The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang

 

Chapter The 198th, which proves that any long-running series must eventually have a wedding episode.

Plot:

The Doctor and Amy follow a message from River Song (Rory at this point has been erased from existence by the mysterious crack in time) and materialise in England near Stonehenge in 102 AD. River has been guided to this place by a painting by Van Gogh that's been passed down through the many guest stars of the 2010 series until it comes into River's possession. The two TARDIS travellers find her ensconced in a nearby Roman legion's camp pretending to be Cleopatra. Together, the three of them discover the Underhenge, an area under Stonehenge containing the Pandorica, an impregnable mini-prison rumoured to contain a trickster or warrior. Stonehenge is transmitting a signal which appears to have attracted Spaceships of every alien race the Doctor has ever encountered, including Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans, to take whatever is inside. It's a trap, however. The villains are in an alliance, and are not after what's in the Pandorica, but instead lock the Doctor in it - he's the fabled trickster / warrior (surprise surprise). One of the Romans is Rory, but he - and all of the legion - are really Autons, brought to life from the Nestene Consciousness mining Amy's imagination. Rory, desperately trying to resist his programming shoots Amy, whose memory has come back as to who he is.

River, trying to escape the TARDIS which has been taken over by forces unknown (and never really adequately explained - presumably it's the Silence, but how they are able to remote control the TARDIS; who knows?), finds herself  trapped as it explodes. The explosion causes the cracks in the fabric of reality, which devour all energy in the universe, causing all the stars to disappear, never to have existed. Rory is cradling the dying Amy, when the Doctor appears from the future, travelling using River's vortex manipulator. With Rory's and others help, this future Doctor contrives the means of his own escape from the Pandorica, and puts Amy in (as the box looks after its occupant very well, it will heal her). Nearly two thousand years later, during which time Rory has guarded the Pandorica, never ageing as he's plastic, the young Amelia is able to open the box, and reunite the older Amy with the Doctor and Rory. The Doctor rescues River from the exploding TARDIS where she's been kept alive in a time loop by the ship's emergency systems. Despite reality still collapsing around them, and despite an attack by a stone Dalek, a vestige of the universe that never existed, the Doctor is able to formulate a plan where he uses the Pandorica plus the energy of the exploding TARDIS to recreate the old universe again with a second big bang; the cracks in the universe will heal, but the Doctor will be on the wrong side when they do, and will no longer have existed.

As his timeline slowly unravels, the Doctor finds he is able to speak to Amy on a couple of key past occasions. He tries to imprint himself in her memory, along with the tale of the TARDIS that he took from Gallifrey. As with Rory, Amy's memories can come back to corporeal reality (something to do with living for years with a time crack in her bedroom, although in the new rebooted reality she hasn't lived with a time crack in her bedroom, but best not to think too hard about that as it's quite confusing). On her wedding day, the phrase "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" reminds her of the TARDIS, and the blue box and its pilot arrive. The Doctor dances at the wedding reception, and then he, Amy and Rory fly off in the TARDIS for more adventures in time and space... 

Context:

Watched each episode from the disc in the series 5 Blu-ray boxset, on two Sunday afternoons separated by a week; this was so my viewing companions - all the kids: boys aged 15 and 11, girl aged 9 - could feel what it was like to wait the regulation amount of time before the cliffhanger of The Pandorica Opens was resolved. I expected a chorus of disapproval and entreaties to put on the next episode immediately after the first, but came there not a peep. Maybe it's not as compelling as I thought. Comments from the children ranged from the youngest congratulating herself on seeing the Van Gogh painting "I knew it was going to be the TARDIS!"; but, she was wrong-footed by the Pandorica opening in the second episode to reveal Amy rather than the Doctor. All three children were confused at how a stone Dalek could survive when none of the other aliens did. I didn't have a satisfactory answer to this (I hesitated to give what I thought was the true reason: that a Stone Dalek looks cool in a way that a stone Silurian, say, probably wouldn't). 

First Time Round:

The date of the The Big Bang's first BBC1 broadcast is quite close to my eldest son's birthday. He was quite young at the time, but we were nonetheless planning a birthday party on the Sunday. The main memory I have is of tidying up the back garden all day Saturday, to allow it to be used as a play area for half a dozen pre-schoolers the following day. As a long and beautiful sunny evening was finally ending, the Better Half and I decided we'd done enough, and came in to watch that night's Doctor Who, and - if I remember correctly - both enjoyed it. Thinking of this, made me wonder whether at least one episode of Doctor Who had been broadcast of each of the family's birth dates, and a bit of research (see Deeper Thoughts section for more details) showed me that this was indeed the case. The three children have never had a Doctor Who episode shown on their birthdays during their lifetimes thus far, but the date for each had seen a few past episodes shown before they were born. Myself and the Better Half have both had Doctor Who seasons start on our birthdays in recent years.

Reaction:

Steven Moffat does not believe that less is more. This double-parter is his definitive statement that actually more is more. It features every monster he could cram in, and includes every possible ally, or references to plot points and loose ends, from all the previous stories of the 2010 series. The scene at the end of the first part The Pandorica Opens, with every alien race teamed up to put the Doctor into his bespoke prison, is like a frame of a particularly over-excited Doctor Who comic strip come to life, or how an army of 11-year olds in 1983 imagined The Five Doctors would be before they saw it (when they discovered it was just eight blokes in cyber-suits on a damp, Welsh hillside, and one Dalek in the studio). In terms of scale, one could not be disappointed. The whole episode is structured to build to a triple cliffhanger: the Doctor locked in the Pandorica, Rory shooting Amy, and River stuck in the TARDIS as it explodes. The universe ends, leaving only the Earth alone in a blank and infinite space. And that's just part one of two. If Doctor Who had any monsters made out of kitchen sinks, Moffat would undoubtedly have thrown them into the mix too; he does after all include a kitchen mop. It's well structured, though; by no means is everything just being thrown at the viewer to see what sticks. Although there's no real reason apart from spectacle why the plan to trap the Doctor couldn't be managed by only one alien race, a couple of moments for featured creatures are very well handled. For example, the dismembered parts of a cyberman having life of their own come together as a full suit keen to capture a new occupant, with the head snapping at Amy like a crocodile's jaws. The Autons too: their reveal, and making Rory a plastic facsimile that does not know he's not real, is the best use of the Nestene duplicate concept since its introduction.

The big reversal of The Pandorica Opens - that the Pandorica does not contain an evil "trickster", but that person as referred to in the legends is instead the Doctor and he's going to end up in the box - is telegraphed from fairly early on, but I don't think it matters. What it does do is unfortunately render meaningless the much celebrated speech that the Doctor does from Stonehenge to the assembled aliens, where they appear to back off because of his bravado. Instead, they are fooling him, turning the moment into one of defeat rather than victory - it's a nice speech, though, and it's only undermined on the second viewing; when it plays out (assuming you're not a clever dick like me who saw things coming) it feels like a punch the air moment, so they get away with it. The other minor thing that doesn't sit right in the first part is the use of Amy's childhood memories to create the scenario aimed to ensnare the Doctor. It doesn't make any sense: the Doctor's no more likely to fall into a trap just because it involves some things Amy read about as a nipper, and if it were spotted it is more likely to give things away (as it indeed does in The Pandorica Opens, albeit too late); this is, though, setting up the possibility of things coming back if Amy can remember them, which will pay off in the second part.

For all the many showy elements of The Pandorica Opens, the story structure is simple and traditional. The same cannot be said, though, for The Big Bang, which is much more timey-wimey, for want a better phrase. The episode plays out in multiple sections too. First, there's the section of the Doctor zipping back and forth through time between 102 AD and the young Amelia Pond in an alternative universe 1996, where there are no stars. The first thing that's notable about this section is that it is a gargantuan cheat. If the Doctor can use time travel to escape from the most secure prison ever made, and then go back in time to explain to people how to free him in the past, there is nothing stopping him doing that every week to escape whatever scenario he ends up in. It's carried along, whizzing past any audience scepticism, by the speed of the telling, and the charm of the performances, particularly Matt Smith and also Caitlin Blackwood as Amelia. Just at the point where it starts to get a bit smug and irritating (something like watching Back to the Future 2 on fast forward) the Doctor makes one more jump, arriving back to appear before himself, Amy and Rory apparently dead. Suddenly, things are serious again. This is the climax of the first section. The second section is the more traditional build up to the ending where the Doctor has to sacrifice himself to put everything back to normal. Some lovely distractions from what is essentially a linear segment are a gun-totin' River Song, and a Stone Dalek (lovely visual, doesn't really make sense - see above for my kids' reaction).

The third of four sections sees the Doctor's existence unravelling as he watches. He's able to drop in on events of the 2010 series as they run backwards. It contains perhaps the most bravura moment of plotting in the whole of Steven Moffat's tenure as showrunner: the scene where the Doctor talks to Amy in the Byzantium. We've already seen this play out in the Weeping Angels 2-parter earlier in the year, but now we see it again, and fully understand what's happening. Finally, there is Amy's wedding. The actors playing her parents are odd choices (and never appeared again), and it's weird that it's the day of her wedding where Amy is suddenly aware that something has changed in her life now she's got them back. A big deal is made, both in this story and earlier in the season, that the TARDIS explodes on Amy's wedding day, the 26th June 2010. But the actions depicted in this story make it feel more like it explodes in 102 AD. If not, how is Amelia affected in 1996, where there are no stars despite it taking place before the explosion, if that happened in 2010.  Maybe the impact rippled backwards in time; whenever anything in post-2005 Doctor Who doesn't quite make temporal sense, the answer is always that it rippled backwards in time somehow. It also occurs to me now that all three of Matt Smith's finales take place in a parallel universe (where there are no stars, where all time's happening at once, where the Doctor's victories have all been undone). It did get a bit wearisome all this messing with time and realities, but first time out it is interesting.

The climax of this last section is a tour de force of lyrical skill: Moffat uses the traditional wedding saying of "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" to describe the TARDIS and bring it back into being. The whole structure of the second episode is built around this clever bit of wordplay. It would ultimately be more satisfying if it was a visual rather than verbal flourish, but it's still nonetheless exciting. All the visual elements surrounding it, marshalled by director Toby Haynes, are wonderful, window dressing or otherwise; and there's far too many great things to call them all out here (I haven't had time to go into Arthur Darvill and Karen Gillan's emotional scenes as the latter realises who the former is, for example). There's a tiny niggle at the back of my mind that Moffat is including everything he can in a sort of desperation that he doesn't believe his storyline is strong enough in and of itself. He's obviously decided that every finale should be as big as anniversary special used to be (just as next season he'd decide that a series opener could be as big as a finale), but if this is just ultimately a bag of tricks, it's a bag of the best tricks one could imagine.  

Connectivity: 

Like The War Machines, this 2-parter is a big story to finish a season, and looks to have had a fair amount of the budget spent on it. Both stories significantly set some action on a date roughly contemporaneous with the broadcast of the story (the 1960s story is set around the 16th July 1966, with its final scene confirmed later as happening on the 20th; Amy's wedding in the The Big Bang is on the 26th June 2010, the same date that episode debuted).  

Deeper Thoughts:

Everything's an anniversary of something, old boy. The focus on tying the action of The Big Bang to the date of its broadcast, and of the proximity of that date to my son's birthday (see above), reminded me of something I have often meant to research in more detail about my favourite TV programme. I follow a lot of fans and feeds on social media related to the venerable Time Lord, and often someone will post something along the lines of "It's 25 years to the day since The Keeper of Traken episode 1" or "On this day in 1979, City of Death was getting record breaking audiences for its second episode" or such. Doctor Who's been going a long, long time, and before that there was a gap, but before that gap it was going an even longer long time. In the early days, Doctor Who was on every week almost all the year round, only stopping for a short break in the Summertime. I wondered whether there was any day on the calendar which wasn't the anniversary of something; so, I did an hour or two's research on the internet. I set a reasonably high standard for what the something could be; it would be too easy to fill a year if I counted the birthday of every actor ever to appear, down to those heroes who play the third Ood on the left and similar. No, it had to be the debut to air of a Doctor Who episode or something reasonably significant related to the show. There were, as it'll probably be no surprise for you to hear, lots of detailed websites I could utilise curated by committed individuals where such information was held.

The first sweep was to go through and find the list of dates where the show has not been broadcast. Like Doctor Who, I originate from the UK, so I'm only counting premieres on British television, but just that - and only looking at first runs of episodes of the main show, no spin offs - covered approximately 80% of the year. Every day from the start of January to the end of April, for example, a Doctor Who episode has been launched on BBC1 in at least one year. The autumn's very popular too for both new and classic series alike. A period from late June to the end of August is a bit fallow, though. It's traditionally been seen in TV as a no-go zone, a time when the best shows were held back to launch in Autumn, rather than lose viewers to various outdoor sun-kissed activities in the school holidays. That's less true these days, though, and a couple of times (the second half of the 2011 series after a mid-series break, and Peter Capaldi's first series in 2014) a run has started in late August. Beyond that, it was standard in the classic series era to have terrestrial repeats in the Summer months when Doctor Who was off the air. Given that in those days it was pretty much impossible to catch up with an episode once it had been shown, these repeats were as important as the original airings, so I don't think it was too much of a cheat to include them. With that, the number of anniversary-free days shrinks markedly down to only a dozen dates out of 366 (February 29th, which I did wonder about, was the date for the 1964 broadcast of an episode of Marco Polo in Doctor Who's first ever season).

I thought I'd need to lean heavily on episodes of spin-offs to get to that level (97% coverage), but no. For the most part, spin offs like Torchwood or The Sarah-Jane Adventures first aired on days of the year that Doctor Who had already been shown. The exception was Torchwood: Miracle Day. Three episodes of the mostly US-based fourth series of that spin-off (on the 14th, 21st and 28th July 2011) were shown on days that nothing else from the worlds of Doctor Who had ever aired. That took the total unaccounted for dates down to nine. On the 29th June 2007, an episode of Totally Doctor Who - a non-fiction magazine show for children - was shown. This wouldn't normally be so special, but the episode included the TV debut of an episode of the animated David Tennant story The Infinite Quest, so that counts. On the 20th December in 2012, the only day of the twelfth month where a full episode or special hadn't already been shown, a teaser for the year's Christmas special called Vastra Investigates premiered on the Red Button. On 21st August 2014, there was a Blue Peter special introducing Peter Capaldi to the young viewers a couple of days before his first story aired. So, with all that considered, there are only six days in the year that aren't an anniversary of something new being shown: the 4th, 15th, 22nd, 29th and 31st July, and the 28th August. Now, it would be ridiculously completist to hope that a series of Doctor Who from 2023 onwards (it's too late for this year, and we're only getting specials next year) could go out of their way to show some new episodes on all those six dates, so every day of the year can showcase something. Ridiculous. But I can't help hoping for it anyway. Until then, a happy anniversary for the 6th August, the date I'm writing this: 41 years since the BBC1 Summer repeat of Destiny of the Daleks episode 2, and on this day a year later in 1981 discerning viewers were enjoying a repeat of Full Circle part 4.

In Summary:

An everything including the kitchen sink drama.