Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Ooooh, I like it in spite of myself as I've always shied away from the New Adventures/Virgin Books/etc malarkey.

It's quite Lara Croft (she even has etheric beam locators) and the robot is quite 2000ADy.

Is this animation the way the Bernice S stuff is going or just a one-off promotion for it?

I must confess that stuff like "X turns out to be the Doctor's brother" usually tends to put me off. There's a point at which you can overegg the pudding in trying to produce links to existing canon and it comes across to me as a lack of confidence on the writer's part and a bit van Stattenish in dragging the Doctor down to Earth and burying him under the dirt of someone else's plot device. Here's the Doctor's daughter/mother/brother/granddaughter might be meant to make him more interesting but I find it often succeeds only in making him less mysterious - one of the reasons I avoided fan-fic in the wilderness years.

I must confess that stuff like "X turns out to be the Doctor's brother" usually tends to put me off.

I'm not entirely up on Irving Braxiatel these days (Big Finish and I parted ways about five years back for financial reasons), but he's never been presented as a lazy contrivance like something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation where writers turned to long-lost relations of the characters because they needed a character story for an episode.

Partly, that's by design; there's very little interaction between the Doctor and Brax; by and large, the world of Benny is kept separate from the world of the Doctor, and Brax is a part of Benny's world. On the rare occasions that they have met, I'd say the relationship between the Doctor and Brax is much like the relationship between Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, respectively.

Is this animation the way the Bernice S stuff is going or just a one-off promotion for it?

Don't quote me, but I think it's just a one-off. About ten years ago, it was rumored that Big Finish was going to do a Benny film, along the lines of Downtime or Shakedown, but nothing ever came of it.

I'd love to see Benny turn up in the new series. As flustered as the eleventh Doctor is by River Song, a woman he hasn't slept with yet but will, I wonder how flustered he would be by Benny, a woman he did sleep with, way back in his eighth Doctor days. My dream Benny casting, much as I've liked Lisa Bowerman's voice, is Rachel Weisz. Of course, neither is Paul Cornell's original casting of Emma Thompson.

Too true Allyn. Plus the reference was made in a novel which was published well after Virgin books had lost the license to produce official Doctor Who fiction and everything was being done surreptitiously anyway. So it's there if you want to believe it (and I do like the idea of the Doctor having a proper family rather than being loomed or whatever) but ignorable if that's not your thing.

I haven't really followed Big Finish much other than the Eighth Doctor and the Gallifrey plays, as you say because it's so expensive. Since the show came back, there are so many releases that you could easily spend sixty pounds a month to obtain everything. And that's before you've even considered whatever BBC Audio are doing and factored in the dvds of the classic episodes. As ever, I think that they'd probably make more if they reduced their prices on the assumption that more people would buy more of them.

Tachyon TV is on 'extended hiatus'?

It's the end of an Erato.

I thought that they did away with Erato's end as it was causing too many dirty jokes.

"ITV's been blown off the air!"
Hehehe!

Thanks for such a detailed write-up! Sounds like a memorable time.

Good review though I disagree with a few points...

Tom you said:
"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."

The idea that RTD didn't write well-plotted science-fictiony DW stories is a curious one (though one I have read before, which perhaps stems from New Earth which overshadows his other stories with its nonplot.)

I disagree that this ep of Moffat's is merely a "logical argument" rather than an action-packed story. There is a massive amount of plot in it but it all flows rather smoothly and also features four sequences across the 55 minutes which are really hugely emotional storytelling.

"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."

As far an unanswered plotpoints I thought (link) the only one was how River was at the wedding (though I did make up my own answer, then again she is a Woman Of Mystery.)

I don't think there is any "ham-fisted sci-fi exposition" - at one point Rory even asks what the Doctor is talking about and the Doctor provides the one-line, more poetic answer for him and the audience.

"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."

I think it's partly so extraordinary because of the sheer amount of plot, all the twists and turns, and that these 55 minutes at the same time contain so many great character moments.

"We can whine all we want that the Pandorica’s restoration field comes out of nowhere,"

It is a poetic extension of the idea of the prison though.

"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."

The myth of Lone Centurion, the Doctor spiraling the Pandorica to the heart of the TARDIS-Sun, the poignancy of the Doctor rewinding and unraveling, the triumphant return of the TARDIS - it was nonstop drama all the way and the final moments had the Doctor acknowledging the unanswered questions during the final uplifting scene so I don't agree there was any dramatic fizzle during the 55 minutes.

'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.'

That's an interesting interpretation and one that makes sense considering the Doctor appeared for one day in 1996...

I think Frank gets to the heart of it when he says that the Doctor's basically firefighting and that all the exciting conceptual ideas stuff we hear about - all those amazing ideas, tripping off Matt Smith's tongue! - are heard and not seen.

Of the 2 big concepts of the season that were supposed to lead us up to this moment - the crack and the silence - the latter is postponed and the former is dealt with by the Doctor flying the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS due to a property that as Tom points out, we only found out about 20 minutes previously. (I guess we should have been warned when sometimes the crack was a gap between realities, sometimes it ate people, sometimes the Doctor had floss bits of chewed-up TARDIS from its teeth, and sometimes it spooged forth soft Rory-horny tentacles to consume dead bodies like a Hoothi.)

Yes, 'The Big Bang' is brilliant and exciting and hilarious and moving and full of big ideas, but a lot of it doesn't make a lick of sense.

RTD was lambasted for fairy Doctor and rewinding time, but I buy the amplified psychic power of a concentrating population more than I do than a Doctor summoned into existence through the imaginative recall of Amy Pond who is somehow special because she slept next to a crack for years on end (despite it seemingly eating the rest of the family first even if it was right next to her head.)

"The Doctor has to revert the universe to its original state, only without himself ever having existed."

I also noticed this, without the Doctor there is no Earth. As the Doctor as a 'whole' would never have existed planet Earth would been overrun with alien life, dinosaurs, Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans etc.

For someone who usually appreciates time-travel and its foibles, I am surprised Moffat didn't factor this in to the plot...

I enjoyed Turn Left (perhaps more so than the Big Bang) and it seems a shame to not acknowledge that episode (though ridden with continuity errors itself).

My partner called it the 'Alzheimer's season', and though part of me baulked at such a crass use of a serious debilitating illness, I can see where he's coming from. Because everything in the season narrative is about the fragility of and connection between identity and memory. Visual memory, false memory, lost memory; the loss of self, loss of relationships, loss of the broader social world (the universe even).

I loved it, even if some bits made no sense. And my memory, and identity, is stronger for having watched and enjoyed it so much.

I sadly suspect that we're being asked not to think too hard about the briefly Doctor-free universe. It's a little different, because in "Turn Left" you have 10 Doctors and then he dies, leaving a vacuum, whereas here he never existed at all. We might speculate that in his absence something or someone filled the gap. Another renegade Time Lord? Or perhaps someone or something else entirely? Did humans maybe rise to the challenge and defend themselves? Or were aliens drawn to Earth partly because the Doctor was around? It might be reasonable to suspect that the Master might have come to Earth partly to mess with the Doctor (though in "Terror of the Autons" the two of them appear to have little prior acquaintance, something which has probably been retconned since).

Other questions abound, of course, such as whether life on Earth would have started if not for the Doctor and Romana bringing Duggan back in time to slug Scaroth in the primeval mud, or whether the dinosaurs would have survived if Adric hadn't been on board the freighter in "Earthshock."

This is why, in my own review, I bring up the question of just how much of the Doctor's history has been erased or changed as a result of the universal reboot. Presumably "The Vampires of Venice" couldn't have happened in a crack-free universe, for example -- but if it didn't, then what was the point of him saving the day in the first place?

I kind of hope we see some of these questions come into play next season. I doubt they will, but it would be pretty interesting.

> I sadly suspect that we're being asked not to think too hard about the briefly Doctor-free universe [...]

My take on this (I'm going to avoid using the FW word, apparently it's childish - who knew? ;-) is that although in one sense the universe-without-the-doctor always existed, in another sense it was created on the 26th June 2010 as a result of the Doctor's own actions.

So the 26th June 2010 in some sense has *two* pasts, where the alternative without-the-doctor past suddenly appears having been created "retroactively". As such the alternative past, whatever it contains, must logically lead up to the same present as was already established by the "real" past.

Which is not to say that the alternative past cannot have some influence, for example Rory gets to live again thanks to the (entirely different!) alternative past where the cracks never existed, but in general major events in Earth's history must somehow end up working out the same.

(I like to think I'm getting quite good at this Fanw... errmm I mean devotee-based extemporising ;-)

though in "Terror of the Autons" the two of them appear to have little prior acquaintance, something which has probably been retconned since

I didn't get that impression. I got more the impression that they hadn't interacted in a while. I believe the Time Lord told the Doctor that "an old acquaintence" (or something like that) was around making trouble. But more importantly, in TotA, the Doctor casually remarked that vanity (or one of those related vices, maybe pride?) was "always the Master's weakness" and likewise the Master casually remarked that "curiosity was always the Doctor's weakness". To me that suggests that they already knew each other pretty well.

Regarding the Doctor-free universe and how it's remained invasion-free as well, I essentially agree with what David is suggesting (I think!)

When Amy brings the Doctor back (and I think it's important to remember he hasn't been erased from time like the things swallowed by the crack - he's trapped on the 'other side' without having had the chance to exist) the Doctor isn't just brought back as Amy remembers him, he's brought back with all his memories and experiences intact - so everything he has done, stays done.

I suppose it's like a predestination paradox - Amy's world is in one piece because the Doctor has 'always' been there to save and protect it (or, he 'always' will be). But he needs to be remembered by Amy for his timeline to fall into place alongside everyone else.

Whether or not that means everyone will now 'remember' what has happened in the past is another question...

@David Claughton: I'm still mulling this over but here's what it starts to look like to me. It seems as though 26th June actually has FOUR (potential?) pasts now:

1. The pre-Pandorica past in which there are cracks in time from an exploding TARDIS. The Angels fall into a giant crack, and the Saturnyne jump through one. This is the history we saw in season 5.

2. The cliffhanger past in which Richard Dawkins has a "star cult" and there are tropical penguins and such. Time and space are collapsing so history is mangled. The Silurians may have existed, but the Angels and Saturnyne didn't.

3. The pre-wedding past in which the Doctor is on the other side of a crack and "rewinding." Maybe 1970s Earth was invaded every week by aliens and the Master, maybe not, but we know Earth survived because of this idea that we'll catch up to the same present, with or without the Doctor.

4. The post-dancing past in which the Doctor DID exist more or less as we saw him and Rory never died or became an Auton. I'm fine with the idea that he remembers these things, that they all do...but did they happen? The events of (say) "The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood" were mostly unaffected by the cracks, but the Angels were swallowed by one and the Saturnyne came through another. In THIS past, how did those events unfold? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Maybe the Doctor thought of something else in this version of history?

@The Science Pundit: I'm sure you're right -- I'll have to watch it again. I remembered getting the impression that he was no one really special to the Doctor, that the Time Lord envoy knew more about the Master than the Doctor did, and that's why the later lines about the Master's character seemed so odd to me -- but maybe I wasn't listening closely enough.

@mattbartley: As I said above I have no problem with Amy, Rory, and the Doctor remembering these events...it's a little magical, I guess, but clearly they do remember them. I'm wondering more about whether and how they happened!

@Supervoc7

4. The post-dancing past in which the Doctor DID exist more or less as we saw him and Rory never died or became an Auton. I'm fine with the idea that he remembers these things, that they all do...but did they happen? The events of (say) "The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood" were mostly unaffected by the cracks, but the Angels were swallowed by one and the Saturnyne came through another. In THIS past, how did those events unfold? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Maybe the Doctor thought of something else in this version of history?

Hmm, I'm thinking the first three episodes happened more or less the same way. There was no crack in Amy's wall, so there was no Prisoner Zero and no Atraxi and the Doctor didn't invite Amy along for exactly the same reason, but as a Timelord he is sensitive to alternate timelines, so he may have decided there was something odd about Amy anyway.

After Victory of the Daleks, since this version of Amy isn't as insecure, she doesn't make a pass at the Doctor so there is no need to grab Rory and they don't go to Venice - which is fine since the Saturnyne aren't there either. Amy's Choice could have played out the same way except with Rory being part of the illusion(s).

As for the Angels I agree he must have done something else - perhaps he was able to hold them off for longer using the extra soldiers that didn't vanish and
that gave him time to come up with something.

Hungry Earth and Cold Blood play out the same way except Rory isn't there so he doesn't get killed. As does Vincent And The Doctor where the only change is Amy doesn't cry. Ditto with The Lodger - the only change is no Engagement Ring.

None of the events in the last two episodes happened, since they're all tied to the exploding TARDIS. Maybe they just have a picnic next to the oldest words in the universe, which now say something infinitely more profound (like maybe "We apologise for the inconvenience" ;-)

OK, so it's not exactly on topic, but I got a laugh out of this blogpost's comparison between the plot holes on Doctor Who with the laughably unbelievable series "World War II" on the History Channel.

http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html

(found via Boing Boing - I know, I know I should get a life ...)

I think the point about a dramatic fizzle is well made. Big Bang may be dramatic and very enjoyable but it’s drama is entirely about rebooting the universe. Whereas the dramatic tension built up in the course of The Pandorica Opens was all about how would the Doctor escape from the Pandorica and oh dear Amy’s dead.

We therefore sit down to The Big Bang expecting a dramatic resolution to the previous week’s dramatic tension. And we don’t get one. We get a relatively quick solution (rather than resolution) which, although entertaining, is really little more than a quirk of temporal theory. Yes, it may be logical but it’s in no sense emotionally fulfilling.

And that's without even mentioning how spectacularly easy this inescapable prison is to open from the outside. Let's trap the Doctor forever in a prison which a child could open from the outside, locate that prison on a distant primitive world secured by two wooden gates and just keep our fingers crossed that no child finds it.

So, although I loved the Big Bang, I was still left with a vague sense of a anticlimax. Whereas, wonderful as the previous week’s cliffhanger was, if that cliffhanger had instead been, say, the revelation that, to save the universe, the Doctor would have to negate his own existence, then the Big Bang would have been a glorious climax to the season rather than just a glorious episode.

And I still can’t get my mind around the fact that, when Amy is woken up by her mother, her bedroom is still full of her Raggedy Doctor toys and pictures. If he never existed, then she never met him at age 7 so why are there still toys.

So. In general I'm like "yeah...yeah...that was a good one all right...that one too." You listed a few head-scratchers, though.

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

Well, no, with Sloman you got verbs. For example: "I had to face my fear, Sarah. That was more important than just going on living." and "Not all spiders sit on the back." Maybe not as poetic, but certainly more useful in daily life. I take your general point, though.

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

Sure: he was Dobby in a cage a few years back, and he wasn't about to save the entire universe. At least here he's winning, even if it's at the cost of his life. But again, I take your point; it's a lovely scene.

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.

I actually genuinely do, and once again...I take your point. It was a nice moment. What I actually genuinely hate is when people say "if you didn't love this as much as I did, you are not a *real* *fan*."

To give the counterpoint: the problem with that moment for me is that there was never the slightest doubt that it was coming. I got more of a jolt from the moment she sees the bow tie and suspenders on her wedding guests; then the moment is dragged out quite a bit. The time when this kind of triumphant return REALLY would have meant something for me was at the beginning of the episode, when I had every reason to doubt the Doctor was going to come out of the Pandorica unscathed and that there might be serious consequences to deal with. Instead we got the fez and the mop, so no triumph there.

Again, don't get me wrong. Nice moment, very clever with the wedding saying and all. I'm happy it moved you so much. I'm just...not a big air-puncher, I guess.

I like posting your reviews on my Facebook wall, Mr. Kirkley. I kinda feel like you enjoy things the same way I do, so they're always a fun read. Thanks.

If this had been his final end in the final ever episode, I wouldn’t have felt cheated.

I said the same thing in my own review - I can't say anything really bad about this episode, because when it comes down to it, if our show ever has to meet its final end, I want it the last episode to be just like the first 45 minutes of this.

On the other hand, this isn't the end of Doctor Who. More of a new beginning. So I don't know, were all the tearful farewells really appropriate? Given that we only got to believe in them for a few minutes before they were rescinded and we were on our way to adventures new. Our heartstrings were well and truly tugged, but it was just a stunt, wasn't it, because according to the RTD rulebook you've got to go big or you might as well go home.

I kind of feel that while this season was supremely enjoyable at every turn, it won't be remembered as a classic one. What did it introduce? Possibly the best Doctor yet, sure, and a companion with a REALLY complicated backstory. And then it expanded interestingly on the Moffat-motif of messing about with time... But beyond that? Its reinvention of not one but three classic races seems to have gone down like a lead balloon. Most of what else kinda sorta worked was RTDian NuWho-by-numbers.

I think what I'm trying to say is that, after an emotional rush the size of The Big Bang, there's a definite sense that Moffat needs to "follow THAT!" I'm hoping he's up to the task and that Season 6 makes Season 5 look like a trial run. If not, he's a great writer but he could end up paddling around in the shallows of his talent instead of giving us what he's REALLY capable of.

As a new 'who' fan to the 11th doctor's universe, I have really enjoyed reading the insightful reviews & discussions here. I don't have the critical expertise of those who have grown up with the doctor the past 40 years, but from my point of view these final 2 episodes have been some of the most poignant 2 hrs of entertainment I've had the pleasure of experiencing. I can't remember the last time that a show has evoked the gamut of emotions I felt as I watched 'The Big Bang'--from mysterious wonder & surprise, to laughing out loud, to heart thumping dread, to tears of sorrow, smiles, more tears of lament only to replace them with tears of joy, & more laughter. Geez not even the final episode of Lost after 6 seasons could encompass that entire range.

Full credit goes to the amazing performances of Matt & Karen as well as Arthur, Alex & Caitlin. This cast is just truly gifted with that quality of acting that makes it believable, natural, with so much said in the unsaid look, expression or gesture. Matt Smith is exceptional, & I can't take my eyes off his performance as the Doctor. Quixotic, charismatic, with ridiculously funny looks & gestures only masking true cleverness & ingenuity, & the ability to compose himself & take charge when needed. It's just genius.

I know so many fans have griped about the loss of David Tennant--well as someone who has since revisited the past episodes of the newer series, I think he was brilliant too & understand their attachment. But this is a show that has a built-in 'reset' button, the Doctor regenerates & fortunately for the 11th Doctor & his TARDIS everything else production-wise did too. I had seen past season episodes sporadically when it had aired on SyFy in the states, but I couldn't become fully engaged in it then like I have now with series 5. First impressions I remember liking DT as the Doctor, but thinking the plots seemed ridiculous. Maybe I could contribute that to the writing, or my general lack of 'who' knowledge at the time, but in giving a curious chance to 'The 11th hour' I was immediately hooked, & have now become too dangerously obsessed for my own good.

So I have to give kudos to everyone involved in this new production.The look of the show is cinematic & beautiful, especially the Adam Smith, Tony Haynes & Jonny Campbell directed episodes. & Steven Moffat has sucked me into his creative mind, making me beg for more. Certainly his episodes were brilliant, my favorites & his touch on the rest have made it a remarkable series. I have really enjoyed the character relationships & being able to journey through all of time & space with them. The more 'organic' approach to our TARDIS destinations throughout the season made them more real, more relatable, more intimate, & more threatening then some extravagant CG creations past seasons have relied upon for dramatic effect. Moffat seems to thrive on the Hitchcock approach to terror, keeping the suspense from the unseen or the simple. But I do look forward to the xmas special, something off-planet, in space, definitely desired.

I find it amusing that there is so much incessant debate over plot holes & improbabilities especially for 'The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang,' when the nature of having time-jumping & universe hopping science fiction, gives way to those endless possibilities. What science fiction show doesn't? To me everything made close to perfect timey-wimey sense, especially with the universe collapsed around them, nothing but the earth & burning time-looped TARDIS, the Doctor had every ability to leap back & forth between his timelines. There wasn't anything left in the universe to govern that type of 'no no.' Although I did wonder how the freshly Pandorica escaped Doctor knew exactly when to jump ahead 2000 years in time before finishing his sentence to Auton-Rory about 'staying out of...trouble' to the exact point of finding Amy & Amelia about to be attacked by the rejuvenated Dalek. Dumb luck I suppose, but he should of at least written the lucky date on Amelia's brochure to make sure it all definitely went according to plan. Although it is improbable that the burning TARDIS could heat & light the earth properly that life would grow up more-or-less the same for Amelia to exist, & that the Doctor would even know that or that his TARDIS survived in proximity to earth, though not close enough to Stonehenge to illuminate the sky when the stars all went out while he was trapped in the Pandorica. But the Doctor is a genius, & we can't always know what is going on in his head, hence 'eye of the storm' & running to the roof in the 1st place. I also wondered why the TARDIS survived 2000 yrs without completely destructing, however I realized that rescuing River broke the time-lock loop & sped up its demise. Eh, so we had to stretch our imagination a bit, but the whole sequence was clever & fez-a-licious funny that does it really matter in the end?

As for the easy open Pandorica, well, it was designed to prevent it's prisoner inside from escaping. The Doctor told Amy he could get inside easy enough when he was 1st examining it, he just wanted to know what he'd find find 1st. I think the key though is that the box opened when touched by its intended prisoner or prisoner, for the Doctor & then Amy/Amelia. I suspect then the Doctor used some kind of 'Doctor DNA" setting on his screwdriver for Rory. And maybe all those tools & gizmos he was using to examine it from the outside gave him a reading about it being a life-perserving box--'forces you to stay alive, can't even escape by dying'--for the Doctor to indefinitely suffer for all of time knowing that all his enemies trapped him there. It's intricate exterior circles were of dalek design seen in the ship in 'Victory of the Daleks' & they obviously had regenerative capabilities then. So throw a life-perserving box in with the thing that destroyed all of life in the universe by exploding & we get an imploding creation, why not?

But none of this wibbley-wobbley stuff was really the heart of the show. It was the heart & soul--love & sacrifice, death & resurrection. It's shown in every relationship between our characters. Amy was sacrificed, albeit, unwilling by her love who then despairingly dreamed of a miracle...out pops the Doctor with hope of a future. With Amy inside the Pandorica, she becomes Hope preserved. Like Pandora's myth, Amy is Hope for the universe. Auton-Rory's sacrifice to guard her for 2000 yrs came with the hope she may live to forgive him & help him be human, like Pinocchio, a 'real boy.'

I think that's a touching scene with Rory & the Doctor, in which the Doctor, after episodes of male competition & even Rory's own human sacrifice in death to save him, the Doctor truly sees & is touched by Rory's heart & soul even in his plastic state.

We also have River, who still very mysterious & questionable, does what she does in love for the Doctor. She watches her love, who doesn't really know her yet, sacrifice himself so that he never will, for now, but we know that one day the roles will be reversed, or will it? Time can be rewritten...

And of course Amy & the Doctor, a love formed through friendship, respect, like brother & sister but with a hint of closer intimacy. Inherently intertwined into each other's lives, each one dependent on the other in this cracked & disappearing world.

The sacrifice of the Doctor, can it be more symbolically Christ-like? Initially dragged to his 'death' by the Roman guard while the crowd of enemies watched in 'The Pandorica Opens.' 'The Big Bang' brought him full circle. His dying future self whispers his fate as he accepts what's to come & is forced to play out the role that tortures him at the hands of his Dalek enemy, & brings him to bear the weight of the universe as his friends watched. It's fate & salvation remains with his self-sacrifice & his TARDIS, the only hope to repair the universe he loves so much. And Amy, the Doctor's link, the Doctor's hope for him & his bluest blue box to live on in her memory, or as by a miracle bring him back. That scene between them, how can their performances not bring tears to your eyes? Even more emotionally powerful is that last scene with the sad, old, tired Doctor & Amelia as he clings to the last hope she can remember this bedtime story & resurrect his memory.

So Amy does, she resurrects them all, even those she's forgotten. Steven Moffat I will never look at the old wedding saying the same again! GENUIS! And there is the dashing Doctor commanding & humbled. And again a lot of laughs as that crazy embarrassing uncle that you can't help but laugh at as he scoots across the dance floor with his own 'cool' moves. And then it continues with the Doctor, reflective about 'the boy who waited' for the 'girl who waited' & that smile fades as he realizes their happiness only brings him pain as he will continue his journey without them...or will he? And then, yet another brilliant scene with River, oh the Doctor & his women! Whoa, you can't argue against Matt Smith's astounding ability to capture all of this entire episode fantastically.

River Song is certainly something even more enigmatic, how did she remember the Doctor to give Amy her blank diary? Did she end up on earth after the big bang? The Doctor gave her back the vortex manipulator, which he had as his timeline erased. So maybe she was there all along on that date, because the Doctor showed it to her from his readings of the crack in the Byzantium. But no wait, River 'remembers the Pandorica well' then when in handcuffs, so she does a hell of a job masking the fact she already knows what the cracks are during the rest of the weeping angel adventure, & yet she knows what they were back then before the Big Bang 2. Hmmm I hope Steven Moffat has this whole thing straight. Can't wait to learn more of her story. I think it will be an interesting dynamic with the Doctor & Mr. & Mrs. Pond with Rory's new found sense of adventure & confidence. Gives me hope that I can be grown up, but not always have to loose the fun.

'The big bang' made a delightful emotionally satisfying bookend to the season stories, but I'm curious what direction we'll head next. Maybe we'll even find our missing ducks. Here's to 'the silence' ramping up a few more decimals in our who-universe!

Wait, wait: You need the third part of that line, which i've been quoting nearly incessantly for no good reason but to get the giggles. The quote is properly:

"It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool."

I know the finale left some people cold and some of them have given well-articulated reasons why that should be, but it didn't me and this post has many of the reasons for that.

So thanks for putting that feeling into more words than "F*** YES!"

Possibly greatest ep ever? Seriously?! That Back To The Future 2-style final episode undermined Doctor Who's whole premise. So now the Doctor can cross his own time line fairly easily and save his past self from danger? Way to kill any suspense in future episodes.

And...yes, it's about time. The time spent watching 13 episodes this year to then basically have no answer to who was behind the whole "silence will fall" story arc? It will be revealed next year?! Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?...

On the plus side, Matt Smith is brilliant. Fast becoming best Doctor ever.

the greatest hero who ever lived, and died, and lived again

Careful..!

"So now the Doctor can cross his own time line fairly easily and save his past self from danger? Way to kill any suspense in future episodes."

In fairness to the episode, there was a least a throw-away line to the effect that he could do it safely because the universe is so small now (and I think another that the vortex manipulator is bad for him). So it doesn't follow from these events that he'll be time-hopping around to solve all his future problems. Though I agree that it felt a little bit like a cheat anyway. Still, it was so much fun I can't complain.

Yikes! Well, glad somebody liked it.

As for me, it didn't answer/resolve/redeem any (or at least, enough) of the questions or problems I had with the previous 12 episodes. And yeah, I do like Doctor Who - I've faithfully watched every episode of the show from Hartnell onward, and this is easily the least enjoyable season so far. Yes, that even counts the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy years. Assuming a "real" fan is one who loves whatever the incumbent reviewer does is tantamount to my saying that people who like the NuNuNu-Who must be idiots who are prepared to love anything Steven Moffat says they should because he is their god and they are happy to mindlessly genuflect at every mention of his holy name. Neither of which positions actually explains anybody's opinion about the show in general, or this episode in particular.

I've found that those people who believe stuff like Karen Gillan can really act and that Amy is a complex, interesting, likeable character, and that Steve Moffat is the most cleverest guy to ever write for television, are getting a lot more out of this show now than I am, sadly for me. I envy them the ability to see what patently appears to be missing from my POV. But there is no disputing the fact that someone thought Mr. Moffat should be allowed to make the decisions for this show, and we must all live with the consequences, for better or worse. If he chooses to ignore what's gone before and re-create canon, we have to accept that. Or move on to other things.

Well, Matt Smith and Arthur Darvill will be enough to make me tune in at Christmas, but the glow has finally dimmed to near-invisibility for me, and I'm grieving about it right now. Still, next year might be better, and I'll give it a chance.

I wasn't intending to start a fan pissing contest - I'm not sure where this thing about being a "real" fan came from. I raised the question of whether people actually ENJOY watching Doctor Who, which is a different matter entirely; it seems like a lot of "real" fans are the only people who don't these days... I will say this, though: personal taste is one thing, but preferring The Trial of a Time Lord to this year's series is just weird: like saying Home and Away is better than The Godfather and then asking people to respect your opinion anyway.

Finally have to say something since someone decided to bring McCoy into this. :)
1) About re-creating canon: Isn't this a tried and true DW writing tradition? In fact, I think ignoring whatever happened before and writing a damn fine story is pretty much what's been happening all along. I mean . . . static electricity, man, static electricity!!
2) Some eras are a person's cup of tea and some aren't. Let's get over that and appreciate what we have. As for me, while I love Peter Davison as the Doctor, I find his entire era (with the exception of the Mara stories, Enlightenment, and Androzani) to be mind-numbingly boring. (I believe I just committed fan heresy by admitting that I hate Castrovalva. Filthy JNT, he takess away our Tom just when he was starting to act again. We hatess him, preciouss, hatess him forever.) On the other hand, I absolutely love McCoy's era, which, has fewer episodes I hate than there are Davison eps I actually like.
There, now you can all stop hating on Moffatness/Anti-Moffatness and get back to the core of Whovian hatred . . . McCoy fans. :)

Paul you said in your review:
"The Big Bang is very possibly the greatest episode of Doctor Who ever made."

I would agree with that, (as to why, my thoughts are more detailed in my review -
click here for the planetzogblog review of The Big Bang.)

I like how you've woven the Doctor speaking about stories - "Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know. It was the best” - into that start (and end) of your review.

(I also mention that line in my review though to illustrate something quite different.)

What makes these 55 minutes (very possibly) "the best" is that those minutes are chock-full of scenes that are hugely emotional, scenes that feature intricate plotting that all makes a satisfying science fiction kind of sense (which also reflect the themes of the season), and each of these scenes are brilliant. Select just about any scene and it could be argued it's one of the all-time great Doctor Who scenes. All these scenes together means the ep is utterly superb.

"I've found that those people who believe stuff like Karen Gillan can really act and that Amy is a complex, interesting, likeable character... are getting a lot more out of this show now than I am, sadly for me".

Too bad for you. Amy has a well thought-out story arc that's been deceptively subtle. This is the girl who didn't make sense. The girl whose entire life and family have been eaten away by the crack in time with her none the wiser. The girl who cries without knowing why. So in retrospect it follows that she appears cynical and even unlikable earlier in the series. It's telling that the final shot of the whole series is not of The Doctor, but of a relaxed and happy Amy, her life restored smiling in the Tardis.

I'm enjoying it this year, but I'm sad to see the Moffat fans reverting to some of the zealousness of the RTD fans - that if people don't like it then they just don't get it or that they're just being contrary and that the series has moved on and if they don't like it they should just stop watching.

So far, though, the RTD fans are still in the lead for the title of objectionable Who fans - and continue to be in their hatred for the current run.

I just want to say that I appreciate everyone who takes the time to write reviews for Behind the Sofa. I've come here religiously to read the reviews since the third series/season. They are well written, funny, and offer intelligent insights that sometimes make me view an episode in a whole different light. While I certainly don't agree with every review on here (I still cannot BELIEVE that none of you utterly BLASTED The End of Time! WTF? ), I am glad that they are there for me to read. I had exactly the opposite reaction to Neil Perryman's when watching Vincent and the Doctor, but I'd be a fool not to see that Neil nevertheless made valid points, and it was a shame that so much of the criticism against his review started to edge a little too much toward the personal. So, please keep it up, guys. Behind the Sofa strikes a perfect balance, as far as I'm concerned. I do miss Jo Anne Thrax's reviews though!

I noted the same thing about the final shot of the sereis: Amy's smile — an unguarded look of sheer happiness and contentment, the likes of which we have not seen from Amy (or even little Amelia) throughout the series until this point.

It's saddening that every season/story seemingly has to be "one of the best ever" or "one of the worst ever", at least in the context of posting one's thoughts on a public forum. I was shocked at the time at the amount of vitriol unleashed on Victory of the Daleks, which clearly is not "one of the best ever" stories... but to this day I have zero comprehension of why a fun little episode like that should have generated so much rage.

Season 31 fails to be "one of the best ever" seasons in my opinion, because really, what does it add to the mythos, it's a whole lot of more of the same (albeit with a brilliant Doctorial debut and plenty of genius Moffatian dialogue). But there's a big gulf between that and "WORST. SEASON. EVER". What does it take to just pleasantly entertain some people?

@Caboodle: I'm curious to know what crimes against canon you feel this season committed, and in particular how they could be worse than those committed by, say, "The End of Time" alone.

@Paul Kirkley: I feel the need to say that while I don't always feel the enthusiasm you do for specific episodes, I really enjoy reading your reviews and this was no exception. I think people "enjoy" shows in different ways; I would never waste time criticizing a show I didn't enjoy. :)

@Matthew: "Victory of the Daleks" had the unfortunate task of following two rather good, imaginative, and at times spectacular stories that were setting the tone for a new Doctor and new showrunner and not being anywhere near up to it. I'm down for "fun little episodes" any day but it didn't even work on that level for me. That said, I can't say it generated any "rage" for me. As for what this season added to the mythos: I'm crossing my fingers that we'll find out next season that the universal "reboot" changed a few things along the way.

I'm not going to bother writing a long detailed comment about how much I loved this program, or the entire series for that matter because you've done it so eloquently. I just wanted to say thanks for the GREAT review, thanks for being someone that adores this program as much as I do, and thanks for making my day. I've read way too many reviews, posts, and long drawn out negative remarks about this series, and this episode that I got tired of reading them. FINALLY someone who actually got it. Write on!

"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."

Very well put.

To be fair to Moffat, in the DWC, he did say that he intentionally left The Silence unresolved as that will be the overarching theme for next season.

When the Doctor unravels, he speaks to Amy aged 7 whilst she sleeps. He says that when she wakes up, she'll have a mum and a dad.

So when Amy wakes up on the morning of her wedding, she's had her parents for years. So I suspect we're meant to take in the idea that she's grown closer to them and everything within the unseen years before the Doctor comes back.

However, the way it was presented on screen does make it look like she took them for granted.

Yeah, it's not explained properly but the way I read it is that Amy wakes up aged 7 and has a mum and dad. Then we see Amy wake up aged 21 where she just thinks she's not got a mum and dad for a bit - like waking from a weird dream. So she, er, always had a mum and dad. I think.

Could someone just clarify one thing for me. In the Eleventh Hour, we saw in the background (framed in the doorway) some adult human shape running past. At the house of Amy. It was a silhouette, as such it couldn't be identified.

I believe it happened when young Amy ran out to sit outside and wait for the Doc. I have heard people say it was the Doctor revisiting his time stream, except we didn't see this correlated in 'The Big Bang'.

I first thought it was Prisoner Zero but could it be related to the burn marks that Professor Song spotted in 'The Pandorica Opens'?

Or am I talking total gumph? Good review Frank, and my apologies to throw a random question in the middle of the comments.

Excellent review, as ever, Frank.

Add to the plot strands left hanging (and I'm not trying to over-analyse the episode, or the series... with due deference here to Stuart's comparison with over-analysing Hamlet... it is just a TV show. But it's something that I thought while watching... a bump in the road when my disbelief was briefly unsuspended)... the date.

What was or is significant about 26.06.10, again?

I suppose it's the wedding?

Or is the creepy voice Fabio Capello? (River is a time-hopping future WAG trying to avert catastrophe?)

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.

I had more problems with another Speilbergian (or - more often - Lucasian) motiff, which is unnecessarily duplicated macguffins. (Two attacks on the partially rebuilt Death Star are better than one for your afterthought of a sequel, etc).

What was driving the plot in the end? The "if you remember it, they will come (back)" idea? Or the microcosm / macrocosm "Pandorica contains the stuff from Big Bang 1.0, so add exploding TARDIS = resurrection device and Universe 1.1" doodad?

(And how does this now explain the Cyberking? Did that happen in the collapsing, starless reality of Amy's memory, with its conspicuous absence of Dalek invasions?)

Given that Moff has explained apparently unreton-able continuity errors previously as "ripples from the Time War" - and presumably he's not doing Time War anymore - the Pandorica amounts to a giant, stealth reboot button.

The technology is the product of an interstellar UN. So when future plot holes emerge it can be conveniently blamed on the Weevils being on shift that day they were building their prison-cum-handy cosmic progenitor device.

(Moffat does like his DNA-arcs. The Dalek one that was activated by the correct ID being presented. The sister who turned out to be the mother of the Empty Child fixing all the corrupted DNA. Young Amy fixing old Amy... Devices fix physical errors in the fabric of identity. Memories are plot devices... Ergo, stories fix worlds and people. Is that how two macguffins amount to one?)

I am only at variance to your review when it comes to tying up all the strands. I quite like the David Chase approach to The Sopranos, stubbornly refusing to explain everything at the end, leaving room for the viewer to imagine other outcomes and stories... but I think you're right in saying:

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.

I really wanted to see the moment they emerged from the Socratic cave and saw stars that weren't going anywhere soon. (In fact I was expecting that the 3D trailer was going to end up as the post-script, as rebooted Amy meets the Doctor all over again...)

I also agree that:

"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."

I had been worried that Moff's era would mark a regression to an FHM-take on female companions, and that worry lingers at the end of the series. But even when Matt Smith went on Jonathan Ross and described Karen as a "10", his awkward, stilted and immediately regretful delivery demonstrated how uneasily that sits with the show, the character and - I would expect - him as a person. The Doctor's a gent. Moff I'm still not sure about.

I never thought I'd say this but - in this sole respect - I miss all RTD's yummy mums and salt-of-the-earth-members-of-ethic-minorities with chops for dinner.

Still, if RTD had written this finale Matt Smith with bleeding legs would have been hurled at the burning TARDIS / Sun from a special, time-looped Cyber-catapault... And the Universe would have taken a quarter of an hour to die while an openly bi character played by Melvyn Hayes slowly re-enacted the preceding series with hand puppets for some kiddies. And they all chanted "Doctor" just as he bought it.

It wasn't shite, I liked the stuff with the fez and that'll do for me.

Thanks for introducing me to Bakhtin's menippea definition... you learn something new every day.

Right. As I understood it, all the Universe wiping-out and rebooting was being applied to every moment simultaneously (redundantly?). This notion that the TARDIS explosion "happened on" 26 June must mean something in some imperceptibly abstracted Time Lord sense...

Come to think of it, though we had "hope" (in the form of the Doctor) the bit of the Pandora myth that was missing was all the nasties previously unknown to man.

Could it be that if Amy remembers other exiled / retconed- out-of-existence baddies (i.e.: Omega), they miraculously reappear too?

The wedding date is significant as a cosmic restore point, significant only to the nasties that had, previously, been deleted from reality?

Actually, forget what I just said. I felt a great disturbance, as if thousands of plot points imagined on Gallifery Base suddenly cried out and were suddenly silenced.

Thank you, Frank, as always.

I don't always agree with you on your opinion of Amy, being a girl and seeing it somewhat differently, but your unpacking of this episode and her part in it is on point.

From a pure enjoyment point of view (and being now less of a fangirl than I was in my early teens), this two-parter blew my socks off. I don't care about plot holes (and they gape), I don't care about threads left hanging (and they are wafting out there), all I care about is was it a rollicking good bit of TV (and it SO was).

Stephen Moffat IS a good writer and he has got a bevy of excellent young actors as well as some great old hands and some very good writers of the genre to take the next season and run with it. To a certain extent, I do see this series as the reboot described. Yes, there were average episodes, but there were more good ones than not and most of them from Moffat's pen. Yes, Amy's character was more stool pigeon than active companion, but that will hopefully be sorted out in short order in the next series.

I think (and hope) that Moffat is thinking long term for his tenure as senior writer and the stories he has planted in the fertile soils of our imaginations during this series will all provide delectable fruit in series to come.

Once again, thank you for the review...looking forward to Christmas already!

Another thing that doesn't make sense about the alliance between the Doctor's enemies is that they didn't need to ally in the first place. It only took a few of them to force him into the Pandorica, so what was the point of the huge fleet and therefore the alliance itself?

I must keep missing the explanation for where the Pandorica comes from in the first place, but I'm still not clear on who built it. Obviously it's pretty amazing (especially if you have a time machine you don't mind destroying), so I figure the idea was that they collaborated on its design and construction. Then again, the Doctor knows it as a fairy tale, so it must have predated the alliance. Somehow.

So maybe the purpose was to overwhelm the Doctor with numbers. In "The Pandorica Opens" we see him frantically (if facetiously) concocting plans to play off the alien fleets against one another, but he seems to despair once he realizes how many there are. They must just figure they need everyone to match his cleverness. Or maybe some of them are providing the catering.

Or: their planets have already fallen into the cracks, so they're all huddled around Earth (the eye of the storm) for safety.

I suspect that the alliance is like many other elements of the finale in that it mostly serves a dramatic purpose: it's just about giving a sense of occasion, regardless of how much sense it makes under scrutiny. You accept it in the first half because you figure "oh, Moffat will explain it in the second half," and then while you're talking to the person seated next to you he's cleared the plates and the alliance is conveniently gone for the second half.

Of course, the other dramatic purpose it serves is to keep you from assuming that the enemy forcing him into the Pandorica is the one Secretly Behind All This. If they're all there, you're less likely to assume the butler did it.

A tour de force review for the finale, Frank! You articulated a lot of what I found troublesome about the episode, although I enjoyed the ride while it lasted. My main sticking point would be the lack of explanation for why the TARDIS explodes and 'Silence will fall' - whilst I appreciate allowing the finale room to believe, you can't help but feel a bit cheated since it seemed as if Gretel-Moffat was leaving the trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow from Episode 1 right through to this moment. I also don't particularly want to sit through another 12 episodes of random characters muttering 'Silence will fall!' in every story of Series Fnarg+1.

There is little in 'The Big Bang' that goes back to explain why Amy is such a pain throughout the rest of the series. Even with her restored family (and the implication is that she is at least somewhat damaged because the crack has eaten her parents) she seems little different in terms of attitude from her early appearances.

The lack of a clearly defined protagonist makes this a rollicking series of wonderfully clever moments, but only half a story. Indeed, this production team seems unable to draw a convincing or memorable villains or monsters. Unlike RTD's very clearly defined 'monsters that a child can scribble' I can barely remember what the fish-people of Venice or the Krafayis even look like. And it seems everyone remembers the plummy-voiced New Daleks and the Silurians for the wrong reasons. I understand there are budget issues, but I did find the lack of a solid alien menace or even a story from Ep 6 onwards that wasn't tied to Earth or some English village rather repetitive. Teaser moments like River's space bar or Planet One are just salt in the wound.

Ironically, whilst the series does feel frustratingly curtailed in terms of scope, it has never looked more beautiful. I was rewatching some Tennant episodes and the use of those horrendous green/ purple lights everywhere is garishly distracting. Even a story like 'Silence in the Library' which I remembered as being more polished suffers from the blanket lighting. The grading of that series and especially 'The Big Bang' have been magnificent - like the gently tinged unnaturally orange sky as the Doctor et al emerge on to the roof to see the exploding TARDIS.

I feel torn between Paul Kirkely's 50 point enthusiasm and your more muted concerns. I loved this episode whilst I was watching it (and I tend to love all the finales, even the ones fandom seems to despise a la LOTL) but there seems to be more gaping logic holes in TBB than in probably all of RTD's finale's put together (the shifting nature of the Pandorica and the restoration field is a case in point).

Most of all, I think I would find it hard to watch 'The Pandorica Opens' again knowing that 45 minutes of dramatic set-up is swept away with a bit of timey-wimey nonsense and all sense of the horror of locking the Doctor up for eternity and the moral implications of his worst enemies ganging up against him evaporates almost instantly in service of a runaround worthy of SJA's 'Mona Lisa's Revenge'.

A mixed series of amazing moments but weak stories for me, but it's obligatory at this point to say how utterly brilliant Matt Smith is in the role.

Very thorough review! Brings up a lot of interesting points. I'm pleased to hear some folktales (Red Riding hood) brought into the mix. But I really can't see River as the wicked step mother. I can see her more as a morally ambiguous good/bad witch, but we'll see how the character develops.

I have to disagree about Amy being a "sadomasochist", though I recognize that she's a bit of eye candy for the "dads" and such. I think it's interesting that she and Rory have reversed roles (compared to Rose and Mickey, for example). Rory is compassionate, while Amy is emotionally awkward. I don't think there's anything wrong with the traditionally male and female companion roles being switched up. It's actually quite refreshing.

I also have to disagree with your view on the microcosm vs. macrocosm. I think Moffat's focus on the smaller picture is absolutely brilliant. I am sick and tired of RTD pulling out all the stops and blowing up London all the time. It's OLD!! Moffat, however, brings things into focus. For example, that River/Dalek moment that you don't like. I think that is one of the most intense moments of the entire series. It creates a contrast against the alien alliance in The Pandorica Opens. While I think the alliance was mostly just for show on Moffat's part, the lone Dalek is not only an obvious "baddie" for The Big Bang, but it's in a scene that pits two of Doctor-Who's-most-wanted against each other.

Think back to Rose saving the lone Dalek from the Doctor in the first season. Then think of that same thing in The Big Bang. Just a little different, right? Moffat created a microcosm of Doctor Who in that Big Bang moment. The companion vs. the arch-enemy. It also shows the cowardice of the alien alliance against the Doctor, by revealing how weak just one of them is against River. Not to mention, River's voice, the Dalek's uncertain pause before begging for mercy, the unwavering hate on one hand and the fear on the other. I couldn't tell if River was doing it for the Doctor or for her own satisfaction. I tend to think it was the latter. Throughout that whole scene, I thought the sparks were visibly flying.

Theory time: the TARDIS exploding was (somehow) facilitated in order to bring about the return of the (full blown, non "time-bubbled") Time Lords - through its restorative powers thingy - with (somehow) Omega on top... River Song (somehow) works for him...

Here's hoping the waiting until Christmas won't prove to be so excruciating (hey, there's SJA in the autumn..!)...
thank the gods for all those classic Who dvds, eh...?

Since Amy was able to bring Rory back, bring her family back, bring the Doctor and Tardis back, and essentially bring the whole universe back, how soon before she remembers the Weeping Angels?

What is this Dahl reference that keeps getting referred to? Just because there’s a character who shares the same first name?

***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.***

In that case, there wouldn’t have been an Earth without any stars. Can’t say I’m bothered by the contradiction but “neatly sidesteps” is a bit OTT.

"At some point, her “spoilers” catchphrase will begin to tire"

Mmm, earlier this year ;)

I think the 'Silence will fall!' voice is just Prisoner Zero, isn't it? Repeating the sound byte from The Eleventh Hour?

And I think really think that the machine in The Lodger was just a throwaway thing, always did; which means I'll be thrilled if Moffat proves me wrong, but I just think it was not intended to be anything than just a suitable plot device (or orginally Meglos!)

The machine in The Lodger may have been there just to reinforce the "House that's bigger than it should be" meme.

I also thought Amelia's house would be similar to the house in The Lodger - that second flight of main stairs in her two storey house always puzzled me.

Additionally I now am trying to rationalise Rory's existence in the restored universe. Why is he there and when did he arrive and why did the Nestene create him? - is the Alliance still out there and are they all in Roman Britain wondering why the Doctor hasn't shown up?

I thought the 'Silence will Fall' voice sounds a BIT like Toby Jones' voice treated electronically, and he's certainly intimated that he's coming back.

Thanks for providing all the reviews and responses guys, it's been (on the whole) the best series since '05, and i always value the comments on BTS more than any other blog or forum. And next year, we get to do it all over again.

Thanks very much!

But don't forget Sarah Jane Adventures. And the next series of Torchwood. And the Eighth Doctor audios once I have a complete run sorted out ...

Looking forward to your Eighth audio reviews as ever; I'd tell you my favourite from the series but I don't want to influence anything! ;)

And yeah, SJA will be eagerly looked forward to for That Episode...like That Episode with Tennant last year.

I thought it was Prisoner Zero too (even insisted as much here and on Twitter) but I listened to both again recently, as I should have in the first place, and they're very different. My money's on the Dream Lord now too, but it could be someone else entirely. Love the idea that the Time Lords may be coming back.

@Rich: I think you're the second person to suggest Amy married Plastic Rory. She didn't - she married Real Rory, who never died because up until the wedding the Doctor had never existed, so he didn't go with the Doctor and didn't get killed.

With me so far? When Amy remembered the Doctor he was restored along with his history ... or at least his history up to the Eleventh Hour, since they are now in a universe where the cracks never existed so Amy's Mum and Dad still exist. Apparently Amy and Rory's memories of their travels in the TARDIS were also restored but those adventures are now on an alternate timeline so they never happened as such which is why Rory gets to stay alive.

I love the idea that Eleventh Hour Rory was an Auton all along, but it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, does it? Rory grew up with Amy and played raggedy doctors and nurses with her. Also, I don't think even Rory could work as a nurse in Leadworth for 20 years without ever getting good at his job, being promoted or, you know, attracting some attention for the never aging or needing to sleep thing!

Hat's off to Russell T Davies for bring the series back sucessfuly but bigger hat's off to Steven Moffatt for ensuring it will survive for the next 40 years.

Maybe his focus on making the show memorable for the kids was always going to be his angle but everyone working on Nu-Who has talked often enough about how their love for the show is what drives them to make it so good and Moffatt must be aware that his actions now are ensuring that in 40 years time there will be another generation profoundly devoted to making the show as good as it can be.

And howabout that - a whole series devoted to getting the line 'something old, something new, somthing borrowed, something blue' to make sense when it was spoken. Well - not just make sense but actually have emmotional impact as well. Well done that man.

That makes more sense - I misheard Rory's comment after Amy's 'something old/new/borrowed/blue' line; I now think Rory says to Amy's mother "I was plastic" indicating he is the human Rory that Amy grew up with but as you say with the additional memories of Plastic Rory. It's an important line but barely audible!

Ah, that wasn't Prisoner Zero's voice? Interesting!

So here's the real question: If Amy Ponds parents never existed, how was Amelia still there?

The fact that Amy's parents were erased by the crack is horrifying and explains so much about her character. Just think about it: who does a kid go to about the scary things in her room? Even though she couldn't remember getting mommy and daddy eaten, she'd still have felt it! No wonder she was scared of it.

I wonder when the doctor realized what had happened. I think it was pretty soon. He was certainly capable of keeping up the pretense after Rory vanished.

Going to thank you too, Stuart, as I've just thanked Frank. Both of you have provided excellent and insightful addenda to my viewing pleasure :)

I am wholly in agreement with you that this has been a rollicking good series of mostly great stories that are, in essence, going back to what Dr Who was always about; a futuristic fairytale for entertaining the children that wryly shoots missiles at the modern zeitgeist which keeps the adults nodding and grinning sagely.

Who cares about plot holes miles wide?! This is SciFi, we can go back and fix 'em later...

Thank you! It's people like you who make me think that the hollow scream into the dark which usually greets the end of my first paragraph each week when I realise I don't know what to write next is worth the pain.

Jeliwobble said: "Who cares about plot holes miles wide?! This is SciFi..."

Who cares? I do! Plot holes and illogic are precisely the enemy of SciFi. They don't even belong in Fantasy or fairy tales (with which DrWho should never have been associated), as even those genres need rules which are self-consistent and make sense within their own narrative. This is why this series has been particularly weak.

Doctor Who was associated with fantasy and fairy tales the moment Barbara entered a box that was bigger on the inside that travelled through time. Under the stricter rules of genre anyway, Doctor Who is a sub-genre unto itself now.

And if plotholes and logic aren't your thing, don't watch Doctor Who because its never been internally consistent. It's always made things up as it goes along. That's how it has managed to survive for nearly fifty years.

Plot holes and lapses in logic do occur in any series, sure, but it's a question of degree and whether the balance of the story is strong enough to compensate for the shortfalls. Generally (with two or three exceptions), this hasn't been the case for me with this series of Doctor Who (and I've seen them all from the show's inception).

Care to offer some examples as to what you would consider exemplary seasons/series of Doctor Who...? Just so we know...

cheers...

Hey there. As Stuart said, Dr Who IS a fairy tale, as all GOOD SciFi is. Fairy tales in their purest form are cautionary tales about Good vs Evil, constructed in a way to be both a warning and an entertainment to children, with layers of subtext that adults can understand and manipulate if necessary.

Any brief read of any of the online collectives of Dr Who plots and storylines will bring up many plot holes and inconsistencies across the 43 years since its inception. We could start at the very beginning and ask what on Earth happened to Susan and where did she come from in the first place? Or how the Master KEEPS coming back from the dead again and again?

As Stuart says, there have always been internal inconsistencies. Luckily, within the genre, it is relatively easy to mend the holes that happened in history as we move the story forward. This was a super season in my opinion. It could have been a stinker, given the love there was for Tennant and the rod of iron with which RTD ruled the come back. But the show has stopped being about the star and is now back to being about the alien that loves humans and the adventures he has; and thank goodness for that.

I take back my question, why Amy didn't get erased by her parents being erased. The crack couldn't take her because her future self was protected under timelock by the Pandorica. So because she was in the Pandorica she continued to exist until she could actually get in the damn thing. Brilliant!

Amy's memories were used to lure the Doctor to Stonehenge, or at least to my understanding they were. The way I saw it was that the Daleks had knowledge of where the Doctor has been in his travels with Amy, the Cabinet War Rooms, SpaceShip UK, etc. Using this knowledge, they then looked through Amy's memories to create a plan to catch the Doctor. Taking inspiration from Pandora's Box, the Daleks use that to devise the Pandorica, creating the legend obviously is easy, go around time and spread the word. Moving on, the Daleks then used the Roman book to devise a force to capture the Doctor. With help from the Nestene, they made sure they had Auton's stationed at Stonehenge to be ready to capture and put the Doctor in the Pandorica, as well as keep the Doctor's and Amy's suspicions low. So they have the time, they have the place. How to deliver the message? In Vincent and the Doctor, at the beginning of the episode it is alluded to that Amy is a Van Gogh fan prior to her travels with the Doctor. So it is a reasonable inference that there is either a Van Gogh print or a Van Gogh book in her room. Using that, the Daleks waited until the Doctor finally met Vincent (This is the stretch in my hypothesis, but you can safely assume the Doctor would take her to meet her idols). After he met them, as evidenced by the quick turnaround, the Daleks were quick to beam the message to Van Gogh so he could paint it. Knowing something from Van Gogh would reach the hands of someone with knowledge of the Doctor, the Daleks then let time run its course. Since time runs laterally, they, hypothetically, had all the time in the world for the message to reach the Daleks.

It's not the greatest, but its better than assuming that her memories meant nothing.

None of it made a jot more sense than any of RTD's handwavey "plot" "resolutions"... I mean, is there any point in cliffhangers ever again? If all the Doctor needs to do to escape from an inescapable predicament from now on is to turn up from a paradoxical future timeline and let himself out?

...and yet it was ten times more loveable somehow. I mean, who couldn't love Fake Plastic Rory's 2,000 year vigil with no hope of reward, or River being caught in a time loop of failure and regret for the same amount of time. And then the final overturning of one of Who's historically most irksome conventions, the idea that all you need to do to write a companion out is marry them off, because obviously marriage is the end of adventure, fun, heroism and just plain mattering... if you're not sexually available, you're not dramatically interesting or worthwhile either. That was then. This is now.

I still feel like this wasn't a Doctor Who story, but a story about Doctor Who, though. Was it meant to make any sense to anyone not wholly invested in the show for decades already? Full marks to Moffat for jettisoning the Alliance of Exponentially Bigger NuWho Finale, though. The man really does understand that a decapitated Cyberman or a crumbling stone Dalek is more scary than a billion spaceships containing everything evil in the universe ever. And that's why the show rests in safe hands into 2011 and beyond.

Surely, if Rory is a giant Airfix soldier, and Amy has just married her plastic beau, then your gripe about the ID badge does not apply.

At least that's how I read it. In the rebooted universe Rory is still the eternal warrior watching over his love. Of course he was credentialed in the 1990s.

By the way, I love all the loose ends. There's lots to look forwards to next year.

The 'something borrowed, something blue' bit was just amazing - it may be the first flush of giddy enthusiasm, but I'm calling that as Doctor Who's finest ever moment.

I felt that the Amy deal made a sort of sense. She lives on her own as a kissogram with an unseen aunt and parents who just aren't there in a very large empty house. Same as some of the museum exhibits like penguins of the Nile, or the observatories but no stars, there are absences and changes in Amy's life, but they've left gaps and inconsistencies rather than her life snapping back completely around them. The duck pond is a prime example, perhaps the crack consumed the ducks, but it's still established as a duck pond and still exists as one without the presence of ducks, because in Amy's worldview there is a duck pond there. Amy's profession and her large house make sense for a lady in her early twenties living with her parents, but the parents just aren't there, Amy's life hasn't snapped back though to her not living in England or doing a different job, and that's because of what is special about Amy.

Everything has an equal and opposite reaction, and my theory is that in return for everything that's been sucked away out of Amy's life, she has absorbed the energy of 'potential' it left. Remember how the Angels feed on the energy of the life that could have happened? Perhaps that energy is what sets Amy apart. She has lost so much and absorbed so much that reality can't ret-con her life, reality has to try to order itself around an unchanging Amy, leaving gaping holes, empty rooms, logic gaps, duck ponds without ducks.

It was probably for this reason the Alliance of Bads chose Amy's memories, because even if they're fictional her memories are imbued with this powerful, vital potential energy that makes them real, and she believes them wholeheartedly enough to create the kind of detail to make them overcome real world logic. She went through what, four psychiatrists and couldn't be convinced that the Doctor wasn't real. Amy is stubborn, faithful and imbued with universal potential energy to the point that space and time have to bend themselves around her to fit her in, even if it makes no sense. The Doctor has mentioned 'fixed points in time' which cannot be changed. I think Amy has become a fixed person in time, like a walking black box protected by all the universal energy that's flowed through her, protecting her from timeline changes and also allowing her to be used as a record or template to restore things. It's possible that Rory's strange nametag is s leftover inconsistency from her stubbornly disallowing his being wiped from time or a change to his timeline once before. In fact, Ledgeworth having a hospital and a coma ward for such a small village makes you wonder if it wasn't originally a much larger town and Amy is the only thing that stopped it being wiped off the map altogether, preserving a smaller, idealised version of the place, full of inconsistencies. Whether this Haruhi Suzumiya-esque power will remain with her, or whether she used it all up bringing back the Doctor remains to be seen.

I sat in a London pub watching this episode, spellbound and in the company of at least thirty other "specialists". I empathise with Paul about experiencing flushes of giddy enthusiasm because I had several during this episode; they may have been the result of spending the whole afternoon beforehand sitting in the sun drinking, but I prefer to think that they were my genuine response to Moffat's astonishing, poignant, bonkers season finale. Quite frankly, I LOVED this episode.

It was a delight to see so much frantic messing around with time and all the wonderful possibilities for hilarious mischief-making that it brought; the hilarity suddenly turning to horror and sadness; the Doctor's vigil by Amy's bedside; the thought that he'd be trapped on the wrong side of the crack and never have existed - that he would have saved all of time and space, yet again, and no-one in creation would ever have known; the wonderful wedding sequence as the Doctor turns up wearing "this old thing"; the dancing; the prospect of more adventures with River Song still to come and perhaps even their wedding... Terrific!

There were one or two moments when I was puzzled of course - and it occurred to me on several occasions to wonder what The Not-We would have made of the twists and turns - but not once did the episode leave me feeling angry. That's a first for me, when I think of my reactions to the confusions and anomalies in previous big-league Nu-Who episodes and series finales.

For once, this was a season which I enjoyed almost in its entirety; ok maybe three or four less interesting episodes in the mix, but that's so cool! Even the less interesting ones were streets ahead in terms of quality and - of course - having a brilliant Doctor in them in the persona of Matt Smith, than the less interesting ones in previous years...

I wish they'd found a use in this episode for the beautiful and poignant piano music, used twice in The Eleventh Hour (when young Amy looks at the just-crashed TARDIS, and later when adult Amy steps inside it for the very first time) also in Flesh & Stone. That would have been very nice to hear again. Hopefully it will turn up on a forthcoming soundtrack CD, track-listed as "Amy's Theme". Still, Murray Gold's music was pretty damned exceptional in this episode and, better still, was mixed at just the right volume so I could hear all the dialogue properly :-)

The only irritation came straight after transmission, when it was explained to me that there would be hundreds of fans who would have hated the episode simply because Omega didn't turn up at the end... FFS! This is the same irritation I felt in 2006 when two or three real specialists insisted to me that the giant demon chained up in The Satan Pit was obviously Sutekh because he spoke with the voice of Gabriel Woolfe. "You can't prove it wasn't Sutekh," they carped at me. "They must have cast Woolfe for a reason..." Better for me to sigh and roll my eyes skywards than pay serious attention to the conspiracy theories of specialists. I am quite happy to savour the anticipation of finding out whose sinister voice could be heard in the TARDIS and who was presumably the cause of its explosion. Hopefully that will happen at Christmas or at some point in the new series...

Just to add one thought; i still think the Duck Pond was a foreshadow. I think the idea that Moffat was going for was that there was alot of stuff that had been erased from Amy's village, and that's why she didn't make sense as a person. I think the idea was that there had been ducks there and they had been erased (somehow), but Amy still remembered it as a Duck Pond.

Overall good review though, i concur that while the episode was highly enjoyable and had some brilliant moments; it did have too many leaps of faith for my liking. I think using a paradoxical version of himself to let himself out of the Pandorica is probably the lamest think Moffat has ever written...

@Darth-mongoose I'm with ya, mate...! And a firm proponent of you eventually (pretty please?) being an integral part of the roster of gentlemen geeks who review in this collaborative blog here (yes, mentioning Haruhi Suzumiya clinched the deal for me)... Fresh blood and all that... Cheerio...!

Absolutely mental finale and hugely reminiscent of the BBC Eighth Doctor books, where his adventures frequently revolved around time unravelling rather than epic alien invasions.

My slight pang of disappointment after the episode was mainly because, like Neil, I was firmly in the belief that there had been a rich tapestry of clues in previous episodes that were going to add up to something big. But there wasn't - at least not yet. But I think that's more my fault than the fault of the episode which was audacious and clever and - pretty rarely for Doctor Who - used time travel as a central plot device.

Yeah, the future Doctor is a little bit of a cheat, but it's cheeky and fun and as long as Moffat doesn't continually revert to it, I think it's great here. But you have to admire Moffat's balls for holding off the big bad till next series as well as leaving several threads hanging. That takes courage so more power to him. Roll on Christmas.

Oh, and the final scene of the Doctor, Amy and Rory in the TARDIS was just magical. They're now firmly one of my favourite Doctor and companion teams.

The notion of River giving Amy a new blank book to start writing in that eventually grows into the "spoilers book" — rather than the "spoilers book" gone blank — is REALLY appealing. But the Doctor handed the book back to River at the end of the episode and indicated that its contents were already restored.

This timey-whimey stuff is causing a headache...I think I'll spend the rest of the weekend watching Quantum Leap episodes.

Am I the only one for which this wasn't a particularly successful episode? Sure, there were plenty of fun-bits, and the production was all well and good, but the resolution still boiled down to some deus ex machina magic, a la countless RTD episodes.

A "restorative field" beamed throughout the universe and Amy (being, once again, "special"...we heard this about Donna some time back, also) being able to remember things that never happened and will the doctor into existence...all bollocks.

Nonetheless, I still enjoyed watching it somewhat better than your typical overblown RTD spectacle, but I'm not quite certain I understand why. Probably because it was a little more grounded than some of his circuses, but, really, when you think of it, the big problem was the universe having never happened, which is hardly the sort of small-scale not-universe-spanning disaster you'd find in some of the old-school stuff.

Even the predestination paradox stuff, which could get old really quickly if it happens too much (and there is no reason given for why it doesn't), I could live with that, Blinovitch be damned. It may not make much sense if you read the tin too closely, but there's precedent for it in Doctor Who and it was sort of fun. I may have prefered a more clever way for the doctor to save himself or something...but I'm not sure there was one in the offing.

As for Amy's specialness, and the whole conundrum about her "life not making sense", I don't buy it. Duck pond, schmuck pond, the pieces don't particularly hold together. Who cares if she lives in a big house? The "clues" may have been intentional going all the way back to "The Eleventh Hour", but there was nothing convincing about them. Children do live with their aunts sometimes, after their parents, uh, cease to exist.

That wasn't helped by her awful domestic nightmare, complete with parents, when the new universe happened...and, apparently, happened exactly the same as it did the first time around (who needs quantum mechanics?), except without the Doctor being there. And the maudlin "let's retrace the season while the Doctor ceases to exist or something" may have let them address their little doctor-with-a-coat easter egg in the Angels two-parter, but I found it rather nonsensical and dramatically flat.

That brings up the bizarre logistics of the doctor's "plan", as it were. Apparently the universe was going to happen again...but without the doctor...but, for some reason, the whole universe and the stars and all that shit didn't exist...but the Earth and, specifically, the town of ledworth, never-existed last of all (if that were to, you know, make any sense at all) so they had a convenient 2000 years or so to do all that flying into the sun stuff. Even young Amelia never-existed just in time for her to let Amy out of the box (but they all remember her anyway). Burning TARDIS or no, there didn't seem much reason for Leadworth to be ground-zero, and, sure enough, when (everyone get down! Time is reversing!) the big reset button happens, once again, as in SOD U LOTT, we get the central characters as the only ones who remember the universe-that-was, apparently because they were in the eye of some sort of storm...which greatly overestimates the importance of Leadworth, universally speaking. It all seems very convenient that things stop-having-ever-existed in just the right order...which I'm not convinced happens when things never-existed.

Sure, all the pieces fit together nicely...but there was no reason for them to. I'm sure I'll have more to say about the episode when I give it another pass, but at the moment I'm not convinced the whole house of cards holds together. Fairy-tale indeed.

PS: is there a grammar term for the active "will soon have never-existed" tense?

PS: is there a grammar term for the active "will soon have never-existed" tense?

I believe that would be the "wibbly-wobbly future-wuture tense".

"I wonder if he'll keep this up? I mean, what's stopping him?"

Mucking about in your own timeline has the potential to destroy the universe. Given that this had already happened, the Doctor was free to arse around to his hearts' content.

I recall a letter to the Radio Times in 1989 complaining that the letter the Doctor sent to himself in Battlefield had effectively destroyed any drama in the series. 21 years later, we're still coping. Best not to worry too much about it.

offscauta - Good thinking, that man/woman!

Incidentally, the marvellously deflating conciseness of "King died in final battle. Everything else propaganda" has long been my favourite piece of Who dialogue ever. However, it's now under serious pressure from "If I always told you the truth I wouldn't need you to trust me".

Think the 'predestination paradox' could be explained later. Maybe not. Hell, it's fantasy isn't it?

Predestination paradoxes are a tricky business. While they can be explained by a strange sort of logic that i'll explain in a minute, they are a bit of a cop-out, and i think it was quite lazy of moffat to include one as the solution to such and important problem as the Pandorica.

As to how they can make some sort of sense though, i'll explain now:

So obviously in their own internal way, predestination paradoxes make sense. The Doctor gets out of the Pandorica because Rory let him out with the screwdriver that the Doctor later goes back in time to give him. It isn't an condradiction and works in its own way, but the main question that's left is; how did the loop form in the first place? How do any predestination paradoxes form in the first place?

A solution to this problem with The Doctor could be answered by this idea; If it's possible that the Doctor would have escaped from the Pandorica eventually and had the capability to travel back in time, it's possible that he would have gone back to change the manner of how he got out; therefore re-writing his own timeline so that he always got out in that manner...

To give an example of how it might have occured imagine this:

1) We start with the Doctor in the Pandorica.

*) It is possible that eventually, he would escape from it somehow. There is no reason for us to believe that the screwdriver was the only way to open it (and in fact, the fact that Rory had to guard Amy in it and that the museum spoke of him preventing it from being opened before it's time, implies that there certainly were other ways to open).

2) So lets say that after a few hundred years, Rory manages to work out a way of letting him out...

3) The Doctor, believing that it now may be too late to do what needs to be done, decides that he needs to re-write time so that he is let out sooner.

4) Therefore, he goes back in time and gives Rory his screwdriver and tells him to let him out.

5) By doing this he re-writes his timeline so he was let out by himself, and so in fact he always was let out by himself.

"Think the 'predestination paradox' could be explained later. Maybe not. Hell, it's fantasy isn't it?"

Well, it's not supposed to be, but you couldn't really tell that from "The Big Bang".

I hope we're not going to have the tedious argument about Doctor Who BEING SCIENCE FICTION and therefore anything that doesn't have spaceships and physics in it doesn't qualify again. Mainly because 95% of Doctor Who since 1963 fails to qualify as Real Doctor Who by the yardstick of these mentalists.

Doctor Who is a fantasy show, if it occasionally wears the clothes science fiction and you enjoy it more accordingly then bully for you, but that's not what it's "supposed" to be :P

Doctor Who's science fiction in my book. But there's hard SF and there's stuff like Star Wars and Doctor Who. There's some element of what you're calling "fantasy" in a lot of ostensible SF.

However, even if we say "Doctor Who is pure fantasy" (which may be truer of some seasons than others) there are still rules, even if they're largely concerned with what's dramatically satisfying and plausible (rather than what's "possible"). As an example, imagine the climax of the last Harry Potter book having been this:

"As Voldemort pointed his wand at Harry and grinned evilly, suddenly a thirty-year-old man with glasses and a lightning bolt scar beneath a mop of black hair appeared out of nowhere and tossed Harry a whopping great gleaming laser rifle. Harry flipped off the safety and disintegrated Voldemort with a single bolt. Everyone cheered and the future Harry gave his younger self a big thumbs up as he vanished back into the timestream."

Plausible -- given the rules and conventions of the Harry Potter fantasy -- or not? And more importantly, dramatically satisfying or not?

To clarify: personally I bought the predestination paradoxes in "The Big Bang" and really enjoyed them, but I don't think the reason they worked for me was because "Doctor Who is fantasy." Time travel is a given of the show, and it was satisfying on a pure entertainment level (if not quite on a dramatic level -- that's the "cheating" feeling some of us got) to see it used so extensively and energetically.

I think a similar trick in Harry Potter would have seemed incongruous (to say the least), since time travel and the sort of "science" that produces laser rifles aren't part of the Harry Potter universe in the same way. It would have seemed even more like "cheating" dramatically too, I would argue if I wanted to REALLY bore you.

So I agree with you that time travel paradoxes are perfectly fine in the Doctor Who universe; after all, without them we wouldn't have "City of Death," "Earthshock," or "Terminus," just to name three big examples.

I'm just disagreeing with your apparently strict definition of "science fiction." For example, I think ideas like "if people are remembered, they can come back" are at best pushing the limits of what belongs in a series like Doctor Who, just as "if enough people pray the Doctor's name simultaneously, he can change from a house-elf into a magic floating messiah" pushed the limits. THOSE things for me are what nudge the series into "fantasy" territory, and I found them both implausible and unsatisfying. "The universe can be extrapolated deterministically from a few atoms" wasn't a lot better, but at least it pretended to be based on something more than "you gotta believe!" I can't even tell you how relieved I was when the Doctor's "you're a miracle" speech to Rory turned out to be a mistake.

Stephen FRY says he was misquoted so the jury's out on that.

Oddly enough I've just watched it again.

Just after they find the Pandorica, the Doctor says that Stonehenge is broadcasting and that anyone and everyone can hear it including poor Vincent. We know from his conversation with Amy that the artist is sensitive to these things so it makes a kind of sense that he'd be able to pick it up and River sent the rendezvous message based on the info on the canvas.

Which is a predestination paradox but hey-ho the show hasn't been averse to them this year. I can't find anyone who doesn't this whole season won't turn out to be another rather long and convoluted one of those.

I think that when the Doctor entered the chamber, a proximity system looking for his genetic makeup (which we know the Daleks have at least because they've used it before to check his identity even after he's regenerated) firstly activated the Pandorica which then begins its unlocking process and then sent a message to all in sundry to let them know that the Doctor is in place and to hightale it to Earth at that moment in order to complete the plan.

That still doesn't explain how Amy's memories played any part in springing this trap...

I thought Stephen Fry fucked off and left us with Fear Her, which is where so much of the trouble began?

Neil Perryman said...
That still doesn't explain how Amy's memories played any part in springing this trap...
Because the Alliance of Bastards™ have a time machine: the moment they receive a signal that the Doctor has entered Underhenge, what's to stop them from going to Amy's time, reading her memories, and then shaping an undercover force of Autons disguised as Roman soldiers to arrive beforehand and back up the Cyber-sentries? Especially as the Daleks probably have a low opinion of the Cybermen, especially on aesthetic grounds.

You can just tell the Daleks are behind this plan simply because of its complexity-- they're never ones to do anything simply (step forward the Dalek Master Plan, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Evil of the Daleks , Destiny of the Daleks and Resurrection of the Daleks.) How they survived for so long while at war with the Time Lords was probably more about the later's indolence when confronted with the formers over-excessive machinations.

That makes no sense either - they must have been to her house *before* they built the Pandorica - they took the design from her book... To be blunt, the trap makes no sense at all. Yet.

Exactly. So Amy likes Romans. What difference does that make to anything?

Also, in narrative continuity, the Alliance couldn't have existed before Victory Of The Daleks because the Mighty Morphin' Skaro Rangers didn't either. So where do we *start*?

Do reviewers believe that, if their review isn't centred on finding fault for fault's sake, they won't get taken seriously as critics? You start off by announcing that it was brilliant and amazing and then spend 2/3 of your review explaining how badly thought out it was. You can't suddenly say 2/3 of the way through: enough griping, it was brilliant.

If 1/3 of your reaction was positive and 2/3 was negative, how can you have thought it was brilliant?

We know from Moffat's previous 2-parters that the way he writes them is to pose umpteen insoluble questions in part 1 and then tie them all up neatly in part 2. So isn't it self-defeating to write a review complaining about so much in part 1 not making sense? It's not supposed to make sense at this point.

Would you stop in the middle of, say, Blink and write a review of its first 20 mins detailing how none of this DVD easter egg stuff makes sense? You say that it's even more nebulous than the Bad Wolf arc but forget that by the end of episode 12 of Series One, we still hadn't any idea of what the nature of the Bad Wolf plot arc was.

You say that the cliffhanger would have been much better if we'd been left thinking that the Doctor was so powerful that he could destroy the universe but we've known for at least half this season that the destruction of the universe was in some way connected to the TARDIS exploding. There's never been any suggestion that the death of the universe had anything to do with the Doctor being all-powerful - just that he owns a very powerful time machine whose explosion could play havoc with time and space. If the Doctor had kept his mouth shut, would we have spent the next 7 days forgetting that River was trapped in a crashing TARDIS around the time that the Universe is supposed to be ended in an explosion linked to the TARDIS?

There was a reason why the Doctor "blabbed" that it was the TARDIS which was the danger and not him. Because the problem he's presented with in being locked in the Pandorica isn't just that he's going to be confined in a box for eternity but also that it will prevent stop him from stopping the TARDIS blowing up - something he was trying to help River do when the Baddie Alliance turned up.

So, the universe is in danger of imminent end, the only people who know how it's going to happen are River and the Doctor, and he shouldn't try to convey this to the Alliance who are locking him up in their attempt to save the universe!!! Imagine if Moffat had written it like that. How many Ep 12 reviews would be complaining how it was poor writing to have the Doctor make no attempt to warn the Alliance that they shouldn't be locking him away because it won't stop the end of the universe? I can think of a few.

Yeah but, you know, just saying...

LOL

Paul you said:
"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."

I noted that when I reviewed this ep (the jeopardy that the Doctor saves his companion from in the "first" Nu-Who story is what he doesn't save her from in this "last" Nu-Who story), though I prefer to think of Moffat's story having even more resonance because RTD's story exists, because he is riffing on what has gone before - this season hasn't exactly shied away from making links to the whole history of Doctor Who.

After reviewing the ep I've been trying to think what this season means as a whole, episode by episode - click here for planetzogblog speculation of what the season is all about: "Doctor Who the 2010 season mysteries contemplated".

(It contains some wild speculation at the end as to what the last ep will feature, the significance of Stonehenge, and this is the last half an hour before broadcast, so, last chance to speculate really.)

This whole discussion in the comment-thread about how the Daleks and chums expected this plan to function - it just occurred to me that what the Daleks are doing is similar to River's messages through time: River uses Gallifreyan inscriptions and, in a similar way, the Daleks decide they have to "speak companion" to really get something to attract the Doctor's attention. (They are aliens after all.)

I know that "it was all just a dream!" is a notorious dramatic cop-out, but with the season closer almost upon us (at the Eleventh Hour, if you will), I'm kind of hoping most of this season has taken place inside of Amy's psychologically fractured head. I'm just that uncomfortable with the concept of an Alliance of every foe the Doctor has ever faced: it's a great metaphor, but falls apart on any closer inspection.

If we're inside Amy's imagination, then the nature of the "trap" makes much more sense.

Also, never mind the Doctpr being The Beast Below now: was he Prisoner Zero all along?