The Pandorica closes
Well that was a hell of a finale.
And I keep thinking about it because time travel is fantastic.
WARNING: TVTROPES LINKS
Time travel is hard
I assume we're all familiar with the notion of a stable time loop. Dude goes back in time to accomplish something and sets in motion events that necessitate or facilitate the time travel in the first place.
Moffat likes this. I mean, like, a lot.
Remember Blink? The entire episode was a somewhat contrived stable time loop. From the universe's point of view:
1. The Doctor and Martha arrive in the relative past, having been sent back by Angels.
2. The Doctor orchestrates his own rescue, using notes from Sally Sparrow.
3. The TARDIS arrives, and the Doctor and Martha (unseen) depart for times and places unknown.
4. Sally discovers the Angels and gradually figures them out.
5. Sally and her slightly dipsy sidekick send the TARDIS back and defeat the Angels.
6. The Doctor, an incarnation before (1), runs across Sally and receives all the notes on his adventure.
It's actually becoming a little alarming how frequently this is happening. Davies-era Doctor Who made a point of emphasizing that affecting one's own past is a Bad Idea. There was even Father's Day, that confusing episode that introduced a paradox-eating critter. Apparently it's okay to do it if you know it already happened and need to fulfill a stable loop, but this sort of glosses over what causes the loop in the first place or why, and doesn't prevent a writer from using a stable loop as a plot device whenever he wants.
Then there's the continuing River Song meme of how the Doctor isn't allowed to read the journal because it contains "spoilers". But how is that much different than going back in time and telling himself what to do?
Blink used a stable time loop. The Lodger used a stable time loop. The Doctor opening the TARDIS by snapping his fingers is even a stable time loop: he only knows he can do it because River told him in Forest of the Dead, but River only knows because she's seen him do it.
And the finale was absolutely flooded with them:
- The Doctor travels back to give Rory instructions to release him from the Pandorica.
- The Doctor travels back to give young-Amy notes to release our Amy from the Pandorica. (Which is interlinked with the above, making sort of a stable time lemniscate.)
- The Doctor travels back from being shot by a Dalek to tell himself his own plan to do so.
I mean, you know. What.
(I do note, though, that Moffat is very careful about age. He will cheerfully put information in a loop, but NEVER objects or people. Things will necessarily age and degrade, and the loop won't actually be stable. Papers and notes are always rewritten and have the new copies sent back, like Sally's notes on the Angel incident or Amy's note that the Doctor needed to investigate the fake flat.)
Time vs. meta-time
For the most part, time passes slowly and in the right order. Sometimes the Doctor will arrive and muck about a bit and leave.
When something catastrophic happens to time, everything gets a little confusing. The entire season was very clearly split into three distinct copies of the universe:
A. "Before" the explosion, with the universe functioning as usual but starting to crack.
B. "After" the explosion, with everything erased except for Earth, possibly leaving this as the only episode in this history of Doctor Who where the Earth is in the least relative danger.
C. Without the explosion, once the universe has been restored.
"Before" and "after" here are really from the audience's point of view, as the TARDIS explosion is stated to occur at every moment in time simultaneously, rewriting the entire timeline with nothingness all at once. So we have different states of the timeline that occur in a sequential order and are subject to causality, forming sort of a meta-timeline from the universe's perspective.
Note that the explosion actually "happened" relative to the Doctor; the TARDIS was thousands of years away from him, but taking the perspectives of the Doctor and the TARDIS + River in parallel, everything around him is affected when the TARDIS relatively explodes. The TARDIS and Doctor are supposed to have some sort of symbiotic thing going on, so this isn't unreasonable.
But then take River Song. At the end of Flesh and Stone, she teasingly warns the Doctor that "the Pandorica is opening", and it's confirmed within the finale that the River we see here is earlier than the one who fought the Angels. So how does future River know? The universe hasn't exploded "yet", so nobody should know the sequence of events that's about to happen. The only possibility is that future-River is actually the future version of the post-explosion River from the end of the episode, meaning that at the time of Flesh and Stone, she had already experienced a history-spanning explosion that hadn't happened yet anywhere in history. (Then shouldn't she have recognized the cracks in the universe?)
Also, the Doctor's unwinding of his own history at the end actually happened: Amy really was moved from the garden to her bedroom in The Eleventh Hour, and the Doctor with a mysterious jacket (which I noticed at the time!) really did talk to her in Flesh and Stone. What.
Mm.
Erasure
It's never very clearly stated what being erased from history actually means. Rather than having history rewritten with a person or thing completely missing, it seems the person or thing is smeared away. Like a temporal smudge tool. Past events still had their same effect on the present, and the future continues without the person. That is, even though the explosion is happening everywhere, the erasure of an individual thing really takes effect at the time of the crack.
Examples:
- Amy's parents are erased, and she no longer remembers them even as young as 7. But she still exists just fine. Nobody in her sleepy village apparently finds it odd that she lives alone, either.
- The prison guards escorting River are erased. But if they'd truly never existed, then different guards would have come along instead, and no such replacements appear.
- Rory is erased, but was instrumental to helping recapture Prisoner Zero in The Eleventh Hour. Earth would have been destroyed in 2008 if he were quietly removed, but nobody seems bothered by this. Also, the residue of his memory remains in Amy's house for the Nestene Consciousness to copy.
- Every race across the entire universe is erased, but the Pandorica they all worked together to build remains, as do the trapped Doctor and the Auton Rory.
It's not explored very deeply, but I think this smudging is far more interesting than true erasure. Rewriting history for people who spend their time skipping around it wouldn't make a lot of sense, besides. And it feels more organic, which is good-time is still a property of nature, even if it can only be manipulated by technology.
It does leave the extremely open question of what would happen if the Doctor traveled, say, back to Amy's birth. What would he see there? Is this related to the Doctor's occasional mention of "timezones", implying that the timeline is broken into discrete chunks, and time within a chunk can be affected more easily?
The Doctor's recovery
Okay, so, the Doctor was simultaneously erased and trapped in the Void. Somehow.
And the Earth still remained, even though the Doctor has saved the entire planet on multiple occasions, and without him the Time War would have ended with the Time Lords' destruction of all history. (A second time!)
And River still had a diary fashioned after the TARDIS, even though the TARDIS never existed.
And merely remembering him with the coolest little speech ever let him both escape the Void and unsmudged him from all of history, from the creation of the solar system all the way to the darkening of the universe as it nears its heat death.
That's all a little hokey and melodramatic, but okay.
So.
River must have remembered the Doctor to have given Amy her diary. Why wasn't that enough? Amy has had "the universe pouring into her head", whatever that actually means in practice, but River has actually been hopping around the universe for who knows how long.
Miscellaneous
Boy, vortex manipulators sure are nifty. You'd think the Doctor would keep one of those around so he can just teleport away from danger more often. He keeps making passive comments about how cheap they are, but they're quicker, more accurate, and less bulky than his (obsolete!) TARDIS.
The Doctor hops briefly into the TARDIS to rescue River. Hm.
- Vortex manipulators, the jalopies of time travel according to the Doctor, can jump in and out of his sports-car TARDIS at will?
- The Doctor jumps into a time loop within a time machine during its own explosion at the right moment to rescue its passenger. Impressive. And using a device he, again, spends the entire episode badmouthing.
Everyone who has ever hated the Doctor builds a big fancy prison to trap him and keep him alive indefinitely instead of, you know. Shooting him. In the face. For being beings of pure hatred bent on conquest of the universe, they sure are hesitant about shooting their arch-nemesis.
Speaking of, Dalek death rays sure do suck. The Doctor was shot in The Stolen Earth and got by with half a regeneration, and he managed to survive long enough to make it to the Pandorica this time around. Shouldn't death rays kill him? If not, shouldn't the crazy advanced Daleks invent a death ray that actually works against their worst enemy?
How did all the races that ever hated the Doctor across billions of years manage to converge on one moment in Earth's relative past? Are all these civilizations that long-running, and have they all known about the Doctor's interference for so long? (As far as I know, the only race shown with time travel capability is the Daleks.)
The universe seems more concerned with the relative time of people than absolute time.
- How does Song manage to get the Doctor at more or less the right time so often? He's over 900 years old, and he spent the vast majority of that time not knowing or encountering her at all. Yet it took him 900 years (okay, 523 or so) of traveling throughout time to think to visit the oldest planet in the universe?
- The Doctor sure lucked out in Blink, with Sally managing to catch a glimpse of him in his own fairly recent past. At least the Doctor tends to return to present day more or less in order, even though this time he happened to go backwards at least once. Timezones again?
- The TARDIS phone sure manages to ring at the right time a lot. Churchill could have easily reached the Doctor before the two had ever met. Perhaps the phone rings relative to the last time the caller saw the Doctor, which would fit the same sort of symbiotic flow of time we have with the explosion.
Where did the Cybermen come from? They were clearly from Rose's universe, so how did they get here?
What happened to the Blinovitch Limitation Effect? Amy touches her little self with no problems. The Doctor even touches his screwdriver to its future self and makes sparks earlier in the episode.
I wonder what effect the undoing of history would have on the Time War. The Doctor has never quite clarified how exactly the lock works, but apparently Gallifrey and everything locked away with it are inaccessible even to a TARDIS, so I presume the explosion wouldn't reach any of it. Which is sort of hilarious.
Time machines are dangerous!
Overall
This is, actually, the best season thusfar, and the best finale thusfar. I've been told that Bad Wolf was better, but that was resolved by some really bad deux ex machina. And The End of Time, while fascinating and enjoyable, was still mostly vague threats. Moffat actually destroyed the universe.
Moffat is brilliant and I love him. I've always thought that Doctor Who was supposed to be far more like Hitchhiker's Guide than Stargate, but Davies's run always injected just enough explanation to make me feel like it was meant to be consistent and reasonable. This season is almost making a point of saying that the universe is crazy and I just have to deal with it. Hell, the Doctor outright said it-I really hope that was a nod to Douglas Adams.
The stories feel a little deeper and more well-connected, rather than a series of cheap monster-of-the-week oh-no-let's-use-the-foogblarch. The season's Ultra Big Bad appeared throughout, much like with Davies's arcs, but it actually affected the story in ways that carried forwards into future episodes.
And now we have a multi-season arc; after all this effort, nobody knows who actually orchestrated the TARDIS's explosion or who was trying to build the jalopy TARDIS in The Lodger. And, yes, I'm assuming the two are related and that the other TARDIS will be revisited. When there are no other Time Lords anywhere in the universe, someone trying to grow a Time Lord vehicle is a pretty big plot point.
I do like the subtle throwbacks to Davies canon sprinkled around:
- The TARDIS cannot pass between the normal universe and the Void.
- The Doctor is slightly psychic and actually making some use of it.
- I had more but I forget oh no
Man this is a lot of words. I have stuff to do!
And I keep thinking about it because time travel is fantastic.
WARNING: TVTROPES LINKS
Time travel is hard
I assume we're all familiar with the notion of a stable time loop. Dude goes back in time to accomplish something and sets in motion events that necessitate or facilitate the time travel in the first place.
Moffat likes this. I mean, like, a lot.
Remember Blink? The entire episode was a somewhat contrived stable time loop. From the universe's point of view:
1. The Doctor and Martha arrive in the relative past, having been sent back by Angels.
2. The Doctor orchestrates his own rescue, using notes from Sally Sparrow.
3. The TARDIS arrives, and the Doctor and Martha (unseen) depart for times and places unknown.
4. Sally discovers the Angels and gradually figures them out.
5. Sally and her slightly dipsy sidekick send the TARDIS back and defeat the Angels.
6. The Doctor, an incarnation before (1), runs across Sally and receives all the notes on his adventure.
It's actually becoming a little alarming how frequently this is happening. Davies-era Doctor Who made a point of emphasizing that affecting one's own past is a Bad Idea. There was even Father's Day, that confusing episode that introduced a paradox-eating critter. Apparently it's okay to do it if you know it already happened and need to fulfill a stable loop, but this sort of glosses over what causes the loop in the first place or why, and doesn't prevent a writer from using a stable loop as a plot device whenever he wants.
Then there's the continuing River Song meme of how the Doctor isn't allowed to read the journal because it contains "spoilers". But how is that much different than going back in time and telling himself what to do?
Blink used a stable time loop. The Lodger used a stable time loop. The Doctor opening the TARDIS by snapping his fingers is even a stable time loop: he only knows he can do it because River told him in Forest of the Dead, but River only knows because she's seen him do it.
And the finale was absolutely flooded with them:
- The Doctor travels back to give Rory instructions to release him from the Pandorica.
- The Doctor travels back to give young-Amy notes to release our Amy from the Pandorica. (Which is interlinked with the above, making sort of a stable time lemniscate.)
- The Doctor travels back from being shot by a Dalek to tell himself his own plan to do so.
I mean, you know. What.
(I do note, though, that Moffat is very careful about age. He will cheerfully put information in a loop, but NEVER objects or people. Things will necessarily age and degrade, and the loop won't actually be stable. Papers and notes are always rewritten and have the new copies sent back, like Sally's notes on the Angel incident or Amy's note that the Doctor needed to investigate the fake flat.)
Time vs. meta-time
For the most part, time passes slowly and in the right order. Sometimes the Doctor will arrive and muck about a bit and leave.
When something catastrophic happens to time, everything gets a little confusing. The entire season was very clearly split into three distinct copies of the universe:
A. "Before" the explosion, with the universe functioning as usual but starting to crack.
B. "After" the explosion, with everything erased except for Earth, possibly leaving this as the only episode in this history of Doctor Who where the Earth is in the least relative danger.
C. Without the explosion, once the universe has been restored.
"Before" and "after" here are really from the audience's point of view, as the TARDIS explosion is stated to occur at every moment in time simultaneously, rewriting the entire timeline with nothingness all at once. So we have different states of the timeline that occur in a sequential order and are subject to causality, forming sort of a meta-timeline from the universe's perspective.
Note that the explosion actually "happened" relative to the Doctor; the TARDIS was thousands of years away from him, but taking the perspectives of the Doctor and the TARDIS + River in parallel, everything around him is affected when the TARDIS relatively explodes. The TARDIS and Doctor are supposed to have some sort of symbiotic thing going on, so this isn't unreasonable.
But then take River Song. At the end of Flesh and Stone, she teasingly warns the Doctor that "the Pandorica is opening", and it's confirmed within the finale that the River we see here is earlier than the one who fought the Angels. So how does future River know? The universe hasn't exploded "yet", so nobody should know the sequence of events that's about to happen. The only possibility is that future-River is actually the future version of the post-explosion River from the end of the episode, meaning that at the time of Flesh and Stone, she had already experienced a history-spanning explosion that hadn't happened yet anywhere in history. (Then shouldn't she have recognized the cracks in the universe?)
Also, the Doctor's unwinding of his own history at the end actually happened: Amy really was moved from the garden to her bedroom in The Eleventh Hour, and the Doctor with a mysterious jacket (which I noticed at the time!) really did talk to her in Flesh and Stone. What.
Mm.
Erasure
It's never very clearly stated what being erased from history actually means. Rather than having history rewritten with a person or thing completely missing, it seems the person or thing is smeared away. Like a temporal smudge tool. Past events still had their same effect on the present, and the future continues without the person. That is, even though the explosion is happening everywhere, the erasure of an individual thing really takes effect at the time of the crack.
Examples:
- Amy's parents are erased, and she no longer remembers them even as young as 7. But she still exists just fine. Nobody in her sleepy village apparently finds it odd that she lives alone, either.
- The prison guards escorting River are erased. But if they'd truly never existed, then different guards would have come along instead, and no such replacements appear.
- Rory is erased, but was instrumental to helping recapture Prisoner Zero in The Eleventh Hour. Earth would have been destroyed in 2008 if he were quietly removed, but nobody seems bothered by this. Also, the residue of his memory remains in Amy's house for the Nestene Consciousness to copy.
- Every race across the entire universe is erased, but the Pandorica they all worked together to build remains, as do the trapped Doctor and the Auton Rory.
It's not explored very deeply, but I think this smudging is far more interesting than true erasure. Rewriting history for people who spend their time skipping around it wouldn't make a lot of sense, besides. And it feels more organic, which is good-time is still a property of nature, even if it can only be manipulated by technology.
It does leave the extremely open question of what would happen if the Doctor traveled, say, back to Amy's birth. What would he see there? Is this related to the Doctor's occasional mention of "timezones", implying that the timeline is broken into discrete chunks, and time within a chunk can be affected more easily?
The Doctor's recovery
Okay, so, the Doctor was simultaneously erased and trapped in the Void. Somehow.
And the Earth still remained, even though the Doctor has saved the entire planet on multiple occasions, and without him the Time War would have ended with the Time Lords' destruction of all history. (A second time!)
And River still had a diary fashioned after the TARDIS, even though the TARDIS never existed.
And merely remembering him with the coolest little speech ever let him both escape the Void and unsmudged him from all of history, from the creation of the solar system all the way to the darkening of the universe as it nears its heat death.
That's all a little hokey and melodramatic, but okay.
So.
River must have remembered the Doctor to have given Amy her diary. Why wasn't that enough? Amy has had "the universe pouring into her head", whatever that actually means in practice, but River has actually been hopping around the universe for who knows how long.
Miscellaneous
Boy, vortex manipulators sure are nifty. You'd think the Doctor would keep one of those around so he can just teleport away from danger more often. He keeps making passive comments about how cheap they are, but they're quicker, more accurate, and less bulky than his (obsolete!) TARDIS.
The Doctor hops briefly into the TARDIS to rescue River. Hm.
- Vortex manipulators, the jalopies of time travel according to the Doctor, can jump in and out of his sports-car TARDIS at will?
- The Doctor jumps into a time loop within a time machine during its own explosion at the right moment to rescue its passenger. Impressive. And using a device he, again, spends the entire episode badmouthing.
Everyone who has ever hated the Doctor builds a big fancy prison to trap him and keep him alive indefinitely instead of, you know. Shooting him. In the face. For being beings of pure hatred bent on conquest of the universe, they sure are hesitant about shooting their arch-nemesis.
Speaking of, Dalek death rays sure do suck. The Doctor was shot in The Stolen Earth and got by with half a regeneration, and he managed to survive long enough to make it to the Pandorica this time around. Shouldn't death rays kill him? If not, shouldn't the crazy advanced Daleks invent a death ray that actually works against their worst enemy?
How did all the races that ever hated the Doctor across billions of years manage to converge on one moment in Earth's relative past? Are all these civilizations that long-running, and have they all known about the Doctor's interference for so long? (As far as I know, the only race shown with time travel capability is the Daleks.)
The universe seems more concerned with the relative time of people than absolute time.
- How does Song manage to get the Doctor at more or less the right time so often? He's over 900 years old, and he spent the vast majority of that time not knowing or encountering her at all. Yet it took him 900 years (okay, 523 or so) of traveling throughout time to think to visit the oldest planet in the universe?
- The Doctor sure lucked out in Blink, with Sally managing to catch a glimpse of him in his own fairly recent past. At least the Doctor tends to return to present day more or less in order, even though this time he happened to go backwards at least once. Timezones again?
- The TARDIS phone sure manages to ring at the right time a lot. Churchill could have easily reached the Doctor before the two had ever met. Perhaps the phone rings relative to the last time the caller saw the Doctor, which would fit the same sort of symbiotic flow of time we have with the explosion.
Where did the Cybermen come from? They were clearly from Rose's universe, so how did they get here?
What happened to the Blinovitch Limitation Effect? Amy touches her little self with no problems. The Doctor even touches his screwdriver to its future self and makes sparks earlier in the episode.
I wonder what effect the undoing of history would have on the Time War. The Doctor has never quite clarified how exactly the lock works, but apparently Gallifrey and everything locked away with it are inaccessible even to a TARDIS, so I presume the explosion wouldn't reach any of it. Which is sort of hilarious.
Time machines are dangerous!
Overall
This is, actually, the best season thusfar, and the best finale thusfar. I've been told that Bad Wolf was better, but that was resolved by some really bad deux ex machina. And The End of Time, while fascinating and enjoyable, was still mostly vague threats. Moffat actually destroyed the universe.
Moffat is brilliant and I love him. I've always thought that Doctor Who was supposed to be far more like Hitchhiker's Guide than Stargate, but Davies's run always injected just enough explanation to make me feel like it was meant to be consistent and reasonable. This season is almost making a point of saying that the universe is crazy and I just have to deal with it. Hell, the Doctor outright said it-I really hope that was a nod to Douglas Adams.
The stories feel a little deeper and more well-connected, rather than a series of cheap monster-of-the-week oh-no-let's-use-the-foogblarch. The season's Ultra Big Bad appeared throughout, much like with Davies's arcs, but it actually affected the story in ways that carried forwards into future episodes.
And now we have a multi-season arc; after all this effort, nobody knows who actually orchestrated the TARDIS's explosion or who was trying to build the jalopy TARDIS in The Lodger. And, yes, I'm assuming the two are related and that the other TARDIS will be revisited. When there are no other Time Lords anywhere in the universe, someone trying to grow a Time Lord vehicle is a pretty big plot point.
I do like the subtle throwbacks to Davies canon sprinkled around:
- The TARDIS cannot pass between the normal universe and the Void.
- The Doctor is slightly psychic and actually making some use of it.
- I had more but I forget oh no
Man this is a lot of words. I have stuff to do!