Doctor Who returned to television this weekend with all the ingredients that you'd expect in from an episode to introduce a new companion -- and some new viewers -- to the series. So why did it feel so unsatisfying?
It's not that "The Bells of Saint John" was a bad episode as such; Matt Smith was still winningly charming as the Doctor, Jenna-Louise Coleman's new companion Clara feels like she'll be a good foil for the character, and there were suitably creepy moments scattered throughout the self-conscious derring-do of the episode. The problem was the nagging sense of deja vu throughout the whole thing; it felt overly familiar and, at times, even stale in a way that hasn't been the case for a long time.
Perhaps that's to be expected. There are a certain number of things that "have" to happen when introducing a new character to the series: They have to realize that the Doctor is an alien; that there's more to life than they'd initially realized; that the Tardis is, indeed, bigger on the inside, and so on. But it wasn't necessarily those scenes that felt "off"; but that the larger story of the episode was oddly haphazard.
The central concept -- souls being uploaded to the internet -- is one of those science fiction ideas that sounds good when you first hear it, but quickly falls apart as soon as you start to actually think about it. Although I did love the barely explored idea of programmable humans who worked for the monster in the Cloud, the "spoon heads" felt like an updated (and more confusing) version of the series' own Weeping Angels. But instead of sending you through time if you blink, they upload you to the internet.
Not only were the villains overly familiar, they fell flat as threats because it wasn't clear what was actually going on. Souls were being uploaded to the Cloud, and it was irreversible, except it wasn't, and they were being uploaded to the Cloud for … some reason that was never really explained, to serve a villain who wasn't properly introduced. Worse still, the episode depended on that least-visual of all movie and television tropes, people typing quickly into computers to hack stuff, on two separate occasions. Even a random, easily averted plane crash couldn't raise excitement levels after that.
"The Bells of Saint John" ultimately felt like Who with flop-sweat, trying to impress newcomers lured by either the new companion or the 50th anniversary with an artificially contemporary threat ("Cloud Computing! Monsters in the Wi-Fi! It's very now!") but so self-conscious and eager that things didn't quite go to plan. There was enough humor, thrills and chills to keep it from being a waste of time entirely, but if this episode was an omen for what's to come this year, the Doctor's golden anniversary may end up being less than the character deserves.
