Doctor Who: The Beast Below

The Eleventh Hour saw the Eleventh Doctor hit the ground running. Did the series manage to keep it up with The Beast Below? The answer to that question has to be "hell, yeah!"

This was a great story, and one that was rendered extremely well. The plot had a point to it - it was going somewhere. It had twists and turns, and it also managed to be scary. I mean, seriously scary. The opening scene with the elevator and the moment that Amy met the tentacle in the tent - awesome. And the Smilers... in the event, they were rather easily despatched by the Queen, but they looked unsettling, even when they were smiling. And if I was a kid, I would now have a fear of elevators, construction tents and those weird fairground booths that the Smilers represented. Which is good. Which is great. Because Doctor Who should scare kids. It is what it does at its best.

And Smith as the Doctor... well, he's pretty much erased any memory of Tennant. He has occupied the role of the Doctor so, so, so well. His mix of awkwardness and arrogance works is extremely effective, and his sudden switch to anger at all around him added the edge of unpredictability to the character that was missing through much of the David Tennant era. And there is a certain magic to the Eleventh Doctor; especially in that scene where he tells Amy that they can only be observers, only to go and start interfering with events in the very next moment.

Furthermore, this episode dealt with a whole host of concepts. Voting, democracy, dark secrets within the state, the idea that whole societies have been built on the suffering of others, and the role of a constitutional monarchy on a democracy - all these were at the heart of this episode. And some of those are very adult ideas and concepts for a family show... which is good. Which is as it should be. Doctor Who at its best isn't just about adventure; the adventure can have a meaning too. The genius of an episode like The Beast Below is that the messages are subtly communicated, rather than shoehorned into the plot as has happened so often to the show's stories in the past.

In fact, I can't really think of any way in which this episode can have been improved. Possibly there was a little too much going on at points, and some of the themes could have been explored in a little more detail. But I'd far rather there was too much going on in a plot than too little. Too much means people end up thinking; too little, and they're reaching for the TV remote.

A new golden age for Doctor Who? On the evidence of these first two episode, I rather think it might be... not least because next week sees the Doctor and Amy meeting Winston Churchill and his secret weapon to win World War Two; the Daleks!