Doctor Who is back! (The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below)

Being in America, I just saw "The Eleventh Hour" a week ago and "The Beast Below" tonight - and boy I was not disappointed. It makes "Rose" look amateurish by comparison.

I thought "The Eleventh Hour" was a better 'introduction' than even the first 2005 episode, "Rose." I gauge this on a scale of how likely I would be to suggest this to one of my friends who are unfamiliar with the series, Doctor Who. It was certainly better than the spinning-Christmas trees in "The Christmas Invasion" which had one and only one good sequence once the Doctor was on the space ship, leaving the rest of the story to be pretty useless. The giant eye in "The Elevent Hour" was a little over the top, but I'll take that since the episode was pretty timeless (no reference to any specific time that the story occurred over) and it wasn't strewn with cheap pop-culture references like in years past.

There was just a moment in "The Beast Below" which really hit closest to the original series more than almost anything that was present in the last 5 years of Doctor Who. This makes me optimistic that the series is finally back on track.

The Russell T. Davies era was, by far, my least favorite era of the entire history of Who - and that includes some of the seasons that were full of incredibly terrible episodes. Season 17 which included some pretty lame stories and the dreadful Season 24 which included the lowest points of the entire classic show, but they were by far less disappointing than a huge chunk of Davies' time producing because they just didn't have that potential to be so much greater than they could have been. But hey, I spent an entire post last week complaining about the guy so I should lay off a bit. Maybe just a bit.

So anyway, I don't want to jump the gun, but if the series holds up as well as the two episodes did, I could almost forget the last 5 years happened.

It's too soon to say if the most recent season will be a critical success of dismal failure, but I haven't enjoyed Doctor Who this much since I saw the leaked version of "Rose."