Never ignore a coincidence. Unless you’re busy, in which case, always ignore a coincidence

There’s been something missing from this series of Doctor Who. A couple of things, actually. Beyond the odd glimpse here and there, special effects have been remarkably underused. Leaving aside the money shots in Victory, other than a few monsters, ships and a space whale, we haven’t had nearly as many special effects as usual. Loads of special-effect-light episodes – Amy’s Choice, Vincent and the Doctor, The Lodger… hell, even the Silurian two-parter didn’t really have that many. The other thing that’s been missing is good monsters. We’ve had the Angels, and… yeah, that’s pretty much it. Prisoner Zero, Power-ranger Daleks, fish-monsters, the stupid Silurians and the giant invisible turkey (and a hologram). So, this episode seems to remedy most of these deficiencies by having special effects every other cutaway and monsters up the wazoo. It looks like they decided to go all-out for the finale. Was it worth it? Click the link to find out!


It was SO worth it. You know what? I knew that it would be the Doctor in the box (though I thought he’d be in it already). It was very, very obvious. But that didn’t bother me. It was, if not as good as Vincent and the Doctor, certainly approaching that level. Matt Smith is now my favourite Doctor. He gives an entrancing performance, delivers lines perfectly, practically dances around the sets. He owns the role. Everything about his performance is utterly compelling, he’s far and away the most interesting thing on-screen. Other than that, there aren’t really that many stand-out performances – Alex Kingston’s River Song has thankfully divested herself of that irritating ‘spoilers!’ campy nonsense, but it doesn’t really matter since she spends half the episode sequestered in the TARDIS or wandering around Amy’s house in the future. Karen Gillan’s performance is competent – she does the feisty stuff just fine, although I found some of her ‘oh, I remember now!’ stuff at the end with Rory a bit overdone.

The thing about this episode is that it’s almost entirely buildup. From the layered pre-credits sequence where we see Van Gogh’s painting passing through the hands of those the Doctor has befriended or encountered this series, leading right up to an ancient diamond cliff face with (in a nice bit of circularity) the words ‘Hello Sweetie’ etched in it. I liked it, despite its implausibility (and the fact that they’re still using telephones in the year five thousand and whatever) because it give a nice sense of ‘joined-up-ness’ to the series – it seems like everyone they’re encountered (more or less) pitch in in one way or another to carry this message to the Doctor.

What’s the message? “Go here” with the time and date painted of the outside panel of an exploding TARDIS. Now, if I was the Doctor, whether I thought this was metaphorical or not (and considering I found a chunk of TARDIS inside a crack in space and time the other day, I’m betting on literal), I would head in the opposite direction. If you’re being told “Go here and your TARDIS will explode”, that’s a pretty good incentive… not to go there. Right? Well, I’m not the Doctor, clearly, so he heads straight to Stonehenge to get this shit straight. After talking to some Romans (who think he’s Caesar), he meets River masquerading as Cleopatra. After she has a quick costume change, they set off to the tourist centre. Oh wait, that’s not there yet. I’ve got the feeling that being something so obvious, Stonehenge can’t have escaped the notice of past Who writers, but I doubt that was really what was on the Moff’s mind when he wrote this. I would have imagined it was more like “…and this bit’ll be just like Indiana Jones!”

Seriously, I know the comparison has been made by many (many) others, but it was basically Indiana Jones and the Series Finale. Or Indiana Jones and the Cyberman’s Arm. Or something. So yeah. That was good – the Pandorica chamber had a good atmosphere to it. The Pandorica itself was also interesting – I really liked the Stargate-esque unlocking mechanism. Even though it opened from the corner, and so functionally was pretty superfluous. Still. It looked really cool. Speaking of ‘looked really cool’, that Cyberman head with the tentacle-wires was pretty good! Despite the fact that Cybermen only have brains inside, not heads, the snap-snap-snap sequence when it was trying to get Amy was equal parts funny and creepy. The idea of the pieces of a Cyberman putting themselves back together is good kid-scarer.

So, by way of River impressing an angry commander and Rory turning up at the right moment, the Doctor now has a small contingent of Roman soldiers on his hands. What does he do with them? He has them stand around doing nothing. There’s a rather well-played sequence in which the Doctor can’t see the blindingly obvious, and we have some more from Rory, and then the aliens turn up. Lots and lots of aliens. This is probably where most of the Mill’s money went – the shots of lots and lots and lots of spaceships overhead. Many of which have headlights. In any case, the Doctor delivers a speech full of what I (if I were a more pretentious writer) would call swaggering braggadocio, but hey, he’s worked hard to develop a reputation over the years, and I suppose it’s fair enough if he wants to cash in on it now and then. I’m surprised how effectively that tactic worked, honestly. The thing is, it works anyway! Moffat’s sparking script is the episode’s greatest asset – not just witty, but intelligent – well-planned – and doubtless the ultimate resolution has already been set up. And it won’t involve Amy gaining God-like powers from nowhere.

(At this point, the BBC website ran out of wallpapers. Which is odd – for most of the episodes I’ve got to pick the ones I like, but there were relatively fewer here. Sorry, no more pretty pictures.)

There are three main strands at this point in the episode – Rory and Amy, of which I am uncertain regarding the potential resolution – because we know that Amy’s going to be back in the next episode (and sorry to be so meta, but she’s signed on for the next series, so even though Auton Rory shot her (oh yeah, the Romans are all Autons, apparently. The Nestene Consciousness arrived a little too early to the party, it would seem)) we know she’s not really dead. River took a flight in the TARDIS, and ended up first at Amy’s house, where she finds that the Romans are all taken from a book, and that the Pandorica looks like the image of Pandora’s Box on the front of Amy’s copy (I feel obliged to point out that Pandora’s Box was actually a jar, but there you go). So it seems the entire scenario’s been constructed from Amy’s memories (or something along those lines). I’m interested to see where the idea that someone’s been messing with Amy’s life in that manner goes. Then (back to River) the TARDIS lands and when she opens the door – stone. Then a weird voice says ‘Silence will fall’ – I presume this is the actual big bad, as the Rainbow Coalition seem to know nothing about it – and stuff explode. Though River’s got to live so she can die in Forest of the Dead, so she’ll be all right (and besides, she’s still got that time-travel device she bought at the beginning of the episode, hasn’t she?)

Then we get to the Doctor. There’s a bit in Genesis of the Daleks where Tom Baker has to decide whether to connect two wires to destroy the Daleks’ production facility. He has qualms because he knows that the Daleks are a great unifying force – many formerly warring races joined to fight the greater evil that the Daleks posed. Here we see the flip side of that, kind of the Doctor Who villains version of the Sinister Six, where even the Daleks have agreed that they have to put aside their differences to face a common foe. As the Doctor is dragged kicking and screaming into the Pandorica, his foes reveal to him their reasoning error, but alas too late, and the Pandorica closes. I guess the silence will fall when it opens again. Or something like that. Never mind, because it looks like we might actually have a good series finale for once! A really strong first part – probably third only to Vincent and Eleventh from this series. Next week is going to be even more amazing (I hope)! Goodnight!