The Pandorica Opens/The Big BangI really enjoyed this last two-part story, much to my surprise, as I was prepared to be disappointed by the show’s finale, but its actually left me suffering from withdrawal symptoms due to the absence of any new episodes to come. Its also given me a bit of a change of heart regarding the direction of the show, and despite five uninspiring episodes for me that I’d very happily forget about, there’s been a few that I really liked, some of which were written by producer Steven Moffat.
In The Pandorica Opens I thought that Amy was going to be revealed as the ‘greatest threat ever to the universe’, well, she is slightly irritating and perhaps that’s a sign of an even greater nuisance lurking below the surface. The big threat was of course the Doctor, at least he is in the minds of his enemies, which makes sense, but Moffat’s decision to bring together so many disparate adversary’s left me feeling unconvinced of an alliance between any of these warmongering alien species, especially as they’re often hell-bent on being the ‘sole supreme beings’ in the galaxy.
It was a good story with a nice build-up to its cliff-hanger ending, and the fantasy of Amy’s childhood mind made a great plot about the trapping of the Doctor. There was a clever reintroduction of Rory as an alien counterfeit with a human personality, which led to his 2000 year vigil of guarding Amy’s incarcerated body, an idea which seemed to tap into the fairytale sensibility that Moffat wanted, and I think this underlying design is something he succeeded with as we got towards the end of the series.
The Big Bang episode was a great romp, with some enjoyable nonsense and plenty of comedy from Matt, which has been the saving grace so often in this series. I loved the way they worked in the silly excuse of having him hold a mop and wear a Fezz on his head, but surely there’s a major plot hole in his time jumping escape from the Pandorica Box? Lets see, he’s trapped in the box at the end of the first-part, but in the second part he appears from the future by using a hand-held time device, and gives his sonic screw-driver to Rory with instructions to open the box and let him out, and then he disappears back to the future. Rory opens the box, lets the Doc out, (and now places Amy’s dead body inside where she will be kept in a life-saving stasis). The newly released Doctor now discovers a hand-held time device lying on the ground, (the same device that his future self has just used to travel backwards and forwards through time with), and he now uses the device to jump forward to the future.
But wait a minute, this doesn’t make any sense, so his future self came back and freed him, but how did he ever get to have a future self that was free to do that in the first instance? He was trapped in a box remember, with no way out. I assume we are meant to either suspend our disbelief and accept this kind of artistic license, or perhaps its a time travelling conundrum that I’m just not grasping, but either way it was a fun episode, and its slightly stupid but charming manner won me over.
At the end of this series everyone appeared to be saying their goodbyes, time and events have all been properly restored, Rory is no longer erased from existence but is back in flesh and blood, so he and Amy finally get married, and the Doctor dances to a cheesy song at their wedding reception. Later as the Doc heads off for the Tardis Amy and Rory come racing after him to say goodbye, their story is over, Amy was integral to the big plot and seems now to have concluded her story, and at this point I was more than happy to let her go, it really felt like time to move on. But after shouting goodbye she grabbed Rory and pushed her way into the Tardis, and I groaned, why, oh why do we still need them as his companions?
The Doc really should have some kind of eject button to get rid of passengers who overstay their welcome.
I think the template of the fairytale theme for the programme’s scripts still needs longer to mature, but I particularly got the sense of it’s shape in the concluding story and the way in which it linked back to the introductory episode. So many other shows or films can also be broken down and made to read like a fairytale, so will consciously taking Dr Who in this direction make it any more unique, or will it just become more and more contentious with each new episode. You can easily analyse certain episodes into fairytale terms, so is anything new actually going on, or is it just that all invented stories of fantasy are fairytales at heart.
In the first story about Amy Pond she is mostly a solitary figure inside her large house, which has a mysterious room harbouring an unseen presence, and this remains there as she grows up daydreaming about her fantasy friend the raggedy Doctor. It’s a similar story to the tale of the princess locked in a tower who waits a long time to be rescued, after many years a prince from a far away place comes along, and he enables her to escape from whatever mysterious power has kept her there till that day. In the unassuming character of Craig Owens, played by James Corden in The Lodger, he has an unrequited love for Sophie, a woman he secretly worships, but she is someone who can only see him as a friend, and she continually fails to notice his real feelings for her. At the climax of the story the truth of Craig’s love finally comes out, which leads Sophie to kiss him, and this in turn brings about a transformation around them that causes the perception filter of an alien ship to stop working, and the fake surroundings around them disappear. Craig and Sophie’s relationship is in essence the tale of the frog and the princess.
The episode about the Queen and her Kingdom living unwittingly on the back of a whale are immediately recognisable as a fairytale, one which for me makes for a very Terry Pratchett kind of fantasy, and I wonder what literature and film sources might have appealed to producer Moffat as suitable fuel for his vision of this family show masquerading as a children’s show, one which in reality has a deep-rooted grasp over its older audience, and could it all just get messy. We might end up with Harry Potter, or even The Never Ending Story as an inspiration, which with it’s cute theme song could provoke an excitably ambitious person working at the BBC to persuade the producer to get an ‘80’s Limahl clone to join the Doc as a companion, and then the show would really be in serious trouble, and it’s only a short road from fairytale to panto, as many a TV soap-opera actor will tell you.
