and improved TARDIS (it’s the flying police booth that allows the Doctor to fly through time and space). The TARDIS is a lot bigger, more useful and seems more like the inside of a tent in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire than an actual booth. The creators of this series really wanted to impress and improve the flying device and they did so by increasing the size. Three levels high and springing with useful switches, knobs and monitors, the new TARDIS is quite impressive and very prominent in this series.
Inanimate objects aside, another great thing about the fifth series is the new doctor and his assistant Amy (played by Karen Gillan). Matt Smith’s portrayal of the ‘next’ Doctor in the series is nothing short of entertaining. He starts off the series by establishing ‘his’ version of the Doctor. Smith brings a wacky, fast-paced, very physical Doctor to the screen that it makes David Tennant look like a slow old man (that’s saying a lot considering that many people consider Tennant one of the best Doctors in the series’ history). When you see Smith in action you’ll understand why he works for this part. He interacts with everyone in the most lighthearted of manners and spews the intelligent rhetoric like a kid who is in desperate need of Prozac. What’s remarkable about Smith’s Doctor is that he can turn the fun off on a dime when the story calls for him to be angry or serious. That opposite reaction makes Smith’s Doctor even deeper and more intriguing.
In short, he makes the series fun.
Almost as equally impressive is the performance of Karen Gillan as Amy Pond. Young and willing to explore the universe with her new/old found friend, Gillan’s Amy acts as a sponge, and companion, to Smith’s Doctor and is a perfect compliment to the Doctor. She also has a very strong side to her in the series, something that I never noticed about the more recent series ladies. Pond’s not a damsel in distress, as much as she is someone helping the Doctor, and sometimes courageously finding herself in trouble and in need of saving. She’s basically the perfect partner and just a blast to watch interact with Smith onscreen. You can truly see the chemistry between the characters (and actors).
Now, inside this series there are some good episodes and then some really excellent ones. The beginning of this series, The Eleventh Hour, is a fantastic introductory to the new Doctor (and the new big problem). You get the Doctor landing in the garden of a young (around 12) Amy Pond and promises her that he’ll return, after a very obnoxiously brief introduction. What happens is that he doesn’t return in five minutes, the time he promised, but he returns some years later to find she has grown up quite a bit. Not only this, he discovers a crack in her bedroom (that he found when she was young) that is more than it seems. The crack is literally a crack in the universe that has allowed a prisoner from another part of the universe escape through and onto the earth. Once the crack is opened and the jailers find out where the prisoner is hiding, the jailers show up to incinerate the earth, unless the prisoner can be returned. So, in comes the good Doctor to save the day, which doesn’t take long. The brilliance of this episode is in the way it introduces all the characters. The storyline of this episode is at best good. It’s certainly nothing special. Because it successfully introduces the Doctor and Amy you have to give it props.
Another episode worthing mentioning is The Time of the Angels. Outside of Ghost Adventures, there have been few television shows that could give me goosebumps. The Time of the Angels trumped anything Ghost Adventures could have shown in terms of scary. The episode revolves around finding and destroying evolution’s most powerful creatures called Angels. The Angels are made of stone and move only when no one is looking. The Doctor, Amy and a woman named River Song (played by ER‘s Alex Kingston) go deep in some catacombs in a search and destroy mission for a rogue Angel. What they find is certainly more than they bargained for, as there isn’t just ‘one’ Angel waiting to kill them. The storyline is broken into two episodes and uses a wonderful dark/light effect to build the tension in the episode. On top of this, more tension is built by the Angel statues continually creeping up on the group of characters as they suck the power out of everything that makes light. Folks, I can’t describe to you how creepy this set of episodes is in this series; trust me it’s creepy.
Those three episodes are probably the best in the series, but there are other really good episodes that keep the fun flowing with the good Doctor. A good one involves the British World War leader Winston Churchill (played by Ian McNeice). In this episode we find our heroes meeting the Daleks for the first time with Smith’s Doctor and find they are equally as dangerous as they’ve always been. Smith’s reaction to the Daleks is priceless and powerful. Anyway, it’s a good example of a very good episode in the entire series.
So, what’s wrong with this series? Nothing really. The only problem I have with the fifth series is that I didn’t get involved with Doctor Who sooner. More importantly, I’ll now have to find time to catch up on many years of the show.
Anyway, if you haven’t experienced the series before, like yours truly, then you owe it to yourself to find out where The X-Files and every other great sci-fi mystery started. Doctor Who: The Complete Fifth Series is nothing short of amazing and exciting.
Now, how should you view it? For me I would put money in the Blu-ray set. It’s only $10 more than the DVD version of the show and you get a whole lot more quality out of it. Starting with the visuals, you get some perfect HD with Doctor Who: The Complete Fifth Series. There are no flaws visually in any of the episodes. You will get pure, non-grainy, vividly colorful visuals in 1080p for your television. Not only this, but you also get a full screen picture; no black bars. The Blu-ray is just simply stunning and exquisite to watch. Even the special effects and large sets don’t detour from the HD quality one bit. This is one of the prettiest shows I’ve seen on Blu-ray in some time.
As for the audio, you’re in for a treat. Coming to you in DTS-HD 5.1, you’ll be in love with how your action/adventure sounds. Like I’ve said before with action/adventure/sci-fi based stories, the audio really helps out with the atmosphere and it helps with drawing the viewer closer to the scenes. Doctor Who is no different, as you’ll find some of the best action sequences that benefit from the audio mastering in DTS-HD. For example, there is an episode where a ‘new Britain’ is floating in the middle of space. There are plenty of moments of action, especially at the end, that really show how well the audio was mixed and mastered. Overall, it’s really good stuff.
Finally, the features are definitely just as good as everything else the Blu-ray has brought, thus far. You get a great set of documentaries that range from the new Doctor (Matt Smith) to the introduction and explanation of the new assistant (Karen Gillan), all the way to how sets were built and stories were put together. You get a lot of information about the show, including a great little tour of the TARDIS, which is positively fascinating. Everything you see on the TARDIS in the fifth series is just that big and functional (well, mechanically functional — not actually functional). Aside from that you also get some great outtakes and a funny scene on how many times Alex Kingston accidentally kneed poor Matt Smith in the balls. There are plenty of things to explore when it comes to the special features of Doctor Who: The Complete Fifth Season on Blu-ray and you get to enjoy most of them in HD.
More importantly, they are all complimentary to the series, which helps when it comes to bridging interest from show to special features.