Well, of course I loved it. Matt Smith is great, he clearly ‘gets’ it – maybe playing it a little too much like David Tennant, but I’m not complaining. The Avengersesque rural England (ok, Wales pretending to be England) was a treat. Steven Moffat didn’t let us down, cheeky thing that he is. Amy Pond as a kissogram was a really, really sneaky ruse. But I think he got away with it. Just. (I was enjoying it in Freeview HD, but that’s another story. Really the detail is quite extraordinary… every fibre…)
Ahem.
Yes, anyway. My only niggle… there had to be one… was a surprising one. I’d have told the story a bit differently at the start. I understand they need a bit before the main titles, but I didn’t like the Tardis out of control flying over London, even if it was making a point that they don’t ‘do’ London any more. It could have started with the Tardis crash landing in the garden, Amy’s reaction to it, drawn out a bit more – until eventually, just before the main titles… the Doctor appears from the box.
Also, the idea of Amy growing up with this possibly-imaginary friend called the Raggedy Doctor, the psychiatrists, her friend playing games with her, is such a good one, I cannot believe Steven Moffat didn’t make more of it. It’s thrown away in a few lines of dialogue. How delicous would it have been to spend the first 15 or 20 minutes with Amy growing up, no-one believing her, maybe without us even seeing the new Doctor at all until he reappears? Maybe we will come back to this story and the superb Caitlin Blackwood who played the young Amy – and is in real life the cousin of Karen Gillan. She almost acted everyone else off the screen.