New Who 5.13: The Big Bang
I was out when this was broadcast, and away the following weekend, so it's taken me a while to find time to sit down and write up my thoughts about it properly. So apologies for the fortnight's delay, but here at last is my write-up of the Doctor Who finale.
This has been the first season finale from the hand of Moffat, so most of fandom was waiting with bated breath to find out if we'd finally seen the back of magic reset buttons, dei ex machinis and Total Bollocks Overdrive. My view on that is that actually we haven't really. There were plenty of things in this episode that didn't really make sense or stretched the suspension of disbelief - see this post (especially points 1 and 6) and this one (especially the fourth paragraph) for some of them. Specifically, we might well say that the Pandorica basically turns out to be a magic reset button, River at the point when she arrives at Amy's wedding is a dea ex machina, and the business with flying the Pandorica into the heart of the TARDIS to undo the effects of the explosion is Total Bollocks Overdrive.
But Doctor Who has always been full of nonsensical plot devices, lightly glossed over with a bit of hand-waving and technobabble. To me, the difference between Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat is more one of presentation than of content. Moffat's resolution was signalled better in advance than Davies' usually were, so that we have absorbed ideas such as 'time can be rewritten' gradually over the course of the season rather than suddenly being expected to swallow them at the last minute. His overall plot structure is more complex, which for me created more of a feeling that it must make sense at some level, and that if it didn't quite convince, then that must be my fault for not getting it rather than his for writing palpable nonsense. Indeed, most of the niggling questions which the finale raises can be answered. By comparison, RTD's didn't tend to leave questions of the type listed in the linked page at all: only questions along the lines of "What? I waited an entire season and all I got was X hokey plot device? Is that it?"
So overall it was a more satisfying finale than RTD used to produce, although still not entirely WTF-free. And Moffat has of course also left us with a tantalising list of unanswered questions to keep us on tenterhooks until next year. Who or what was it that made the TARDIS explode in the first place? Whose was the voice saying 'silence will fall'? Who was the 'good man' that River song killed; why; and who actually is she anyway? And what about that TARDIS-like ship in The Lodger: who built that and what happened to them? This is a new move which RTD didn't really make use of - unless, I suppose, you count the gradual unfolding over all four of his seasons of revelations about what happened in the Time War.
Meanwhile, back to this episode, I thought Matt Smith was superb again, right from his touching-without-being-sentimental monologue by little Amelia's bedside to his mad-as-fish wedding dancing. Little Amelia herself was great too, but I'm afraid that after a whole season I'm still quite lukewarm about grown-up Amy. I don't hate her, and she certainly has her moments. I liked her for most of the Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone two-parter, for example, where she managed to be inquisitive, intelligent, self-confident, unwise, brave, scared, noble and compassionate over the course of the story while still seeming like a coherent single character. But over the season as a whole I have found it difficult to relate to her as a rounded person. She does odd unpredictable things sometimes which don't really sit well with the rest of her behaviour, feeling as though they just pop up out of nowhere only to be forgotten again the next minute. Her attempt to seduce the Doctor at the end of Flesh and Stone is an example of that, but it's not the only one. In the Doctor, similar unpredictability is great, because it keeps us interested and helps to signal how alien he is. But in a companion, who is supposed to be our audience-identification figure, it becomes disconcerting. And I also don't think it was helped by Karen Gillan's tendency to pull rather weird pouty, stary faces and vogue-y poses all the time:
Not to worry, though, because I am growing immensely fond of Rory. I liked him already before The Big Bang. He's unapologetically normal where Amy feels like she considers herself to be special (without really convincing me of the fact), but he's still basically game to have a go at anything, especially for Amy's sake. I don't personally share in his admiration for Amy, but that's not a problem for me. We've seen at several points through the season, and especially in Amy's Choice, that what Rory thinks he wants is ordinary, settled security. But we've also seen him gradually discovering that he can enjoy experiences well beyond the ordinary, and at the very end of The Big Bang he has reached the point where he's every bit as enthusiastic as Amy about running off with the Doctor. So to me what that signals is that he was probably attracted to Amy all along partly because he subconsciously did long for excitement and adventure, and saw Amy as someone likely to provide those things. That's perfectly understandable, even if I find Amy a bit weird myself. And his final decision in The Big Bang is also a very satisfactory resolution of the adventure vs. domestic bliss debate which has been something of a theme of this season, especially in Amy's Choice and The Lodger. The answer we've ended up with is - why not have both? And that seems very positive to me.
So I'm totally thrilled to see Rory heading off into space, and indeed to hear on the rumour-vine that Arthur Darvill will be getting his name in the opening credits as a full-time companion next season. I'm keen to see more of him as a character, and have been hoping for a multiple-companion Team TARDIS set-up anyway ever since I got into the First Doctor era and realised how well it can work. I really think it allows much more scope for character-development, simply because there are more characters who are consistently present across more than one 45-minute story. I'd actually have trusted RTD to make better use of that potential than Steven Moffat, but then again we have seen a fairly convincing character-arc for Rory in the current season, if not so much for Amy - so maybe Moffat will do great things with it after all. It certainly seems like a wise move with the rather more alien Doctor that we now have in Eleven by comparison with Ten. I'd love to see more scenes in which his alienness is played off against Rory and Amy's humanity - him doing strange things which make them doubt whether they should trust him; him needing a human perspective to help resolve a situation, and so forth.
The other particularly interesting thing about Rory from my point of view is that he seemed to get back his full memories of his time as an Auton replica at the exact point when the Doctor re-appeared at his and Amy's wedding. (When the Doctor appears, he exclaims "It's the Doctor! How did we forget the Doctor? I was plastic! He was the stripper at my stag night!"). This is fantastic, because it should mean that he is now familiar with all of British history from AD 102 to 1996. OK, so he's only going to have the fairly limited perspective of what he saw or heard from his stand-point beside the Pandorica - but still, the pictures of the Pandorica throughout history suggest that both it and he did move about a fair bit during that period (even going backwards in time if the Egyptian and Classical Greek images are taken into account - though I don't think they need be). There's certainly every reason to hope that, without depriving Rory of his basic ordinary humanity, those memories should give him something of a depth of perspective that can be drawn on occasionally for dramatic purposes, and even better plenty of local knowledge of the time-periods which the TARDIS might now visit.
Rory is now in a position, in fact, to play the same sort of orienting role in historical stories as Barbara used to do thanks to her knowledge as a history teacher. Indeed, Moffat has already shown markedly more interest in historical stories than RTD did, with a total of four stories this season set either entirely or substantially in Earth's past (Victory of the Daleks, The Vampires of Venice, Vincent and the Doctor and The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang) - a hit-rate which is proportionately very close to that of the mid-1960s, when roughly every third story was a 'historical' as a matter of course. So Rory's new knowledge could well see quite a lot of action next season. Is it too much to ask, I wonder, that we might even finally get a 'pure' historical with that set-up, in which the essential drama revolves around Amy and the Doctor trying to get along in a society which is alien to them, but not to Rory? I'm not banking on it - new Who seems pretty wedded to the basic assumption that There Must Be Monsters, and of course I recognise that their absence raises problems around creating opportunities for heroics which don't also threaten to change the past. But I can dream.
Anyway, the phone-call at the end of the story strongly suggests that the Christmas special will give us an Egyptian goddess on the Orient Express... in space! Clearly not a pure historical, or even a straightforward historical in the sense of being set chronologically in Earth's past, then - but still by the sounds of it a story which will draw on not one but two periods of human history. With a Doctor I now firmly like, a multi-companion TARDIS team and a historically-well-informed companion on board, that should be pretty good watching.
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
This has been the first season finale from the hand of Moffat, so most of fandom was waiting with bated breath to find out if we'd finally seen the back of magic reset buttons, dei ex machinis and Total Bollocks Overdrive. My view on that is that actually we haven't really. There were plenty of things in this episode that didn't really make sense or stretched the suspension of disbelief - see this post (especially points 1 and 6) and this one (especially the fourth paragraph) for some of them. Specifically, we might well say that the Pandorica basically turns out to be a magic reset button, River at the point when she arrives at Amy's wedding is a dea ex machina, and the business with flying the Pandorica into the heart of the TARDIS to undo the effects of the explosion is Total Bollocks Overdrive.
But Doctor Who has always been full of nonsensical plot devices, lightly glossed over with a bit of hand-waving and technobabble. To me, the difference between Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat is more one of presentation than of content. Moffat's resolution was signalled better in advance than Davies' usually were, so that we have absorbed ideas such as 'time can be rewritten' gradually over the course of the season rather than suddenly being expected to swallow them at the last minute. His overall plot structure is more complex, which for me created more of a feeling that it must make sense at some level, and that if it didn't quite convince, then that must be my fault for not getting it rather than his for writing palpable nonsense. Indeed, most of the niggling questions which the finale raises can be answered. By comparison, RTD's didn't tend to leave questions of the type listed in the linked page at all: only questions along the lines of "What? I waited an entire season and all I got was X hokey plot device? Is that it?"
So overall it was a more satisfying finale than RTD used to produce, although still not entirely WTF-free. And Moffat has of course also left us with a tantalising list of unanswered questions to keep us on tenterhooks until next year. Who or what was it that made the TARDIS explode in the first place? Whose was the voice saying 'silence will fall'? Who was the 'good man' that River song killed; why; and who actually is she anyway? And what about that TARDIS-like ship in The Lodger: who built that and what happened to them? This is a new move which RTD didn't really make use of - unless, I suppose, you count the gradual unfolding over all four of his seasons of revelations about what happened in the Time War.
Meanwhile, back to this episode, I thought Matt Smith was superb again, right from his touching-without-being-sentimental monologue by little Amelia's bedside to his mad-as-fish wedding dancing. Little Amelia herself was great too, but I'm afraid that after a whole season I'm still quite lukewarm about grown-up Amy. I don't hate her, and she certainly has her moments. I liked her for most of the Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone two-parter, for example, where she managed to be inquisitive, intelligent, self-confident, unwise, brave, scared, noble and compassionate over the course of the story while still seeming like a coherent single character. But over the season as a whole I have found it difficult to relate to her as a rounded person. She does odd unpredictable things sometimes which don't really sit well with the rest of her behaviour, feeling as though they just pop up out of nowhere only to be forgotten again the next minute. Her attempt to seduce the Doctor at the end of Flesh and Stone is an example of that, but it's not the only one. In the Doctor, similar unpredictability is great, because it keeps us interested and helps to signal how alien he is. But in a companion, who is supposed to be our audience-identification figure, it becomes disconcerting. And I also don't think it was helped by Karen Gillan's tendency to pull rather weird pouty, stary faces and vogue-y poses all the time:
Not to worry, though, because I am growing immensely fond of Rory. I liked him already before The Big Bang. He's unapologetically normal where Amy feels like she considers herself to be special (without really convincing me of the fact), but he's still basically game to have a go at anything, especially for Amy's sake. I don't personally share in his admiration for Amy, but that's not a problem for me. We've seen at several points through the season, and especially in Amy's Choice, that what Rory thinks he wants is ordinary, settled security. But we've also seen him gradually discovering that he can enjoy experiences well beyond the ordinary, and at the very end of The Big Bang he has reached the point where he's every bit as enthusiastic as Amy about running off with the Doctor. So to me what that signals is that he was probably attracted to Amy all along partly because he subconsciously did long for excitement and adventure, and saw Amy as someone likely to provide those things. That's perfectly understandable, even if I find Amy a bit weird myself. And his final decision in The Big Bang is also a very satisfactory resolution of the adventure vs. domestic bliss debate which has been something of a theme of this season, especially in Amy's Choice and The Lodger. The answer we've ended up with is - why not have both? And that seems very positive to me.
So I'm totally thrilled to see Rory heading off into space, and indeed to hear on the rumour-vine that Arthur Darvill will be getting his name in the opening credits as a full-time companion next season. I'm keen to see more of him as a character, and have been hoping for a multiple-companion Team TARDIS set-up anyway ever since I got into the First Doctor era and realised how well it can work. I really think it allows much more scope for character-development, simply because there are more characters who are consistently present across more than one 45-minute story. I'd actually have trusted RTD to make better use of that potential than Steven Moffat, but then again we have seen a fairly convincing character-arc for Rory in the current season, if not so much for Amy - so maybe Moffat will do great things with it after all. It certainly seems like a wise move with the rather more alien Doctor that we now have in Eleven by comparison with Ten. I'd love to see more scenes in which his alienness is played off against Rory and Amy's humanity - him doing strange things which make them doubt whether they should trust him; him needing a human perspective to help resolve a situation, and so forth.
The other particularly interesting thing about Rory from my point of view is that he seemed to get back his full memories of his time as an Auton replica at the exact point when the Doctor re-appeared at his and Amy's wedding. (When the Doctor appears, he exclaims "It's the Doctor! How did we forget the Doctor? I was plastic! He was the stripper at my stag night!"). This is fantastic, because it should mean that he is now familiar with all of British history from AD 102 to 1996. OK, so he's only going to have the fairly limited perspective of what he saw or heard from his stand-point beside the Pandorica - but still, the pictures of the Pandorica throughout history suggest that both it and he did move about a fair bit during that period (even going backwards in time if the Egyptian and Classical Greek images are taken into account - though I don't think they need be). There's certainly every reason to hope that, without depriving Rory of his basic ordinary humanity, those memories should give him something of a depth of perspective that can be drawn on occasionally for dramatic purposes, and even better plenty of local knowledge of the time-periods which the TARDIS might now visit.
Rory is now in a position, in fact, to play the same sort of orienting role in historical stories as Barbara used to do thanks to her knowledge as a history teacher. Indeed, Moffat has already shown markedly more interest in historical stories than RTD did, with a total of four stories this season set either entirely or substantially in Earth's past (Victory of the Daleks, The Vampires of Venice, Vincent and the Doctor and The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang) - a hit-rate which is proportionately very close to that of the mid-1960s, when roughly every third story was a 'historical' as a matter of course. So Rory's new knowledge could well see quite a lot of action next season. Is it too much to ask, I wonder, that we might even finally get a 'pure' historical with that set-up, in which the essential drama revolves around Amy and the Doctor trying to get along in a society which is alien to them, but not to Rory? I'm not banking on it - new Who seems pretty wedded to the basic assumption that There Must Be Monsters, and of course I recognise that their absence raises problems around creating opportunities for heroics which don't also threaten to change the past. But I can dream.
Anyway, the phone-call at the end of the story strongly suggests that the Christmas special will give us an Egyptian goddess on the Orient Express... in space! Clearly not a pure historical, or even a straightforward historical in the sense of being set chronologically in Earth's past, then - but still by the sounds of it a story which will draw on not one but two periods of human history. With a Doctor I now firmly like, a multi-companion TARDIS team and a historically-well-informed companion on board, that should be pretty good watching.
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.