ANDREW'S
DOCTOR WHO REVIEWS 
This big spectacular end to Matt Smith’s first season as the
Doctor throws all and everything at the story – Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans,
Silurians, Autons, Judoon and so much more, all apparently coming together to
trap the Doctor in some sort of technological box which he then escapes from by
one of Steven Moffat’s mind-bendingly complex timey-wimey plots. Bits of this
are fantastic and other bits are messy as hell and you come out of the end with
a headache from the insanity of it all.
River Song calls the Doctor and Amy to Roman Britain in 102
AD. Here she shows them a new van Gogh painting – The Pandorica Opens – which
shows the TARDIS exploding. The Doctor knows of the Pandorica as a
semi-mythological prison for the universe’s most dangerous being, he realises
it must lay somewhere near Stonehenge.
They find the Pandorica buried beneath Stonehenge and River
warns the Doctor that ‘everyone who ever hated him’ is joining together to
imprison him in the Pandorica (and there are after all a lot of candidates). At
the same time a Roman legion shows up which has amongst its number Rory, Amy’s
fiancé who is supposed to have been wiped from time by the crack.
River begins to pilot the TARDIS towards Stonehenge and
realises that the Pandorica and the Roman legion somehow come from Amy’s
memories. The Doctor warns her that the TARDIS is about to explode to create
the time crack and warns her to leave, but she is trapped inside the TARDIS.
On Earth the Doctor is being manouvered into entering the
Pandorica. The Roman legionnaires, including Rory, are Autons and although he
struggles against it Auton Rory shoots Amy fatally. The Doctor is sealed into
the Pandorica as all the stars in the sky begin to turn to supernovas.
The exploding TARDIS wipes out the universe, save for Earth,
it’s moon and a sun-like object. The Rory Auton is mourning Amy when the Doctor
arrives, gives him his sonic screwdriver so that the Doctor within the
Pandorica can be freed and Amy placed inside it which will bring her back to
life. The Doctor then travels to the future, whilst Rory guards Amy through
time.
In modern day Amelia Pond (Caitlin Blackwood) touches the
Pandorica in the British Museum which frees Amy from inside. It also
revitalises a Dalek that has turned to stone over the centuries and that chases
the Doctor, Rory, Amy and Amelia around the Museum. As the Universe continues
to collapse young Amelia vanishes and the Doctor realises the sun-like object
is his exploding TARDIS. He rescues River from inside it and she joins them at
the Museum.
The Doctor pilots the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS
which somehow allows the Universe to be restored.
Amy wakes in 2010 and finds that not only Rory but both her
parents have been restored to life. At her wedding she remembers the Doctor and
implores him to arrive at her wedding, which somehow rescues the Doctor and the
TARDIS and brings them back to the Universe.
This story not only features loads of the Doctor’s enemies
ganging up on him, but half the cast of the whole season show up for cameos,
Vincent, Churchill, Liz 10, Bracewell, Amelia and, of course, River Song. The
first episode is all about build up but when you hit the second episode it all
goes manic with the Doctor popping backwards and forwards in time to points in
both this story and others throughout the season organising different things to
allow the very complicated resolution of the story to slot into place.
It’s an awful lot to take in. When you have time to pick it
all apart it does all make sense, but the first few times you watch it you end
up thinking “what the hell just happened?”! This does make it quite hard to
really like this story and you do feel a bit cheated by the fact that a lot of
this is solved by the Doctor jumping back in time. It’s great to see young Amy
again and the stone Dalek is very effective.
What keeps you most interested is the humorous interplay
between Matt Smith and Alex Kingston, the deepening of the relationship between
Amy and Rory (even though he is an Auton for much of the story) and the general
confidence with which the whole thing is presented. It’s not my favourite story
by any stretch but watching it again now it has aged better than expected.
NEXT UP: A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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Andrew J. Müller,
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and Shaun Runham
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2022
