New Who Review for The Big Bang
Posted By Kathleen David on July 25, 2010
Spoilers behind the cut and in the comments. You can now talk about the season as a whole. The only reason I am putting things behind the cut is that some people haven’t had a chance to see the episode yet.
Well that was fun wasn’t it? The pay-off was nice. I have one or two quibbles but we are talking that timey-wimey kind of stuff that you just kinda backburner when it comes to Dr. Who.
I do like how everything in the season was relevant. Including what looked like a few continuity goofs but turned out to be something else entirely.
And a round of applause for the actors. They managed to make it entirely believable and some of that dialogue was a mouthful. And River Song was redeemed in my eyes.
I am grateful that Moffat was given the reins and allowed to do what he wanted to do with the Mythos.
I think the sequence between Amy, River, the Doctor, and that poor Fez was one of the funniest of the season.
They did a lot of extra footage this year to splice together this episode. I am sure that some fan has gone back and tracked all the shots and where they were dropped in. Rather clever I thought.
So Amy remembers things that didn’t exist. I still think that she is in a pocket universe. Again the companion as Deus Ex Machina is used. I am really hoping that this doesn’t happen every season from now on. I really don’t mind if everything isn’t connected. Or go back to a couple of episodes telling a story and have done with it.
How does Rory remember he was plastic? Yeah, that bothered me a lot.
But it was all niggling points. Overall I was quite happy with the whole season.
I am looking forward to the next season. I have a feeling that we are going to find out about River and why Daleks aren’t happy to see her.
I’m going to have to rewatch the episode, just to make sure I soak it all in.
I have a theory about River, and how she plays into everything. It’ll be amusing to see if I’m right.
Great season ender . . . also great opener on Moffat & Gattis’ take on Sherlock lasy night . . .
I’m still wondering who River Killed.
I have my suspicions.
Kath,
Why wouldn’t Rory remember that he was plastic? And again, this is Auton Rory during the “universe has been reduced to just the planet Earth” segment of the episode, not human Rory in the later “Doctor’s sacrifice re-starts the universe/Amy’s memory of the Doctor brings him back” segment near the end. Now, if “Mr. Pond” remembered having been a plastic duplicate of the real thing, then there’d be a disconnect in logic.
The better question might be why was Auton Rory still around after the Doctor was sealed in the Pandorica when none of the other Auton centurions (or any of the Doctor’s enemies– at least alive) were? Best guess, because he was with Amy, who, as a time traveler, provided some degree of protection to him from changes in the timeline (similar to how Rose and Mickey, by virtue of being time travelers are able to respectively reactivate a Dalek in “Dalek” and open the Genesis Ark in “Doomsday.”). Since Auton Rory was unaffected by these changes to the known universe, he’d also remember being plastic.
But again, the real Rory, restored both to life (and to having existed at all) by Amy’s memories of him (just as her parents were), wouldn’t remember being plastic, since that wasn’t him.
Rick
I believe that Rory The Human and Rory The Auton were one and the same in the psychological sense because Amy basically did what Rose did: bond with The Doctor and The Tardis and created her own pocket universe with her psychic energy. Remember “Amy’s Choice” when The Dream Lord relied on Amy to choose which “dream scenario” was real? She dismissed the dream where Rory died while accepting the possibility that it could be real because she “couldn’t live without him.” While I was surprised to see “Roman Rory” at first, I later thought “Maybe they’re still dreaming!” because dream logic doesn’t have to make sense and in a way Amy was still trying to choose between marrying Rory and forgetting that he ever existed. I guess we’ll find out next season if I’m right.
It was a great season finale. As it was ending, I was wondering about the loose ends and then they went out and said they still needed to find out about those loose ends. So, we know that next season some of those will be answered.
As far as River, we “know (?)” that we have to see her in her timeline inbetween “The Time of Angels”/”Flesh and Stone” and “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead.” The Doctor has to give her that “future sonic screwdriver” at some point. At the moment I can’t accept that he gives it to her earlier in her timeline and tells her not to use it until she is going to “The Library.” (Of course, he could just leave it for her at that point in her life without actually having an adventure with her.)
Over at http://www.bbcamerica.com/video/doctor-who.jsp
in the reduced Doctor Who Confidential, Steven Moffat does say a few things that the next season will deal with (all of which can be deduced by the end of this episode).
Of course it goes without saying that the Doctor mopped up operations in “The Big Bang.”
So I won’t say it.
Rick