It seems like years since I sat down to pen my review of the Eleventh Hour – Matt Smith still unproven as a Doctor, next to nothing known about Amy Pond, and the cracks in time a mystery. Now… well, things are different. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting… but it wasn’t what just happened. As for my full and frank opinion on what just happened, well, just click the link, but really, really spoilers from the start. Really really really. I mean it. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, don’t read further. Just don’t. Seriously, don’t.


AAAAAaAAAAaaAAAaaaAAaaaaAaaaaa! That was

the

best Doctor Who series finale ever. No RTD finale had this planning, this finesse, this… this… Can I repeat, for the record, how great a writer I think Stephen Moffat is? Seriously, go back and watch one of the RTD episodes. The writing is good, fantastic, even, but at the expense of almost everything else. Moffat can make it all work together. Witty, inventive, brimming with energy and paced expertly – this is what Doctor Who can be. As you may know, I believe Doctor Who is the best television programme ever, and episodes like this are the reason why. Sorry, that’s the excitable shouting done. On with the review!

After the (rather lengthy) recap, it was nice to see the young Amelia again – saying her prayers to Santa as in The Eleventh Hour, but this time, no Doctor. From then, the psychologist (no biting), the Richard Dawkins gag, and the fact that there are no stars here. The Doctor (in a fez. Fezzes are cool, although also clearly just a way of helping the kids to follow what the Doctor’s doing when) drops the hint off (again, the later hopping back and forth bit is really good) telling Amy to go to the ‘National Museum’, where she ditches her aunt, who she clearly doesn’t give a shit about, and waits in a museum because someone left a Post-it note telling her to do so. Hey, kids are stupid, I’ll buy it. Then the Pandorica opens. It’s Amy! And she’s alive! Right, here was the bit I didn’t buy – not that the Pandorica kept its occupant alive, just that it had the added ‘if by some coincidence a younger version of this person happens to touch the Pandorica it can bring the occupant back from a state of near death’ mechanism. It’s the sort of thing I’d expect to see fitted as standard on the RTD model plot device – they often can’t function without it (or something like it) but I expected the Moff model not to have it. Hey ho.

I also liked the idea of Auton Rory hanging around the Pandorica for 2000 years to keep it safe. I mean, since it’s build to be the most secure prison in the universe, I’d damn well expect it to be safe, but I suppose it was a good way to show the audience the depth of Rory’s devotion to Amy (not unlike the Doctor’s test). The Doctor’s rescue of River (‘I hate repeats’ was clever as well, and the feel that the museum had – the ‘vibe’ it gave off – the imminent total event collapse – was really well done. I wasn’t entirely clear why Amelia vanished part-way into the first act, and I did think it rather a shame, and rather Dickensian, that once she’d served her purpose, she was quickly written out, but I suppose it would have made things a little cumbersome having her tagging along for the rest of the episode.

The early parts of the episodes’ temporal jumping around were very well-done, very interesting and very funny. This is what I mean about Moffat writing – the vortex manipulator was set up right at the beginning of the last episode. The bouncing back and forth was great because it meant we saw bits of the story out of sequence, and had to piece them together (well, it was all explained ultimately) in a way not dissimilar to Moffat’s finest hour, Blink. What this all leads to is the Doctor sacrificing himself by blasting off in the Pandorica after being blasted by a Dalek to the blasted (exploding) TARDIS masquerading as the sun (now that was clever. The only reason the Earth’s still around is that it’s the eye of the story with the TARDIS protecting it) and then… well, then it seems like everything begins to reset.

So, the Doctor’s passing back through time, revisiting various events. This is where his appearance in Flesh and Stone comes in – which is why the soldiers don’t notice him there – and then we have the Doctor his speech to the sleeping Amy (of which more below. All I can say is that for all people accuse Moffat of sentimentality, this wasn’t sentimental – it was emotional, affecting. Brilliant, and even more so in light of the later events. Just as interesting was the emergence of Amy’s parents – it did seem weird that she talked about her mother carving the faces into the apple in The Eleventh Hour, despite no real information being given about her parents’ absence – and it was explored further! That’s the thing about this episode, I think – if anything significant is unexplained, it’s deliberate.

This episode actually reminded me not just of Blink but also of this series’ Angels two-parter, in that there were monsters made of stone (and I for one preferred the stone Dalek to the new Daleks) – but more because the primary threat in the first episode (which didn’t really become apparent until late into the episode) turned out to be secondary to a threat that later became apparent – and technically, the secondary threat was the same both times.
The few problems (other than the multi-purpose Pandorica) I had were with causality. If the Doctor couldn’t be released from the Pandorica without the sonic screwdriver, then how did he get out and give Rory the screwdriver… I suppose it can be put down to timey-wimey or something,

The writing bears mentioning again. It was stupendous. I mean, really something. Moffat usually writes up a storm, but this was a hurricane. A million different ideas hurtling around at tremendous speed. My favourite bit of the whole episode was the whole ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’ concept – the Doctor’s poignant soliloquy for himself, and the TARDIS turned out to be a clue as well. Amy’s realisation and then the TARDIS’s appearance (although it was a little bizarre that the attendees at the wedding really didn’t care when the Doctor turned up, went off, then came back again. The TARDIS can be remarkably precise when the plot demands, can’t it?) along with the ready-prepared Doctor.

The best thing about this episode was how it had so clearly been planned. With all the previous buildups – Bad Wolf for example – we got a few abstruse clues here and there. The cracks here actually affected stuff, and even better, events within episodes became relevant – like the oft-mentioned bit in Flesh and Stone – everything fitted into place. Well, not everything, obviously. It turns out Mr Moffat’s playing a really, really long game here. I’d be willing to bet that the silence, the duck-pond – and whatever that voice was – is going to take another series – at least- to resolve. That’s why this episode worked so well – much has still been left for later, and while I began today thinking we were going to get resolution, I now can’t see things any other way to the way they turned out in the end. And whatever’s going on with River… Seriously, I’m grinning as I write this. I know that whatever the Moff is going to do has been planned out – possibly since the Silence in the Library episodes – and that it’s going to be amazing. Of that I have absolutely no doubt. The Big Bang is probably the best episode of the whole tremendous series, and I couldn’t be happier! Bring on Christmas Day!