A new Doctor, a new companion and even a new TARDIS, all steampunked and gleaming. New Doctors always take some getting used to, and I did not care for the look of this new one (played by Matt Smith) when he appeared at the end of Season 4 (as they are numbered in the modern version of the epic) and replaced David Tennant. Mind you, I hadn’t cared for Tennant either when he replaced Christopher Eggleston, my favorite Doctor to date (of course, I watched little of the old series, seeing a few Tom Baker episodes when I lived in England but none of the others). Doctors come and go, so it doesn’t do much good to decide you like any one in particular. At some point, he will move on.

The same is doubly true for the Doctor’s “companion”, the young women with whom he is travelling. Rose Tyler was probably the greatest of the companions, and when she was trapped in an alternate universe, never to see or be seen by the Doctor again, it was simply heart-breaking. Of course, Billie Piper went on from there to play a hard-working, secret-revealing call girl in “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” (whoops, I see in IMDB I have almost all of S3 to catch up with!) so we didn’t so much lose a companion as gain, well, a companion.

As I said, I didn’t care much for the new Doctor — until he met Amy Pond, his new companion. Somehow, actress Karen Gillan brings out the best in Smith, or complements him in a way that works really well for me. (Sigh, all this subjectivity.) Like most of the Doctors’ travelling companions, Gillan is not drop-dead gorgeous; she’s pretty and full of energy (they don’t say “spunk” in England, but that’s what she’s got, Lou Grant help her), frightened of nothing except, from what I can tell through a single episode, being left behind. She’s also ginger, which is probably just an accidental joke since the Doctor keeps wanting to come himself as a ginger and never does.

As I said, one episode, the Earth saved and aliens chastised and the Doctor asserting his place as savior of the human race and someone ready to race off into time and space and show a pretty girl a good time.

And I do dig the new TARDIS, trendy though it is.