Police issue warning about internet meme “Pedobear” apparently mistaking it for a genuine pedophile mascot, thereby rendering any and all attempts to make this situation sound funnier than it already is moot.

Homeland Security Secretary admits that the U.S. will always be at risk to terrorist threats. “We also have information that indicates that the sky is, in fact, blue,” continued Napolitano.

Pope plans to violate his own rules just for the sake of antagonizing the Anglican church. East Coast and West Coast rappers issue joint statement condemning this pointless feud.

Subject of next year’s “Where Are They Now” articles determined.

WARNING: There will be plenty of spoilers in this frank and open discussion of the fourth season premiere of Mad Men, “Public Relations.” So hold onto your hams, because here we go.

BENJAMIN: I’ll just start off by saying that it’s going to be tough to be objective about the entire episode when it ended on such a ridiculously high and thrilling note. Seeing Don grasp the spotlight with both hands with the zeal we’ve previously only seen him have for finding translations for “Hilton” was a practically fist-pumping moment. Nashville Teens’ booming “Tobacco Road” didn’t hurt either. It was like the end of an episode of Entourage only I didn’t feel like stabbing anyone.

That being said, there were a lot of things worth noting and discussing. First off, the show is clearly a lot more overt about its theme of the business of creativity. Usually personified in the friction between Don and Roger, it’s now the thread running through nearly every interaction Don has. Whereas before it was easy to see Don framing himself in the trappings of business — nuclear family, house in the suburbs, successful midtown office — he’s now built himself a bit of a ’60s hipster life. He lives downtown, the firm’s office is a ramshackle ode to modern-at-that-time prefab design, and he doesn’t mind getting into some freaky shit in the old boudoir. As Bert also points out to him, now that he’s partner, every single thing he does in the company is a business move, not just a creative one.

It’s one of the reasons why his reaction to the Jantzen people was so shocking. It’s already been established how important business is to the firm, and Don’s reasons for kicking them out on their asses is so directly tied to a creative choice. (It’s also telling that he refers to the benign and crippled Conference Room as “his office,” claiming ownership of the entire floor [and probably any other fictional additions above or below].) The lie that Don built his life out of has always been a potent reflection of his work, but now that Don needs to be the face of the firm, that lie takes on a greater meaning and a much larger risk.

ANNA: One of the things that I appreciate more and more about Mad Men is the temporal shifts between seasons. By skipping several months in between seasons, many of the characters have developed and the audience is able to appreciate these changes more than if they’d been more gradual. I loved seeing the new, more confident Peggy. In her new position she’s developed a good relationship with an underling and she’s not afraid to stand up to Don. The role reversal is complete when Peggy is forced to call Don for bail money. When Don chews Peggy out she’s not afraid to explain herself and she’s free to needle Don about what he’s done to the agency by refusing to sell himself in his first interview. Her mannerisms, dress and exuberance in her new job signal that it is finally “her time.”

BENJAMIN: She’s also dating Karl from Lost, so she probably shouldn’t walk past any big open windows with him.

On a serious note, though, what I like about the subtlety of Peggy’s character is that her relationship with Don is much more emotional than Don’s relationship is with her (or perhaps how much he’d ever let on). As much as she’s paving her own way, her line about everyone doing their work for his approval (whether or not it might have been true for everyone else) brings her whole Surrogate Father relationship with Don screaming to the foreground. There may always be a part of her that holds back for Don’s approval.

ANNA: I’m wondering if Betty will ever have any redeeming qualities. While it is easy to see how she ended up as the spoiled princess that she is based on her upbringing, she no longer has the excuse of an unhappy marriage with a philandering and secretive husband to excuse her horrible treatment of her children. While Betty and Henry seem to have plenty of sexual chemistry, Betty still seems to reserve her harshest treatment for her daughter. Why a woman so preoccupied with appearances thinks it is OK to force feed her daughter at the Thanksgiving table is beyond me.

I’m looking forward to seeing more of Henry’s mother. She’s pretty accurate about her assessment of Betty’s parenting skills. In contrast, while Don’s parenting habits are nothing to write home about (as he plops his kids in front of the TV in his dark apartment) at least he seems to actually care about his kids even if he’s unable to express it well. He promises to help his son fix is pajama button and lingers in the doorway of their room after putting them to bed. I don’t think Betty’s ever shown to be sharing a quiet moment like that with her children.

MATT: Maybe the most interesting thing in this episode for me was how Peggy and Pete have discovered guerrilla marketing well before the term became part of advertising parlance, how well it worked and how terribly Don reacted to it after Peggy had to reveal their stunt. Don’s trying to push the envelope, but within traditional bounds. He simply tries to make the ad more titillating, then throws a tantrum when the clients, who said that wasn’t what they wanted, tell them again that’s not what they wanted. Peggy and Pete, on the other hand are doing something really new and have got the clients behind them. Don’s just so used to being right, and he’s coasted on his usually terrific marketing sense up to this point. Could this be the season he discovers that his every instinct isn’t always the best idea? I’m not sure how I feel about his big ego-trip statements to the interviewer at the end. On the one hand, it’s a reversal from his tight-lipped asshole approach, but now he’s just being a prick. I’m not sure that’s better PR. It’ll sure be interesting to see how it plays out.

I loved the theme of the episode. The title, “Public Relations,” refers not only to the news story Don is interviewing for at the beginning and its many unexpected repercussions, along with the news story Pete and Peggy stage, but also to how Don is again presenting a facade to the world — the lonely ex-husband — when in fact he’s go so much more going on with his mysterious mistress, the situation with Betty and the house, and his kids. Plus, Betty’s having to do some PR of her own, presenting a good-wife front for her new husband and his family, who don’t seem to be buying it for a minute. Mad Men’s always been a show about how people present themselves versus who they truly are, and I like the portrayal of how things are bumpy when you have to shift the story.

One character that remains seemingly unchanged? Roger Sterling. Man, that guy is just a beautiful asshole. In the first 10 minutes, he had three huge asshole moments: 1) Complaining that Ad Age couldn’t afford to get a whole reporter in regards to the reporter with one leg, 2) the crack about needing ”someone white” to carve his Thanksgiving turkey and 3) inviting Don to ”stuff” his wife’s actress friend after a few dates. And yet I can’t help but love the guy. That kinda makes me feel awful.

BENJAMIN: I actually thought that stuffing joke was a little beneath Roger’s usual expert wit. I’m hoping this season we see not only more great Sterling comedy, but episodes like the one last season where his old flame came to the firm with her father’s ailing dog food company. The scenes between those two were absolutely fantastic. I want more of that maudlin Fitzgeraldian Roger Sterling!

One things for sure, not too many shows can land a season premiere like Mad Men does. If this episode is any indication, we’re in for a pretty spectacular season.

But as I watch more television I become frustrated with the limits it places on itself. There’s one thing I value most in storytelling, and it’s the one thing most serial shows ignore, pretend at, or cheat: stakes. I want to believe that the actions of the characters have some consequence, and that some things will change permanently. Because if you don’t have real stakes, what’s the meaning of anything that happens?

Two shows that I used to enjoy a great deal have gotten progressively worse, while a (very dark) horse has risen high in my esteem. The two that are failing have lost all sense of stakes, or never had them to begin with. The third—the success—is all about them.

DEAD TO ME: Glee. While I understand I’m not the target audience for Glee—I get odd looks from my heterosexual male friends when I mention I am/was a fan—it was nonetheless a breath of fresh air.

If you’re not familiar, Glee is a high school drama about a glee club full of underdogs and the many forces aligned against them, told through absurd comedy and glee club-like renditions of popular songs. There’s pretty much nothing in the component pieces that would be attractive to me, but the combination was so audaciously over-the-top and cheerful that I was sucked in by the charm. Plus, Jane Lynch is the villain. Why did it take so long for someone to cast Jane Lynch as the villain?

Much of the first half of the first season was taken up with melodramatic betrayals and deceptions: The star quarterback’s cheerleader girlfriend is pregnant, but with the QB’s best friend’s kid; the glee teacher’s wife is faking a pregnancy to keep their marriage together, and wants to adopt the cheerleader’s kid to sub in as her own; the glee teacher is attracted to the guidance counselor but wants to stay loyal to his conniving wife; the cheerleading coach (Lynch) is deliberately sabotaging the glee club; and so on.

None of this is original, but Glee’s ability to wind up the tension every single episode by upping the ante to absurd heights was just a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Plot holes gaped and storylines were abandoned wholesale, but I didn’t care; bizarrely, the slipshod plotting only added to the charm. By the end of that season arc, many of the secrets had been exposed and a lot of wrongs had been righted or, at least, aired. Good work all around.

But then the second part of season one began and, rather arbitrarily, almost every single thing the characters had fought for was gracelessly undone. The star QB finally ended up with the “right” girl, which they both wanted all the previous season. But then they split up for no particular reason… and only long enough to introduce a new love interest for the girl. The glee teacher and the guidance counselor get together, but separate again for… no particular reason. It’s as if everything the characters fought for didn’t matter, and we’re right back to all the same love triangles and deceptions because the writers couldn’t figure out what else to do.

That is lame as hell, people. The Onion A.V. Club took the curious tack of saying the episode was a dark and emotionally wrenching thing that a lot of peppy people don’t yet grasp, which is a curious thing to say about a show that once devoted an entire episode to “Single Ladies,” that great and timeless ballad of heartache and loss.

I get that storytelling for primetime slots is difficult. The pilot has to set up a whole season but tell a complete story, and the first season has to tell a complete story because a second season may never get made. But if you’re going to completely blow your wad in one season like that, maybe your story was better off as a mini-series.

ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK: The Office. I’ve been with this show since the beginning, and have seen the first five seasons so many times I have whole great chunks of dialogue memorized. Andy Bernard, played by Ed Helms, is one of my top five favorite television characters of all time. There’s so much revolutionary comedy work being done here that the show’s humble presentation often obscures just how great it is.

And yet…

Somewhere along the way the show stopped being The Office and became Jim and Pam’s Perfect Precious Little Romance. To a degree, that’s fine; the show does best when it has one or two season-long arcs to string together the episodes and make the whole thing feel less aimless.

But It bugged me when they brought in the Karen character (played by Rashida Jones) to keep Jim and Pam apart that much longer, because who doesn’t love romantic tension drawn out for-fucking-ever?

It bugged me more that they then simply dismissed Karen for the finale, after making some late (and rather lame) stabs at turning this blameless character into a bitch. It bugged me that after moving Pam to NYC, they brought up and then disappeared a character who might have designs on her because no one can mess with Jim and Pam’s Perfect Precious Little Romance.

And then, this season, several episodes go by where every plot line is about Jim and Pam or one of the other budding couples. Will Andy and Erin get together? Will Michael succeed on his blind date? How are Kelly and Ryan doing?

A better question: Who the hell cares? It’s sad when a storyline that’s actually kind of interesting—Dunder Mifflin’s buy-out by Sabre, a company owned by a loud and boisterous captain of industry played by Kathy Bates—is dismissed after a few episodes so we can get back to seeing how long Erin and Andy can send mixed signals.

But, looking back, this is nothing new. The Office, for all its comedic innovation, has been very shy about really owning up to the consequences of anything. Remember way back when Michael had to lay someone off on Halloween, and spent the whole episode deciding which named, likeable character would get the ax? And it ended up being some random guy who’d never had a line of dialogue (nor who, I think, had ever appeared in the show before)?

Or when the Charles character was introduced, and for several episodes he was absolutely right about Michael’s terrible behavior? And then in the last episode or two they painted Charles as a kiss-ass and easily dismissable? (The show has often had that weird, topsy-turvy viewpoint: that Michael is terrible and abusive, but when someone actually calls him on it we’re meant to feel bad for Michael and to hate the person who called him out.)

Or the incredibly lame resolution to the “Michael Scott gets fired” storyline? Or the episode where Pam thinks something Jim said to her dad finally split her parents up, but it turns out Jim was just super romantic and oh my gosh aren’t they so perfect?

I don’t turn on NBC for fan fiction, and it’s getting harder to ignore The Office’s many sins. The writing staff is far too fond of the reset button, and the more outlandish their storylines get, the more lame the methods they use to back off from the consequences of them. The next few episodes may be my last ones.

ON THE RISE: Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Yes, really.

When asked how I can enjoy a show that, for its first few episodes anyway, seemed content to be a brain-dead mash-up of 300 and Gladiator, I say one thing: Spartacus is like the WWE if it was rated NC-17 and didn’t have to pander to stupid rednecks.

It’s all there: the competition, the shifting power dynamics, the tension between owners and fighters, the sex and the bloodlust. The fun thing about Spartacus is the finality of so much of it; by the very nature of so many of the main characters being gladiators or schemers, they body count remains constant and dramatic. Sympathetic (and not so sympathetic) characters die or are killed on a regular basis, and not always at the end of a drawn-out episode to the sound of gravitas-wringing music. They just die, sometimes by surprise, because that’s the life. No one is ever made to feel comfortable, and that is exactly as it should be.

But more than that, the team of writers pull off something pretty difficult: they interest us in a wide range of characters and make almost all of them, at one point or another, sympathetic. Their allegiances are constantly in flux. Spartacus’s shift from defiant slave to loyal gladiator to rebel is organic, and so consequently is his relationship with his fellow gladiators and his lanista Batiatus. It’s a show about trust—or allegiance, to take a more militant/WWE tone—and the ways it contrasts trust in the gladiator pits with trust in posh Roman villas looks effortless. It’s all about who rules who and why, and what ruling and being ruled means depending on where you are.

And by god, what the characters do matters. By the end of the first season it’s clear that the second season has to be completely different; it’s not much of a spoiler to say Spartacus rises up and, with the help of his fellow gladiators, kills off almost every villainous character in the cast. There’s no going back from that, and I admire the hell out of ballsy storytelling like that.

Aside from all that, it’s just plain bloody fun. There’s way too much sex and blood and macho posturing for the show to be high art, but who cares? Spartacus: Blood and Sand is the most flat-out entertaining show I’ve seen in some time.

Several of the Bureau Chiefs are now heavily into the new HBO series Treme, as most of us were big fans of creator David Simon’s earlier HBO project, The Wire.  Doctor K, Ken Lowery, Benjamin Birdie, Eugene Ahn and Matt Wilson sat down around the virtual table and have a discussion of their impressions of the series so far, especially as they weigh it against their experience with the earlier show.

Doctor K

I’m really feeling that this show defies coherent assessment right now. I’ve just got a bag of impressions without anything really holding them together.

After two episodes, it seems clear that the individual episodes won’t be tied together by some overarching plot the way seasons of The Wire were. That may make the show more challenging for an audience that wants some kind of coherence, but at the same time, the mixture of different plots has its own appeal. The show builds a kind of trust in the audience here that gets reciprocated–I’m willing to go along for the ride on this show and trust that the destination will be well worth my time. I was surprised when it looked like the plot with Khandi Alexander’s brother was going to get resolved in the second episode, so I’m glad it wasn’t. It’s this plot where we’re really seeing the incompetence and corruption of the New Orleans recovery operations.

Clarke Peters’ (like with early episodes of The Wire, I have not gotten a grasp on character names yet) plot is the most oblique, but the strange and violent turn it took in this episode continues to build a mystery about what his powerful role was with the Indians before Katrina. Also, this episode lets you know that this character is not Lester Freamon, the kind, effective, and quiet detective that he played on The Wire. This is the plot that I feel I have to invest the most trust–viewers unfamiliar with this particular aspect of New Orleans culture are so far only getting little chunks of information about what it was like.

From a personal standpoint, I love that the show is addressing the affect of Katrina on Tulane University. The cuts to programs seem totally ridiculous, yet entirely in keeping with the way a university bureaucracy works. I like in general how Creighton, John Goodman’s character, is depicted here. He has a practical approach to academia, seeing its need to produce useful citizens, and I’m curious to see where his character goes with his novel about the earlier flood.

Ken Lowery

I actually spent a bit of time in New Orleans the summer after Katrina. My family vacationed there yearly when I was young, and despite not being much better than the tourists many of the show’s characters deride, I have genuine fondness for the place. So much of the pilot struck me as resoundingly authentic: the people talking about what happened to their homes and where they were living now, the milky-dirty cars that had spent time under water, the mass relocation to Baton Rouge, the grossly understaffed restaurants. It was jarring to see all that on the screen.

Comparisons to The Wire are inevitable, I know, and sometimes fair. But I think those comparisons are also limiting. The shows share DNA more in their abstract than in their particulars; both are shows attempting to paint a portrait of a whole city… its people, its psychology, its movement not only as a survey of interconnected people but also a witness to a city as a whole recovering from great trauma.

And while The Wire is a portrait of social structures failing people left and right, Treme‘s only glance in that direction is the locals’ grumbling over the many failures of both the federal government and the compassion of the rest of the United States. The complaints are more than valid, and the John Goodman character seems to be the mouthpiece for the show; here is David Simon and company finally responding to all the horrible shit people said about New Orleans and the Katrina refugees in the wake of that great tragedy. But for being so obvious, he’s the one character I’m having the hardest time warming to.

I am glad the show isn’t–so far–adhering closely to any obvious season arcs. I’m also glad it’s hard to summarize. The best I can usually do is say it’s “about the city and the people and the music and the food,” and that rambling list of traits fits the tone just fine.

Benjamin Birdie

I just want to first rap David Simon’s knuckles’ for laying out a hoodwink solely to trip up fans of The Wire. Every single person whose ever seen that show, when LaDonna’s “brother” walks into the visitor’s room, recognizes him as Slim Charles immediately, and naturally figures they’re being introduced to a new main character. Finding out he’s the wrong guy is not just thus a legitimate shock, but really quite heartbreaking when you see how done up their mom got for the occasion.

In general, I wasn’t as blown away by the second episode as I was the pilot. To me, the pilot was pretty much a perfect 80 minutes. Here, it’s simply settled into being a great television show. One of the things I appreciated about Six Feet Under, before it careened off the rails so strikingly in later seasons, was that it built its drama out of just regular day-to-day stuff. It wasn’t a procedural, or a serial really, it was just peoples’ lives. That’s what I like the most about this show. You can tell it’s that kind of good when the “Next On”s have trouble piecing together a hook for their twenty seconds. It’s just, you know, stuff happening. That kind of a show is quite refreshing, even if it isn’t necessarily primed for mass success.

For example, in this episode, if you follow Janette’s thread, it’s such a subtle kind of setup. She messes up her omelette, which shows us the state she’s in. She asks her parents for money, and gets some, but not all that she needs. She’s juggling stuff at the restaurant to make ends meet, but it’s not some guy knocking on her door ready to shut the place down. It’s just a much more naturalistic kind of storytelling.

Ken Lowery

As a former partner in a restaurant, I can say with some authority that the Janette stuff is nerve-wracking to watch and very, very familiar. You better believe we ended up washing our own tablecloths.

Eugene Ahn

This show, much like The Wire, is about the dedication or commitment to an idea. In The Wire, it was justice, being right (even when wrong). But it wasn’t real, it was this ephemeral, at times impossible idea that became a moving target that characters consistently tried to hit, in every way possible and through whatever means they could cobble together.

The difference with Treme is that the idea is something that’s both somewhat abstract, the concept of a city, a community, a heritage self-contained within a larger nationalistic culture, but also very real. We get the benefit of having seen New Orleans build itself back up, and with this show going back to three months after the hurricane hit, the idea that everyone in NO abides by is very real and realizable to us. It’s aided by the constant reminders of music, another concept that’s just as malleable; real and concrete to each of us personally, harder to contemplate in a broader, more universal stroke.

I wonder if Simon will use the somewhat opposite starting points (The Wire starting with a sort of optimism, at least in being able to solve the case and Treme in its from-the-ground-up sort of contained desperation) to bring the show to a darker place by the end of the season, or if it will swell like a crescendo of a great song. I’m anxious to see if that happens.

Doctor K

The message I got from The Wire, which I’m also starting to see in Treme, is that bureaucratic systems only function at all due to the heroic actions of a few individuals who understand how to work the systems for the greater good. Otherwise, bureaucracies are made up mostly of individuals trying to game the system for their own benefit, whether it’s financial profit or minimized effort. In Treme, the Melissa Leo/Khandi Alexander plot is where this is most evident, but we’re also starting to see it in John Goodman’s reaction to Tulane cancelling certain majors.

Matt Wilson

One of the big questions I had about the show after its terrific premiere was how it would deal with outsiders coming into the city. The pilot made it fairly clear that some would be portrayed as buffoons, like the English reporter who asks a professor in A NEW ORLEANS SAINTS T-SHIRT if maybe the world would be better off without the city.

I had read in some advance reviews that the second episode treated the Wisconsin church group there to help rebuild similarly, but I thought they got off fairly easily, all things considered. Yeah, the street musicians charged them an extra $20 to play “When the Saints Go Marching In,” but Steve Zahn gave them a real NO experience and Wendell Pierce was as nice as he could be to them. Essentially they came off as slightly ignorant but also gamely in search of authenticity. I am sure, however, that we will see more of the thread of “Why didn’t you care about this city before it was underwater?” as things progress, though.

I liked this second episode a whole lot, especially the restaurant plot and the surprising turn with Clarke Peters’ character, but I did notice a couple kinks that Simon and crew will hopefully work out. First, the approach to musical guest stars. The pilot did a great job of just kind of letting Elvis Costello be there without making it too awkward, but this episode had at least two “Hey! It’s (guest star)!” moments–with Trombone Shorty and Galactic–that seemed kind of forced.

Second, I wonder when we’ll get to see some chinks in these (mostly) very noble characters’ armor. We almost got there with Clarke Peters this week, but his outburst was of the righteous anger category so I’m not sure. The thread of Wendell Pierce and his multiple kids is maybe promising, too. Simon has made no secret of his desire to make Treme as authentic as he could, even showing it to New Orleanians to get their approval. But at this point he’s perhaps being a little too reverent. On The Wire, he had a lifetime’s experience to pull from to create a real living, breathing Baltimore, seedy underbelly and all. The characters were the most rounded in all of television. I hope he’ll get there with this show, too. Not to say these characters aren’t more fleshed-out than just about any others on TV, but the guy’s set a standard for himself.

And on an unrelated note: I had no idea that they played live music in strip clubs on Bourbon Street. It really is the Paris of the South!

Benjamin Birdie

Simon has said that depicting a strip club with live music was one of the few creative liberties he took with the show, so don’t buy your plane ticket just yet!

Ken Lowery

The idea that Clarke Peters’ character was exercising a kind of justice is an interesting notion, and one I’ve seen echoed here and elsewhere. But I don’t see what he did as righteous anger. I see it as frustration finally unchained. It was a dark and revealing turn for the character, but I don’t see it as a righteous act, no matter how justified.

Doctor K

I got the feeling from Clarke Peters’s outburst that this kind of violence may be more in keeping with his character in a way that will play out later. That is, his position in the Indians gives him a certain level of privilege and power in the city that this kid abused by stealing his tools. Whatever the case, this is the plot that has me the most intrigued.

Debuting in 1963, Doctor Who was an afternoon serial originally launched by the BBC as an educational program for children. By the fifth episode, it had pretty much abandoned that pretense and settled into a science-fiction show centered on an eccentric alien scientist who travels through time and space in an old blue box that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Canceled in 1989 due to a combination of low ratings and new network management that considered it (essentially rightfully) as a hokey embarrassment, an abortive attempt to relaunch the show was made in 1996 by the American network Fox.

It wasn’t until 2005 when the show was finally brought back and turned into a significant international success by show-runner Russell T. Davies, the producer and writer of a number of successful and acclaimed dramas. On April 3rd, the first episode of a new series aired on the BBC, with a new show-runner and head-writer, Steven Moffat, creator of the sitcom Coupling and starring a new Doctor, the eleventh, played by Matt Smith, and a new companion, fiery Scottish redhead Karen Gillan.

The Bureau Chiefs are big nerds, and naturally we sat down to watch it.

Dorian Wright
Overall I thought it was a very good episode, particularly the opening sequence with the new Doctor and little Amelia Pond. Even though we’re reminded several times that he’s still “baking” and not really fully formed yet, Smith had a manic energy there and a sense of humor I thought was really engaging. If I’m being completely honest, the big middle section of the story felt a little weaker to me, mostly because it’s the standard “introduce the new Doctor and companion” set-up; mysterious alien menace that the Doctor has to defeat with a time limit and limited tools, all while getting to know a plucky young woman. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a story structure that works very well for the show, but it did feel somewhat repetitive.

As for the new plucky girl, Karen Gillan is very appealing, and I like the air of wounded trust that she has in her interactions with Smith. It’s a nice change from the devotion and adoration we’ve seen from the companions in the new series. She’s much more skeptical of him, and she has reason to be. I hope that’s a thread we see developed.

I was also struck by some of the tonal changes. The menaces feel a bit more surreal than they were during the Tennant and Davies years. Cracks in walls and giant alien eyes are a bit more abstract than alien rhinos or squid people. It also felt a bit more “grown-up.” Both Moffat now and Davies before him emphasized that the show was primarily for children, but Moffat seems to be aiming at a slightly older, or at least more worldy, child. Amy being a kiss-o-gram feels like it’s coming from that. It’s a child-like idea of a job that’s slightly sexy, but in a giggly, naive way. Same thing with her having multiple boyfriends, or sort-of boyfriends.

Anna Neatrour
I enjoyed the way the choice of Amy as a companion shows the direct effect of a few minutes of interaction with the Doctor, and the results of that interaction are not necessarily all positive. I hope this is followed up on later in the series. While the episode did follow conventional story lines, it did so in a way that felt pleasantly nostalgic (especially the call-out to the previous doctors) instead of overly derivative.

I was wondering a bit about the casting of Smith, but he does bring out the slightly unhinged quality that I think the best interpretations of the Doctor have. Every first episode featuring a new doctor is going to have an origin story quality to it as he figures out his new incarnation, and I think this one did a good job bringing that out. I’m guessing some geeks are going to start investing in bowties and suspenders.

Dave Lartigue
Season openers are usually fairly weak, since they’re often introducing a new Doctor, new companion, or, in this case, both.

There are two stories here: one of alien beings looking for an escaped prisoner on Earth, and one of a girl who’s lived her whole life trying to make sense of something that happened when she was a child. The former story is bland and forgettable, which is fine; that allows it to get out of the way of the latter story. Matt Smith puts aside everyone’s standard “new Doctor” fears in an instant, bringing a childlike, anarchic, unpredictable air to the character (a nice change from all the “Dark Doctor” stuff we’ve been having to deal with).

New companion Amy Pond gives us only a little more than a saucy tease, but the version of her as a child, Amelia Pond, is wonderful. Amelia is a serious little child who hosts the Doctor without being troubled at all by his bizarre ways. These scenes are wonderful, and if the show had decided to roll with Amelia as-is, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. The story here is not about flying eyes who are looking for an alien shapeshifter they won’t recognize if it’s shifted its shape, it’s about how Amelia Pond becomes Amy Pond, with a newly-regenerated Doctor at the center of it.

Amy’s story cannibalizes most of the previous companions from the new series. The script is very similar to “Smith and Jones,” Martha’s debut. The fact that a single previous encounter with the Doctor changed her life forever is the same situation as Donna’s. And of course Rose was the innocent bystander with no future roused into action by a chance encounter.

Unlike the others, though, Amy is being given a deliberately sexy air — the odd police uniform leaked out in early photos turns out to be a “kiss-o-gram” costume, complete with seamed stockings. There is a lot of attention paid to her eyes and lips. And when the Doctor undresses in front of her, she eagerly looks on with a smile. We’ve had crushes on the Doctor before (ad nauseum, I might add), but this doesn’t seem like a crush, and although I am not thrilled about another companion mostly driven by her physical/romantic attraction to the Doctor, it would be nice if that attraction were a little more on the naughty side (Moffat did give us Coupling, after all.)

The TARDIS, too, gets a makeover, and it once again emphasizes its role as an organic being, linked inseparably to the Doctor himself. The architecture and function is decidedly Not Of This World, yet the central console — the heart, so to speak — is a bizarre amalgamation of familiar things turned unfamiliar, odds and ends turned to mysterious purposes.

It’s difficult to be a Doctor Who fan and fear change; change is a built-in feature of the show. Moffat seems to be drawing a thick line between the previous seasons and his tenure, and nothing is spared; it’s all new. Yet, in a delightful touch, he adds a montage of the previous Doctors — all of them — to show that he hasn’t forgotten about the past. He is greatly aware of where he’s come from. And, it seems, highly confident of where he’s going. I think think this is going to be a very fun season.

Dorian
What is everyone else’s reaction to the new Tardis? Apart from the new actor, that’s probably the most significant visual break from the last five years of the show, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed. I wasn’t a big fan of the previous TARDIS either; I liked the scale of it, but thought it just looked rather dingy and dull.

I do actually like that they’ve made the new one even bigger, and the gleam, the polish of it, with all that glass and lighting and stairs and galleys going off into the distance makes it look very “sci-fi”, almost self-conciously so. But I groaned when I saw the hot and cold taps, the typewriter and the gramophone horn. There are all these otherworldly, constantly moving bits on the console, and then you’ve got these deliberatly retro elements mashed on that visually out of style with the rest of the room. They feel like nerd-pandering, like the designers are trying to wring some life out of the “steampunk” fad before it fades away.

Dave
I felt that the console showed a nice link to the Doctor himself, who is a similar mix of anachronistic elements used to odd effect. And I like the contrast with the gleamy, what-currently-passes-for-high-tech areas surrounding the console. (I would have to say that my favorite TARDIS interior was the TV movie one, which this kind of reminds me of.) I am hoping that the emphasized exits off the console room will mean that finally we’ll see more of the interior.

Anna
I thought it was a little too steampunk, and that glowing glass spire going up and down seemed more than a little phallic.

When thinking about the show again, I think Moffat did a great job in blending in darker, more adult elements into a family friendly show. The idea of an interdimensional escaped prisoner living in one’s house for years is genuinely creepy. The psychological effects of an encounter with the doctor in childhood bring a disturbing and more realistic element into the whole Doctor/companion relationship. Even though this was played for laughs when the townspeople reacted to Amy’s infamous imaginary friend coming to life, the final shot of the Doctor-centered relics of her childhood was a little sad. What would her life had been like if she hadn’t met him as Amelia?

Dorian
Going forward, I thought both Smith and Gillen were very good in their roles, and I’m looking forward to their dynamic being explored more. I’m also hoping that the business with Amy’s wedding and Rory gets developed more. One of the aspects of the first two seasons I didn’t much care for was the selfishness and self-centeredness of Rose, especially when it came to the way she treated Mickey. While it’s true that Mickey was also a bit of a prick, Rory comes off immediately as a nice, devoted guy. If Amy ran off and left him at the altar, that makes her pretty unlikeable, even if she has waited fourteen years to have an adventure with the Doctor.

I thought it was clever the way hints were seeded for future stories here, as well. Not just the “the Pandorica will open” and “silence will fall” bits that telegraph the big themes, like Bad Wolf or Torchwood did in earlier seasons, but the implication that the Doctor didn’t go back for Amy just because he’s lonely, that there’s something more to her that he’s investigating, or the very subtle hint that something is up with Rory, if you happened not to blink during the close up on his ID badge. Those are all threads I’m looking forward to seeing the development of.

Anna
Honestly, the running off before the wedding aspect of the story was part of the episode that seemed a little too familiar to me, just because of the whole thing with Donna’s wedding before.

I get what you’re saying about Rose’s selfishness, but I don’t think I’m particularly worried about it with Amy yet. Partially because I’m finding Amy more appealing than Rose, and I’m really hoping that the Mary-Sueness of Rose’s storyline isn’t transplanted into the current season. Rose is the main reason why I haven’t watched all of the more recent seasons. I think that having Amelia be so profoundly affected by the Doctor in childhood gives grown-up Amy sufficient motivation to run away when she gets the chance to be with him. If it is Rory she’s ditching that wouldn’t be good, but how often is it that you get to adventure with the focus of your childhood fantasies? And Amy’s basically an orphan. She gets a pass from me on this one so far.

Dave
The other possible hint I notices was the “MYTH” brand laptop (with the “Y” being a Greek psi). Don’t know if it means anything. I think we shouldn’t assume that Rory is the guy who will be at the altar tomorrow; two years have passed, and she didn’t seem all that crazy about him then. Honestly, I go into each season trying not to have too many expectations and just letting the show bring me what it will.

Matt Wilson
I’m interested to see how Smith handles the more dramatic stuff. As with Tennant, his first appearance was designed to play up the Doctor’s humorous, fun, crazy, unpredictable and, most importantly, likable sides to win over the audience fast. But if this season is anything like previous ones, there are going to be moments of melancholy and intensity, and we haven’t seen how Smith does those yet.

I think Tennant, at least what his Doctor became in his last few appearances, probably would have played the moment where the Doctor tells the prison-guard aliens to “Basically, run” very differently, with more intensity compared to Smith’s grinny approach. In some ways, that feel is a bit of a sigh of relief after the last few Davies movies, which seemed to try very hard to be IMPORTANT and have pathos.

Still, I know by the season finale there’s going to be some big dramatic moment Smith’s going to have to play straight. I’m curious to see whether it works.