Who In Review: The God Complex

I'm not going to beat about the bush. The Matt Smith era is far from my favourite in the long history of Doctor Who, and whilst I may enjoy a number of his episodes, I find many of them marred by his performance. After watching The Eleventh Hour (with its truly awful extended opening scene with the newly regenerated Doctor eating various things brought to him by a juvenile Amelia Pond) I was hopeful that, as with his predecessors, I would grow to like him as his first few stories unfolded. By the end of his first season, however, I was a little disappointed. Not only had I failed to warm to the new Doctor, but I had taken a disliking to his unpleasant new companion and felt that even the best episodes of Series 5 had been pretty underwhelming and average. Unfortunately, the next few years did little to change my mind.

But I'm not here to moan about the Eleventh Doctor; this is about my favourite of all his serials! Since I can count the truly great Matt Smith stories on one hand (minus thumbs), this task (unlike choosing my favourite David Tennant story) was incredibly easy. Whilst The Doctor's Wife and The Crimson Horror were both utterly brilliant, and The Snowmen is the only Christmas episode Moffat got perfectly right, my absolute favourite Matt Smith story is:

The God Complex.

Firstly, I do like the double meaning of the title and the way it's slipped into the dialogue. But there's much more here than just a cool title. The location, and in particular the design of the 1980s Hotel, is stunning! From the cassette player churning out lift music to the gaudy mustard and burgundy corridors to the 'sophisticated' hair salon, everything looks exactly right and evocatively creepy. Even the chunky phone Rita uses as she succumbs to the rapture is perfect. The creature itself is a work of art, beautifully sculpted and fleetingly shot for most of the episode, and the aerial shot as it dies and the Hotel fragments to reveal the true interior of the prison ship is brilliantly done. The Nightmares in the bedrooms are also incredibly realised - the clown, for a start, is utterly terrifying and the scene where you first meet Joe, surrounded by laughing ventriloquists dummies, makes my skin crawl.

Then, of course, there is the guest cast. Daniel Pirrie and David Walliams do excellent turns as Joe and Gibbis, but are outclassed by Dimitri Leonidas as the poor conspiracy geek Howie and the utterly superb Amara Karan as Rita. Rita is wonderful from the moment we meet her and makes me wish she had been a companion. She gets all the best lines, confronting the Doctor on the staircase about why he feels it's up to him to save them all, choosing to file the confirmation that Gibbis is an alien under 'freak out about later', responding to the Doctor's realisation that she's Muslim with "Don't be frightened" and going off to face her fate rather than put the others at risk and asking the Doctor to remember her the way she was. It's one of the most heartbreaking moments in the modern series, and the fact that Rita is such a strong and likeable character despite only being on screen for half an hour is testament to both Karan's acting and Toby Whithouse's script. Likewise, Leonidas makes Howie an instantly sympathetic character who echoes the equally awkward and frightened Vince from Horror Of Fang Rock. Of course, all this is thanks to the flawless direction by Nick Hurran, with eerie shots of corridors and stairwells interspersed with CCTV footage and jump cuts between Joe/Howie/Rita's screaming/laughing faces as they succumb to the rapture.

And this is one of the few episodes where I think that Matt Smith is actually good as the Doctor. Okay, so he gets a few scenes where he rambles and gurns, but the scene where he confronts Gibbis over his cowardice is incredibly powerful, as are the sequences where he breaks Amy's faith in him and their final conversation when he returns her and Rory to Earth. I actually wish this had been Amy and Rory's final outing. It's a much better send off that what they eventually got and comes after an incredibly dangerous encounter which has made the Doctor question his right to put them in such life-threatening situations. His argument for taking them home, seemingly for good, is reasonable and seems to be a satisfying conclusion to Amy and Rory's arc. I'd happily watch Closing Time, then skip forward to The Snowmen and pretend what lies in between doesn't exist! Alas, that wasn't to be.

This episode also goes some way in disempowering the Doctor, bringing him down from the almost God-like status he seemed to have attained throughout Tennant's era (The Last Of The Time Lords being a prime example, the end of The Waters Of Mars being another), which I think was sorely needed. For me, the Doctor has never been an all powerful alien who saves the universe on a daily basis. Yes, he's alien. Yes, he saves the universe. But sometimes he messes things up, and sometimes he achieves something on a small scale. As Rory points out, "Not all victories are about saving the universe". And here the Doctor does mess things up. He fails to save Joe, Howie and Rita because he got it wrong. By the end of the episode, he hasn't saved the universe, but he has saved Amy and Rory, and allowed the creature to die, thus preventing any more people being ensnared by the prison ship.

The God Complex is often overlooked in favour of some of the more spectacular episodes where Big Things happen and the emotion and drama are signposted with bombastic gestures and special effects. But in being so focused, with so much to say and a perfect balance of humour and tragedy, The God Complex is infinitely superior to anything else from Smith's era.