MAD, November 14: Favourite episode – The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
This finale is EVERYTHING.
Feel free to delete the rambling.
At the heart of it, you will find the core of Amy and Rory’s relationship, the apex of the Doctor and River’s dynamic, the key to Amy and the Doctor’s bond -they literally unlocked each other, the TARDIS’s being woven into the fabric of the Universe.
It has the Doctor being a trickster and a wizard and a titan; it has River being Isis and putting back together her boxed husband; it has Amy becoming Cégeste and acknowledging the Doctor as her creator as well as her best friend, taking her first step out of her fairy tale to become herself creator and writer of the Doctor; it has Rory becoming a legend and a machine; it has Moffat tying ALL the metaphorical and not so metaphorical knots –I lost my mind at the Flesh and Stone explanation.
It has the show finally remembering a time machine allows plenty of timey-wimeyness, PLENTY. And playing all the cards: messages and phone calls across time and space, paradoxes and loops and alternative timelines. It has a fez. Actually I don’t care about the fez, but I care about the Doctor being in the box, out of the box and back in the box, and then nowhere, and finally appearing out of nowhere in a blue box of bluest blue.
The cinematography is also one of my favourite, of all seasons. Often, shows lack distinctive cinematography, but the Pandorica scenes were aesthetically new and baffling. I thought : that’s the way I want the show to look like, that’s Doctor Who.
It has what remains for me THE speech of Eleven, all bluff and bravado and craziness and trickiness and camp. It has a wedding, a wonderful, fantastic, extraordinary wedding, a grand manifesto refusing angst and tragic endings. It has Liz X and Van Gogh and Churchill and Dorium and Daleks and Cybermen and Romans. And it still makes sense.
It has emotion, humour, adventure, poetry, mystery, boldness, genre-savviness, cheekiness… I could go on forever. For me, these finale episodes are the closest to perfection written for New Who. That’s when I fell in love with Moffat’s writing.
-Loved the Star Wars atmosphere of the first part.
-Clara is the Doctor’s babysitter. It’s official now. I get a really non-romantic feel… It doesn’t suit my theories. Also, I have a feeling she definitely will be my companion.
-Matt & Jenna’s acting was flawless.
-Their relationship felt very ‘classic who’ to me. How great is that!
-The plot was a bit… It could have been more elaborated. Problem of pace between Clara's backstory and the rest of the episode.
-COULD YOU PLEASE STOP REPEATING THE SONG HAS ENDED!?
-Very interesting answer to the God Complex. The God/Vampire! Mirror, mirror… Moffat is unknotting the Lonely God trope and I LOVE IT!
-Jenna Louise Coleman was amazing. She's good, REALLY good.
-MATT SMITH WAS JUST… He just is the Doctor, both classic and very much his own. Perfect.
-Moffat era and excellent child actors: a love story.
-SUSAN!
-Cinematography: less pretty than last episode, but very good. It was bound to happen; CGI is always a bit campy (Don't hit)…
-Another bike. Okay, my tag for them will be Dastardly and Muttley.
-Each time Matt Smith said Akhaten I was drooling; you're like a modern Trevor Howard, aren't you?
-I may have forgotten to mention the Hubert Reeves moment of Eleven describing the birth of the Universe : it was a very beautiful poetic touching the-world-is-awesome scientific-ish scene.
