Previously on Doctor Who, EVERYBODY FUCKING CRIED.

Seriously, this time. In the previous episode, our time traveling hero, the Doctor, suffered a bad dose of radiation poisoning and started to die. He began to regenerate to save his own life. For those of you unfamiliar with regeneration, allow me to explain. The Doctor’s people, the Time Lords, can sometimes cheat death by regenerating. Regenerating allows the body to heal itself of all wounds, but it has the consequence of changing the person’s appearance and some aspects of their personality. Basically, in order to save himself from death, the Doctor had to change into a completely new person. Time Lords can do this 12 times, giving them a total of 13 lives. From this day forward, ladies and gentlemen, the Doctor is on his 11th life.

For those of you who haven’t caught on yet, I’m explaining a little back-story for all of the people new to Doctor Who.

The Doctor’s regeneration released a large burst of energy from his body that badly damaged the interior of his time machine/space ship, the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space). Our episode begins with the TARDIS (which, yes, is disguised to look like an old British emergency police phone box) falling out of the sky. The console is exploding. The Doctor nearly falls out. What’s going on? Where will he crash? Cue the new opening credit sequence.

The new opening comes as a bit of a shock. Whereas previous openings showed the TARDIS flying through space or the time vortex, our new opening shows the TARDIS flying through what can best be described as the eye of a storm and a tunnel of fire. The theme song, while technically the same song we’ve had since the 1960’s, is now arranged to have a more spooky, horror-like quality. The names of the actors burst onto the screen in bolts of lightning. I found the visuals hokey, like walking through a cheaply made haunted house at the county fair. The music, however, is a nice arrangement. It’s especially a breath of fresh air after the over-orchestrated mess that was used throughout 2008 and 2009.

The TARDIS crashes in the front lawn of a house somewhere in the English countryside. The year is… who knows! The crash disturbs a little Scottish girl named Amelia Pond, who at the time was praying for Santa to send a policeman to look at the scary crack in her wall. She sees a wooden box with the word “police” written on it, and greets the strange man who exits. It’s the Doctor! He stumbles out of the TARDIS, fumbles around a little, and is eventually invited into Amelia’s house. We’re then treated to a funny scene where the Doctor suffers some post-regeneration food cravings, then subsequently rejects everything Amelia cooks for him. That is, until he takes it upon himself to eat some fish fingers (or fish sticks) dipped in custard.

Young actress Caitlin Blackwood is simply charming as Amelia Pond. Amelia is an orphan living with her aunt, left alone at night while her aunt does godknowswhat. She’s not an easy kid to scare, and she responds to the Doctor’s odd behavior with mildly confused amusement and sarcasm. She just continues to give the Doctor a look that says “What the hell is wrong with you?” The Doctor notices this, which draws attention to the fact that the crack in her wall does scare her, meaning it can’t be an ordinary crack.

Amelia takes the Doctor upstairs to see the crack in her bedroom wall. Amelia says there’s a voice coming from it, and sure enough there is. A voice from the other side of the wall repeats the warning, “Prisoner Zero has escaped.” The Doctor takes his handy sonic screwdriver out of his pocket, and uses it to open the crack all the way, which opens a portal to somewhere else in the universe. Where? A prison, most likely. A prison guarded by aliens that look like giant eyeballs.

The crack snaps shut, healing the wall in Amelia’s room. But now there are other things to worry about. Apparently a prisoner has escaped through the crack in Amelia’s wall, and he’s likely hiding somewhere in her house. Before the Doctor can further investigate, the cloister bell from the TARDIS rings, indicating that the engine is about to fail. The Doctor runs outside, hops in the TARDIS, and tells Amelia he’ll be back in 5 minutes. The TARDIS disappears, and Amelia eagerly waits for the mysterious time traveling Doctor to return.

Cut to 12 years later. Yep, 12 years. The Doctor assumes it’s only the next morning or so (for him, it really has been 5 minutes), and runs into the house. He’s then greeted by a cricket bat to the head, which knocks him out. Meanwhile, a male nurse starts to notice strange happenings at the coma ward of the local hospital.

The Doctor wakes up, handcuffed to the radiator. A young English policewoman radios for backup and asks what our hero is doing in her house. He asks what happened to a little Scottish girl named Amelia Pond, which freaks out the young woman. While the two talk, the Doctor points out a perception filter over one of the doors in the house. The perception filter is something that doesn’t make an object invisible, so much that it forces people to ignore it. It’s what the Doctor uses on his TARDIS so that nobody ever questions its presence in the places he lands. Now that the young policewoman notices the door, she can’t help but enter.

There, she confronts a freaky alien snake that tries to eat her. She runs out of the room, gives the Doctor back his sonic screwdriver (which he uses to escape from her handcuffs), and the two confront Prisoner Zero. Prisoner Zero has somehow morphed into the form of a man walking a dog. Except it’s not really a man. The real man is one of the coma patients at the hospital, and Prisoner Zero has stolen his face. The Doctor and young woman manage to escape from the house before Prisoner Zero can kill them.

By the way, in case you hadn’t guessed by now, the young policewoman is Amelia Pond, all grown up. Oh, and she’s not really a cop. That’s a costume she uses for her job as a callgirl stripper “kissogram.” As soon as the Doctor figures out who Amelia really is, she drops the fake English accent and uses her normal Scottish. She’s calling herself Amy these days, by the way.

Remember the giant eyeball space alien prison guard thing? It’s called an Atraxi. Now that the Doctor has uncovered Prisoner Zero, the Atraxis demand that either the Prisoner Zero surrenders himself, or they will destroy the Earth. Now the Doctor has to capture Prisoner Zero and stop the Atraxi from destroying the Earth. And he’s only got 20 minutes.

30 minutes into the episode, and we finally have our plot. Up until this point, we’ve had to deal with a lot of setup and an introduction for Amy. With that, I’m glad this was an extra long premier episode. That’s a lot of setup for our adventure, but it gives us insight into who Amy is and her relationship to the Doctor, so it’s worth it.

So it turns out the English village is named Leadworth, and it’s about 30 minutes (by car) from the nearest city. It’s one of those small towns where most of the residents know one another, and because of that practically every character we meet knows about Amy’s “imaginary friend” called the Raggedy Doctor. It turns out she told everyone about the Doctor and his tattered clothes, and how he appeared in her lawn with a broken time machine. She even drew cartoons as a little girl, had her friends dress up as him to play pretend, and went through several psychiatrists who tried to convince her that the Raggedy Doctor wasn’t real. This creates a relationship we’re not used to with the Doctor and his previous companions. Not only has Amy technically known the Doctor since childhood, but she’s also been disappointed and let down by him everyday for the past 12 years of her life. At first she doesn’t even want to believe he’s the Doctor, and it takes some heavy convincing from the Doctor for her to trust him.

Anyway, next we meet the male nurse from earlier. It’s Amy’s childhood friend and current boyfriend, Rory Williams. Not a typo, folks. He’s a male nurse named Rory. I’ll come back when you’re done chuckling.

Anyway, Rory has noticed some of the coma patients walking around the village, and he took pictures of every one of them with his phone. It turns out all of the coma patients in the hospital are people that Prisoner Zero has knocked out and taken the form of. Every time Rory saw one walking around the village, that was Prisoner Zero. The Doctor snatches Rory’s phone, tells him and Amy to go secure the coma ward at the hospital, and goes off to find a laptop for himself.

The Doctor noticed a man named Jeff carrying a laptop earlier. He breaks into Jeff’s home, interrupts him while he’s watching internet porn (seriously), and uses the laptop to contact several experts who can help the Doctor capture Prisoner Zero. The Doctor then uses Rory’s phone to write a computer virus, and uses his consortium of geniuses to spread it.

Rory and Amy make it to the hospital, where Prisoner Zero has already gone on a killing spree. The duo confront Prisoner Zero, who has picked a new disguise…

OLIVIA COLMAN FROM HOT FUZZ AND THAT MITCHELL & WEBB LOOK?!

The Doctor makes it to the hospital to find Amy & Rory facing Prisoner Zero. Prisoner Zero, who recognizes the Doctor as a Time Lord, tells him that the wall crack he escaped from wasn’t his own design. Something else is creating cracks across the skin of the universe– something that I’m sure will come back in a big way by the end of the season.

As for the computer virus and the team of geniuses? The virus sent a message across the world: “0.” The Atraxi recognize the 0 virus as warning, then trace the source of the virus to the phone the Doctor is carrying. They capture Prisoner Zero, but the Doctor isn’t done yet. The Atraxi were about to destroy the Earth to find one prisoner, and that has him slightly pissed off.

Tired of being call a “Raggedy” Doctor, the Doctor raids the hospital locker room for new clothes, then confronts an Atraxi on the roof. He tells them about the many aliens who’ve tried to destroy the Earth before, and what he did to them. The Doctor gives the Atraxi one warning: “Basically, run.”

The Doctor heads back to the TARDIS, which has been self-repairing in Amy’s lawn this whole time, and takes it for a quick spin to the Moon before returning to Earth.

He returns 2 years later. He’s not the most efficient time traveler, the Doctor. Upon his return in the middle of the night, he wakes Amy up. She runs outside and gives him grief for disappearing on her for years at a time again. To make up for it, the Doctor offers Amy the chance to travel across time and the universe with him. He even shows her the interior of the TARDIS.

It’s bigger on the inside, you know.

The new interior is possibly the second largest set they’ve ever used for the TARDIS. The largest was used in the 1996 TV movie, where the inside of the TARDIS was a castle big enough to drive a small car through. Personally, I love the new interior. It has a makeshift look as if it was put together with spare parts, but the control console doesn’t look haphazardly slapped together like the previous one. I also love the stairwells leading to other rooms, making the TARDIS look bigger than one more (something the previous set didn’t accomplish).

There’s something else of note in this scene. A monitor in the TARDIS seems to be analyzing a signal, and the design on the screen resembles the crack on Amy’s wall. The Doctor investigating these weird cracks across the universe? Fine. But the camera put a lot of focus on that monitor when the Doctor told Amy that loneliness was the only reason he wanted her to come along. Yeah, I think he just lied to her. So prepare yourselves just in case we’re dealing with a manipulative version of the Doctor. We haven’t had one of those since the Doctor was on his 7th life.

And what’s this? A wedding dress in Amy’s room? Hmm, Amy did seem to mention a desire to make it back home by tomorrow morning for “stuff.” But considering the Doctor’s off timing in this episode (”5 minutes” turned into 12 years, then another 2 years), something tells me Amy is going to miss her big day.

And that’s the end of the episode. Karen Gillian is cute as Amy Pond, as well as defiant and (to use the actress’ own words from many interviews) sassy. Rory immediately proves to be a more effective “companion’s boyfriend” than Rose’s ex Mickey.

Matt Smith himself pulls in a surprisingly good performance as the Doctor. Following on the heels of what many consider to be David Tennant’s finest hour, Smith hits the ground running and doesn’t stop. He keeps the energy of Tennant, but tames it with more controlled speech patterns. His physical mannerisms sometimes mimick those of an old man, but he remains eccentric and more than a little invasive in others’ personal space. In other words, Smith’s Doctor is quirky and impossible to look away from. Nobody stole the show from him in terms of performance, but he didn’t go far enough to make him annoying. So far, it looks like he’s off to a good start as the Doctor. There have been a few remarks from fans about Smith’s odd looks, but we’re talking about a character once played by the beloved Tom Baker.

Also not as pretty as David Tennant

My one problem is that writer Steven Moffat clearly reused plot points from a previous Doctor Who episode titled “The Girl in the Fireplace.” In that story, the Doctor met France’s Madame de Pompadour in her youth before quickly disappearing, leaving her memories of him to be treated as though he was nothing more than an imaginary friend. He then disappeared and reappeared several times in Madame de Pompadour’s life, each time to save her from the monsters that scared her as a child. In the end, when the Doctor goes back to his own time for “five minutes,” he returns to find that Madame de Pompadour has died of old age. That’s the exact same way the Doctor met Amy, except he stopped before Amy could whither away and die. The retreaded story elements are a major disappointment, but shouldn’t be noticeable at all if you’re not familiar with the earlier episode.

Overall, a fun episode. I walked away looking forward to whatever comes next.