That's the Moffat vortex. It sucks you in and then murders characters you care about. It has no soul.
What We Know So Far
Season Four was a disappointing return to the bad habits of Season One. We had lots and lots of Christmas specials, lots of Russell T. Davies melodrama, and the return of The One of Whom We Do Not Speak. In short, it was a season of hairpulling, facepalming, and gnashing of teeth.
There were high points—"Silence in the Library" and its follow-up, "Forest of the Dead," were excellent, and I have an inexplicable fondness for Donna Noble as a companion. That's most of the list, though.
Fortunate news, weary souls! Season Five will mark the Davies departure, and Steven Moffat—the man responsible for most of the series' best episodes—is taking over as showrunner. The only question now, then, is whether he can pull off the same magic as the head writer instead of just an episode-by-episode basis. Because make no mistake: the head writer job is rough. There's way more pressure and way less mercy, and there's no "let someone else write it." Doctor Who runs thirteen episodes a season. If your writing stable only produces nine episodes, that's four episodes that need to be constructed from the ground up, even if you have no good ideas.
So how many good ideas does Moffat have?
There were high points—"Silence in the Library" and its follow-up, "Forest of the Dead," were excellent, and I have an inexplicable fondness for Donna Noble as a companion. That's most of the list, though.
Fortunate news, weary souls! Season Five will mark the Davies departure, and Steven Moffat—the man responsible for most of the series' best episodes—is taking over as showrunner. The only question now, then, is whether he can pull off the same magic as the head writer instead of just an episode-by-episode basis. Because make no mistake: the head writer job is rough. There's way more pressure and way less mercy, and there's no "let someone else write it." Doctor Who runs thirteen episodes a season. If your writing stable only produces nine episodes, that's four episodes that need to be constructed from the ground up, even if you have no good ideas.
So how many good ideas does Moffat have?
What We Found Out
Lots. Here we go, Moffat. Spoilers.
5.01, The Eleventh Hour: We've got a new title sequence! So that's interesting. The new Doc meets Amy Pond (who starts as an adorable little girl named Amelia and grows up to be a knockout redhead who dresses in costumes and kisses people at parties), encounters a crack in space-time (which seems an awful lot like it'll be the season's overarching arc), gets a brand new revamped TARDIS, and terrifies a race of eyeballs-with-armor into never nearing planet Earth again. So, in general, pretty standard Who fare, although the production quality has been visibly ramped up. I should point out, though, that this episode leaves several questions unanswered, among them: why did the TARDIS crash? How does Prisoner Zero know about "the Pandorica"? And, finally, why is Doc able to get up and walk around immediately after regeneration? Last time, he was on his butt for nearly a full episode before he could walk again, although that recuperation time would have been truncated by getting him some tea, if I remember right. Doc Eleven doesn't need the reboot time, apparently. Not that I'm complaining—though it's a transgression against past canon, it's not the show's worst by a long shot, and I won't whine about it too much if it means we get to skip another episode of those stupid Santas-with-flamethrowers. 4/5
5.02, The Beast Below: Doc and Amy arrive on the Starship UK, which is the entire nation of Britain soaring through space. The weird thing, though, is that the starship doesn't vibrate like it ought to, being, you know, a spaceship. Also, it's a police state where adults consciously ignore crying children. Doc notices this and starts investigating. Along the way, he meets Liz 10—that is to say, Elizabeth X, the current queen of the United Kingdom who is very suspicious of the way things are being run in her nation. Turns out that Starship UK is actually riding on the back of a star whale, one of a race of long-lived, gargantuan creatures who fly through space. This one came close enough to Great Britain for them to catch it and stick a big old spaceship on its back—a saddle on a horse, essentially, complete with a whip to keep the thing moving. Every citizen, upon adulthood, is told about the situation so they can vote properly: they choose whether to disapprove of the system, or agree tacitly by having their memories of it removed. Liz 10 is one of them: every few years, she rediscovers her country's dirty little secret, and has to choose between forgetting it and "abdicating," a short term for letting the star whale go free, killing all the people riding it. The system's been active for centuries.
(Because that's what humanity does when confronted with a benevolent space creature willing to save them from their dying planet: enslave it, torture it, and quietly forget about it. This is a wonderful break from Who's normal format. In fact, it's one of exactly three episodes*, by my count, wherein the driving conflict comes from humans being horrid to aliens.)
Doc thinks he needs to choose between freeing the whale—killing all the humans on its back—and turning the ancient, beautiful creature into a vegetable so it will no longer feel its torture. Amy, though, realizes the whale didn't arrive on Earth by accident; it volunteered to save the humans because it could hear their children screaming. Having realized this, she frees it. 4/5
5.03, Victory of the Daleks: In the midst of the Blitz in 1940s London, Winston Churchill has begun using Daleks as a weapon against the Germans. Doc discovers them and wigs out, certain they have a plan to cause trouble, despite Churchill's repeated protestations they're the invention of one of his underlings. Doc loses his temper and screams, "I am the Doctor and you are the Daleks!" which was exactly what the Daleks wanted, apparently, because their mystical Progenitor wouldn't let them make more Daleks without proof they were actually Daleks. (The general shape and the plunger for an arm didn't do it, apparently.) Because of Doc's testimony, they're able to make five new Daleks (now in color!). Doc immediately sets about trying to destroy them, until they force him to back off because the man who pretended to be their inventor is actually a robot, who is actually a bomb orders of magnitude more destructive than a nuke. (Just...just go with it.) Doc has to let the Daleks escape in order to save Earth.
Despite a cool overall feel and a story that finally made the Daleks something other than a repeatedly trounced "threat," the episode breaks down under scrutiny. What do I mean by this? I mean that WWII-era planes fly in space. And the Daleks enact a scheme that depends utterly on Doc saying exactly those words. And, most devastating of all, the Daleks built a robot.
The Daleks. Built. A robot.
The Daleks—who look like this—built. a. robot. A robot who looks exactly like a human.
In case this isn't coming across clearly enough, let's think: what are the prerequisites for building things? Maybe...I don't know...hands? 2/5
5.04, The Time of Angels: Doc and Amy get a time-delayed message from River Song (time travel is cool again!). They meet her and a team of SWAT priests (go with it) for a daring expedition into an alien mausoleum to chase a Weeping Angel. You heard right: they're looking for one of the terrifying stone monsters from "Blink," and they're doing it in a castle where the tombs are statues. Upon reaching the crashed ship with the Angel, Doc and River realize abruptly that the aliens who built this mausoleum were two-headed...but all the statues have only one head. They've walked into an army of Weeping Angels. 4/5
Callow note: a friend pointed out to me that this army of Weeping Angels is a canon transgression, because in the Angels look at each other. And they don't freeze. Oh, Moffat. How could you do this? This is Davies-level tomfoolery! Pick a rule and stick with it!
5.05, Flesh and Stone: Doc, River, Amy and their SWAT priests play an intense game of cat and mouse with at least 500 Weeping Angels. The Angels are in search of a power source so their army can be revived and storm the universe. The power source in question is a crack in time, precisely like the one Amy saw in her bedroom when she was a little girl, except this one is huge and everyone it swallows doesn't just cease to exist: they never existed at all (a mechanic we learn about by sacrificing every one of the SWAT priests to it). Meanwhile, Amy has been infected by a Weeping Angel because she looked one in the eye (a distinct breach of pre-established canon, by the way—dangerous move, Moffat) and the only way to keep it from consuming her entirely is for her to keep her eyes closed at all times. This forces her to move around the Weeping Angels—who only stop moving when you look at them, in a perverse game of red-light-green-light where you die as soon as you blink—with her eyes closed the whole time.
When the three major characters are finally safe, Doc moves to his next significant problem: closing the crack in time. Left open, it'll consume all the things, a situation he would rather avoid, being quite attached to the universe. The only way he can think of to close it is for it to consume him. He's the most complicated space-time event they have to hand—it would, he says, take every single one of the Weeping Angels to equal him in that particular quirk. Sure enough, come climax time, every Weeping Angel gets vacuumed into the crack. The episode closes with some ominous foreshadowing about River Song, and a just-happy-to-be-alive Amy trying to make out with the Doctor. This wouldn't be a problem, except she's supposed to be getting married the next morning. 5/5
5.06, The Vampires of Venice: In an urgent attempt to repair Amy's relationship with her endearingly bumbling fiancé, Rory, Doc takes the pair to 18th Century Venice for a pre-nuptial date. Everything is ruined when Amy gets kidnapped to serve as a vampire bride to a race of alien fish-people, who were displaced from their planet by another crack in time and are trying to turn Venice into their new home—by flooding it and converting all its females to their own race. Doc takes issue with their tactics and stops them, while Rory stumbles around trying with all his might to be as heroic as Doc. 2/5
5.07, Amy's Choice: Amy, Rory, and Doc find themselves caught in an Inception dilemma: they're dreaming, but they can't tell which scenario is a dream and which is real. In one, they're in the TARDIS, flying toward a freezing sun. In the other, they're five years in the future, Amy's pregnant, Rory has a ponytail, and a bunch of geriatrics have been possessed by aliens. It's all a complicated revenge scenario for a fellow calling himself the Dream Lord, who pops in and out to taunt our heroes, promising them that if they can figure out which world is the dream, he'll leave them alone. In the course of the conflict, Rory dies in the Five-Years-Forward timeline, forcing Amy to decide that that one must be the dream world. If it isn't, she doesn't care, because a world without Rory isn't one she wants. (Aww! Although...golly, those are some unfortunate implications.)
It seems that the Five-Years-Forward scenario was, in fact, the dream scenario, and the Dream Lord leaves. Doc quickly deduces, though, that it was all a double bluff: the TARDIS-is-flying-into-an-ice-star scenario was a dream, too. The Dream Lord is a projection of the Doctor's subconscious (more unfortunate implications), caused by some agitated alien spores. 4/5
5.08, The Hungry Earth: Some ten years in the future, humans are drilling where they have no business drilling, and it's causing the earth to swallow them up. It's already swallowed one man, and when Doc, Amy, and Rory arrive, it gulps Amy down, too. Doc discovers that it's not just pulling people down, though; someone else is coming up. They've only got twelve minutes to prepare, and somehow wire up their entire area with cameras in those twelve minutes, which...okay, whatever, I would struggle just to find a camera in twelve minutes, but I guess this works, too. The things that come up are lizard-people, part of homo reptilia, the race who possessed Earth before humans took over. Doc captures one of them, a female named Alaya who really really really wants a war between humans and lizards (and inexplicably speaks English—we can't even blame the TARDIS for this one, because a bunch of non-TARDIS users can understand her). Doc decides to mount a hostage exchange: all the people the lizard-folk took for their warrior. All he needs is for the rest of the drill team to keep Alaya not dead while he takes the TARDIS down for a talk with the lizard-people. 3/5
5.09, Cold Blood: Left alone, it takes about twenty minutes for one of the drill team to straight-up murder their hostage. Good ole' humans. Meanwhile, Doc, Amy, and a small group of humans try to negotiate with an ambassador of the lizard-people for a shared Earth. It seems to be going well until the lizard-people find out about Alaya dying, at which point everything goes down the toilet. To keep the races from all-out war, the lizard ambassador activates his city's security precautions (a massive, toxic fumigation), forcing all the hostile reptiles into hibernation. The humans, meanwhile, are in a great hurry to get back to the surface via the TARDIS.
Before Doc, Amy, and Rory can get in, though, they stumble upon another Crack in Time. Doc investigates it, determined to learn what's causing it, but a vengeful lizard-woman attacks and kills Rory.
Wait, what?
WHAT.
WHAT.
RORY DOES NOT DIE. THIS ISN'T EVEN A MOFFAT EPISODE.
Yes. Rory dies. There's a sudden onslaught of feels for which I was not in any way prepared, because Rory's corpse is swallowed by the time-crack, and Amy Pond forgets him. It's like an entirely different episode—one that mattered—intruded on this other, entirely forgettable one.
Guys, why is Rory dead? That's not...that's not even fair. 3/5 for the unremarkable Lizards Want Our Planet episode, but the five minutes of intrusion from the overarching plot is at least a 4/5
5.10, Vincent and the Doctor: Doc, trying desperately to heal the emotional wound Amy doesn't know she has, takes her on a tour of nice places, one of which is the Musée d'Orsay, where they see an alien in one of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. They skip back to 1890, where the meet Mr. Van Gogh himself. His village is being menaced by a monster invisible to the naked eye—except, for some reason, Vincent's, perhaps because he has synesthesia. They track down the monster and Vincent slays it accidentally. Peril solved, Doc takes Vincent Van Gogh for a visit to the Musée d'Orsay to see his own exhibit and hear how he's influenced the history of art. It's this clip, and if you never watch an episode of Who, watch this clip. 5/5
5.11, The Lodger: The TARDIS drops Doc unceremoniously and alone in Essex, jumping away with Amy still inside. Something in Essex is keeping it from landing, and Doc sets out to find out what. To do so, he moves in as a lodger downstairs from the source of the disturbance. He quickly establishes himself as the most Alpha of Alpha Males, up to and including being an outstanding football player despite never playing before. Which...is a bit annoying, really. Doc's superpower is his brain. He's not a prime physical specimen. Or, at least, he oughtn't be. Weaknesses, not superpowers, make characters interesting. It certainly irritates his new roommate, Craig, an overweight, shy, depressed fellow who's in love with his best friend...who is now starry-eyed over the Doctor.
Anyway, the Menacing Thing Upstairs is a broken time machine trying to launch itself. It's been kidnapping humans to function as pilots, but unfortunately they can't handle the psychic stress and all die. So Doc sics Sedentary Craig upon it, causing the time machine's circuits to lose their will to move. (It's not as bad as it sounds. He actually crashes the circuits by being in love.) This one rates a surprising 4/5
5.12, The Pandorica Opens: River Song invites Doc to Stonehenge, circa the age of the Roman Empire. There they find the Pandorica, the prison of the most terrifying unnamed monster in the history of the universe. It's opening, and every single villain Doc ever beat is coming to Earth, intending to control whatever is inside. Doc enlists the Romans to help defend the Pandorica, and one of them is...Rory? What?
River rides the TARDIS to Amy's house in Leadworth, where she realizes that everything Doc is doing is being simulated, somehow. The Romans—including Roman Rory—are all plastic replicas imbued with fake consciousnesses stolen from Amy's memories. The plastic!Romans' programming gets activated, and they capture Doc (while plastic!Rory tries to resist, and ends up shooting Amy) and bring him to the Pandorica. There, the entire Villain's Gallery arrives and explains they've formed an alliance to keep the Doctor from destroying the universe. Since the time-cracks are caused by the TARDIS exploding, and only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS, the obvious solution is to keep him away from it. Thus, it will not explode and the universe will not be destroyed.
But wait! River Song is already in the TARDIS, and she's landed on the date of its explosion, and—
5/5
5.13, The Big Bang: Using the vortex manipulator—cheap and nasty time travel for the stranded Time Lord—Doc runs a time-travel gambit to get himself out of the Pandorica. I can't figure out if I want to cry foul on this one, because it seems an awful lot like cheating. Admittedly, it's a very traditional time-traveler strategy, but it's been clearly ousted for the Doctor because he can't interfere in his own timeline. Even if the universe just got significantly smaller, and even if the rules on Doctor Who have the consistency of chunky pudding, these are some clear shenanigans.
After being released from the Pandorica, Doc puts Amy inside it, because it is "the perfect prison." It'll keep her in a state of suspended animation until they can get some of her living DNA onto it, so that it can restore her. As much as I'm attached to Amy Pond, this is a really handwavy explanation. Why is the Pandorica engineered to keep its prisoner preserved? The Villain's Gallery from last episode built it to contain Doc, didn't they? (Scratch that. Apparently, no, they didn't. Who built the Pandorica, then? And why did they build it this way?) For whatever reason, all Doc and Rory need to do is put her in the box, skip forward to when Amelia, her seven-year-old self, can visit it, and then release her. Doc primes his vortex manipulator and plastic!Rory flatly refuses to leave his girl.
But you'll be here for 2000 years, Doc says.
Yes, says Rory.
Oh, Rory Williams. You win. You win forever. It's a shame you'll always be in Doc's shadow, but regardless, you just took top spot for Most Admirable Males on this show.
Two thousand years later, Doc arrives and lures Amelia Pond to the museum exhibit of the Pandorica. She touches it, releasing Amy and reviving a Dalek. They run, hook up with Doc, and are about to be toasted by the Dalek lasers when plastic!Rory shows up and paralyzes it. They escape, barely, and run into future!Doc, who appears and drops dead after whispering something to present!Doc. Apparently he's got twelve minutes to live. He uses those minutes to find River Song, who was trapped in the TARDIS, which is currently exploding in every moment of the universe. He quickly explains that the Pandorica currently contains a sort of "memory" of the universe-as-it-was. If they can amplify it, they can reboot the whole universe—a second Big Bang. "How are we gonna do that?" ask the team. "Well," says Doc, and gets shot by the Dalek. He timejumps twelve minutes backward, and River Song kills the Dalek. TIMELY RESPONSE, RIVER. COULDN'T HAVE SHOT IT A FEW MINUTES AGO.
Just kidding, Doc isn't dead. He lied. With his twelve new minutes, he gets back to the Pandorica and wires it up to the vortex manipulator. He's going to pilot the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS, effectively apportioning the universe memory everywhere. Only one hitch: Doc has to go with it.
He says a tearful farewell to Amy and River—Rory doesn't warrant quite as many tears, because he has a Y chromosome—and tells Amy that when she wakes up, her parents will be with her. They were among the first to have been swallowed by the crack in her wall; that's why she grew up in a big, empty house. As long as she remembers them, the Second Big Bang will bring them back. Doc then flies into the explosion, hitting hard reset on the universe.
For Doc, it plays out a bit like rewinding through his life. He sees Amy—and even visits her in a scene we recognize from "Flesh and Stone," the importance of which we didn't realize until just now—and says more gut-wrenching farewells. His final moments take him back to the night he first met Amelia Pond. She's fallen asleep waiting for the Doctor to come back, so he carries her up to her room and speaks to her while she sleeps about how he came by the TARDIS, a thing simultaneously both old and new—he was just going to borrow it, really. But it's such a lovely blue.
And then Doc Eleven fades quietly into never-existence.
We move to the wedding day of Rory Williams and Amelia Pond. Amy has her parents back, and her wedding is wonderful, but there's something nagging at her. Something she's forgotten. When Rory gives her a blue journal—a present from River Song—Amy experiences it even more strongly. Finally, Rory mentions "that old wedding tradition" and everything clicks. Amy shouts to the nonexistent Doctor, "I remember you and you are late for my wedding!" And then she recites that old wedding tradition, and never has it sounded cooler: "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue."
Amy's magical memory brings Doc back from never existing, and he arrives just in time to dance. 4/5
Is it family-friendly? Often. Mild cursing, medium-to-moderate thematic content, but very tame, generally. 10+
Is it daring? Yes and no. This season vacillates a bit between exploring new frontiers and re-treading old ground—specifically in the case of Amy Pond. Where it treads old ground, though, it does so in new and exciting ways.
What's the rating? 7.5/10.
In short, this season almost functions like a reboot of the reboot. Everything is new and yet familiar: the TARDIS is remodeled, Doc has a new face, and he picks up a companion who's sassy, contrary, and already romantically involved (but still into him). It even plays something of the same tune of Season One, with a climax revolving around the hints and clues of the season—all of which lead up to the companion being central to the ticking of the universe. And yet, it doesn't suck. How about that, Moffat.
Geronimo.
*Those three episodes being this one, "Planet of the Ood," and "42."
(Because that's what humanity does when confronted with a benevolent space creature willing to save them from their dying planet: enslave it, torture it, and quietly forget about it. This is a wonderful break from Who's normal format. In fact, it's one of exactly three episodes*, by my count, wherein the driving conflict comes from humans being horrid to aliens.)
Doc thinks he needs to choose between freeing the whale—killing all the humans on its back—and turning the ancient, beautiful creature into a vegetable so it will no longer feel its torture. Amy, though, realizes the whale didn't arrive on Earth by accident; it volunteered to save the humans because it could hear their children screaming. Having realized this, she frees it. 4/5
5.03, Victory of the Daleks: In the midst of the Blitz in 1940s London, Winston Churchill has begun using Daleks as a weapon against the Germans. Doc discovers them and wigs out, certain they have a plan to cause trouble, despite Churchill's repeated protestations they're the invention of one of his underlings. Doc loses his temper and screams, "I am the Doctor and you are the Daleks!" which was exactly what the Daleks wanted, apparently, because their mystical Progenitor wouldn't let them make more Daleks without proof they were actually Daleks. (The general shape and the plunger for an arm didn't do it, apparently.) Because of Doc's testimony, they're able to make five new Daleks (now in color!). Doc immediately sets about trying to destroy them, until they force him to back off because the man who pretended to be their inventor is actually a robot, who is actually a bomb orders of magnitude more destructive than a nuke. (Just...just go with it.) Doc has to let the Daleks escape in order to save Earth.
Despite a cool overall feel and a story that finally made the Daleks something other than a repeatedly trounced "threat," the episode breaks down under scrutiny. What do I mean by this? I mean that WWII-era planes fly in space. And the Daleks enact a scheme that depends utterly on Doc saying exactly those words. And, most devastating of all, the Daleks built a robot.
The Daleks. Built. A robot.
The Daleks—who look like this—built. a. robot. A robot who looks exactly like a human.
In case this isn't coming across clearly enough, let's think: what are the prerequisites for building things? Maybe...I don't know...hands? 2/5
5.04, The Time of Angels: Doc and Amy get a time-delayed message from River Song (time travel is cool again!). They meet her and a team of SWAT priests (go with it) for a daring expedition into an alien mausoleum to chase a Weeping Angel. You heard right: they're looking for one of the terrifying stone monsters from "Blink," and they're doing it in a castle where the tombs are statues. Upon reaching the crashed ship with the Angel, Doc and River realize abruptly that the aliens who built this mausoleum were two-headed...but all the statues have only one head. They've walked into an army of Weeping Angels. 4/5
Callow note: a friend pointed out to me that this army of Weeping Angels is a canon transgression, because in the Angels look at each other. And they don't freeze. Oh, Moffat. How could you do this? This is Davies-level tomfoolery! Pick a rule and stick with it!
5.05, Flesh and Stone: Doc, River, Amy and their SWAT priests play an intense game of cat and mouse with at least 500 Weeping Angels. The Angels are in search of a power source so their army can be revived and storm the universe. The power source in question is a crack in time, precisely like the one Amy saw in her bedroom when she was a little girl, except this one is huge and everyone it swallows doesn't just cease to exist: they never existed at all (a mechanic we learn about by sacrificing every one of the SWAT priests to it). Meanwhile, Amy has been infected by a Weeping Angel because she looked one in the eye (a distinct breach of pre-established canon, by the way—dangerous move, Moffat) and the only way to keep it from consuming her entirely is for her to keep her eyes closed at all times. This forces her to move around the Weeping Angels—who only stop moving when you look at them, in a perverse game of red-light-green-light where you die as soon as you blink—with her eyes closed the whole time.
When the three major characters are finally safe, Doc moves to his next significant problem: closing the crack in time. Left open, it'll consume all the things, a situation he would rather avoid, being quite attached to the universe. The only way he can think of to close it is for it to consume him. He's the most complicated space-time event they have to hand—it would, he says, take every single one of the Weeping Angels to equal him in that particular quirk. Sure enough, come climax time, every Weeping Angel gets vacuumed into the crack. The episode closes with some ominous foreshadowing about River Song, and a just-happy-to-be-alive Amy trying to make out with the Doctor. This wouldn't be a problem, except she's supposed to be getting married the next morning. 5/5
5.06, The Vampires of Venice: In an urgent attempt to repair Amy's relationship with her endearingly bumbling fiancé, Rory, Doc takes the pair to 18th Century Venice for a pre-nuptial date. Everything is ruined when Amy gets kidnapped to serve as a vampire bride to a race of alien fish-people, who were displaced from their planet by another crack in time and are trying to turn Venice into their new home—by flooding it and converting all its females to their own race. Doc takes issue with their tactics and stops them, while Rory stumbles around trying with all his might to be as heroic as Doc. 2/5
5.07, Amy's Choice: Amy, Rory, and Doc find themselves caught in an Inception dilemma: they're dreaming, but they can't tell which scenario is a dream and which is real. In one, they're in the TARDIS, flying toward a freezing sun. In the other, they're five years in the future, Amy's pregnant, Rory has a ponytail, and a bunch of geriatrics have been possessed by aliens. It's all a complicated revenge scenario for a fellow calling himself the Dream Lord, who pops in and out to taunt our heroes, promising them that if they can figure out which world is the dream, he'll leave them alone. In the course of the conflict, Rory dies in the Five-Years-Forward timeline, forcing Amy to decide that that one must be the dream world. If it isn't, she doesn't care, because a world without Rory isn't one she wants. (Aww! Although...golly, those are some unfortunate implications.)
It seems that the Five-Years-Forward scenario was, in fact, the dream scenario, and the Dream Lord leaves. Doc quickly deduces, though, that it was all a double bluff: the TARDIS-is-flying-into-an-ice-star scenario was a dream, too. The Dream Lord is a projection of the Doctor's subconscious (more unfortunate implications), caused by some agitated alien spores. 4/5
5.08, The Hungry Earth: Some ten years in the future, humans are drilling where they have no business drilling, and it's causing the earth to swallow them up. It's already swallowed one man, and when Doc, Amy, and Rory arrive, it gulps Amy down, too. Doc discovers that it's not just pulling people down, though; someone else is coming up. They've only got twelve minutes to prepare, and somehow wire up their entire area with cameras in those twelve minutes, which...okay, whatever, I would struggle just to find a camera in twelve minutes, but I guess this works, too. The things that come up are lizard-people, part of homo reptilia, the race who possessed Earth before humans took over. Doc captures one of them, a female named Alaya who really really really wants a war between humans and lizards (and inexplicably speaks English—we can't even blame the TARDIS for this one, because a bunch of non-TARDIS users can understand her). Doc decides to mount a hostage exchange: all the people the lizard-folk took for their warrior. All he needs is for the rest of the drill team to keep Alaya not dead while he takes the TARDIS down for a talk with the lizard-people. 3/5
5.09, Cold Blood: Left alone, it takes about twenty minutes for one of the drill team to straight-up murder their hostage. Good ole' humans. Meanwhile, Doc, Amy, and a small group of humans try to negotiate with an ambassador of the lizard-people for a shared Earth. It seems to be going well until the lizard-people find out about Alaya dying, at which point everything goes down the toilet. To keep the races from all-out war, the lizard ambassador activates his city's security precautions (a massive, toxic fumigation), forcing all the hostile reptiles into hibernation. The humans, meanwhile, are in a great hurry to get back to the surface via the TARDIS.
Before Doc, Amy, and Rory can get in, though, they stumble upon another Crack in Time. Doc investigates it, determined to learn what's causing it, but a vengeful lizard-woman attacks and kills Rory.
Wait, what?
WHAT.
WHAT.
RORY DOES NOT DIE. THIS ISN'T EVEN A MOFFAT EPISODE.
Yes. Rory dies. There's a sudden onslaught of feels for which I was not in any way prepared, because Rory's corpse is swallowed by the time-crack, and Amy Pond forgets him. It's like an entirely different episode—one that mattered—intruded on this other, entirely forgettable one.
Guys, why is Rory dead? That's not...that's not even fair. 3/5 for the unremarkable Lizards Want Our Planet episode, but the five minutes of intrusion from the overarching plot is at least a 4/5
5.10, Vincent and the Doctor: Doc, trying desperately to heal the emotional wound Amy doesn't know she has, takes her on a tour of nice places, one of which is the Musée d'Orsay, where they see an alien in one of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. They skip back to 1890, where the meet Mr. Van Gogh himself. His village is being menaced by a monster invisible to the naked eye—except, for some reason, Vincent's, perhaps because he has synesthesia. They track down the monster and Vincent slays it accidentally. Peril solved, Doc takes Vincent Van Gogh for a visit to the Musée d'Orsay to see his own exhibit and hear how he's influenced the history of art. It's this clip, and if you never watch an episode of Who, watch this clip. 5/5
5.11, The Lodger: The TARDIS drops Doc unceremoniously and alone in Essex, jumping away with Amy still inside. Something in Essex is keeping it from landing, and Doc sets out to find out what. To do so, he moves in as a lodger downstairs from the source of the disturbance. He quickly establishes himself as the most Alpha of Alpha Males, up to and including being an outstanding football player despite never playing before. Which...is a bit annoying, really. Doc's superpower is his brain. He's not a prime physical specimen. Or, at least, he oughtn't be. Weaknesses, not superpowers, make characters interesting. It certainly irritates his new roommate, Craig, an overweight, shy, depressed fellow who's in love with his best friend...who is now starry-eyed over the Doctor.
Anyway, the Menacing Thing Upstairs is a broken time machine trying to launch itself. It's been kidnapping humans to function as pilots, but unfortunately they can't handle the psychic stress and all die. So Doc sics Sedentary Craig upon it, causing the time machine's circuits to lose their will to move. (It's not as bad as it sounds. He actually crashes the circuits by being in love.) This one rates a surprising 4/5
5.12, The Pandorica Opens: River Song invites Doc to Stonehenge, circa the age of the Roman Empire. There they find the Pandorica, the prison of the most terrifying unnamed monster in the history of the universe. It's opening, and every single villain Doc ever beat is coming to Earth, intending to control whatever is inside. Doc enlists the Romans to help defend the Pandorica, and one of them is...Rory? What?
River rides the TARDIS to Amy's house in Leadworth, where she realizes that everything Doc is doing is being simulated, somehow. The Romans—including Roman Rory—are all plastic replicas imbued with fake consciousnesses stolen from Amy's memories. The plastic!Romans' programming gets activated, and they capture Doc (while plastic!Rory tries to resist, and ends up shooting Amy) and bring him to the Pandorica. There, the entire Villain's Gallery arrives and explains they've formed an alliance to keep the Doctor from destroying the universe. Since the time-cracks are caused by the TARDIS exploding, and only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS, the obvious solution is to keep him away from it. Thus, it will not explode and the universe will not be destroyed.
But wait! River Song is already in the TARDIS, and she's landed on the date of its explosion, and—
5/5
5.13, The Big Bang: Using the vortex manipulator—cheap and nasty time travel for the stranded Time Lord—Doc runs a time-travel gambit to get himself out of the Pandorica. I can't figure out if I want to cry foul on this one, because it seems an awful lot like cheating. Admittedly, it's a very traditional time-traveler strategy, but it's been clearly ousted for the Doctor because he can't interfere in his own timeline. Even if the universe just got significantly smaller, and even if the rules on Doctor Who have the consistency of chunky pudding, these are some clear shenanigans.
After being released from the Pandorica, Doc puts Amy inside it, because it is "the perfect prison." It'll keep her in a state of suspended animation until they can get some of her living DNA onto it, so that it can restore her. As much as I'm attached to Amy Pond, this is a really handwavy explanation. Why is the Pandorica engineered to keep its prisoner preserved? The Villain's Gallery from last episode built it to contain Doc, didn't they? (Scratch that. Apparently, no, they didn't. Who built the Pandorica, then? And why did they build it this way?) For whatever reason, all Doc and Rory need to do is put her in the box, skip forward to when Amelia, her seven-year-old self, can visit it, and then release her. Doc primes his vortex manipulator and plastic!Rory flatly refuses to leave his girl.
But you'll be here for 2000 years, Doc says.
Yes, says Rory.
Oh, Rory Williams. You win. You win forever. It's a shame you'll always be in Doc's shadow, but regardless, you just took top spot for Most Admirable Males on this show.
Two thousand years later, Doc arrives and lures Amelia Pond to the museum exhibit of the Pandorica. She touches it, releasing Amy and reviving a Dalek. They run, hook up with Doc, and are about to be toasted by the Dalek lasers when plastic!Rory shows up and paralyzes it. They escape, barely, and run into future!Doc, who appears and drops dead after whispering something to present!Doc. Apparently he's got twelve minutes to live. He uses those minutes to find River Song, who was trapped in the TARDIS, which is currently exploding in every moment of the universe. He quickly explains that the Pandorica currently contains a sort of "memory" of the universe-as-it-was. If they can amplify it, they can reboot the whole universe—a second Big Bang. "How are we gonna do that?" ask the team. "Well," says Doc, and gets shot by the Dalek. He timejumps twelve minutes backward, and River Song kills the Dalek. TIMELY RESPONSE, RIVER. COULDN'T HAVE SHOT IT A FEW MINUTES AGO.
Just kidding, Doc isn't dead. He lied. With his twelve new minutes, he gets back to the Pandorica and wires it up to the vortex manipulator. He's going to pilot the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS, effectively apportioning the universe memory everywhere. Only one hitch: Doc has to go with it.
He says a tearful farewell to Amy and River—Rory doesn't warrant quite as many tears, because he has a Y chromosome—and tells Amy that when she wakes up, her parents will be with her. They were among the first to have been swallowed by the crack in her wall; that's why she grew up in a big, empty house. As long as she remembers them, the Second Big Bang will bring them back. Doc then flies into the explosion, hitting hard reset on the universe.
For Doc, it plays out a bit like rewinding through his life. He sees Amy—and even visits her in a scene we recognize from "Flesh and Stone," the importance of which we didn't realize until just now—and says more gut-wrenching farewells. His final moments take him back to the night he first met Amelia Pond. She's fallen asleep waiting for the Doctor to come back, so he carries her up to her room and speaks to her while she sleeps about how he came by the TARDIS, a thing simultaneously both old and new—he was just going to borrow it, really. But it's such a lovely blue.
And then Doc Eleven fades quietly into never-existence.
We move to the wedding day of Rory Williams and Amelia Pond. Amy has her parents back, and her wedding is wonderful, but there's something nagging at her. Something she's forgotten. When Rory gives her a blue journal—a present from River Song—Amy experiences it even more strongly. Finally, Rory mentions "that old wedding tradition" and everything clicks. Amy shouts to the nonexistent Doctor, "I remember you and you are late for my wedding!" And then she recites that old wedding tradition, and never has it sounded cooler: "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue."
Amy's magical memory brings Doc back from never existing, and he arrives just in time to dance. 4/5
What's Good?
Oh, so much.
This season takes a noticeable uptick in quality from the last several seasons. Yes, there are still issues. But there are so few it's easy to overlook.
We'll start with the basics. Amy Pond is, in a sense, a Moffat-ized reboot of Rose Tyler: she's sassy, rebellious, and her primary motivating factor is "I want to be with the Doctor!" Also, really good-looking. The thing is, though, that this version of Rose Tyler is so much better. Yes, her primary motivator is to be with the Doctor, and yes, there's some squicky romantic tension there that I could really do without since Amy is, oh, I don't know, engaged to be married. But it's not her only driving force. The problem with Rose was that she didn't exist except as an extension to the Doctor; she was shallow, one-dimensional, and obnoxious. Worst of all, Doc loved her.
Amy's different. Though she shares all sorts of character traits, she's motivated by more than her love for Doc, and she's terrifically complicated. She has trusts issues out the wazoo (this whole season is, arguably, the story of her learning to trust the Doctor), but she works through them.
Next is Rory—the Moffat-ized version of Mickey. He's bumbling, undeserving, and pales in comparison to the Doctor. But he's just better than Mickey ever was. He's a likable guy, he means well, and clearly he was doing something right if he managed to get Amy to say yes to him. Thing is, he's not worthy of her when we start out; by the end of the season, he's one of the worthiest human beings in the history of the world. Heck, it's not that he doesn't deserve Amy by the end of the season. I'm forced to wonder if Amy deserves him.
Finally, we have the Doctor himself. Unlike past iterations, Matt Smith has very little nonsense to overcome when interacting with his character. He fills the shoes almost instantly. There's no friction when he slides into the Doctor's signature offbeat style. Added to that, this version of the Doctor is even more palatable than his last iterations. He doesn't always have the answers. He's not always the ace. (Alright, most of the time he's the ace, but it's less often this time around.) He screws up—there are whole plotlines that happen just because the Doctor wasn't paying attention, or let his emotions get the best of him, or didn't have all the information. In short, folks, Doc is more human now.
What's Bad?
So very, very little. I'll confess that the show still slides into melodrama sometimes. And there're still shades of Deus ex Doctorus slithering around here, making things slightly less edible.
The major problem with this season is the Deus. Admittedly, this time around, it's not ex Doctorus. But we must acknowledge that at the end of it all, all the problems are solved very easily, and it's because the universe revolves around Amy Pond's memory. Sure, there are hints. There's buildup. But the solution to this season's myth arc still evades consequences.
Added to that is that Amy Pond is kind of a reprehensible human being sometimes. I get that the Doctor's all kinds of sexy, but she flings herself at him on multiple occasions. She invites him to kiss her (mild spoiler) at her wedding.
Finally, it cannot be denied that a handful of these episodes are intensely forgettable. That's a small number, though, and even when this season is bad, it's not that bad.
So, then...
Is it quality? Finally, I can say this without reservation: yes.Is it family-friendly? Often. Mild cursing, medium-to-moderate thematic content, but very tame, generally. 10+
Is it daring? Yes and no. This season vacillates a bit between exploring new frontiers and re-treading old ground—specifically in the case of Amy Pond. Where it treads old ground, though, it does so in new and exciting ways.
What's the rating? 7.5/10.
In short, this season almost functions like a reboot of the reboot. Everything is new and yet familiar: the TARDIS is remodeled, Doc has a new face, and he picks up a companion who's sassy, contrary, and already romantically involved (but still into him). It even plays something of the same tune of Season One, with a climax revolving around the hints and clues of the season—all of which lead up to the companion being central to the ticking of the universe. And yet, it doesn't suck. How about that, Moffat.
Geronimo.
*Those three episodes being this one, "Planet of the Ood," and "42."
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