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The power of love is, in addition to being a curious thing, a plot device that Doctor Who likes to fall back on in those moments when an interesting premise flames out or the writers seem to have written themselves into a corner. It's not a bad plot device, either. I mean, it would be a terrible one if Doctor Who was a terribly cerebral series intent on creating works that can stand up to forensic levels of scrutiny, but it isn't. And trying to make it so would be like, I don't know, explaining that Jedis can move things with their minds because they've got some magic blood disorder; making sure everything is airtight and logical removes a lot of the fun from a big, daft adventure series. Having said that, there's a difference between having all the people on Earth wish The Doctor back to his full power in "The Last of the Time Lords" and using a leaf to defeat a giant soul-eating star. There's matters of scale to consider.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. "The Rings of Akhaten" begins with probably the most British image ever created: The Doctor, reading the Beano, while "Ghost Town" by The Specials plays in the background. (Incidentally, I know it's probably only been used as an easy signifier to say "This is happening in the '80s!" but the inclusion of the archetypal state of the nation pop song in an episode that airs the week a host of sweeping, awful reforms attacking the welfare state are introduced strikes me as horribly, if unintentionally, apt.) He watches as the aforementioned leaf hits a young man in the face, causing him to wander into traffic in the worst case of plant-on-man violence since The Ruins. A young woman drags him out of the way of an oncoming car, they look into each others' eyes, and we're treated to a little montage of the two going out, marvelling at the role that a leaf played in the course of their lives (Did Alan Ball take an uncredited pass on this script?) before becoming parents to one Clara Oswald.

Yes, The Doctor is trying to figure out just who his new Companion is in a way which is at least slightly more meaningful - if no less creepy - than just combing through her old Facebook photos. In the course of his snooping, he watches a younger Clara at her mother's funeral and is compelled to show present day Clara something spectacular in the form of the eponymous rings, which are a series of colossal chunks of rock in orbit around a red star. On one of these is a pyramid from which the inhabitants of the rocks say all life originated. The Doctor remains skeptical but says that it's a nice story at least, before taking Clara on a tour of the local market, which is a veritable Mos Eisley Cantina of weird monsters and strange cultists.

Now, I really like Matt Smith as The Doctor. I think he provides a nice balance between the po-faced seriousness of Christopher Eccleston and occasionally wearying energy of David Tennant, and on his best days he can be funny and suggest a being of great power. "The Ring of Akhaten" was not one of his best days, primarily because the scenes featuring all the different aliens relied a little too much on outrageous mugging. There's a time and a place for outrageous mugging, and they are "hardly ever" and "reasonably far away from scenes in which a small child is about to be killed." His more serious turn towards the end of the episode as he tried to impress the episode's villain to death (a kind of scene which my friend Neil McWilliam has frequently described as "galactic cock-waving") also verged on self-parody, though I think the way in which Smith depicted The Doctor being physically drained by his experience pulled it back just far enough.

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