The Pandorica Opens

[teyla]

Finally. Watching his season 5 stuff up until now, I was beginning to think Moffat had lost the ability to write compelling Doctor Who episodes. Apparently, he just put all his good ideas into the finale, and the rest of the season had to make do with what was left.

So, yeah, I enjoyed it. There were a couple of things that didn't make sense on a superficial level, and a couple of things that made no sense on a more significant level, but overall, I liked the ideas he had. Oh, and Amy didn't get locked up in the TARDIS doing nothing. That was a plus. (By the way, did we have a Doctor lite episode this season? We had one in all seasons so far, except season 1. But I can't really see if there was one this season; I don't think so.)

I'm still ambiguous about River. She's just so sexualized. Why the hell does it have to be hypnotic lipstick? And I am still put off by the idea of her being able to fly the TARDIS, but, yeah, I know. That's just me getting butthurt about Moffat not respecting my fanon.

I liked the idea of all of the Doctor's enemies forming an alliance to take him out. Not that they ever would--Daleks and Cybermen and Sontarans are far too one-dimensional to do anything as complicated as forming an alliance with anyone, let alone one another--but hey, good for Moffat if he's expanding the range of those old enemies to include more than just floating around and making long exposition speeches about how they're planning to kill the Doctor this time. It was all a little predictable--when the Doctor started talking about "a trickster, a warrior", I went, well, sounds like you, Doc--but hey, I'm the last person to demand super-complicated plots.

Generally, I thought the episode had a very good basic concept, and was realized rather well--I think it would have profited from more detail when it came to the actual, mechanical workings of the plot, though. What exactly did they do with Amy's memories? How did they set up that trap? The Doctor was ultimately drawn to the Pandorica by River showing him Vincent's painting--but that painting was only made because the TARDIS did explode, so the alliance would have had to build their trap around that, and by locking the Doctor in, they would prevent the TARDIS exploding (or they think they would), which would un-happen Vincent's painting, which would mean that the centerpiece of their trap was gone. That's not the only problem I had; there were several things where Moffat just didn't offer any explanation, not even any random technobabble. Mostly, I'm confused about the thing with Amy's memories. What exactly did they do, and were those all real Romans or all fake Romans, or part real and part fake, or . . . what?

Well, I'm looking forward to see next week's plot resolve.


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