Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Cry Me A River.

Right, stop whatever you're doing for ten minutes and watch this. It's the animated prequel to the next audio series of Doctor Who spin-off Professor Bernice Summerfield. And I'd make it full screen:

Some back story for the uninitiated: created by new series writer Paul Cornell (Father's Day, Human Nature) and voiced by Lisa Bowerman, Summerfield's adventures began in the pages of the original Doctor Who novels published in the late 90s when the was "terminally" off air (she was the companion in the original novel version of Human Nature), and was a companion of the Seventh (McCoy) Doctor. After splitting with the character, she continued in her own series of books which then transferred to audio drama cd for the Big Finish company and were instrumental in getting them to the license to produce original stories featuring the classic Doctors.

The audio adventures for Bernice have run for over ten years; I haven't heard most of them, but the style is rather closer to the British comic book tradition, very 2000 AD. An archaeologist, she's somewhat an forerunner to River Song though she's only rarely been reunited with the Doctor and always seemingly in the right order. She's shifted away from her day job in recent years and this short film is an attempt to draw her back in that direction, smartly referencing Lara Croft to a degree and producing the kind of chase which couldn't be accomplished as well in audio. Smart.

Her nemesis it seems is now Irving Braxiatel, her one time boss, owner of private museum, the Braxiatel Collection (mentioned briefly in the classic series Paris set story City of Death). Brax is a timelord and loomed large in the spin-off Whoniverse having been a major character in both the Bernice plays and the Gallifrey series (about Romana II's presidency) oscillating between malevolence and benevolence and is voiced by Miles Richardson, Ian's son (and sounds exactly like his father when he's playing the older version). Oh and he's the Doctor's brother. Best mention that too.

Who Fix

Just a quick plug for a brand new blog from the makers of Tachyon TV: Who Fix - your daily dose of Doctor Who goodness. It's pretty self-explanatory and we hope that you enjoy it...

http://www.whofix.net

Cheers

Neil and John

He Can Carry A Good Tune

Doctor Who: Proms 10 & 11 - Royal Albert Hall, 24th and 25th July

And here we are again, two years later and another Doctor Who Prom. Much has changed since that last extravaganza and the series itself has undergone something of a transformation under the auspices of Head Writer & Executive Steven Moffat. We have a new Doctor too, in the beguiling form of Matt Smith. But some things haven't changed and one of them is the music composed for the series by Murray Gold. Proms 10  and 11 at the Royal Albert Hall provide us with an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with some of Gold's most successful pieces composed for the Russell T Davies era of the show and to get to know a whole new set of themes for the first series overseen by Moffat.

What I like about these Proms is that we get a chance to hear concert versions of the music composed for the series unshackled from the extremely busy sound mix that smothers many of the episodes we see on television. You can listen to the latest themes without all manner of sound effects, including explosions and weapons fire, and dialogue obscuring some of the best music being composed for a British television series today. The music is also presented within the world of Doctor Who as live too, with all manner of monsters prowling round the Hall and plenty of interactivity including clips of the series and special appearances. Hopefully, the children attending these Proms will be inspired by Gold's music for the show but also will come away also having had a taster of some of the more accessible classical pieces within the programme.

This year's Proms get off to a gorgeous start with 'The Mad Man With A Box', an ethereal piece, almost mystical in quality, that, with its beautiful solo vocal from Yamit Mamo, manages to capture some of the magic of the man that we all know of as the Doctor. Onto the stage comes one of the hosts for our show, Karen Gillan, resplendent in a gold and black gown, who then introduces us to the pizazz of 'An Untimely Arrival' which covers the pre-titles to The Eleventh Doctor as the TARDIS crash lands in Amy's garden. Full of energy and vigour, Gold uses it as a bridging motif between the RTD era and the new adventures of a new Doctor. Familiar but also preparing the way into the new series without frightening the horses too much. It complements the John Adams piece, Short Ride In A Fast Machine quite wonderfully, itself full of syncopation and looping, repetitive rhythms and, for these Proms, it is certainly one of Adams more accessible and audience friendly pieces.

One of my highlights of these Proms is Gold's new theme for the Doctor, 'I Am The Doctor'. It's an epic signature tune for one of the most mercurial of the Doctor's incarnations and sets out to remind us that although the Doctor has changed, he is still very much the hero. The melody sticks in the mind and is instantly addictive and it's been used throughout the series but most significantly in The Pandorica Opens as he gives his speech to the amassed ships of his deadliest enemies above Stonehenge. A superb composition, a Gold standard if you like, and musically one of Series Five's greatest achievements. As this played, the Hall was invaded by all manner of alien foes - Saturnynians, Silurians, Cybermen and Judoon - and children everywhere, even those of us who are 48 years old and still refuse to grow up, were left grinning with delight.

Two classical pieces follow with the BBC National Orchestra Of Wales under the brilliant conductorship of Grant Llewellyn. If the Adams piece was a bit of a warm up, then Llewellyn gets the Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir to really give it some welly here. William Walton's Overture 'Portsmouth Point', a crafty nod to Murray Gold's home town, is a jaunty, perky work, full of gorgeous melody and rhythm. The mood undergoes a startling change with the second piece. An all time favourite, Holst's 'Mars', from The Planets gets a stunning rendition here and much kudos must go to the Choir and the percussion section of the Orchestra for really getting their teeth into this. Another highlight of the two Proms, it's stunningly performed and Llewellyn conducts like a man possessed. The boiling, doom laden aggression and pounding military crescendos sent tingles down my spine. Now, if they could have shown a few clips of Quatermass whilst this was playing then I'd have been an extremely happy telefantasy fan boy.

Back to Who with 'Battle In The Skies' from Victory Of The Daleks. Amusingly, Gold's homage to the scores of Ron Goodwin (633 Squadron and Where Eagles Dare) and Eric Coates (The Dam Busters) is heard as an ARP warden yells across the Hall, 'Put that light out!' as one of Bracewell's 'Ironside' Daleks rises from the floor of the Hall and asks everyone if they want a cup of tea...and a biscuit (thanks to Nick Briggs). The poor old Ironside is then bluntly interrupted by the white Dalek Supreme, arriving on stage in a blaze of light and dry ice. It sends the Ironside Dalek packing and then orders conductor Ben Foster to play the music of the Daleks or else! Foster teases the Dalek and on the matinee performance threatens it with his baton only to be told not to interfere with its sucker. The Supreme (aided and abetted by Barnaby Edwards) patrols the stage as Foster whips the Orchestra Of Wales into a stirring accompaniment to the episode's dogfight sequences. After a swift ice cream in the interval, it is back to the second half of the programme.

Grant Llewellyn returns and once again he wrings as much drama as he can from the Choir and the Orchestra with 'O Fortuna' from Carl Orff's Carmina burana. A medieval eruption of choral power, this iconic piece is stirring and epic, summoning up the very essence of raw nature, of life and death. And Old Spice. Yes, I'm old enough to remember those ads. Karen begins to introduce one of her favourite themes, Amy, but suddenly receives a very special message. In the spirit of Music Of The Spheres back in 2008, where David Tennant's Doctor attempted to stop a Graske from disrupting the Prom, Matt Smith pops up on the video screens around the Hall, greeting the audience from some very odd angles, even upside down at one point, in fine panto tradition. It's a lovely, witty piece, "Sir, careful with that wig. And you sir. And you. And actually most of the violin section. Oh, and ladies mind those skirts. And selected gentlemen."

He's got to fix an overloading fold-back quasar do-dah, thingumy that will turn into a "wibbly wobbly explody wody thing". And he tries to defuse it with an electric tooth brush! But here he goes one better than Tennant. He disappears off the screen and emerges, for real, in the centre of the Hall, looking for someone to help him defuse this bomb. Smith's comic timing and physicality is much to the fore and when he actually does pop up in the Royal Albert Hall for real, interacting with children from the audience, he's in his element and ad-libbing away like a good 'un. Children clearly adore him (he captivated Ellis and Ben in these performances) and he completely confirms that of all the things about Series Five, he is quite simply the series greatest asset right now. Judging by the way he handled all the gobbledegook of the script he's also fast becoming the Stanley Unwin of all of the Doctors! "ITV's been blown off the air!" he naughtily concludes after deactivating the bomb.

We return to the music from the series with 'Amy' and this time Arthur Darvill comes on stage to introduce the music. This is again one of Gold's major triumphs and definitely a high point in the Proms. Yamit Mamo returns for solo vocal duties and with nods to Danny Elfman, Gold offers a heartbreakingly lovely tune for the new companion in the series, deftly capturing the frailties and weaknesses of the woman as well as her sense of wonder and bravery. Quite stunning. It's back to more monsters with a suite of themes, 'Liz, Lizards, Vampires And Vincent', covering the music to accompany the battle between Liz 10 and the Smilers on Starship UK; the return of the Silurians (with Ben Foster surrounded by three of them as he tries to conduct); the marauding vampire Sisters Of The Water and the tragic life of Vincent Van Gogh. Of these, the standouts are certainly the motifs and themes for Vampires Of Venice and Vincent And The Doctor.

The vampires get a memorably unearthly melody to accompany their sojourns into Venice and into the Hall itself as a group of the Sisters way lay a member of the audience during the matinee performance, dancing around him, much to his bemusement. The magnificent music that featured during Vincent's journey into the future and his visit to the gallery to hear how his work had affected millions of lives is presented here. Full of joy and sadness, it remains a very special, emotionally powerful theme.  The medley concludes with the nerve jangling incidentals, using a lilting piano riff, pounding chords and choir, that accompany the Weeping Angels and one of them pops in for a quick visit, scaring the bejesus out of most of the kids in the audience.

Karen and Arthur return to introduce Wagner's 'The Ride Of The Valkyries' and Grant Llewellyn gives the Orchestra Of Wales yet another energetic work out with the swirling strings and strident brass of this stirring classic. It again truly shows what a class act this Orchestra is. Karen then introduces, to several whoops from the audience, 'This Is Gallifrey', as featured in Series Three, and 'Vale decem' from The End Of Time. 'This Is Gallifrey' is here used to wonderful effect as, in the evening performance at least, the video screens show all the regenerations of each Doctor. All the Doctors get their fair share of applause and this slightly distracts from what is one of Gold's finest pieces for the series. Naturally, the greatest response is reserved for Tennant and Smith. On the matinee, either through a technical fault or by decision, the roll call of Doctors wasn't shown and 'This Is Gallifrey' was allowed to soar, full of loss and pride for an ancient society. 'Vale decem' is an amazing choral work with counter-tenor Mark Chambers beautiful voice at the centre of a moving, elegiac piece that sees the regeneration of the Tenth into the Eleventh. Both pieces are guaranteed not to leave a dry eye in the house. Superb.

Matt then arrives on stage to describe Gold's response to Moffat's two part series finale, a specially arranged work, 'The Pandorica Suite'. To be honest, it's not my favourite of Gold's recent work as it tends to resort to emotionally colouring the scenes it covers, particularly the comedy time travel bits, rather than develop big, memorable themes. There's little to remember or to hum here as it rather is incidental music and only until he gets to the conclusion of the suite with a thrilling reinterpretation, signposted with some great brass sections, of 'I Am The Doctor' does it come alive with crashing percussion and insistent woodwind.

Smith, Gillan and Darvill come back to introduce 'The Song Of Freedom', from Series Four. Personally, not one of my favourites but Mark Chambers voice is again extraordinary and Foster gets a tremendous performance from the London Phiharmonic Choir and the Orchestra for this anthemic theme. Murray Gold guests on keyboards during this and the arrangement of the 'Doctor Who Theme' and I'm still not particularly fond of his latest arrangement of the series theme, especially those very non-Ron Grainer opening orchestral tags and brass sections. That said, fortunately enough of Grainer's original composition and Delia Derbyshire's realisation remains and it's lovely to hear the old theme in such a setting driven by especially powerful bass and percussion. Both Proms rightly received a standing ovation and it is still pretty amazing to think that the little series we all love has been transformed into an unstoppable multi-media attraction. To paraphrase the Ninth Doctor, 'Fantastic!'

Radio Squee

Stuart Ian Burns listens to the Doctor Who Prom 2010

Listening to a Doctor Who Prom on the radio should be a miserable experience for most fans simply because we’re not there and we can't see what we're missing.  When the audience are reacting to whatever’s happening in the Royal Albert Hall, it’s not until the end of a piece that (in this case) presenter Petroc Trelawny explains that the eleven rhythmic applauses are for the video appearances of each of the different incarnations of the Doctor, so we should be disappointed that we couldn’t quite rightly cheer for Paul McGann at the correct moment (or whichever Doctor is wrongly your favourite).

Yet, Karen’s funny introductions in which she seemed be surprised by the sound of her own voice, Arthur's astonishment at the scale of the auditorium, the weight of the orchestral and choral sound and the infectious atmosphere in the hall were just enough to transport at least my thoughts to my imagined favourite spot just in front of the stage (which I hear in reality isn’t acoustically the best place to stand but it's my imagination so for me it is).  Someone else from this parish was actually in the hall tonight (and will be again tomorrow lunch time) and may write about the experience so I don't really want to steal his thunder.  But I did at least want to say, as Karen might, wasn't that, well, amazing?

der-der-der-dum-da-dum vocals

This was also a fascinating first chance to hear the imaginarium of Murray Gold (orchestrated by Ben Foster) largely without the dialogue on top.  First impressions in the prologue and The Mad Man with a Box were that in keeping with Moffat’s scripts, Gold had embraced the infantile qualities of the premise of the series by shifting from the ethereal qualities of “Flavia” to the kinds of der-der-der-dum-da-dum vocals that a child (and some adults) might use to interpret the music, essentially giving them something to sing along to.  As the concert progressed, Gold was keen to demonstrate that although this is a new series with new themes, the range and ability he established in the previous era was still in effect.

This Is The Doctor, what we heard of it under being drowned out by the dialogue (for a chance – it's usually the other way round) in contrast to the Tenth Doctor's angsty theme, is broad and rhythmic with an added, strident level of heroism that suggests the character has moved on from the underlying tragedy of the first two incarnations of the new era.  Battle in the Skies (Daleks vs Spitfires) may have lacked the raw vocal distinctiveness of the The Dark and Endless Dalek night, but the meddly Liz, Lizards, Vampires and Vincent better demonstrated the range of sounds that the composer has to produce across the series, the final section perfectly capturing the melancholic state of the painter. 

Perhaps inevitably my favourite tune of the night was Amy, which keys in nicely to the slightly madcap elements of the character’s personality but also includes some evident discord because her life doesn’t make sense.  Murray’s companion compositions have been a mix of tragic (Rose), plaintive (Martha and Rose) and screwball (Donna) and in Amy he finds something rather more magical, perhaps because it has to cover the span of a longer life, and so has to fit both the child like wonder of Amelia and the bright young yet cynical thing she’s become.

Another gift at the close of the concert was the latest version of the Doctor Who theme, and for the first time in general public (after a couple of tantalising hints at the stuttery end of the credits sequences in the Doctor Who PC games) the middle eighth which is the moment when this rendition suddenly makes sense as the choir crashes in.  I still live in hope that Moffat will have a change of heart and make good on his praise for the Delia Derbyshire arrangement and use the thing in the next series, but after hearing Murray's latest version tonight I’m oddly less hostile towards it.  The graphics still look horrendous though.

I still live in hope that Moffat will have a change of heart and make good on his praise for the Delia Derbyshire arrangement and use the thing in the next series

Amid Murray Gold’s gold, the classical, some would say archival music was well chosen: the incessant, metrical sound of John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine brought to mind the ticking of a clock; Walton’s busy Portsmouth Point Overture suggested the bustle of a space port; Wagner’s repeating Die Walküre (which I made some good jokes about last time); Orff’s O Fortuna, the certain inspiration for much of Murray’s choral work and Holst’s Mars from The Planets the certain inspiration for much of the music in the Star Trek films, almost unlistenable now without imagining Picard growling “The line must be drawn here!” just as the Enterprise shatters into a thousand tiny pieces.

During the interval in 2008, the BBC controversially commissioned science fiction writer Justina Robson to provide an audio essay on the programme which quickly descended into a bonkers evisceration of the sexual politics of the show.  This time, much more in keeping with the mood of the concert, Matthew Sweet offered a pleasant and intelligent short history of the score music in the classic series from An Unearthly Child through to the unearthly noise of Keff McCulloch which 2Entertain would do well to snap up and put out as an extra on one of their future releases.

All of the composers interviewed were on good form and although some of the stories were well worn (Dudley Simpson biking over the pages days before transmission), it was interesting to hear how their experiences and the demands placed upon them by successive producers were very similar across the forty years, assuming that if the video wasn't of the standard they'd hoped, the music would be able to somehow pull it together.  That it did, is a testament to their creativity and like Sweet, I too sometimes whistle City of Death out in the world, and even did it in Paris.  But that's a story for another time.

the unearthly noise of Keff McCulloch

Back in the Albert, any disappointment about the audience’s genuine sympathy for the exterminated Daleks before the interval (has it come to this?) quickly dissipated in the face of Matt Smith’s lively and mostly live turn as the Doctor.  In an interview at the back of this month’s Doctor Who Magazine, the actor suggests, going into the next series, that he has a better handle on how to play the character and that was certainly on display here as he navigated a mix of improv and script with a volunteer from the audience.  Smith is able to fully inhabit the Doctor now and it seems to be because he’s realised that the best way to make him convincing is to simply be himself (unless he was simply being himself tonight and so therefore he was the Doctor – there’s a brain teaser).

Music of the Spheres succeeded because of its evocation the beauty of classical music through a rather gorgeous speech; whatever this was called simply brought the magic of the show right into the auditorium.  We weren’t given an indication on the radio as to the age of this small boy, but surely the experience of interacting with a fictional character will have interesting repercussions for his future psychological development.  Let’s hope for the sake of his parents he doesn’t spend the next decade or so obsessing about this mysterious imaginary friend from his past who he helped save half of London, but then, unlike Amy, but like the rest of us, he can keep in touch with his friend’s adventures.  And how they sound.

Next: Dvořák's Slavonic Dance in E minor Op.72 No.2

Scarcely Bears Thinking About

Doctor Who: The Big Bang
Review by Tom Dickinson

The Big Bang is one of the most thrilling, most enchanting, and most exciting Doctor Who stories I've ever experienced in any medium. But it's also one of the most deeply flawed, primarily because it gets too bogged down in its own impressive complexity. Recently I was watching the featurette on the Mawdryn Undead DVD, in which Peter Davison, Nicholas Courtney and Eric Saward all wonder whether that story might have been a bit too complicated for Doctor Who. If they were watching The Big Bang, it must surely have made their heads spin.

Russell T Davies was often (and rightly) said to have under-thought the logical, science fictional plot progression of his stories, giving his writerly attention instead to the drama and the emotional journey of the characters. But Moffat over-thinks his, to the extent where the science fiction is not so much a story that we're shown as a logical argument that we're told. It’s like a Neal Stephenson book, crammed into fifty-five minutes. The story of The Big Bang (or at least its middle part) isn’t much more than a bunch of people being chased around a museum by a stone Dalek (which is, I admit, kind of fantastic). And every so often, they pause to exchange bizarre pseudo-logical pronouncements such as "exploding at every point in history" and "the universe literally never happened," gradually building up the ultimate explanation in a way that’s bewildering, but impressively bewildering.

It's bewildering, but impressively bewildering.

But does it make sense? I'm scared to think about it all too hard, for fear I might get trapped in its intricacies (or, if you prefer, arrant nonsense) and never emerge. Just look what happened to poor Neil. I'm not going to challenge whether there's actually any sense in Moffat's convoluted maze of paradoxes, restoration fields, footprints of the never-were and fezzes. I'm going to take it as read that Moffat designed another intricate puzzle-box of harmoniously moving parts. I'm just not sure that's what wound up on screen. Recently, Chip (of the Two Minute Time Lord podcast) put out an episode featuring Erik (of the Bridging the Rift podcast) which gives plausible answers to some (but not all) of the questions raised in this episode. But the very fact that it's necessary for us to make up our own answers is a testament to just how muddled the plotting in this story is. I'm all for challenging drama, but too much ham-fisted sci-fi exposition can distract, to the point where it ceases to be drama at all.

Let’s return to the Mawdryn Undead comparison. In that story, two versions of the Brigadier from different points in his timeline meet one another. In this story, we have two characters, the Doctor and Amy, meeting other versions of themselves… using two entirely inconsistent models of time travel: Amy meets a version of herself from an altered timeline, whereas the Doctor travels in tidy, self-consistent causal loops, crossing his own timeline (which flippantly violates the fundamental rules of Doctor Who storytelling, but who cares, because it’s fun). And this turns out to be one of the more sensible, less complicated parts of this story!

Maybe this convoluted beast of a story would have worked if it had been spread out over multiple episodes, and the exposition was given time to develop more slowly. This is why Neal Stephenson’s books are ofen so incredibly hefty. But we all know Moffat really couldn't afford that. The more information he gives us in advance, the greater the likelihood that we'd have figured out his entire plot. The television viewer of today is too sophisticated for his or her own good, and Doctor Who fans especially: look how much we managed to figure out based on the few hints we were given. We can whine all we want that the Pandorica’s restoration field comes out of nowhere, but if Moffat had even hinted at its existence in The Pandorica Opens, we would all have known more or less exactly what was going to happen this week. So as a result, Moffat's got to deliver all his exposition in one go. It's a lose/lose situation.

You know what they say about a cosmos without the Doctor...

Unless there’s another option, which of course there was: he could have cut it out entirely. We really don't need the head-scratching brainteaser because it's all just setup to what's really important: the brutal fact that, in order to save everyone and restore Amy's lost family, the Doctor has to revert the universe to its original state, only without himself ever having existed.* There are certainly less cumbersome ways we could have gotten to that point. Having the Doctor mumble something about "complicated space-time events" would have done it for me.

*(Which wouldn’t really be a very good thing at all, would it? The universe needs the Doctor. Didn’t Moffat watch Turn Left? Plus, The Doctor wasn’t there to use the Moment to end the time war, which would of course mean that there wouldn't be a universe anymore because the Time Lords destroyed it and become beings of pure consciousness and energy. Didn’t Moffat watch The End of Time? Or was there no Time War at all, without the Doctor inciting it in Genesis of the Daleks? Maybe we shouldn't think too hard about all this. You know what they say about a cosmos without the Doctor...)

But Moffat instead chooses to walk us step by step down his winding path, using time he could have devoted to other, more important things, such as giving us some idea of the identity of the villain of the piece. Yes, I understand that Moffat has chosen to play the long(er) game and postpone the answer to this question until next year. But while that's a refreshing and surprising way of handling plotting in Doctor Who, it comes at the cost of reducing The Big Bang to a dramatic fizzle. This isn’t Lost. Questions such as "who is making the TARDIS explode" and "what do they stand to gain by erasing the universe" and "did the Doctor thwart their evil plan or is he somehow playing right into their hands" are pretty central to the dramatic stakes of this story now, and while the delayed payoff might make this story better when we revisit it next year or the year after, that's little comfort at the moment.

Moffat has chosen to play the long(er) game.

And I say all of this about a story I described above as "one of the most thrilling, most enchanting, and most exciting Doctor Who stories I've ever experienced in any medium." I complain because I care. In the end, the thing that saves this story is the very same thing I whined about earlier: the sheer concentration of the offending exposition. Most of the material I found really unpalatable was at the center of the episode, giving us a thrilling opening and a gloriously triumphant conclusion. And a strong introduction and conclusion count for a lot.

The teaser was just magical, re-enacting the opening of The Eleventh Hour with the younger (and, in my opinion, more likable) Amelia Pond with the details changed but many things very much the same. I wrote at length in my review of The Eleventh Hour about how much I loved the establishing shot of Casa Pond, and I love it just as much here if not more. It serves to establish one of the most important (and surprising) parts of The Big Bang: the ways in which it echoes the stories we've seen so far. While we fans have been scrambling to recognize the clues that would take on greater plot significance in the finale (and certainly there were a few), far more important are the moments of thematic significance. Against what we've come to expect from Doctor Who over the years, the duck pond is not an important plot point but rather an important metaphor for Amy’s house and the void left behind when things are forgotten. 

After the brilliant teaser (which ends with Amy in the Pandorica, one of the episode's biggest surprises), we're given a story whose focal point is Rory, or rather Auton Rory, who is fast becoming one of my favorite companions. His scenes with the Doctor are wonderfully written and performed (and shot, as well--kudos to newcomer Toby Haynes). I've had friends tell me that they found it difficult to get emotionally involved with this series, and I agree, but whenever Rory’s on screen that problem fades away. And while Rory's return as the security guard is obvious (nurse, gondolier, doctor, plainclothes detective, centurian, security officer, groom... what will Rory Williams be next?) it's nevertheless extremely satisfying.

Nurse, gondolier, doctor, plainclothes detective, centurian, security officer, groom... what will Rory Williams be next?

Sadly this is the point at which the story beings to crumble under the weight of its own exposition, but by the time the Doctor has rigged the Pandorica to fly into the exploding TARDIS, most of the heavy plotting is out of the way and we’re free to focus on the drama of the situation. Karen Gillan gives one of her better performances, and there’s even a poignant moment for River Song (who is otherwise surprisingly irrelevant to this story) as she mourns the fact that the Doctor will now never get to know her, nicely inverting her sacrifice in Forest of the Dead.

The Doctor’s journey backwards through the events of the series is a wonderful moment for Matt Smith, as he cements his “best Doctor ever” status (for me, anyway). The Lodger seems a strange choice, and I wonder whether there were other scenes scripted or filmed that were left out for time. In any case, the Doctor’s reassurance of Amy from Flesh and Stone is better in context, and his bedtime story to Amy is inspired. On first viewing it plays as a natural outpouring of warmth and humanity from a defeated Doctor, telling a bedtime story to a little girl as his final act. And then on second viewing, it plays as a moment of sheer genius on the part of the Doctor and brilliant writing by Moffat as the Doctor seamlessly integrates the necessary clues into a story specifically designed to be remembered on one very particular day. When this pays off at Amy’s wedding reception with the invocation of “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” it’s one of Doctor Who’s finest and most triumphant moments.

There are those who will object to the plot point of Amy losing and recovering her memory as being too similar to Donna's fate in Journey's End, when really what’s happening is quite the opposite: whereas Donna must forget the Doctor or she will die, Amy must remember the Doctor, or he will die (okay, never have existed. Today just dying is a result). In any case, the companion forced to forget his or her travels with the Doctor is really just an occupational hazard of time travel, used previously in Mawdryn Undead with the Brigadier's temporary amnesia (how glad I am that I watched that story shortly before writing this review) and stretching further back to The War Games in 1969. Perhaps that's a more apt comparison, considering the debt Smith's Doctor owes to Troughton. But while Moffat's owes much to the Doctor Who stories of the past (of course he does, that's how Doctor Who works), what he's doing here with the theme of memory and forgetting is richer and more complex than anything that's been attempted in Doctor Who before.

The most metatextual Doctor Who story since Love and Monsters.

And that's the kind of complexity that can really be appreciated in this episode and in the way the series functions as a whole: the thematic complexity. The running themes relating to fairy tales and imaginative storytelling are developed to a grand conclusion in The Big Bang where it’s Amy’s ability to remember the Doctor as a story that allows her ultimately to bring him back even when it looked like he might be gone forever. I don’t think it’s too much of  a stretch to read it as an allegory for the Doctor being “forgotten” in the 1980s and subsequent “remembering” in 2005 by a generation of writers who had been affected as children by stories of the Doctor, making this the most metatextual Doctor Who story since Love and Monsters. 

And so the episode ends with a joyous farewell to Leadworth and the old team back together again, with some tantalizing hints thrown our way about what’s coming next year. If the Orient Express in space is a “sly dig at RTD,” as I’ve heard suggested by some fans, then it’s a dig too sly for me because I don’t get it. It sounds fantastic to me, and if that’s what we’ll be seeing this Christmas then I’m all for it. And if not, well, that’s okay too. I’m excited about the future of the show because, while this year has had its faults, overall I think it’s featured some really fantastic writing, acting, and directing, so I’m excited to see where this team will take us in year two. 

How many days ‘til Christmas?

Making it a good one

Doctor Who: The Big Bang

Review by Paul Kirkley

The Big Bang is very possibly the greatest episode of Doctor Who ever made. Here are 50 – count ’em! – reasons why:

He’s back – and it’s about time. No, it really is this time. It’s incredible how little this ancient TV show about a time traveller has actually exploited the fantastic, fairytale possibilities of time. This episode does its best to make up for half a century of neglect in 55 minutes.

We got a total story reboot. All those Dr Who Monster Book baddies gathered together at the end of last week’s episode was undoubtedly an OMG moment, but having them all standing around chatting and shuffling would inevitably have diminished everyone involved. As an idea, it peaked before it even got started, so it was the right decision to just let it go.

Instead, we got a brand new mystery for the young adventuress Amelia Pond - like getting a whole new bonus story when we were least expecting it.

A world without stars. Or the Doctor. I don’t know which is the more unthinkable.

The museum scenes have a real filmic quality to them. Beautifully shot by Toby Haynes and scored by Murray Gold in a manner that wouldn’t have disgraced Steven Spielberg and John Williams.

A stone Dalek. Uh-huh-u-huh, that’s pretty cool

“Okay kid – this is where it gets complicated.” Yep, you got me. Wasn’t expecting that.

Rory needs a ridiculous miracle, and he gets one: the Doctor, in a fez, with a mop. Given that the last time we saw our man he’d just been locked away for eternity by an alliance of all his greatest enemies, this sudden comic, vaudeville reappearance – with props - totally subverts our expectations.

“Echoes. Fossils in time. Footprints of the never were.” You never got this stuff with Robert Sloman, did you?

“Your girlfriend isn’t more important than the universe.” “She is to me.” Ouch, I felt that. Still, you go gallivanting around the universe with a jaw that big, you’re gonna have to take the occasional slug.

Rory’s vigil. The lonely centurion, performing one last act of devotion to the box he had pledged to protect for nearly 2,000 years. Now that’s what I call an epic fairytale.

It’s reassuring to know the Doctor only changes history for the most important of reasons. Like getting a little girl a drink.

It’s all jaunty, timey-wimey caper one minute and then, bang: there’s a dying Doctor from the future. Breathless – and breathlessly inventive –stuff.

Things you can do in 12 minutes: Suck a mint, buy a sledge, have a fast bath. See Sidney? This show’s still educational.

“Today, just dying is a result.”

The lone Dalek powering up in the darkness echoes the latent menace of 2005’s reputation-rescuing Dalek (you know, before before it was pissed away again in various camp runarounds)

The Doctor against the London skyline and the exploding sun-TARDIS burning up the sky: it’s the sort of shot that makes you feel justified in using poncy terms like mise en scene. See, I just did.

And then a Dalek rises up above the roofline. A decade ago, that would have been an iconic moment in itself. Here it seemed positively throwaway. I guess we’ve just got spoiled.

“It's a fez. I wear a fez now.”

The Doctor getting frazzled by the Dalek is still a shock, even with all the warnings we’ve had. Maybe I should have been keeping count.

“I’m River Song. Check your records again.” Blimey – we’ve come along way from that Dalek being Rose's new BF in series one, haven’t we? This one was petrified in more ways than one. And then it died.

Rebooting the universe: not so much jargon as anti-jargon, bringing the biggest Event of all down to the level of everyday Windows frustrations.

And for all its crazily epic scale, the idea that all you need is a few atoms to grow a universe is a very elegant sci-fi concept; after all, yer basic periodic table of elements provides all the building blocks you need. (Okay, so recreating a specific universe - stars, planets, Mr Kipling’s French Fancies and all - is a bit more tricky. But hey, it's still better than that bloody Paradox Machine, right?)

The Doctor in The Pandorica: so weak, so broken, so utterly defeated. Have we ever seen him this vulnerable before?

“He wants to talk to you before he goes.” It’s the “before he goes” that gets you: a deathbed farewell.

“Amy Pond. All alone. The girl who didn’t make sense. How could I resist?” How could anyone?

And

"You'll have your family back - you won't need your imaginary friend any more." As if.

And

“Nothing is ever forgotten.” This is what Michael Praed’s Robin Hood said just before he died. As a kid, it broke my heart. And so did this.

That kiss. We’ve had our fair share of Doctor-companion lip-lockery in recent years, but that tiny, chaste, blink-and-you-miss-it kiss to the back of the hand was the most beautiful by a mile.

“Geronimo!”

Look at the pain etched on the Doctor’s face as he pilots The Pandorica into the heart of the explosion. In the flying final sacrifice stakes, it beats even Davison’s heroic effort at the end of Androzani part 3. I have never feared for my hero more. If this had been his final end in the final ever episode, I wouldn’t have felt cheated.

Flashbacks: to Aickman Road and then, oh yes… the Byzantium. Hah! That jacket! It’s a measure of the quality of this show that we would immediately assume some clever timey-wimey trickery over a mere continuity blunder. And then be proved right.

Amelia asleep on her suitcase in the garden. The girl who waited.

And then, because Moffat is really spoiling us now, another impossibly lovely goodbye. “When you wake up, you’ll have a mum and dad.” Now that’s a Doctor with a bedside manner.

“You’ll dream about that box. It will never leave you. Brand new and ancient at the same time. And the bluest blue ever.” This was lump in the throat stuff, even before we knew it was clever coded message.

The Doctor shedding tears not for the loss of himself, but for the loss of his friend. And then the way his expression turns to real fear as he turns to look at the crack. “I don’t belong here any more.” It’s difficult to know in which of these Doctor-Amy farewells Matt Smith is more extraordinary. But if Tom Baker ever starts guffing on about “Well of course Doctor Who isn’t really an acting part…”, can someone bung a DVD of this in his gob? Cos, don’t get me wrong, I love Tom Baker – we all love Tom Baker - but there’s a lot more to playing this crazy, raggedy man in a box than the ability to walk through a door interestingly.

Twinkling lights in the sky: Amelia’s reward for wishing upon a star. Then the sun comes up and…

It’s Amy, all grown up. How many little surprises can one episode throw at us?

And Amy has a family. With a little tiny dad! In The Doctor Dances, everybody lived. Here, even people who were already dead get to live.

Amy the bride: how traffic-stoppingly beautiful does Karen Gillan look?

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. But of course. With the benefit of hindsight, how else was this series ever going to end? If you didn’t cry or laugh out loud or punch the air at this point, you might want to ask yourself if you actually genuinely like Doctor Who. The most glorious, utterly transcendent moment in the show’s 47-year history? Today, at least, I’m saying, Hell yes.

“Raggedy man, I remember you and you are late for my wedding!” The tremble of glasses. The wind. A wheezing, groaning sound. And there it is: that iconic blue box. The bluest blue ever.

The Doc in his dapper new duds. “Hello everyone. I’m Amy’s imaginary friend. But I came anyway!”

The Doctor Dances. Really, really badly. (“That’s it, that’s good, keep it loose!”)

“2,000 years. The boy who waited. Good on you, mate.”

“Hang on, did you think I was asking you to marry me, or asking if you were married?” The wise and ancient hero who saved the universe. And still a little boy lost when it comes to women.

Who is River Song? We’re going to find out very soon. And she’s sorry, because that’s when everything changes. Ooh ’eck.

An Egyptian Goddess loose on the Orient Express. In Space. Somewhere in a parallel universe, Russell T Davies is still writing the Christmas specials…

But not in ours. In ours, Steven Moffat is the man with the power to make and break realities, to reboot universes and give little lost girls the gift of stars. He is the custodian of the greatest story ever told, with the greatest hero who ever lived, and died, and lived again. And in Matt Smith, he has found his perfect muse, and given us the perfect Doctor Who.

“I’ll be a story in your head. That’s okay – we’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know. It was the best.”

Get Me To The Church On Time

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang
Review by Frank Collins

I'm not sure that experience of working on Spielberg's version of Tin Tin has rubbed off on Moffat that well. The Pandorica Opens more or less amounts to a gene-splicing of the Devil's Tower sequences of Close Encounters and the catacomb exploring of the Indiana Jones films and looks very pretty but I'm not convinced on this evidence he can do 'epic' in Doctor Who. The narratives that hold these glossy visual spectacles together are really what Moffat is interested in. The rest is a bit tokenistic. The two part story that concludes with The Big Bang also reflects an ancient literary tradition that you could say Spielberg himself has deliberately woven into many of his major films. It falls into the tradition of menippea - a form of satire that signifies a mixed, often discontinuous way of writing that draws upon distinct, multiple traditions. Both The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang act as reflections of each other, at once proposing an anti-epic visual presentation in counter-point to an epic narrative.

From the sky full of spaceships above Stonehenge to the alliance of monsters with their rather ridiculously contrived plan to trap the Doctor in the Pandorica, Moffat turns the whole thing on its head and in The Big Bang simply has four people chasing around a museum whilst the universe shrinks outside the window and the Doctor cheats willfully with the time lines, bouncing around like a deranged cosmic Tommy Cooper. Bakhtin regarded menippea as 'the use of the fantastic internally motivated by the urge to create extraordinary situations for the testing of philosophical ideas'. Which sums up the finale for me and Moffat's own view of the entire Doctor Who series synthesised into a carnivalesque ambivalence for logic, an irreverent desire to break the rules and to cross boundaries. Sometimes it works spectacularly - not just in terms of visual spectacle but also in narrative complexity - and sometimes it's a way for him to cheat, avoid the implications of what he's done and refuse to answer questions left dangling by the preceding 11 episodes.

Thus we get no real answers to who was saying 'silence will fall', why the TARDIS was exploding and a reasoning for Amy's 'special' status. And presumably the missing ducks from the Leadworth duck pond ended up on the other side of the crack in time. Moffat knows his game and in the opening sequence with Vincent in 1890 he's clearly sending himself up rotten when the neighbour attending with the doctor looks at the painting of the exploding TARDIS and mutters, 'Look at this, even worse than his usual rubbish'.

Moffat's end game with this finale is to focus in on the triangular relationship between Amy Pond, the Doctor and Rory Williams. The messages carried through time via Van Gogh's painting, Churchill's telephone call, Liz Ten's meeting with River after she has broken out of the Stormcage facility are simply a means to an end whilst also cleverly rewarding the patient viewer with the pleasure of recognition in these pre-titles revisitations. They throw out a number of questions that in typical Moffat style aren't likely to be answered - why is Liz Ten still alive in 5154 and why is Bracewell still working for Churchill when it was more than suggested at the end of Victory Of The Daleks that he was off in search of his true love, Dorabella. These are, like many other sequences in the story, narrative conceits.

The Pandorica Opens is in effect one massive conceit. The significance of the Pandorica and the exploding TARDIS drive the story but in the end we never really discover the answer to the latter and the former is inevitably not what it seems with much of the episode heavily signposting the fact that it's a prison cell into which the Doctor is dumped by his enemies and not the home of an ultimate 'big bad'. The most effective twist in The Pandorica Opens is the resurrection of Rory, presumed erased from history at the end of Cold Blood. His reappearance is another layer to the series themes about 'remembering' and 'forgetting' and, significantly, he isn't the real Rory but a facsimile, a memory of Rory, created by the Nestenes. They presumably replaced the real Rory who did die at the end of Cold Blood. Or was he an Auton right from his introduction in The Eleventh Hour, then destroyed in Cold Blood, and then resurrected in The Pandorica Opens? It is narrative obfuscations such as these that Moffat deliberately ignores or refuses to clarify.

Rory is that most human of non-humans, embodying the crisis of subjectivity at the heart of this revelation. He struggles with his Nestene programming and conflicting human emotions, just as Amy evoked the same contradictions in the Dalek's android Bracewell back in 1941, to reaffirm his love for Amy, only to then destroy the object of his feelings. That this death takes place simultaneously with the Doctor's capture and imprisonment in the Pandorica, the destruction of the TARDIS and the death of the universe offers the spectacle a much needed emotional grounding. Rory's non-human status and his subsequent murder of Amy is the single most powerful scene in The Pandorica Opens and legitimises what is in effect a Doctor Who episode that resembles a Busby Berkeley tap routine performed by a sweating Steven Moffat sporting a fixed grin. It's hard to be 'epic'.

Moffat uses such conceits to again fuel the narrative expectation in The Big Bang where the audience is given a linear narrative - of the Doctor escaping from the Pandorica and the dead - now alive - Amy taking his place - that is broken into non-linear and often repetitive moments of recall, planting visual and verbal information about scenes that haven't happened but will happen or that have happened and we don't know why they have until the explanation appears further along the narrative. He's testing our ideas about time and the use of empirical and metaphysical paradoxes in the science fiction genre. For me, however amusing it is, and - in the way Matt Smith performs these sequences - it is, it really amounts to more grandstanding, including the revitalisation of the Dalek as a token monster to chase our heroes down corridors, that delays the story getting to the roof of the museum and the ultimate fate of the Doctor, the Pandorica and the TARDIS.

What's more interesting in the story are the binary oppositions between men and women. Amy truly is the fairy tale figure of the mysterious Little Red Riding Hood that the series has been constructed around. She is not only the absent woman in search of her self, her journey starting as a girl, the adorable Caitlin Blackwood returning as the younger Amy, and continuing through to impending womanhood and that wedding but the story is itself a science fiction satire about getting the bride to the church on time, about getting the adolescent Amy married off.

Typically, the finale also underlines of some of the problems I've been having with this series. Firstly, the series as a whole has evidently suffered from a cut in budget. This is unfortunate because television is such a visual medium these days and you need to spend money on it to engage audiences. Otherwise, you might as well do all this on the radio and, oddly, a great deal of The Big Bang might as well have gone out as an Afternoon Play on Radio 4. No matter how much of a clever clogs Moffat is, he can't just rely on characters running around a museum engaging in time travel screw-ball comedy to define the nature of the threat to the audience. The difference here to Series Three or Four, for example, is the inward and insular way Series Five has been structured around Amy and the Doctor, including the world in which these characters are seen to exist and the way they counter the threats to this world.

There is less show and more tell in many of the scripts with, I'd argue, only The Time Of Angels/Flesh and Stone really achieving the winning mix of the epic and the personal that uses the visual medium of television well.  There are undoubtedly instances where location filming abroad has paid off, as in the Vampires Of Venice and Vincent And The Doctor, and the threats have been placed on a broader canvas (unlike the exploding TARDIS which is only ever seen on a canvas). On the whole I get a sense that the world building that's so necessary for a high concept series like Doctor Who is being presented to us in shorthand.

If you look at The Pandorica Opens the money has clearly been spent on the Stonehenge locations and the visual effects. By the time we get to The Big Bang the Stonehenge location is gone as is the visual misdirection of the massing alliance space fleet and what was indicated as threat has, ironically enough, become as fossilised as the remaining Daleks (no doubt another addition to the Character Options range). The Big Bang tells us about the threat to the universe but never actually reveals why it is there in the first place, why it is happening and who caused it. It's an unsatisfying finale because we never have a 'big bad' on which to pin the focus of the story. That conflict is absent and the Doctor spends most of The Big Bang fire-fighting whilst Moffat brings the story of Amy full circle.

Much of the series has therefore been set within a self-referential bubble, with the effects of conflict on those outside that bubble all happening off screen. We're told about the consequences from the Doctor, Amy and Rory but we never really see it actually affecting other people. As the TARDIS burns itself out we get the barest indication through dialogue that Richard Dawkins is slightly concerned about the shrinking of history and the lack of stars in the sky. These are powerful concepts that Moffat is creating but I keep feeling I'm being placed at a distance from them and I am only allowed to hear about them, never mind see them, through Amy or Rory. You have to have very strong, very identifiable supporting characters to be able to pull that switch from the broadest to the narrowest world view and to convince an audience that the apocalypse is mostly taking place off screen.

Although RTD's use of his characters families and the extended repertoire of supporting characters in Harriet Jones, Captain Jack et al might be seen as too much a reflection of soap opera, the audience accepted that world view because of its familiarity and because the conflict between the Doctor and the villain of the week was often staged on screen in familiar surroundings, often showing us the consequences. In the end we are left only with Amy and Rory as the audience identification figures and there isn't enough context to care about the threat to them and to us, as the audience. I've stopped caring, to be honest, because the series won't let me care.

Secondly, try as I do, but I don't much like Amy. I find her a rather unsympathetic character. It culminates with her finally waking up on her wedding day and getting married. How do we accept that Amy then casually waves goodbye to parents that she's desperately fought to bring back into existence, and who occupy a minimum of screen time, as she and Rory abruptly leave in the TARDIS. We don't even see them wave back! After all the reunions, I find it rather callous of her to reject that new world with her parents in it, and after restoring the Doctor through the power of suggestion, to spend her honeymoon with him in the TARDIS. Has this woman an obsession about younger, father figures?

I'm afraid there's a whiff of a straight male fantasy (the kissogram's a bit of dead giveaway) deliberately being projected onto the character possibly as as an extension to Moffat's own fantasies of a woman who doles out a form of sadomasochism to the men in her life. Moffat and Moffat's analog, Rory, bask in the power of a strong, controlling woman. Amy as the idealised woman, ironically, may both evoke in them the feelings of safety and protection associated with childhood and likewise from which Rory, and by extension Moffat, may derive satisfaction from earning the approval of that figure. Very much a case of bringing yourself to what you write I think.

Amy spends a lot of time belittling both the Doctor and Rory, trying to dominate and to an extent emasculate them (her attempt to seduce the Doctor is clearly an extension of that but he's strong enough to reject it) and it is very telling when, at the wedding reception, the Doctor congratulates Rory with, 'From now on I shall be leaving the kissing duties to the brand new Mr. Pond' after Amy has ordered the Doctor to 'kiss the bride'. Here, the Doctor firmly rejects her dominance but also confirms that Rory is no longer Rory Williams but Rory Pond. 'No, I'm not Mr. Pond. That's not how it works.' 'Yeah it is' confirms the Doctor with Rory's status underlined as victim of his own self-defeating personality disorder.

Rory is for me the best thing about The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang. As I said, he's the Moffat analog and in being such is a far more humane character, even when he's an Auton, than the horribly idealised Amy Pond. This is the plastic man that hangs around for 2000 years protecting the Pandorica, marries the woman inside it and settles down to a life of hen-pecking in the TARDIS. He's a man who engages in excessive self sacrifice in order to get a response from the woman who allegedly loves him and then happily takes the humiliation from Amy when he is reluctant to find any pleasure in all the dangers that travelling in the TARDIS throws at him. He's a deeply flawed man whom most of us can relate to - 'the boy who waited' guarding the gift of hope in the Pandorica (definitely symbolically similar to Pandora's box itself) and who then emerges into manhood.

The finale is flawed, lacking a really decent conflict between the Doctor and whoever it is that caused the TARDIS to explode and told us 'silence will fall', but they are good, solid and entertaining episodes. The scripts are witty and full of life even if Moffat plunges into self-indulgence in The Big Bang. The death of Amy at Rory's hand, literally, is the pinnacle of The Pandorica Opens whilst the allegedly show stopping gathering of the alliance of monsters is just a sop to keep the kids happy (and bearing in mind my thoughts about the budgetary necessities of the anti-epic, how must they have been disappointed to find it all reduced to one pathetic Dalek screeching for mercy in The Big Bang?).

The Big Bang is more satisfying emotionally with it being the conclusion of the series long Amy arc. The stand out scene between the Doctor and Amy, the conversation with her as he prepares to hurtle into the heart of the burning TARDIS, is one of the best of the series. It adds the full stop to the whole series subtext about 'remembering' and 'forgetting' that has been drip fed into stories from the beginning and the notion that the Pandorica ultimately symbolises hope after both forgetting and remembering, much as in the ancient story of Pandora, even if it does stray rather too close to a big reset button.

Moffat's story arc, in which all of history is erased and then rebooted, in which the very act of remembering is a macrocosmic event (the key to saving the universe) -  and a microcosmic event (bringing back your long vanished parents) is surprise, surprise a main tenet in fairy tales. Amy's Red Riding Hood journey through time, symbolised very powerfully in the forest scenes in Flesh And Stone, is one about avoiding the threat of being devoured wherein the hungry wolf of the old fairy tale is now the crack in the bedroom wall. But like many readings of fairy tales, is this also a story about a girl's desperate avoidance of womanhood, her impending marriage to Rory, and to remain a child by jumping aboard the TARDIS to avoid the predations of the wolf (Rory and the crack in time)? Might this explain her defensiveness to Rory in some of the earlier stories?

The interesting thing about Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales is that they are concerned with the control of women, the control of desire. Amy as a Red Riding Hood princess whose final trajectory is marriage is a fascinating reading of a transgressive woman, acting on her own desires but who in the end must be rescued by two friendly male figures - Rory and the Doctor - the husband and the father. River, cycling through a number of identities and appearances - from earth mother to seductress - is positioned here as a trickster heroine and as literally, the figure of the old wive's tale, the woman as storyteller and an analog to Scheherazade, as one who spins her narrative ('spoilers') throughout the Doctor's timeline. Plus, of course, she's his wife and by extension she's symbolically Amy's wicked stepmother.

As ever, Matt Smith completely steals the show and is particularly impressive in The Big Bang, giving us a mesmerising range of performances within one episode, capturing ancient wisdom and youthful recklessness in one big eccentric package. He truly is the biggest success of what I think has been a fairly middling series this year and remains the sole reason for continuing to watch the show. I have no problem with Karen Gillan's abilities but I'm hoping that now we've got Amy married off the character will acquire some warmth and sensitivity. The themes in this year's series about the journey from childhood to womanhood didn't quite make it across in the performances until the very end of the series. Less flippancy and that awful shouty emphasis she puts on the ends of certain line readings would also help. But when she's good she's very good.

I'm very pleased that Rory appears to have permanently joined the crew. He is the 'everyman' figure that the series must hold on to and Arthur Darvill is completely charming in the role. Now all we need are better monsters (the new Daleks and Silurians were design disasters in my opinion), decent scares and better realised worlds as a context for the journeys the Doctor, Amy and Rory go on.

Until Christmas then...

The Doctor and Amy's Excellent Adventure

Stuart Ian Burns watches Doctor Who: The Big Bang

Raggedy Doctor, raggedy final episode.  I’ve been watching lots of productions of Hamlet lately and concurrently reading scraps of literary criticism, volumes of words devoted to whether he’s really mad, she was in on the murder of his Dad and oddly what religion they all are.  Some of this is quite the most bonkers theorising you’re likely to see in print as each and every Phd tries to find something new to say about a four hundred year old play that everyone (well everyone who cares about literature, a progressively dwindling number) has already had an opinion about.  Shakespeare was probably a genius because he knew his legacy wouldn’t just be built on the poetry of his plays but the collective head-scratching of his audience.

The days, weeks and hours leading up to The Big Bang have been like those four hundred years compressed into a much shorter time.  Online, the minutiae of dialogue, narrative and since this is television, directorial choices, ploughed over and over.  A feature of modern television obviously, but even in the Bad Wolf era, the Doigian attention to brainteasers wasn’t quite this intensive.  The Big Bang had a lot to live up to, not just as a piece of Saturday night television watched by the millions not watching football or having a barbecue or both but as the solution to a three month old logic problem.  I’m not about to end this paragraph comparing Steven Moffat to Shakespeare, but his methodology was certainly similar.

the Doigian attention to brainteasers wasn’t quite this intensive

The brilliance of The Big Bang, and yes, it is brilliant, is that it manages to not only provide answers to some of those questions (that’s some) but also spin them into a emotional entertainment which unlike you what you might expect from the title, refused to give in to the tendency in these finales for massive space opera and offered instead a much smaller story which was ultimately about a girl and her childhood memories, about dreams and fairy tales, in which Moffat risked losing those viewers who focus on the literal and attempt to punch through something more profound.  As the older Amy says when the Pandorica opens again, "OK kid, this is where it gets complicated."

Just before transmission, the rector of this parish tweeted that he was more nervous about this episode than the England match tomorrow and as it turned out Moffat split his story roughly down the middle, with Big Bang 2 as the narrative equivalent of oranges and an ear-bashing from Fabio Capello.  Anyone expecting a monster mash will have been surprised to find Saturday night drama again audaciously being carried by little Caitlin Blackwood in an extended recreation of The Eleventh Hour, sans the Doctor and with the small and telling gesture that the stars haven’t just gone out this time – they never existed.  A residue of race-memory is retained, not least by that well known cultist Richard Dawkins, who in the Russell T Davies version of this episode would have been back on screen pointing to a diagram of where in the void Alpha Centuri should be.

that well known cultist Richard Dawkins

Few other cliffhanger resolutions have been like this, continuing to keep the audience guessing even after the main titles, but as Moffat said in last month’s parish newsletter, he was writing a script which attempted to be a sequel to all the episodes this season (with the exception of episode seven – so far) so you can understand why he might want to take his time.  The reveal of this new universe (can a planet and not a proper sun be described as a universe?) was a masterclass in suggestion, with remnants such as the stone Daleks (like their cousins in Victory) from the old timeline anomalies in the new, the whole planet now a metaphor for the interior of Amy’s brain, with a history that doesn’t make sense and presumably since there’s no space exploration, any Star Trek or Star Wars (What’s a galaxy? Why build a spaceship if we’ve nowhere to go?).

As with Amy’s note in The Lodger and every other script Steven Moffat has written, the explicability of how these Mobius (no not Morbius) events are generated and resolved was again not fully explained and likely to be the most headache inducing (particularly for poor Blinovitch).  The predestination paradoxes agogo used to explicate the break from the Pandorica and Amy’s resurrection are the stuff of the jail break in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and I can understand why someone might feel cheated by the inherent logic short circuit in the centre.  Cheap tricks are not exactly new in Doctor Who.  The fake Mona Lisas in City of Death for one thing, and Jonathan Morris’s novel Festival of Death is replete with them.  Quite whether kids and some adults would have been able to follow all of the shifting about of time I’m not sure, though they must have loved the Doctor in a fez randomly carrying a mop.  

Jonathan Morris’s novel Festival of Death

Like the deus ex pandorica conclusion to the crackpot crack plot, Moffat gets away with his folly (at least for me) by ultimately turning both into quiet meditations on sacrifice.  Amy’s boys both become myths in different ways to show their love for her and though we can argue whether the Doctor would have done the same no matter what sort of human she was, Pond, thanks to Karen Gillan’s consistently well judged performance (give or take a few line readings), is the kind of girl you would surrender yourself for.  Her twin reactions to the story of how her boyfriend may have perished safeguarding the Pandorica over two millenia and the Doctor’s final words before he hurls himself into the smouldering TARDIS just demolished me; she’s almost a younger, female Cribbins.  When Gillan cries, I do too.  We await her cover version of Gossip Calypso with great interest.

From Amy’s resurrection to the whole universe.  The Doctor’s steering of the Pandorica into the heart of the Tardis’s storm firstly brought to mind similar journey’s in Contact, Sunshine, The Abyss and more specifically 2001, a lone figure entering the unknown and like 2001, gaining the opportunity to become a viewer reviewing elements of his own lifetime, though Moffat sadly doesn’t take the opportunity to explain if timelords are loomed or born, there’s no star time-tot floating in the void.  He does however resolve two of the big theories, of the multiple Doctor’s in Flesh and Stone and the non-dream sequence in The Eleventh Hour, Amelia’s long evening wait.  Rare is it in Doctor Who that this kind of forward planning has been in evidence and so sensationally pulled off.  This whole finale is nearly a homage to the inexplicable Dalek amongst the Roman battalion in Paul Cornell and Caroline Symcox's Big Finish audio Seasons of Fear (which threw forward to Time of the Daleks later that season).

Paul Cornell and Caroline Symcox's Big Finish audio Seasons of Fear

Matt Smith’s performance in this section and especially when he explains his existence to a sleeping Amelia was extraordinary.  Once again we see the character’s years weighted on his shoulders and behind his eyes as he agrees with River’s suggestion that they’re all a fairy tale, distilling his existence to a poetic version of the key components, of the kind a small mind might be able to comprehend.  He recalls the beginning of his own adventure, however long that was before An Unearthly Child (the jury is still out), his own life folding back on itself; given the number of times Billy has appeared this series, I almost expected him to break into chat about his grand daughter, kidnapped teachers and a junkyard, but unlike some authors we could mention, Moffat’s tasteful enough to keep to the essentials.  Then before the Doctor finds himself watching another story with a hyperbolic title, he’s gone.

Finally we meet Amy’s family, the appearance of whom was rather spoiled by the BBC Three listing in the Radio Times.  Like other elements of Amy’s character, the loss of memory, the runaway bride, ginger, Augustus and Tabetha recalled Donna’s parents, same kind of demographic group, yet more immediately likeable somehow, especially when her Dad said he needs a few moments to perfect his speech (never mind the Dahl reference, Augustus is played by the brilliantly named Halcro Johnston which might be the best actor’s name ever).  It’s in these moments, Moffat’s groundwork on memory begins to pay off as like Gwyneth Paltrow at the close of Sliding Doors, this older Amy begins to remember the person she was in the other timeline.  There is some glossing over such topics as to the extent she and her husband remember both remember their other existences, Rory in particular with two thousand years as her plastic pal who’s sort of fun to be with (if you want, not sure).  

Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors

The Doctor’s re-emergence also neatly sidesteps the subject of how the Earth is a nice place to live without the troubles that befell it in Turn Left – Amy would have remembered him eventually and so he will have existed and so the Whoniverse is back to normal – moreso since it also corrected the bother created by the cracks.  Such questions and answers simply didn’t occur to me during my sharp intake of breath on seeing River at the window, her TARDIS diary and Amy’s explanation of “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”.  As with much of the rest of the episode, Moffat, aided by a beautiful sweeping push-in, is able to turn what should be inexplicable narrative sleight of hand into a beautiful character moment as Amy is able to confirm that she isn’t mad – even if the man in the top hat quite conclusively is.  Look at the dancing.

Threading through this all of this is River Song, pointedly oscillating, like the Doctor himself between elucidator and enigma.  We’re meant to believe that her moral compass is pointing more toward the Seventh Doctor than the present incarnation – though in one of the episode’s few logic missteps (few?), I don’t quite understand how having her do an Absolom Daak demonstrates that (unless it’s because the pepperpot wasn’t armed).  Still, there is something rather chilling about seeing this remnant scream for mercy and Alex Kingston enjoying its misunderstanding of the role River has in the Doctor’s life, her eyes sparkling.  At some point, her “spoilers” catchphrase will begin to tire, but you suspect that Moffat will, in a timely manner, judge when that will be, and some of the answers will begin to flow. 

Absolom Daak

Because in order to keep us interested, still guessing, still theorising, oh the mysteries some of which, like Hamlet's listlessness, may never be "solved".  We don’t know who was controlling the TARDIS, who’s voice is slithering “Silence will fall” or why, as the Doctor notes, his time machine exploded in the first place.  We don’t know what happened to the ducks in the duck pond.  A crack, perhaps, but given how often these potentially otherwise picayune anatidae have been mentioned, no explanation to their relevance was forthcoming.  What of the machine in The Lodger?  Perhaps most importantly, will Arthur Darvill be in the opening credits now that he appears to be a full companion?  He’s certainly earned it, having been in more episodes than Moffat’s written, and turned Rory into a character who feels as significant as Amy.  Unless he really does become nu-Who’s equivalent of South Park’s Kenny, always existing on the precipice between life and death, ready to take the bullet or neutron ray when an episode is requiring an emotional crescendo.

In my review of The Eleventh Hour, I said I was “enchanted, beguiled, cheering, laughing and clapping” and that’s been my state through most of this series (though to be fair when has it ever not been?).  The only slightly bogus journey was the Chibnall Silurian two-parter and even that held together well enough on the strength of its dialogue, its direction and performances.  There was no New Earth, no Planet of the Ood.  Even Victory of the Daleks entertained me, though I know it’s not been universally praised because of (amongst other things) the new Dalek design.  What Moffat has done is to somehow mix our collective childhood memory of Doctor Who (before it was tarnished through our adult cynicism via dvd) with the needs of modern television for an emotional luminance and hired a Doctor who is able to embody both.  If nothing else, I think we can all agree that in Matt Smith is a replacement for the other fella who may well yet eclipse him (assuming he hasn’t already).

Just Like That...

Doctor Who: The Big Bang
Review by Neil Perryman

Well, at least I don't have to eat my Tom Baker underpants.

I still feel like a bit of a berk, though. I may have been right about a future-Doctor gallivanting around the Byzantium but my subsequent theories, the ones I'd tirelessly harvested from apparent inconsistencies littered throughout this series, failed to bear fruit. So either I've been reading far too much into it or the story isn't over yet. It's frustrating to say the least.

As it currently stands, the Injustice League of Pandorica's plan still makes very little sense (see my grumbles last week), the duck-less pond turned out to be a blind alley after all, and Rory's ID badge means somebody should be fired; or was Rory a qualified nurse at the tender age of six?

Even worse, Amy's house wasn't "too big" because it was trans-dimensional, it was because her mum and dad weren't around when the Doctor originally came-a-calling. I'll have to watch The Eleventh Hour again to make sure but doesn't Amy tell the Doctor that she lives with her Aunt? And isn't it possible for people to live in a house that is too big for them without their lives failing to make any sense? I live in a bloody volcano and my life… erm… well, you get the general idea.

At least the predestination postcard (don't forget to use the red pen!) was vaguely significant. I guess.

This was a bit of a let-down for me, as was the catch-all explanation that the crack somehow made Amy "special", which just felt a bit easy, although I suppose it does explain how Auton-Rory can remember his own death at the hands of the Silurians. However, this understanding can only be arrived at once you've wrestled with the finer points of the timey-wimey narrative and you finally allow yourself to succumb to the conclusion that Amy's memories could include adventures that she hasn't actually had yet when the Nestene Conciseness turns up. I think. I really couldn't swear to it. And you should probably thank me for not spending another paragraph trying to explain it.

That took me two hours to work out. During the transmission itself, I was utterly bewildered.

the Injustice League of Pandorica's plan still makes very little sense...

The way they handled Amy's "death" was disappointing but unless she stayed dead (highly unlikely, bordering on the impossible) how could it have been anything but? I suppose it all depends on how quickly you can accept that the Pandorica has a dual-function as a handy resurrector without any prior warning. Last week it was an impenetrable prison and now it's a giant reset button. That felt like a convenient switcheroo to me: keeping someone alive isn't the same as bringing someone back from the dead, is it? Even RTD would have balked at the speed of that particular turnaround.

But at least the increasingly odd safety features that we've encountered throughout Moffat's reign can now be said to form a theme of sorts. A really silly theme but a theme nonetheless. Both the Dalek's Progenitor and the pseudo-TARDIS from The Lodger required the right person to interact with a machine in just the right way to make it work, and now Amy brings herself back to life by doing just that. Say what you like, but at least Moffat is consistent, and while you may not like his ideas at least he has the decency to foreshadow them properly.

Here's another example: Amy's memories are used to create the scenario for the Alliance's overly-complicated trap and while this sounds unbearably cool in principle, it doesn't really bear any scrutiny (the Doctor arrives at Stonehenge with no tangible intervention from Amy at all). But that doesn't matter to Moffat - he treats the Alliance as complete idiots, so maybe this is just another massive cock-up on their part. Or perhaps they thought Amy would ask the Doctor to take her there one day, given her fascination for the subject? Yeah, that could work. But what really matters is that it helps to sell to the audience the conceit that Amy's memories can manifest themselves in the flesh/plastic. "If it can be remembered it can come back".

The problem I had with the initial set-up wasn't that Amy's memories could be used to recreate physical objects and people (I can suspend my disbelief as much as the next fan), it was the inconsistency and pointlessness of the recreations themselves that baffled me. But once you are able to toss that niggle aside then yes, by jove! It really does make sense!

I am actually talking myself into going along with this as I write this review, as if you hadn't guessed.

Even RTD would have balked at the speed of that particular turnaround...

This was an episode that liked to cheat. The Doctor lies about being dead (although this makes sense as it keeps his companions moving) and he happily crosses his own time-line to deploy a couple of cheeky predestination paradoxes so he can save the day. Aaron Blinovitch must have been spinning in his grave, assuming he hadn't ceased to exist at that point; forget the Time Lord Victorious, this was the Time Lord Mischievous. I wonder if he'll keep this up? I mean, what's stopping him?

The Doctor's plan - to fly a magical box into his dying TARDIS so he can ignite a ret-conning Big Bang - was about as bold and as silly as this show gets. But given that we've seen the universe wiped out of existence the only practical solution was for a massive reset to occur. What possible alternative was there? And the only machina capable of being deus ex-ed at such short notice is sitting right in front of them and I suppose it could have been worse, it could have been left to the sonic screwdriver to sort the mess out.

So a reboot was completely unavoidable and carping on about it now would be a complete waste of time. So, I won't.

How the reboot was played out remains the most important thing and once again I'm slowly coming around to its singular charms. By time I reach the end of the next paragraph I may even grow to love it.

The Doctor's sacrifice was handled nicely, if predictably, and while the box's function will probably continue to irk me for quite some time to come, at least the sentiment felt right. Watching the Doctor spooling back through his adventures, heard but not seen, trying to influence events in the wrong order was inspired too; it's just a shame that more of this wasn't planted throughout the series. And the moment where the Doctor implores Amy to remember what he told her when she was seven, and you realise that he doesn't even know what he's going to tell her yet, skirts pretty close to genius in my book.

forget the Time Lord Victorious, this was the Time Lord Mischievous...

The memory that he eventually plants in Amy's mind, which he specifically designs to be triggered during her wedding ("something borrowed, something blue"), is quite remarkable and I couldn't help but be moved by his triumphant return to reality via Amy's sheer force of will. It was a scene that managed to walk a very fine line between fairytale magic, metatextual mysticism, pseudo-scientific technobabble, oh and complete and utter BOBBINS.

Thankfully, in between all the head-scratching and leaps of faith, The Big Bang still offers some truly iconic moments, even if you you aren't seduced by Moffat's vision: the calcified Dalek begging for mercy, that eerie vision of TARDIS keeping the planet alive long enough for the Doctor to figure it all out, the thrill of two Doctors coming face-to-face, Rory's mythical sacrifice, the sheer joy of Matt Smith's dancing…  Ah yes, the joy that is Matt Smith. Sigh.

However, I must confess that the episode's climax lacked a certain something. And while I was relieved that the thread concerning the Big Bad lurking behind the TARDIS's destructive behaviour was left hanging, I was still a little surprised not to have been furnished with another hint as to their identity or next move. OK, I admit it, I was one of those poor saps who was expecting Philip Madoc to turn up as Omega. So sue me!

Instead, we were either treated to a sly dig at RTD ("The Orient Express. In space.") or we're in for one hell of a bizarre Christmas Special.

And I can't wait.

The Memory Cheats

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens

Review by Paul Kirkley

Expectation is a slippery biscuit. Because, clearly, this was brilliant. Amazing, in fact. And yet, on first viewing, I couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit short-changed, possibly because of all the tweeting and blogging that had been going on since the BAFTA screening about how it was the greatest thing since, well, the Big Bang. (Or, at least, that’s what Ian Levine said. But then he probably said the same about Take That’s first single. And we can only guess how much the bloke who wrote Attack of the Cybermen must have got off on a continuity porn-fest like this.)

Anyway, I’m not going to do my usual nitpicking about plot holes and lapses in logic because the plotting is so dense I suspect that, on this occasion, it might be a case of, it’s not you, it’s me – i.e. it made sense but I simply failed to understand it. One thread I will risk a tug on, though, cos it’s quite fundamental, is the whole idea of the trap built from Amy’s memories.

So how does that work, exactly? It’s a terrific concept but hard to get a handle on in any real, practical sense. River says the Doctor’s enemies have used Amy’s memories to construct a scenario he will believe, in order to get close to him. But, as Neil has already pointed out, surely the Doctor was delivered to Stonehenge by van Gogh’s painting and River’s graffiti? The only bits from Amy are the Romans – and they’re little more than window dressing who could have been replaced by any old army – Rory, who makes cock all sense anyway, and the Pandorica itself, which the Doctor appears to have known about since his own childhood and which, I’m pretty sure, he’d have come and taken a shufty at whatever it was called. Unless I’m missing the obvious, this actually turned out to be an even more nebulous concept than series one’s much-derided Bad Wolf arc – which at least made a kind of sense, if you sort of squinted and tried not to think too hard about it.

(Incidentally, I bet it was the Daleks’ idea to construct the whole “Amy’s memories” scenario. They seem to have been taking a lot of inspiration from The Anthony Ainley Book of Hopelessly Convoluted Traps lately. You can imagine the scene when they outlined the plan to all the other Big Bads, with much awkward coughing and shuffling of feet from the Cybermen, while the Sontarans insisted it would be a more effective martial strategy to just poke the Doctor on Facebook.)

My other big irritation was with the cliffhanger. Not because it wasn’t brilliant, but because it was teetering right on the verge of Best. Cliffhanger. Ever. until the Doctor ruined it by blabbing too much. The idea that our hero is a more dangerous force than the combined evil of all his enemies is a pretty powerful one, and would have left us with much to chew on over the next seven, agonising days. Instead, the Doctor kind of blew the whole gaff by revealing it wasn’t actually him that was the threat but the TARDIS, and that the Daleks et al had basically not bothered to check their facts about who could pilot it (sloppy, as there’s a whole list of people who have in the new TARDIS Handbook, available at all good galactic bookshops, etc).  I couldn’t help feeling this revelation undermined the moment somewhat: instead of the terrible, unknowable powers of The Oncoming Storm, it was basically reduced to the equivalent of a misunderstanding about who was at the wheel when a vehicle got flashed by a speed camera.

Fatty wouldn’t be the first to have one off the wrist from Captain Jack

There were a couple of other little niggles – I thought the reveal of the vandalised cliff face was a bit chucked away by the director, and the silence falling at the end still feels less like a dramatic flourish and more like Murray Gold’s just mis-timed his cue. Also, though I don’t usually trust anyone who uses the term “fanwank” – it smacks of a lazy reflex response ming-mongs use to try to prove they’re too cool to care about old monsters and stuff – the Evil Alliance did push credibility to breaking point. Then again, if the Lib Dems can hook up with the Tories, I guess anything’s possible.

But enough griping. On the whole, The Pandorica Opens rocked like a stone Dalek (hmmm… interesting idea: someone should write that down).

Some things to note:

The pre-titles sequence was so Alias it hurt. But hurt in a good way.

River’s contact got his vortex manipulator from “a handsome time agent”. Anyone we know? Still, Fatty wouldn’t be the first to have one off the wrist from Captain Jack.

Speaking of which, the Blue Man Group have really let themselves go in the 52nd century, haven’t they?

The Cyberhead: Sweet Jesus, have those metal muthas ever been more terrifying than when skittering across the floor on their own spidery innards? And that was before it opened up and popped a big grinning skull out.

Joke of the week: “You graffitied the oldest cliff-face in the universe.” “You wouldn’t answer your phone.”

It’s been mentioned elsewhere, but look at Matt Smith’s face when he first hears the Daleks. Look at the eyes: that flicker of doubt, of fear, of weariness. Then the mask comes on, and he’s instantly back to his quipping, larky self. (Interestingly, David Tennant pulled off exactly the same trick, in another exchange with River Song, in Forest of the Dead. Maybe Moffat puts this stuff in the stage directions.)

The last time we saw a plastic boyfriend, it was Noel Clarke with a champagne cork stuck in his bonce. This, I believe, is called progress.

And the Comedy Award goes to… Matt Smith and Arthur Darvill, for their beautifully awkward reunion exchange – especially Smith’s “How’ve you been?” and the way Darvill, when prodded, slowly rocked back on his heels, like a Weeble.

Loved the Doctor’s “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” speech, especially the taunt about “your silly little spaceships with all your silly little guns”. That'll learn 'em.

The scenes between Rory and Amy: how can something be so simultaneously ridiculous and heartbreaking? Only in Doctor Who... It certainly rescues the Autons from burping bin ignominy; the last time we saw a plastic boyfriend, it was Noel Clarke with a champagne cork stuck in his bonce. This, I believe, is called progress.

Toby Haynes’ direction was impressively cinematic, and not just in the big money shots: River exploring Amy’s darkened house was just as beautiful. (Hard to think this is the same show where directors once had to fight to get a dimmer switch put into TC3.) And the decision to go slo-mo in the climactic moments was spot-on: we’ve had pomp and bombast before – Russell the T loved a bit of that – but has Doctor Who ever been more grandly, more thrillingly operatic than in those climactic shots of our defeated hero being dragged, Christ-like, to his final humiliation? Stunning.

In summary, then: Stephen fry can fuck off.