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Happy Fourth, everyone! I seem to have come across a spare bit of time and nothing in particular to do with it, so it must be time for me to overanalyze some television.
I think I'll start with the Pandorica Opens again, because this is going to get long and complicated, regardless of where I start, so I might as well start in the first half rather than the second. I guess... okay, thesis sentence: The finale was good, entertaining, and actually fairly satisfying, from a distance. But the way that it breaks and disregards certain things is going to slowly drive me nuts.
Things that are/will be driving me nuts for the foreseeable future, in relative chronological order:
Number one: The VanGogh painting. No one could look at that, know it's for the Doctor, and not know what it means. It's a gosh-darn picture of the TARDIS exploding. I mean, really, it's not like VanGogh was a dadaist or something (actually, come to think of it, the TARDIS is a bit like found art, perhaps the Doctor is a dadaist...) In order to know that it's for the Doctor, you have to recognize the TARDIS. If you recognize the TARDIS, you see that it is exploding. I don't understand why this message couldn't have been put into words. (Except that, as a prop, it was probably fun to make, and it is fun to look at. So I can consider it justified. But in that case, just change your bloody throw-away lines about not "understanding." It's this kind of sloppiness that... eventually gets a whole lot worse.) Also, I get that VanGogh can see things that others can't, but he's not psychic. I don't buy that he could look into the future, through the vortex, and see the TARDIS exploding long enough before the explosion to... agh, time travel!
Number two: the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. Okay, so you have the oldest planet ever, and a member of one of the oldest civilizations in the universe. One that, though it is hopelessly stuffy and bureaucratic, produced at least three people with an ounce of wanderlust and time machines. To say nothing of the period when TARDIS time travel was new and novel and people probably did things just for kicks, like visiting the oldest planet ever (which is probably why the society had to crack down on people having fun). This entire scene is just... the most bizarre, tiny, annoying deus ex machina. Also it's an excuse for River Song to look edgy and cool, and we all know I am not in favour of that. And I cannot be the only person who was hoping what the mountains really said was "We apologize for the inconvenience." (ALSO how does River Song know a language no one has been able to translate until the TARDIS?)
Number two and a half: It is, however, shortly afterwards when the Doctor lands in the Roman camp after following the coordinates that I realize that this whole thing just reeks of Xanatos Gambit. I really, really super want to believe that River is toying with the Doctor here. Because where would she get the coordinates without somehow getting caught up in the Alliance's plot herself. I'm sure there could easily be a rational explanation, but since it's not delved into I really want to go "Ah! Plot point!" She's the one that brings him to the trap. (This will drive me nuts because it'd actually be pretty awesome if it was true, but it requires so much hand-waving of other things...)
Number three: All right, I was going to complain about the Pandorica being so easy to break into with the sonic screwdriver, but we just took care of that with the whole "Anyone can break into a prison" thing, which I wasn't paying attention to the first time around. This is me, crossing a number off of my list. (Still way too much of a shortcut, though.) Since I have a number here, though, and no complaining... I think what's really itching at me about these two episodes is that there's a certain of element of time still being written, rather than unwritten or rewritten. This series of events... it's colossal, universal, and contemporary to every point in space and time, which is a huge, gigantic, brain-breaking paradox. One that I'm happy to buy into for the sake of entertainment, but a huge, gigantic, brain-breaking paradox nonetheless. One of the main premises of Doctor Who is that time is already written, more or less, and so you can travel about and know exactly where it is you're going (more or less... provided you're not the Doctor). Little details change when they're observed, but on the whole you generally can't go about changing history entirely. Yet here we are, in the midst of an event that affects the whole of reality, that has been in progress in one way or another for quite some time, broadcasting its presence to the whole of creation, and this is the first we've heard about it, because it's been building up and culminating in the background, somehow parallel to the rest of the universe. Like someone went back and recorded a double-exposure over the whole thing, and now we've got this Pandorica and this explosion that never were there before... It's very unsettling, because it's such a betrayal of the rules. (But more on this later...)
I... actually I've kind of run out of numbers. I was writing this while re-watching the pair of episodes, and somewhere into the very beginning of the Big Bang I kind of gave up on nitpicking, because there's a point where the Doctor Who Nonsense finally trips over the line into Magical Nonsense. Somewhere in the end of The Pandorica Opens, or in the beginning of the Big Bang, we jumped up out of time travel and technobabble and landed in magic land. The point, for me, was somewhere around the sonic screwdriver sparking when it crossed its own timeline, but Amy not like, exploding when she patted her past self on the head. I accepted long ago in this season that the timeline was too far gone for the Reapers to have gotten involved. They were probably one of the first things wiped out in the explosion. But... something, at least? A little static shock? Anything? Just as a nod to continuity of fake science? (I'm big on that...) It really makes me want to keep thinking something is wrong with Amy, beyond her being "special" in that her memories can recreate the entire universe.
And there... there is my big problem with this. Because these two episodes (and, by extension, the entire season) turn into a swirling mass of time being un-, re- and just plain written, in and out of order, and yet all exactly in the order we're seeing it. And then, rather than the Big Bad going down, everything bad still happens and we have to re-build the entire universe based on a quasi-comprehensible "restoration field" and the memories of a girl who, for a good part of the season, forgot about her own fiancé (even while he was still alive).
This is what bothers me! They killed off the universe! The universe everything is in now... it's all supposedly based on Amy's memories, and the bits of the universe that were in the Pandorica when the TARDIS exploded. There's just no way I can accept that that could reproduce a perfect copy of the universe. It feels uncomfortable and precarious, and honestly I'd much rather have a season of the Doctor's adventures on the other side of the crack (because I wanted a Zagreus plot arc out of this), rather than have a season of him gallivanting about in a universe re-created from the mind of his number one fangirl. (If I wanted to get meta here, I could go on and on and on about Amy being a parallel for fandom. I mean... yeah. The Doctor exists in her mind and is her invisible friend based on this quick glimpse she got of him. She makes up stories about him, she fancies him, she draws pictures and makes puppets and otherwise expands upon the idea. Then he doesn't exist only in her mind for a while and she has adventures, and then he doesn't exist at all anymore and then he exists again from her mind. If I wanted to be a brat, I could throw up my arms and shout "This entire universe is fanfiction, now!" Also, if I wanted to be a brat, I could go on and on about how amazing it is that parts of the fandom flip out about Amy being so open and proactive about who she fancies, because as far as I can see it, she's an excellent reflection of how an awful lot of us behave on the internet (down to her collection of Doctor paraphernalia next to her bed). But... enough of that...)
And River Song. Man what, just what? The River that dropped the book off almost has to have come from the future. Either that, or, much like the Doctor remembered Rory when Amy didn't, River remembers the Doctor while Amy doesn't (for someone whose brain can restore the universe, she's awfully susceptible to these things, eh?). That just... puts River on too high a pedestal for me. Buuuut I'm just being grumpy because I don't like her overmuch. I think once she's a villain (which I think the musical cues are telling me is true), I'll appreciate her more. But given all the time travel muckery Moffat did with this season, I'm pretty worn out already on the sort of muckery that's going to have to go on with River and the Doctor, considering the nature of their relationship. (I harbour a very slight yet luminous glimmer of hope that instead of the whole shebang with River and the Doctor being entirely backwards-vs-forwards in their meetings, we'll get a River that's post-Silence in the Library. This, actually, is one of the ways I'm currently attempting to hand-wave River remembering the Doctor. Much like the memory imprints that were taken from Amy before Rory was erased from time (and thus contained Rory as he was), perhaps the memory print of River that's still living in Doctor Moon somehow returned... er... as a projection, or made some kind of shady deal for a body in order to give Amy the notebook. Which, if I recall, was left in the library, right? But see what I've done here... this is exactly the sort of paradox that shouldn't be possible, because if the Doctor was erased River never would've been saved in the Library anyway, but because this entire season was built on this kind of memory paradox, I think it's okay for it to happen now, and kind of hope it will.)
I think I'm just kind of... thrown off by the fact that there was no actual Big Bag that had to be taken down, and so, rather than MacGuyvering someone else's technobabble with more technobabble, we were MaGuyvering the universe itself, which just... is magic, and improper. That's my problem. I like universes with rules. I'm cool with reboots, even, but not under the pretense that everything is now exactly as it was (we could've undone the Time War, darnit!). I cannot accept that, because... the point of humans is that they're imperfect and irrational and interesting; they're not something to recreate the universe from if you want it to be the same. And I'm not sure I want to accept that this imperfect recreation might be part of the big problem next season, because then, rather than fighting entertaining cranky and/or megalomaniacal enemies with or without their handbags, regardless of who stole them, we're going to keep on fighting the rules. And the rules in Doctor Who aren't even solid enough to fight in the first place.
Alsoalso! There were so many finely-calibrated hints and things... it feels like a betrayal to fix the whole thing with magic, darnit! If you're going to put that much thought into it, fix it, don't... magical-girl-memories-repair-go! it away.
This may be the only situation in which I really want an "Actually, it was all an illusion" ending. I mean... agh! I wanted to retcon RTD's era out of existence because it was melodramatic and annoyed me, but now I want to retcon Moffat's, because he actually did more damage to the internal framework than RTD ever did. I will never win.
That said... I did enjoy the finale on a less canonical level. The writing was good, there were some great moments. And hey, Rory isn't still plastic, so at least there's that.
In conclusion: Dear Moffat, Minus Eleventy Billion! Plus Ten Billion, Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine Thousand, Nine Hundred and Eighty One. That gives you a plus or minus three for the season, which I think, given the circumstances, is very fair. You're lucky I like you, because you're proving to be a very dangerous driver.
I think I'll start with the Pandorica Opens again, because this is going to get long and complicated, regardless of where I start, so I might as well start in the first half rather than the second. I guess... okay, thesis sentence: The finale was good, entertaining, and actually fairly satisfying, from a distance. But the way that it breaks and disregards certain things is going to slowly drive me nuts.
Things that are/will be driving me nuts for the foreseeable future, in relative chronological order:
Number one: The VanGogh painting. No one could look at that, know it's for the Doctor, and not know what it means. It's a gosh-darn picture of the TARDIS exploding. I mean, really, it's not like VanGogh was a dadaist or something (actually, come to think of it, the TARDIS is a bit like found art, perhaps the Doctor is a dadaist...) In order to know that it's for the Doctor, you have to recognize the TARDIS. If you recognize the TARDIS, you see that it is exploding. I don't understand why this message couldn't have been put into words. (Except that, as a prop, it was probably fun to make, and it is fun to look at. So I can consider it justified. But in that case, just change your bloody throw-away lines about not "understanding." It's this kind of sloppiness that... eventually gets a whole lot worse.) Also, I get that VanGogh can see things that others can't, but he's not psychic. I don't buy that he could look into the future, through the vortex, and see the TARDIS exploding long enough before the explosion to... agh, time travel!
Number two: the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. Okay, so you have the oldest planet ever, and a member of one of the oldest civilizations in the universe. One that, though it is hopelessly stuffy and bureaucratic, produced at least three people with an ounce of wanderlust and time machines. To say nothing of the period when TARDIS time travel was new and novel and people probably did things just for kicks, like visiting the oldest planet ever (which is probably why the society had to crack down on people having fun). This entire scene is just... the most bizarre, tiny, annoying deus ex machina. Also it's an excuse for River Song to look edgy and cool, and we all know I am not in favour of that. And I cannot be the only person who was hoping what the mountains really said was "We apologize for the inconvenience." (ALSO how does River Song know a language no one has been able to translate until the TARDIS?)
Number two and a half: It is, however, shortly afterwards when the Doctor lands in the Roman camp after following the coordinates that I realize that this whole thing just reeks of Xanatos Gambit. I really, really super want to believe that River is toying with the Doctor here. Because where would she get the coordinates without somehow getting caught up in the Alliance's plot herself. I'm sure there could easily be a rational explanation, but since it's not delved into I really want to go "Ah! Plot point!" She's the one that brings him to the trap. (This will drive me nuts because it'd actually be pretty awesome if it was true, but it requires so much hand-waving of other things...)
Number three: All right, I was going to complain about the Pandorica being so easy to break into with the sonic screwdriver, but we just took care of that with the whole "Anyone can break into a prison" thing, which I wasn't paying attention to the first time around. This is me, crossing a number off of my list. (Still way too much of a shortcut, though.) Since I have a number here, though, and no complaining... I think what's really itching at me about these two episodes is that there's a certain of element of time still being written, rather than unwritten or rewritten. This series of events... it's colossal, universal, and contemporary to every point in space and time, which is a huge, gigantic, brain-breaking paradox. One that I'm happy to buy into for the sake of entertainment, but a huge, gigantic, brain-breaking paradox nonetheless. One of the main premises of Doctor Who is that time is already written, more or less, and so you can travel about and know exactly where it is you're going (more or less... provided you're not the Doctor). Little details change when they're observed, but on the whole you generally can't go about changing history entirely. Yet here we are, in the midst of an event that affects the whole of reality, that has been in progress in one way or another for quite some time, broadcasting its presence to the whole of creation, and this is the first we've heard about it, because it's been building up and culminating in the background, somehow parallel to the rest of the universe. Like someone went back and recorded a double-exposure over the whole thing, and now we've got this Pandorica and this explosion that never were there before... It's very unsettling, because it's such a betrayal of the rules. (But more on this later...)
I... actually I've kind of run out of numbers. I was writing this while re-watching the pair of episodes, and somewhere into the very beginning of the Big Bang I kind of gave up on nitpicking, because there's a point where the Doctor Who Nonsense finally trips over the line into Magical Nonsense. Somewhere in the end of The Pandorica Opens, or in the beginning of the Big Bang, we jumped up out of time travel and technobabble and landed in magic land. The point, for me, was somewhere around the sonic screwdriver sparking when it crossed its own timeline, but Amy not like, exploding when she patted her past self on the head. I accepted long ago in this season that the timeline was too far gone for the Reapers to have gotten involved. They were probably one of the first things wiped out in the explosion. But... something, at least? A little static shock? Anything? Just as a nod to continuity of fake science? (I'm big on that...) It really makes me want to keep thinking something is wrong with Amy, beyond her being "special" in that her memories can recreate the entire universe.
And there... there is my big problem with this. Because these two episodes (and, by extension, the entire season) turn into a swirling mass of time being un-, re- and just plain written, in and out of order, and yet all exactly in the order we're seeing it. And then, rather than the Big Bad going down, everything bad still happens and we have to re-build the entire universe based on a quasi-comprehensible "restoration field" and the memories of a girl who, for a good part of the season, forgot about her own fiancé (even while he was still alive).
This is what bothers me! They killed off the universe! The universe everything is in now... it's all supposedly based on Amy's memories, and the bits of the universe that were in the Pandorica when the TARDIS exploded. There's just no way I can accept that that could reproduce a perfect copy of the universe. It feels uncomfortable and precarious, and honestly I'd much rather have a season of the Doctor's adventures on the other side of the crack (
And River Song. Man what, just what? The River that dropped the book off almost has to have come from the future. Either that, or, much like the Doctor remembered Rory when Amy didn't, River remembers the Doctor while Amy doesn't (for someone whose brain can restore the universe, she's awfully susceptible to these things, eh?). That just... puts River on too high a pedestal for me. Buuuut I'm just being grumpy because I don't like her overmuch. I think once she's a villain (which I think the musical cues are telling me is true), I'll appreciate her more. But given all the time travel muckery Moffat did with this season, I'm pretty worn out already on the sort of muckery that's going to have to go on with River and the Doctor, considering the nature of their relationship. (I harbour a very slight yet luminous glimmer of hope that instead of the whole shebang with River and the Doctor being entirely backwards-vs-forwards in their meetings, we'll get a River that's post-Silence in the Library. This, actually, is one of the ways I'm currently attempting to hand-wave River remembering the Doctor. Much like the memory imprints that were taken from Amy before Rory was erased from time (and thus contained Rory as he was), perhaps the memory print of River that's still living in Doctor Moon somehow returned... er... as a projection, or made some kind of shady deal for a body in order to give Amy the notebook. Which, if I recall, was left in the library, right? But see what I've done here... this is exactly the sort of paradox that shouldn't be possible, because if the Doctor was erased River never would've been saved in the Library anyway, but because this entire season was built on this kind of memory paradox, I think it's okay for it to happen now, and kind of hope it will.)
I think I'm just kind of... thrown off by the fact that there was no actual Big Bag that had to be taken down, and so, rather than MacGuyvering someone else's technobabble with more technobabble, we were MaGuyvering the universe itself, which just... is magic, and improper. That's my problem. I like universes with rules. I'm cool with reboots, even, but not under the pretense that everything is now exactly as it was (we could've undone the Time War, darnit!). I cannot accept that, because... the point of humans is that they're imperfect and irrational and interesting; they're not something to recreate the universe from if you want it to be the same. And I'm not sure I want to accept that this imperfect recreation might be part of the big problem next season, because then, rather than fighting entertaining cranky and/or megalomaniacal enemies with or without their handbags, regardless of who stole them, we're going to keep on fighting the rules. And the rules in Doctor Who aren't even solid enough to fight in the first place.
Alsoalso! There were so many finely-calibrated hints and things... it feels like a betrayal to fix the whole thing with magic, darnit! If you're going to put that much thought into it, fix it, don't... magical-girl-memories-repair-go! it away.
This may be the only situation in which I really want an "Actually, it was all an illusion" ending. I mean... agh! I wanted to retcon RTD's era out of existence because it was melodramatic and annoyed me, but now I want to retcon Moffat's, because he actually did more damage to the internal framework than RTD ever did. I will never win.
That said... I did enjoy the finale on a less canonical level. The writing was good, there were some great moments. And hey, Rory isn't still plastic, so at least there's that.
In conclusion: Dear Moffat, Minus Eleventy Billion! Plus Ten Billion, Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine Thousand, Nine Hundred and Eighty One. That gives you a plus or minus three for the season, which I think, given the circumstances, is very fair. You're lucky I like you, because you're proving to be a very dangerous driver.
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