Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Saturday, 26 June 2010

DO NOT READ THIS POST EITHER...

...unless you have seen the series finale to Doctor Who or don't care about knowing the ending.

Mega-spoilers ahead.

As high concept science fiction goes it doesn't get much better than this. Creating a new and gradually collapsing universe in which there is one sun (which isn't a sun at all) and one planet with a moon and nothing else is just what happened between the end of The Pandorica Opens and the start of Big Bang. Amy/Amelia as everyone has suspected all along turned out to be the key.

The new version of the Universe was established and described, eight year old Amelia was shown as crucial because she could remember the stars, a visit to the museum revealed what appeared to be fossilised Daleks  and the Pandorica, a mysterious unseen figure kept interacting with Amelia, leaving cryptic instructions to follow, Amelia turned out to be able to open the Pandorica by touching it (for reasons explained later) and when she did it was the older Amy inside not the Doctor.
And that was just the pre-credit sequence.
The episode zipped along at an unbelievable pace, throwing in multiple versions of the time-jumping doctor, explaining away apparent continuity errors in earlier episodes, establishing stable time-loops and using a collision between the exploding Tardis and the indestructable Pandorica to reboot the entire Universe.
Oh yes, almost forgot, there was also drama, emotion, a 2000 year vigil by the Auton Rory, the resurrection of the real Rory (and Amy's previously unseen and forgotten parents) and a wedding thrown in.

There were also enough loose ends and hints to set up the new season. All in all quite exceptional.

2 comments:

arnie said...

I didn't see the series so can't comment. However, the <a href="http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2010/06/28/dr-who-and-the-deus-ex-machina-of-doom/>IanVisits blog</a> disagrees with you more than somewhat.

Bob Hale said...

Having read many of the reviews he's right about one thing. He is being controversial. Almost everyone who has reviewed it loved it.
Each to his own though.

On www.tv.com when the final episode of Ashes to Ashes aired all but one of the people who commented gave it between 9.5 and 10. One gave it 1 and said the American ending was better. I though the American ending was one of the worst episodes I've ever seen of anything.

And he's entirely missed the point of this Doctor Who series finale where it wasn't the big Universe shattering events that were important, it was the small human emotions. The big events were just the backdrop.