The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang - Ranking: 102

          The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang

(Series 4, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory and River Song, 19-26/6/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Toby Haynes)

Rank: 102

  'Oh no, a bunch of aliens have just created a world based on my subconscious memories and now there are Auton replicas of load of musicians milling around looking confused while talking to some Ancient Auton Greeks about peace and love while Auton squirrels play happily in the Auton trees and wait, what’s this? An army of lots of aliens coming towards me? Good job my memories have created lots of Auton replicas of Dr Who monsters to fight them really isn’t it? Plus The Spice Girls are on our team. Wait don’t run away!’  

 

You have to be pretty darn sure of yourself to name your big series finale episode ‘The Big Bang’ what with the most deliciously sarcastic fanbase on the internet all watching on, but against the odds Steven Moffat’s first finale as showrunner somehow manages to be more epic and jam-packed than even Russell T Davies’. Where the Eccleston and Tennant Doctors faced off one foe or a maximum of two, here the 11th Doctor faces off a conglomerate of pretty much all of the ones he’s ever met (frustratingly not seen much on screen), bitter enemies who hate each other’s guts but hate the Doctor’s even more after he’s foiled so many of their dastardly deeds and so make a truce, not to kill him because that would be easy, but to trap him through his curiosity inside a big box, more afraid of The Doctor than they are of each other. It’s a brilliantly bold story a free-for-all that reminds me more than any other of the joys of playing with my Dr Who toys, merrily combining different worlds and time periods free from any worries about budget or licensing rights. But is it a brilliantly told bold story? Ah well that’s where things fall down sadly. ‘The Pandorica Opens’ is the most Moffaty of all Moffat stories, featuring all his strengths and weaknesses as showrunner. It’s imaginative and brilliant and full of lots of things you weren’t expecting, but it’s also a story that’s forever distracting itself, never making the most of the many wonderful things it has going for it, while promising you a story you never get that would have been better still. You could never accuse this story of being lazy or taking the easy route, but sometimes you wish it would slow down a little bit just to let us get our breathe back, to have the traditional ‘third episode pause’ where the plot stops moving and things calm down a bit. Brilliantly exciting absolutely, but in the end as exhausting as it is exhilarating. 

 
On one hand ‘Pandorica’ is undoubtedly one of the best stories Moffat ever told. It’s jam-packed full of twists and turns and is a true joy to watch while it’s on (which is, after all, the main criteria for any story). But on the other, once it’s over or you watch it again you realise that you’ve watched a brilliant story on the fringes of the one that you thought you were to get and no matter how brilliantly conceived and executed it’s not up to the story they keep telling us we’re getting. That mass army? It’s a Sontaron shouting next to some Daleks while some bored Cybermen mill around with name-checks for most of the others. That’s not an army: we thought we were getting a modern equivalent of the galactic Federation from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, all plotting and scheming together. That perfect and so very Dr Who setting at Stonehenge? It’s merely scenery. One of the things you watch these stories for is to see how cleverly The Doctor can get himself out of difficulty but this one cheats by not resolving anything and simply re-booting the universe, like re-writing a saved game when it gets too hard. After an often quite brilliant year of The Doctor thinking on his feet and Moffat coming up with all sorts of inventive endings to his stories (the Davies era liked it’s sudden endings too) it feels a bit like a cheat. There are times when ‘The Pandorica Opens’ is the most frustrating Dr Who story ever.

There are also times when it’s the cleverest Dr Who story ever, one that keeps you on your toes so often you wonder if you’ll ever be able to sit down again. Even if the element of this two-parter we expected to be the big bang turned out to be more of a whimper there’s still an impressive and constant display of fireworks here, with the story still a glorious, meticulously crafted story that’s so clever in so many different ways. One of the things I like most is the way it ties up so many loose ends from across the year, with this story a sequel of sorts to practically every story we’ve had this year, treating the characters like a big jigsaw puzzle so they’re all involved in the plot. The jury is out on the all-time greatest writer on Who but Moffat is easily the most meticulous planner to work on the series, laying a trail of breadcrumbs so subtly we can’t see them, giving a return to some of the characters we met during the course of the year and making series five feel more intertwined than the usual run of stories that sit alongside each other. It’s no small thing to work out either, having a script so laid out in advance that they even recorded special scenes on the sets of other stories sometimes months in advance: they had to create a suitable Van Gogh style painting of The Tardis breaking up ready for Churchill to handle it during filming for ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ in August 2009, then Liz 10 keeping it safe in ‘The Beast Below’ filmed in September  then film Van Gogh drawing it as part of ‘Vincent and The Doctor’ in December (Moffat said afterwards he was proud of getting in nods to every episode before noticing he’d missed ‘Amy’s Choice’ and jokingly promised to do better; I can’t see one for ‘Vampires In Venice’ either, unless it’s all the kissing going on in this story). Filming for the episode itself then took place in parts due to scheduling conflicts and actor availability: the museum sections from episode two were filmed first in January 2010, then Stonehenge during one tense brief shoot in February (where it rained, constantly), then against a studio replica later in the month (nicknamed ‘Foamhenge’!) then the bits with young Amy’s back garden in March. It’s been the practice of the show since the mid Pertwee era to shoot it out of sequence, by set order, but few stories have ever been made in quite as timey-wimey fashion as this one. I truly don’t know any other writer who could have pulled that off, to be that sure in the script that there would be no major changes to it that it could be set in stone that early on (funnily enough there’s another way of reading this story that it’s all about change and not being set in stone. The monsters think if they can stick The Doctor in a box then the universe can carry on without problems but the universe is ever changing and you can’t just tidy the things you don’t like about the universe away and hide away from them. It’s a theme that’s going to become much bigger in series six, with Hitler and peg dolls (!) tidied away into cupboards; see ‘Night Terrors’. You could also see this story as the ‘critics’ of Dr Who trying to pigeonhole a show that simply keeps moving –  that shouty Sontaron we see does look an awful lot like Michael Grade, the man who cancelled Who in 1989).

Talking of playing with time, that’s always been one of Moffat’s strengths too and none more so than here. Dr Who is, as I’m sure you’re aware by now, not like other series. Half the fun is never knowing what planet or timezone you’re going to be in from episode to episode. Moffat takes that s stage further though: you never know which planet or timezone you’re going to be in from scene to scene. This isn’t a story tied to one location but has all of time and space as its canvas, with threads that stretch back to the beginning of time and on to the far future, a story slowly unravelling in the backgrounds of so many other series five stories and which follows Amy from her childhood to her symbolic walk into adulthood on her wedding day. If Davies prided himself on playing ‘The Long Game’ in series one and ‘invented’ the idea of season arcs with Bad Wolf (give or take keys to time and timelords on trial) then Moffat is playing The Longest Game. The scope of this story is really quite amazing and it’s not all for show, it really does make sense: of course the big bang was caused by the Tardis doing a universe re-set! Of course Stonehenge is the burial ground of the oldest prison in the universe! (Not so sure I buy the idea of it being a radio transmitter though; surely the pyramids would be a better design for that?) Of course River warned The Doctor via the oldest known surviving message in the universe! (A pinch from Douglas Adams’ ‘So Long and Thanks For All The Fish’ heralded as the great message for the entire universe where it’s actually a message from God apologising ‘for the inconvenience’ of being born). Of course Van Gogh did it too with a painting that’s been kept safe for thousands of years till it’s needed! Of course young Amy saves her adult self by imprinting her genetic code at the local museum after she was trapped there for 200 years! Of course Rory’s an Auton replica Roman that murders her…Wait what?! 

That’s maybe the biggest surprise in a story full of them: Yes, Rory comes back after two stories of being properly definitively dead with Amy forgetting all about him - long enough for us all to assume we really would never see him in the series again - only this time he’s a 2000 year old Auton replica of a Roman centurion. Which might be a ridiculous twist in any other companion’s life but somehow fits with the rest of what we see of Rory, one of the more dependable and unlucky companions. By now we’d got used to the fact that Rory not only died but was wiped from existence forever at the end of ‘Cold Blood’. That’s two stories now where he hasn’t been so much as mentioned, only The Doctor remembering he existed at all and now he’s back because Amy’s subconscious won’t let her forget (handyf for him that a bunch of aliens decided to construct an entire alternate reality from her memories as a trap). I’m not sure I entirely bought this subplot: Amy mentions to The Doctor that The Romans were her favourite period in history (‘The Invasion Of The Hot Italians’) but does that really fit in with what we now of Amy? If this was Barbara’s subconscious then the fact that a companion had been reading about history for fun would make perfect sense (only, of course, The Roman would look like Ian); there are quite a few companions I can see reading up on ‘Pandora’s Box’ for fun too, but again Amy isn’t one of them. Her memory box would be filled with adventures and space and there ought to be an Auton replica Raggedy Imaginary Friend walking round. Just try to compare the impression you get about Amy from the scene where River visits her house and finds all the things she was thinking of next to the crack in her wall and compare it back to the rebel Mels is leading astray in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’; they’re not the same person at all. It’s not just that twist though but the fact that ‘Pandorica’ promised to be a story about war and ended up a story about love. Amy and Rory are the biggest romance we’ve seen in the series beyond the 9^th/10^th Doctor and Rose. They’re the modern day equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, with an apparently similarly doomed ending; but rather than Juliet pretending to be dead so she can run away with her lover, only to wake and find him dead from suicide because he couldn’t live without her we have Rory disappearing through a crack in time, brought back by Amy’s memories, whose briefly reunited but then shoots her because of his Auton programming (‘the perfect cover story – they believe their disguise until activated’). I love the scene of Rory asking poignantly to The Doctor ‘did she miss me?’ while Amy hasn’t got a clue who he is, which gets me every time. There’s a much happier ending though (Shakespeare didn’t know how to write as well as Moffat), as Rory spends 2000 years protecting the box and keeping it safe so that Amy can be restored: though made of plastic he’s still able to be killed.

Stories of the legionary are legion, adding further to the fairytale idea behind their romance (odd really, that a writer as clever and as prepared as Moffat didn’t drop those elements in across his other scripts, with a distant Roman looking on like ‘The watcher’ from ‘Logopolis’. Was this a rare part of the script Moffat hadn’t written till the end?) The fact that the will they?-won’t they? Character arc ends with their wedding (filmed with lots of extras in Miskin Manor), a rare moment of absolute un-tinged celebration in modern Who, is the perfect ending for the series, as we get to celebrate with them (though, again, it’s odd in retrospect because of the people from later stories who really ought to be here but haven’t been written yet: chiefly Mels and Rory’s dad Brian. Just because they haven’t cast them yet that’s no excuse! I guess River would have been too tricky to explain, but they could have smuggled her in as a distant friend cousin or something). The way this then ties into the main subplot, by having Amy remember the Tardis (triggered by the famous wedding tradition of ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue) is the icing on the wedding cake of a story, maybe the cleverest idea in this whole book, so obvious you instantly get it even though you didn’t see it coming at all. Moffat’s writing at its finest: how no other DW writer thought of that joke in 46 years I don’t know but its a very fitting resolution that ties together all sorts of different strands from across the year that felt as if they had no chance of ever going together: the crack in the wall, the wedding, Rory’s deaths and the amount of people with wiped memories we’ve seen this year. Oh and there’s also a setting up of the series to come, what with a reunited Amy and Rory spending their wedding night enjoying a ‘big bang’ of their own (a joke Moffat slipped past the censors because nobody but him knew what was happening!)

Of course it’s still not the full on ‘Doctor trapped in a prison versus every monster he’s ever fought’ finale we were anticipating and the monsters act so uncharacteristically you begin to wonder if they’re plastic replicas too. We get a great long list of the monsters present and it’s the single biggest list ever assembled in one story, made up of all the costumes that still existed in usable condition in the props room (which explains why there are some weird ones there, no purely CGI monsters like Krillitanes or Macra and a few monsters who haven’t been written/revived yet you’d think would be a shoo-in for this confrontation like Ice Warriors and The Silence. You would have thought all The Masters would have turned up to this one to gloat too). Even with the obvious gaps though its one hell of a collection, mentioned in order of alphabet so the ones at the end don’t come round and exterminate me for putting them last: Atraxi, Autons, Blowfish (from ‘Torchwood’), Chelonians (from the ‘New Adventures’ book ‘The Highest Science’), Cybermen, Daleks, Draconians, Drahvins (!), Haemagoths (from the 11^th Doctor novel ‘The Forgotten Army’), Hoix (the thing with all the saliva seen briefly in ‘Love and Monsters’ and cobbled together form other costumes anyway), Judoon, Roboforms, Silurians, Slitheen, Sontarons, Sycorax, Terileptils, Uvodni (from ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’), Weevils (the things Torchwood keep in the basement that start out in the pilot as the single scariest creature around but turn into the butt of all their jokes), Zygons. In any other series that would be the money shot right there, used in every trailer, featured over and over again during the course of the episode, letting us linger on each and every one, staring into their eyes filled with such hate for The Doctor and so scared at rumours that the Doctor and his Tardis break the universe. Instead you barely see any of them; it’s only guidebooks that even give me the full list of whose there. It ought to be the single scariest thing The Doctor ever faces and the bitter cruel irony of all his lives: all this time he’s been teaching the universe the importance of co-operation and friendship and – K9 and sonic screwdriver aside – that’s how he fixed the vast majority of stories by inspiring others to help those in need. The fact that his enemies now fear him enough to put their differences aside and come after him together ought to make them terrifyingly unstoppable, even if by chance they did put their differences aside (I can’t see it happening; only The Draconians would hang back from a fight and let the rest take over and I don’t know what they’re doing in that list anyway given that they quite like The Doctor and saw him as the hero at the end of ‘Frontier In Space’). I do love the way that Moffat sort of repeats Davies and ‘Doomsday’ by having not just Dalek and Cyber wars but lots more monsters working together though – doing something similar yet different! There’s a great scene where the 11^th Doctor, usually so calm and in control, pleads to be released that’s some of Matt Smith’s best acting. And then? Nothing. The threat goes away, to be replaced by more twists and turns. Brilliant writing? Maybe. But it also feels like a cheat because Moffat can’t work out for the life of him how The Doctor would defeat a threat this big. The scales have become too big, in Moffat’s desperate desire to top every Davies season finale. The Tardis causing the universe to implode was honestly threat enough. It’s a most brilliant cliffhanger. But it’s a terrible conclusion to a cliffhanger that ignores the threat that had us tuning in again the following week.

It’s a waste, too, of the single greatest real setting we’ve ever had on the series: Stonehenge! In a story that goes out the week of Summer solstice when it was in the news anyway! It’s extraordinary to think that Dr Who ever got permission to film here (albeit under strict instructions like not touching the stones and the usual lighting rig had to be replaced by spotlights from underneath, which is why these scenes loom a bit odd when edited in with the others). To our American readers that would be the equivalent to Star Trek filming in The Statue of Liberty for real or outing up a fake fifth head on Mount Rushmore for a day’s filming. How come? Well, the tourist board probably had their eye on the extra publicity boost being in Dr Who would give the plus it was February when the weather is so bad hardly anybody turns up. Even so though, its actual real Stonehenge, perhaps England’s mystery, with stones thought to be 10,000 years old and still nobody knows why they were built. A calendar? A clock? A holy druid meeting place? Or my personal favourite theory, a Mesolithic era rock concert? (The Spice Girls are old enough to have headlined that gig too). It’s perfect for a Dr Who story. And yet it feels pencilled in, as if Moffat never truly believed he’d be able to film there (even though so much of this story was filmed after that shoot). Surely ‘Stonehenge’ is crying out to be one of the most obvious Dr Who plots of all (who built it?). It has to be something: I mean, it’s there, its older than recorded time with plenty of holes to stick a bit of Dr Who plotting inside, it shouldn’t exist and yet it does and everyone watching at home has heard of it – I refuse to think that this is the only time Dr Who are going to use it, but of curse anyone who uses it from now on has to mention ‘The Pandorica’ for continuity now. It’s so frustrating they went to all the trouble of getting permission to shoot there (something very few series get to do) and then didn’t even set the story around it (the Pandorica could have been anywhere You can’t just put something that wonderful into a story and then ignore it. For years I’ve been waiting to have a story set there (never realising they would actually get the rights to film in the real thing) wondering what brilliant stories they would come up with. In the end it’s just treated like a storage vault for a big box, just another prison to lock The Doctor up in and we’ve had no end of those. Even the Pandorica box itself  looks cheap and tacky: it’s an impressively huge prop but it doesn’t look as if its survived thousands of years. Besides who actually made this? Which of the monsters we see commissioned it? Maybe it’s leftover from the Orcene standing stones attack in ‘Stones of Blood’, maybe its remnants of a Silurian city from the days when humanity lurked as animals before they hid underground, perhaps its a link to Atlantis – take your pick from the versions seen in ‘The Underwater Menace’ ‘The Time Monster’ and ‘Timelash’- or maybe it’s a reminder of humanity’s earliest created by the Racnoss/Fendahl/everybody else. This would have been the perfect opportunity for proof of the aliens putting aside their differences to work together: it should have different sides in different colours, one metallic and Cybermany, one side grey with bumps for The Daleks, one reflecting Sontaron battle armour, one Sycoraxy and red, one green and Slitheeny, etc etc. Oh and the idea of Stonehenge being a transmitter? Utterly daft. It’s a box. There’s no technology; even if its wifi who hangs around waiting for The Doctor to set it off?

Which is a shame because the idea of The Doctor, our do-gooder, being imprisoned for the universe’s safety is a brilliant one. Basically ‘Pandorica’s Box’ is how ‘Shada’ might have turned out, had Douglas Adams had this sort of a budget in 1979 and had a technician’s strike not killed that story off, so it’s nice to see the idea back in Who again. The tease that they’re going to kill the Tardis off makes a change from killing poor Rory again too. In addition, the idea that universe has been destroyed by the crack in the wall that’s been following the 11th Doctor since he first landed in Amy’s garden that turns out to be caused by the Tardis is very clever: it suddenly explains everything, like why the Tardis landed in Amy’s garden in the first place. It’s one final twist in this crazy paving episode that finally pushes this story on the side of good rather than bad, tying up loose ends we didn’t even know were loose and giving us a playout to cheer and tide us over till Christmas. The first episode cliffhanger, with the lights going out all across the sky ‘Logopolis’ style, is brilliant: we’ve had stakes in Dr Who before but never so big they destroyed that many worlds. The fact that for once The earth is about the only planet not in immediate danger is a great twist on the usual too! There’s a lot of room for the emotion Moffat writes so well too: The Doctor saves everyone by, err, flying into it – not sure why that works but it does – but in doing so he knows that he’s going to not only die but be wiped from existence. Only that means poor Amy is doomed to forget the Doctor, her memory of all her glorious adventures wiped. We’ve already seen how awful that is, first with Donna and then with Amy not remembering Rory, so we know the stakes are high. The Doctor’s tearful speech to an unconscious Amy as he goes to his death is some of Moffat’s finest writing for the series: all the threads of the story are in place, all the plot elements are sorted, now The Doctor has to face the consequences of his final decision and you really feel it; other times Moffat does it you know they’re going to re-write the rules any second but this one feels final. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was written, much like ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’, so that if any of the regulars wanted to leave the series at this point they could go on a high here. Maybe The Doctor would regenerate resetting the universe? Maybe Amy would forget him and he’d have to move on? Maybe Rory would be dead (again?!)  Then, just as you’ve got used to the fact the story is going to do something nasty instead we get that triumphant wedding at last, after a series of Amy hedging her bets and trying to make a ‘choice’ between her twin lives, finally committing herself to the man who sent 2000 years keeping her safe. It’s every bit as warm and wonderful as it should be: its a rare respite from saving the universe, a celebration of nearest and dearest and we feel like we’re invited as we see and watch the Doctor’s giraffe dance (the script just said ‘get Matt Smith to improvise something eccentric’ and he sure does, comedy gold that’s completely in character), the perfect happy silly end to one of the tensest hour and a halfs in the series.

I love a good museum too and this setting is effect for the time-travelling fun Moffat wants to have. The filming took place in Swansea’s Angwyn Museum and like many a museum ought to be neat and orderly but has been hit by Moffat disease: keep your eyes peeled out for the exhibits, all of which give subtle signs that time has somehow become ‘wrong’: there are penguins in the Nile, Polar Bears in the Australian exhibit, dinosaurs in ice, Pharaohs in the Himalayas. It’s a clever and subtle way of getting over just how big and world-altering this thereat is, while also being totally in keeping with museums (which are very Who in the way that all time and space fits inside one building!) The exhibit of calcified Daleks, turned to stone after all those years waiting, look amazing too, like they really have been decaying for centuries. I would have been quite happy to have had the entire story set here, or for another to do the same. We really needed to be here longer. Same for some of the other bits that Moffat does so well yet moves on from too quick: The Cybermen are the scariest they are in the entire comeback series, with their best story since ‘The Invasion’ in 1968! Just look at how Moffat re-introduces them (‘It’s like being an organ donor, only you’re sort of alive – and screaming!’) If you’d somehow missed their last appearance, in ‘The Next Doctor’ in 2009 (not that long ago but you never know) then this is all the introduction you need and they’re incredibly creepy (The Daleks and Sontaron, by contrast seem pushovers). Now that Moffat is back writing occasional stories for the series again I long for him to do a proper Cybermen one: he clearly ‘gets’ them in a way few writers do, more than he gets the Daleks actually given his Dalek record isn’t the best.  Ditto the Roman setting which seems a bit random to be honest. I’m shocked that Moffat didn’t do the single most obvious gag in the episode by starting The Doctor’s big epic speech as they put him in the Pandorica and they don’t listen to him with ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, aliens, lend me your listening devices!!!’

Despite the stop-starty nature of the plot there are excellent characterisations of our regulars across the board, particularly the Doctor who is never more Doctory than here, alternating between being the wise game player a million moves ahead of even himself and a big child who just wants to play. The infamous fez Matt Smith gets to wear is perfect for his Doctor; it’s childish yet full of wisdom centuries old, an 18^th century war-hat designed for the Turkish feared armies of the Ottoman empire to wear and a kid’s toy simultaneously. It’s almost a shame when River Song shoots it off his head (at the insistence of the executive producers who feared costume-loving Matt would never ever take it off). It’s also an ever so clever means of letting us follow a tricky plot involving time travel inside the museum, as The Doctor sets a plan into motion that needs his friends to be occupied (we can follow which Doctor is which by his headgear and the mop). I can’t say it always works: I got completely lost when the Doctor from this story arrives in the middle of ‘Time Of The Angels’ to talk to Amy when her eyes are tight shut, planting ideas in her head for this story; even watching that scene with this story it never quite fits (‘You know, if you ever have a wedding think of me and my Tardis’ would be easier; even when The Doctor needs people to follow his rules to the letter he makes them cryptic!) The tease that he’s died is also one too many, given the amount of people dropping like flies all over the place this story (it’s also surely a tease for the audience at home: Amy and Rory know to trust him by now, however little sense he makes). In the end its all a plot maguffin because both the Doctor and Rory need the sonic screwdriver at different times and there’s no other way for them to both have it; just think how easier it would have been if, say, he’d given Rory a sonic as a to-be wedding present in case he doesn’t make it). Amy, too, gets more depth than she’s had for a while as she goes through every emotion going and the contrast with her younger trusting self with her cynical adult self shows better than any other scene how far she’s come after knowing The Doctor. Rory, meanwhile, goes from being comic relief to a real boy in this episode, his reliance and dependability turned from a punchline into the trait that saves the day several times over. While some of the past episodes makes you ponder why the Ponds ever ended up a couple at all they’re a real team here and you feel they can’t live without each other, all the doubts Amy at least had now gone (which is why its such a shame when they’re split up again two series later; their bond feels unbreakable here).

There’s a lot going on in this story as you can tell – often a bit too much, to be honest (while at other times not enough: my main response first time round was confusion that we still didn’t know who River was or what ‘Silence Must Fall’ meant). There are times, many many times, when it feels as if you’ve accidentally sat down on your remote control and pressed a wrong button (a daily occurrence in my house anyway): some of it whizzes by too fast for you to watch it, other parts seem woefully slow by comparison. At other times it feels as if we’re watching nothing less than Steven Moffat have a full-on nervous breakdown as we jump from one thing to another, often with no rhyme or reason and the moment when an older Amy tells her younger self’ ‘OK kid, this is where things get complicated’ makes you want to throw things at the screen (haven’t we viewers already been through enough?) This is the place where a lot of longterm fans jumped ship for the pure and basic fact they couldn’t follow any of it, a view with which I have a lot of sympathy. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with any of the subplots so much as they don’t get enough time to breathe: there are so many good ideas here that deserved to be full episodes in their own right but which are just passing ideas here. How did Roman-Rory feel guarding his wife for centuries and keeping the Pandorica safe for centuries through multiple invasions, fires, flood and famine? We never find out. What impact does changing the timelines have? Not a clue (it’s just a get out clause why so many humans forget about past alien invasions they ought to remember; honestly though it’s a bit rude the way it re-writes history and some of our favourite stories like ‘The Christmas Invasion’ on a whim; it’s a good job Davies and Moffat are such good friends or I’d find that a rather too literal case of feeling ‘replaced’ on a show that wouldn’t exist without me). What happens to ‘young’ Amy once the plot no longer needs her? Come to that what happens to ‘adult’ River Song when the plot doesn’t need her?! Most of all, though, what happens to the waiting monsters – having them never get together because the universe changed timelines without even seeing them again might be a clever way of saving money but it feels like a big fat hairy cheat– you’d think they’d have more than a few back-up plans up their sleeve for him to get out too, even if they probably didn’t have Rory turning into an Auton and shooting Amy on their ‘the Doctor escapes again’ bingo card.  Though many a new-Who two-parter could have been done in one, this story needs at least three to make the most of every detail we get here. Some series of DW don’t cover this much ground in a season of 26! All Mofat stories feel like cryptic crosswords, with facts that only make sense after other facts have been learned and which are clever indeed when you look back at them but this one especially is in danger of being Rubik’s cube: once you’ve seen how all the colours are going to line up together you don’t really need to watch anymore. The toy’s broken. It’s as if, after waiting for this job all these years, Moffat doesn’t know which of his idle ideas growing up he wanted to use so he used them all – which is a pain not just for this finale but all the ones that follow as he tries to top it every year for another five. Well, that’s what being showrunner does to you I suppose, it opens a pandora’s box in your head of all the toys you can play with including any you care to invent) and leaves you desperate to play with them all.

Despite all that though I still really enjoyed this episode. There’s a freedom, a feeling this series can do anything air about it unmatched by any other story (bar perhaps ‘The Mind Robber’ or ‘Warrior’s Gate’) that’s electrifying. So much of Dr Who follows strict rules despite it being such a naturally rebellious series that its’ great to have at least one modern story that positively breaks down any attempt to categorise it and while other season finales find him old, tried, jaded and grownup, struggling to match the complexity and level of jeopardy of this one, this is his inner seven year old chortling with glee and stuffing everything into the plot in one go and that enthusiasm is infectious. Historical? Futuristic? Fairytale? Science? Comedy? Emotional drama? High stakes action? ‘Pandorica’ is everything, often in scenes that overlap with each other. Moffat fills the script with so many gags and quotable one-liners (my favourite: River remembering dating an Auton duplicate who had swappable heads) that even without the time elements you’d never be bored: a lot of Dr Who is good for sleeping through (‘Terminus’ ‘Monster Of Peladon’ most 13th Doctor stories) but you can’t take your eyes off this one for a minute. For all the scale though it’s the attention to detail that makes this one work: an older Amy checking her age to see whether her younger self has pierced ears yet; the wedding cake with the bride full of red hair; the fan-pleasing gag about Richard Dawkins (married to Lalla ‘Romana’ Ward in real life); the museum and its jokes. It all makes this story feel rooted in the ‘real’ despite the continued fairytale feel. There are moments too when the plotlines have fallen into synch and things are being explained and the characters have the room to go back to being the people we know and love again that I wouldn’t change for the world, no matter how many chances I had to fly a Tardis into a crack in time and do just that. As breathless rushes go this is one worth getting breathless for, no matter how much you wish they’d have slowed down a bit. Considering that this is one of only two series finales in the modern series where no main characters leave (the other is series eight) it still feels suitably epic and like a proper finale with all the stakes higher than ever. ‘The Pandorica Opens’ is a huge colossal achievement and one that Moffat was rightly applauded for, a series finale that tops even the big stories in series five. I just wish that we’d have had the bits we were teased with as well as the bits we weren’t expecting so it could have been, at least potentially, amongst the greatest stories ever rather than a merely very good one. 

POSITIVES + Caitlin Blackwood makes a welcome return after stealing the show in ‘The Eleventh Doctor’ as the 7 year old Amy (she looks recognisably like the older Amy; it helps that she’s Karen Gillan’s cousin in real life). I said in my reviewe for that story that I wish the Doctor could have taken her rather than grown-up Amy with him, even if I know why they didn’t (child laws regarding how many hours you work, children age rapidly which is a pain when you shoot scenes across a year, the amount of adults that don’t like children, or children for that matter). This is the next best thing though: The Doctor goes back to Amy and tells her of all the wonderful things that are going to happen when he comes back and ‘meets’ her properly and even if I don’t quite know how that works with kissagram Amy not recognising him in ‘Hour’ it’s the perfect ending: Amy doesn’t have to wait as a lonely child warped by psychologists and hardened by cynicism anymore; she gets to stay that clever imaginative curious brave funny little girl we first met a bit longer. The fact that older Amy can then turn round and say that The Doctor is real with complete confidence that he will arrive, because he never lets her down, shows how many wrongs The Doctor puts right by doing this. Amy might not know why she’s crying but I know why I am. Despite her inexperience Cailtlin’s so natural she makes the adults raise their game to match her. The pause for breath at the start of part two, when she’s lured to the local museum and opens the Pandorica box with her DNA, finding her older self inside, is one of the great ‘pre-credits sequences of new-Who mostly because of her performance.

NEGATIVES – River seems a bit off this episode. Especially given that we know what her background is and what she means to Amy and Rory. It’s almost as if she’s been added to this story as an afterthought, without the usual clever way her timeline intersects with The Doctor. One she delivers her ‘hello sweetie’ message she’s just a spare part even when she shouldn’t be. Even given that time has to happen this set way it seems odd that she isn’t there to be understanding when Rory realises he’s an Auton or to help him jog Amy’s memory, or giving The Doctor more specific warnings about the Pandorica and what it is, or above all trying to make her mum and dad remember The Doctor with clues (there’s no reason at all why she can’t be at their wedding offering hints). Usually River adds an extra element of cleverness to the plots but Moffat realises that she’s too much of a get out of jail free card to solve this story. So why have her there at all? It also seems very out of character, in a story about her mum and dad getting  married, that River doesn’t drop more hints to The Doctor about their own. Or tease him mercilessly for his dancing (sudden thought: does not being able to be in the same time and place mean she can’t be there even when Amy is pregnant with her? It would explain her strange behaviour if she’s not 100% sure when on their wedding day she was conceived. That’s something they didn’t think about when they wrote the blinovitch limitation effect into ‘Mawdryn Undead’!)

  

BEST QUOTE: ‘The universe is big. It's vast and complicated and... ridiculous and sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles, and... that's a theory. Nine hundred years, never seen one yet, but this would do me’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Annoyingly no one has yet done the single most obvious spin-off book/comic/audio adventure ever and told us how these monsters first got together to make the Pandorica. You think there would be multiple accounts from different points of view by now, all contradictory. Oh well, I can at least offer you the ‘real’ homes of two of the monsters in the union. ‘The Highest Science’ (1993) by Gareth Roberts is the 11th New Adventures book and sees the 7th Doctor and Benny squaring up to  The Chelonians, small stocky deadly mutant ninja turtles with beaks. They’re deadlier than they sound: as primal and animalistic as any carnivore race seen in the series. The Doctor meets them while searching for a ‘Fortean Flicker’, a device that bends time and causes weird things to happen to certain people in the universe that pulls them to another planet (including the mythical ‘Eight Twelves’, named after the time of the London bus they caught the day they were transported). One of them is historian Gustav Urnst, whose tracked down an ancient library on the planet Sakkrat which mention the concept of ‘the highest science’. At the same time the Chelonians are sent to the planet by the fortean flicker, laying their eggs inside the human colonists they meet and generally being very nasty indeed. A very Dr Who tale of the highest philosophy living side by side with primal monsters who see everything as food it recalls ‘The Ark In Space’ especially and is a good read, even if its darker and more serious than usual for a Gareth Roberts novel.  

‘The Forgotten Army’ (2010) is an 11th Doctor and Amy novel by Brian Minchin, a rare case of the tie-in novels actually fitting into the TV series (this book was part of the first trio of 11th Doctor stories published in April 2010, two months earlier than ‘Pandorica’, to coincide with the broadcast of ‘The Eleventh Hour’). A race called the Vykoids have created a new ice age in 21st century America and soon everything’s gone haywire: there are woolly mammoths trampling Broadway and glaciers on the hills. It turns out that the Vykoids want to take the planet over as a tourist trap and transport all the Humans away to their home planet to work in the mines, but needed to  make some changes first! A silly story that nevertheless makes some good points about ironically enough, global warming and mankind’s vulnerability to sudden temperature changes its one of the better 11th Doctor novels which tend to be more inconsistent than the 9th or 10th ones on the whole). The Haemogoths only get a cameo in the story, a family of tourists who travel to the iced-over New York to eat the universe-famous burgers! Goodness knows what they were doing seeking revenge against The Doctor at Stonehenge: maybe they thought it was another fast food restaurant? There’s no description of them in the book or indeed much in the TV series; a competition to design them was held in ‘Dr Who Adventures’ issue #192 where the winner drew them as a sort of bird-lizard-human hybrid.

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