10 and 1 Things About The Big Bang

(Major spoilers for the finale of Doctor Who Series 5.)Item 1: Of all the New Who finales, this has very much been my favorite to date, in large part because it at once met and subverted my expectations. And right from the start too. The teaser features little Amelia Pond (expected) opening the Pandorica to reveal... Amy? Great hook. I fully expected the Doctor to escape the box with River's vortex manipulator, but he doesn't. He uses a paradox instead, and uses the vortex manipulator only to move about in the absence of the TARDIS. And it does things like this right through to the end when you HOPE that Rory will become a companion, but surely tv rules say he won't, and then he does! Like Doomsday, this thing had me in tears, but tears of joy (is this the first finale with a happy ending? I think it is!). Aesthetic orgasm, as I call it. It was exactly what I wanted it to be, even though I might not have known what I wanted.

Item 2: As the first year of a new era, we're still comparing Moffat to Davies. It's inevitable. One of the things that really made this finale stand out from previous efforts is how personal and intimate it felt. RTD was good at spectacle. Huge stakes resolved in public - Rose as God destroys the Daleks, a Cyberman in every home, the Master tyrant of Earth, planets in the sky - which went well with the operatic emotions and Doctor-as-God theme of the last few series. The difference between RTD and Moffat is essentially the one between myth and fairy tales. Fairy tales share (supernatural) elements with myth, but are far more personal. They're about children lost in the woods and house cats with special powers, things kids can relate to. The cat's master wins a kingdom in Puss'n'Boots, and that's similar to the epic scale of the end of the universe in The Big Bang. But the way the universe is saved is through a personal, fairy tale story involving a little girl and her imaginary friend. Nowhere is this more apparent than when the Doctor visits Amelia's room at night and tells her the story of how he got the TARDIS (the oldest fairy tale on the show). This is the climax, not piloting the Pandorica into the heart of an explosion. Similarly, the resolution isn't the recreation of the universe, it's the remembering of the Doctor. At a wedding. In a small town where everybody knows everybody. And where there used to be Star Wars-style celebrations on the whole planet, there's the Doctor dancing goofily with the village's kids.

Item 3: Fairy tale logic. I loved the episode, and I think most people did. But the backlash from certain parts of fandom who DIDN'T like it is the kind of thing that makes we wonder why I go on the Internet at all. The biggest criticism levied against the finale (or, in fact, Series 5) is that the resolution involving Amy "wishing" the Doctor back doesn't make any sense. As if the Whoniverse was 1) a coherent continuity and 2) anything close to hard sf. I personally thought that the story was internally consistent and that the various ways the day was won were set up and earned. It did not smack of deus ex machina, which really requires a "by the way, we didn't say it, but..." moment. (Examples include: "By the way, though looking into the TARDIS regressed that Slitheen to an egg, it can turn Rose into a goddess." "By the way, closing the gap between worlds will suck all the Cybermen and Daleks out of ours." And so on.) RTD explained things with techno-babble, and in SF, we're used to that making "sense". It doesn't really. They're just "magic words" dressed up as science, but we accept the justification. How is fairy-babble any less legitimate? Older Whovians should also remember the Pertwee era's Buddhism-babble and Bidmead's math-babble (specifically Logopolis and Castrovalva). Even RTD fans should remember The Shakespeare Code as featuring a distinctly magical way of dealing with the universe. The Big Bang doesn't rob you of the scientifically ordered universe you crave, it's just that the Doctor doesn't always talk about events in a pseudo-scientific way. "If something is remembered, it can come back" excludes the quantum ramifications of such a statement, but they are nonetheless implied, and no stranger than the Weeping Angels reality/irreality. How would it help Rory to know the science behind the effect, when all he needs to know is how to invoke the effect? And the Doctor says it himself: "It's not a light, it's a restoration field, but never mind, call it a light." Buy the premise, buy the bit. Everything that happens in The Big Bang has been set up, but not over-explained or scientifically justified. I don't care because it's so satisfying on a poetic level.
Item 4: The Future Doctor. If you read my comments on other episodes of this series, you'll remember the idea of a future 11th Doctor going back to past episodes, explaining away a strange shadow here, an unseen character there, etc. This actually happens! Although, it seems that everything I thought was the future Doctor's doing wasn't, and what I dismissed as a production problem... was! While I was busy saying the strange bit with the Doctor having his coat when he'd lost it in Flesh and Stone was just a continuity flub, I was neglecting to go back and listen to the exchange again. Because it's a very weird thing that does not pay off in the episode. That should have been my real clue that it was the Doctor returning through history. Jury's still out if he's the shadow in little Amelia's house - they don't reuse the footage which is sort of damning evidence. Maybe there's lots of deleted scenes where he opens a door on the roof of Churchill's bunker, etc.

Item 5: One of the greatest moments of the episode has to be Amy's use of "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" as a sort of summoning spell for the TARDIS. I got there maybe a split second before Rory started stuttering through his reference to the traditional saying and burst out in tears as soon as Amy clued in and actually said the very incantation I was myself reciting in my head. It's incredible how it all fits the description of the TARDIS, isn't it? Magical!
Item 6: Speaking of magic, there's Rory, "the boy who waited". We're pretty far from Mickey here. Moffat somehow turns Rory into both an equivalent of Amy (who also waited) and of the Doctor (also a "fairy tale") and cemented his place in the TARDIS crew. And so the show makes history by having the first married couple as companions. And Rory's had 2000 years to build up his confidence and skills (depending on what he can actually remember from his plastic days). He's only really afraid of one thing, and that's Amy (love that he knows deep down that he's now Mr. Pond).

Item 7: We were never sure about Geronimo, were we? It seemed too close to Allons-y, which itself had outworn its welcome (I'd say that after meeting Alonso in Voyage of the Damned, it had climaxed and should have been retired), and kinda silly besides. I wouldn't say it was overused this series, but I think it was all worth it for seeing the Doctor text Geronimo to his peeps on Earth while heading to his death aboard the flying Pandorica. That was great, and Alex Kingston reads it beautifully, her voice breaking.

Item 8: I can't wait for Murray Gold to release the series' music so I can put some of these musical cues on infinite loop. One cue that was really intriguing in The Big Bang was this kind of reverse music that accompanied the universe's reboot, but found its best place over scenes with River.
Item 9: The doctor lies. It's been River's mantra lately. In The Time of Angels, I took this to be a bit of obfuscation about her identity since she admitted to lying as well. River = Doctor. Now that that theory has been made much less likely, we have to expect the Doctor to lie to her sometime soon (i,e. her past). I'm thinking the lie might be about not having peeked at her journal before giving it back to her in this episode. It's a peek that might get him out of trouble in timey-wimey fashion in the next series or later.

Item 10: If Moffat and I share something, it's a love of metatexty-postmoderny... stuff. There's the ones you get on the first pass and make you smile, like the Doctor hating repeats as he suffers a clip show of the past series. The truly beautiful bits are those you only get on a second or third pass. In this case, it's Amy's dad writing his speech as a metaphor for the rewriting of the universe. Look at it again. His speech isn't finished the same way the universe isn't complete, not without a Doctor. He scribbles the last few words as Amy starts to remember, and he's done when she's ready to summon the Doctor. Wonderful.

Item 11: Moffat's left a number of things unresolved, like who caused the TARDIS to blow in the first place (the voice announcing the silence in the previous episode). The Doctor even says the universe isn't safe yet. With rumors of their bringing back the Yeti, my money's on the Great Intelligence. The nihilism implicit in the "silence" fits its New Adventures redesign as a Lovecraftian Great Old One. In a very brief interview I saw with the Grand Moff, he also said we'd find out who/what River Song is. Series 6 - my reason to live.

I don't know if they were being cheeky with the whole Egyptian goddess on the Orient Express... in space, but I'm primed for Christmas either way!