I didn’t go into “The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang” expecting a whole lot, conditioned as I am on Russell T Davies’s extravagant-yet-ultimately-lightweight season finales. Don’t get me wrong, they were most always a great deal of fun, but they most always left me somewhat wanting – excepting Season Three’s Master trilogy, although I’m not sure that’s in line with popular opinion. Oh, and “The Parting of the Ways.” Wait a minute…I loved most of his finales! But I often felt as if they didn’t go as far as they could. Part of the way through the current season the Pandoricrack, as I’ve come to call it, started to annoy me, and I began not so much resenting the thread, but rather simply dismissing it – assuming that whatever it was about wouldn’t be terribly thrilling. It turned out to be not only thrilling, but strange and deep and stimulating. This was Steven Moffat’s trademark “Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey” taken up to 11. (Maybe next year will go to 12?) This two-part finale forces viewers to go back and reexamine most of the season, and that isn’t something that can really be said for the Davies finales, which isn’t to imply they’re inferior. More on that later…

My first viewing of “The Big Bang” left me pretty disoriented. The tone of the thing felt very different from the graveness of “The Pandorica Opens.” Subsequent viewings have alleviated much of that, and I’m not sure it needed to feel like a Part Two, as much as its own dog. It’s a majestic piece of television, really, that celebrates the wonder of this series, as well as its darkness. A universe without stars – hell, a cosmos without the Doctor, as the Master once said, scarcely bears thinking about. The fez. How was a fez jammed into the narrative in such a way that while it had virtually nothing to do with the plot, and yet you can’t imagine the episode without it? The raggedy Doctor? All a result of the TARDIS blowing up at the close of “The End of Time.” Love the fact that he becomes the raggedy Doctor once again, after being shot by the Dalek. Back when I wrote up “Flesh and Stone” I mentioned the scene where a version of the Doctor from the future came to briefly visit Amy. Turns out that theory was correct! The stone Dalek was good stuff. A finale with loads of Dalek, and yet it never became too much. Oddly though, my favorite moment in the entire hour is when Amy sees the display in the museum charting the sightings of the centurion who guarded the Pandorica. That was just brilliant. It was so very much like the kind of thing you see in a museum or in a book and dismiss as legend. But here the centurion was real, or at least as real as an Auton can be I suppose. Who doesn’t love Rory, the boy who waited, at this point, and look forward to seeing what he brings to the TARDIS crew as a companion?

A while back I wrote about the feeling that a reset button of sorts had been pressed with this season, and how the season wouldn’t make perfect sense until the finale had played. Clearly I was onto something. Indeed Amy Pond has even been branded by the Doctor “the girl who doesn’t make any sense.” A huge amount of this season, as we’ve now found out, has been very much about Amy. Far more so than I think anyone was able to clearly see as the season moved forward. As “The Big Bang” ends, you almost feel as if you’re for the first time seeing the real Amy Pond, and that her journeys with the Doctor are just beginning. This couldn’t have been as easy role for Karen Gillan to play, and I’ve much more respect for her as an actress, now knowing the heavy narrative load she was carrying.

Here’s the thing, as great and complex as this finale (as well as the season) was, I don’t think there’s any way this could have been executed and accepted by the average BBC TV viewer five years ago when Davies unveiled his first season. It took five years worth of the less complex Davies structure, as well as him introducing and reintroducing all the ideas that make up this series, to get the show to a point where someone like Steven Moffat could come along and attempt something this elaborate. And make no mistake – it is elaborate, not to mention confusing. (One need only take a look at this graph to get an idea of how complexly structured the two-part finale is. Another great piece of reading is over at Den of Geek.) But this doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Even before he started working his magic on “Doctor Who,” as far back as “Coupling,” Moffat showed how skilled he was at twisting narrative structure around, and in that show he didn’t have the benefit of time travel as a means to accomplish it. So even though I’ve had issues from time to time with some of the choices Davies made during his tenure, I give him several warm rounds of applause for being the guy whose choices allowed for Steven Moffat to step up to the plate and give it a go. Anything great that happens with “Doctor Who” in the coming years owes a huge debt to the groundwork laid by Russell T Davies.

Moffat is also clearly able to indulge in ludicrous flights of fancy in the same way Davies did. “If something can be remembered, it can come back.” What the fuck is all that about? It has no basis in science, not even wacky “Doctor Who” science, and yet it’s immensely pivotal to the story. There’s a poetry to it, no doubt, but it’s strictly fantasy, and really has no more business being a component of this series than the mumbo-jumbo sprinkled liberally throughout “The End of Time.” But “Doctor Who” is an ever-evolving beast, and it has to be to survive. These are the kind of ideas that it pulls out to assert its place in the TV universe. No other sci-fi series would dare display something so baroque, and ultimately its peculiar bits and bobs such as that are quickly becoming hallmarks of this show. Nevermind that Philip Hinchcliffe wouldn’t have dared try something of that ilk; the fact is Steven Moffat did and it somehow works.

One of the serious ideas Moffat has brought to the series is the notion that “time can be rewritten,” which is in stark contrast to Davies use of “fixed points.” Fixed points indicate rules and structure; time can be rewritten means all bets are off. Now this isn’t necessarily a brilliant move on Moffat’s part, as much as it is a bold one. It says, “I’m not going to play by the rules. Instead I’m going to invent some new ones.” Steven Moffat’s style of writing practically begged for this development, as I suspect he’d have felt stifled by hanging onto the old rules. For some this could be considered heresy, but ultimately that’s what any good showrunner will do with this series. He or she will find a way – their way – to reinvent it. What’s interesting is how this is quite logically an extension of what was going on in the last few Davies specials, starting with “The Waters of Mars,” and the Doctor’s trashing of the fixed point at Bowie Base One, because as far as he was concerned, the Laws of Time were now his to play with. Furthermore, everything that went down with the Time Lords in “The End of Time” could easily have exacerbated this attitude in the Doctor. Whether Moffat and Davies ever discussed this we do not know, but it’s worked out beautifully, and it’s taken the series to a whole new, exciting level. Whether or not the Doctor will someday have to pay the piper remains to be seen, but for now it sure seems that his abilities to see through and manipulate time are at an all time high.

I also conjectured a while back that Moffat had a longer-range plan in mind than just the components of this season, and sure enough, we were left with numerous, important dangling threads. What is The Silence? Whose nasty, ugly voice is uttering those words? Who ‘sploded the TARDIS? Exactly how different is the rebooted universe of Big Bang 2? Oh, and pretty much everything about River Song, who remains almost as much of a mystery as she did when we first met her in Season Four. If time can be rewritten, does that mean it’s possible that River’s death will not be in the Library after all? (By the way, Alex Kingston was especially strong in this hour.) Exactly how far does Moffat plan to take this idea? This show can seemingly go anywhere it wants at this point. I suppose that’s always been the case, but it’s feeling unusually fresh at the moment. Moffat had a very tough job putting his stamp on “Who” after the Davies renaissance, but now he’s got an entire season under his belt, and I’d like to believe that Season Six will be considerably tighter. For the time being though, just the seasonal arc as presented in “The Eleventh Hour”, the Weeping Angels two-parter, and the two part season finale is a five hour testament to what Moffat’s capable of doing with this series.

Finally we come to Matt Smith. Taking over from David Tennant’s near-unanimously beloved portrayal was never going to be an easy task for any actor. When Smith was announced it was very easy to be skeptical about what he could bring to the table. Right off the bat, his age seemed as if it could only work against him. The fact that he was a total unknown didn’t seem to help matters. And yet he somehow projects all the hundreds of years the Doctor has lived seemingly effortlessly. Back before there ever was a new series, I think every “Doctor Who” fan had his or her idea of what they thought a new Doctor should be like. Matt Smith is almost alarmingly close to what I’d always thought a modern Doctor should be like – a heroic fogey trying desperately to get with the times; someone who’s equal parts clueless and clued in. Christopher Eccleston and Tennant were both great Doctor’s as well, but neither of them had a true sense of the alien about them. They sort of tried to chisel it into Eccleston, but there was so much going on with reinventing the series at the time, I don’t think it was the kind of thing that anyone really concentrated on. (Who knows what Eccleston may have done with the character had he done another season?) Tennant never seemed even remotely alien, and that’s fine. Not every Doctor must project that (Peter Davison certainly didn’t, and he was a great Doctor). Smith loses himself in the alien nature of this character. It’s a gorgeous thing to behold, and I imagine he’ll only get stronger and stranger as time moves on. The man is a fine actor and this series is lucky to have him.

If you’ve been reading throughout this season, I’d like to extend a thank you to you – and then an even bigger thank you to those of you who took time out to drop some comments my way. That really makes my day, when a reader takes the time to write a few words. I hope you’ve enjoyed this season as much as I have, and until Christmas, I think it’s time to say goodbye. So, goodbyyyyyyyye!

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Classic “Who” DVD Recommendation of the Week: No DVDs to recommend this week. Instead I want to recommend a book: “The Writer’s Tale” by Russell T Davies. I finally just found a copy of it myself today, and I’ve been paging through it and it appears to be every bit as good as everyone says it is. If you really want to have a better understanding of what it takes to put this series together, there is no better text. Make sure and pick up the edition subtitled “The Final Chapter,” as that includes an extra 300 pages worth of material that wasn’t in the previous edition.

(Thanks as always to Sonic Biro for the screencaps.)

In the TARDIS, Amy (Karen Gillan) ponders the wedding ring, while the Doctor (Matt Smith) hatches a plan to take her to the oldest planet in the universe to see the oldest piece of writing, which is chiseled onto a cliff face. The TARDIS doors open and the translators show the words as “Hello Sweetie.” Bam! Britain, 102 AD. The TARDIS arrives in front of a Roman army, and Amy mentions that Roman soldiers were her favorite topic in school. A soldier, whose face is smeared with lipstick, mistakes the Doctor for Caesar and takes the pair to see Cleopatra, whom River is impersonating. Finally we get to see the painting, which shares its name with this episode, and it’s a vision of the exploding TARDIS, painted exactly as we’d imagine van Gogh would paint such a vision. (Surely poster prints of this will be available for fans to hang on their walls any day now? I know I’d buy one.) Finally, seven minutes into the episode, we get the opening credits.

And thus begins what’s easily the most ambitious setup for a season finale the new series has yet done. “The Pandorica Opens” is positively cinematic in scope, direction, editing and, of course, writing. These setup installments were never this good in the Davies era, and it’s almost a shame it isn’t the season finale proper, as it would be an unbearable, months-long wait to see the resolution to everything this episode does. It would be the “Doctor Who” equivalent of Part One of “The Best of Both Worlds,” which ended the third season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” In fact it’s somewhat strange that “Doctor Who” – a show infamous for its end of episode cliffhangers – has yet to end a season on any kind of serious hang (stuff like regenerations or Donna suddenly appearing in the TARDIS doesn’t really count). The feeling I got watching “The Pandorica Opens” is the exact same feeling I got while watching the last 20 minutes of “Utopia” from Season Three – only this thing kept up that level of intensity for nearly a whole hour.

The episode shifts into an almost “Indiana Jones” type of piece for a while, as the trio of time travelers make their way to a secret area beneath Stonehenge, to find the massive Pandorica prison, which is somehow tied to the exploding TARDIS. Whatever’s housed in it is the most feared thing in the entire universe. As with the Romans, Amy mentions that the story of Pandora’s Box was a favorite of hers as a child. This catches the Doctor’s attention, but there’s too much going on for him to focus on it. The box finally begins opening – from the inside, no less, but it’s a process that could take hours, as there are many locks and mechanisms to work through, and so the tension continues to ratchet upwards.

The Doctor: “Think of the fear that went into making this box. What could inspire that level of fear? Hello you. Have we met?”

Another nice, yet expected (provided you’ve been paying attention), flourish is that for River, these events take place before “The Time of Angels” two-parter, although I’m still confused then about River and Amy’s first meeting in that story, as River didn’t seem to recognize her. Or has she become so used to her life being out of whack with the Doctor’s that she’s learned how to play along when the time is right? Does it hurt the tension of this story knowing that no matter what happens in it, River will survive these events?

The Doctor deduces that Stonehenge itself is essentially one giant radio transmitter, sending signals out across the universe that are warning the cosmos about the opening Pandorica. All across the universe, starships begin responding to the signal: Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans and probably a dozen other races the Doctor’s encountered in his many lives are all coming to this one place and time in Earth’s history. (Draconians – really?!?) It’s just amazing how epic this thing feels. Once again, the Doctor marvels at what the box must contain; of course, by the end of the episode he probably feels quite the fool for not figuring out the puzzle ahead of time.

The Doctor: “Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered, it can come back.”

In one of the episodes only absurd gestures, River, at the Doctor’s behest, goes off to enlist the aid of the Roman army to help fight the myriad fleet of aliens, while the Doctor and Amy battle three different pieces of a half-dead Cyberman that’s lurking around and beneath the monument. The sequence is easily the coolest thing the series has done with the Cybermen since they were first reintroduced back in Season Two. It’s funny, frightening, and intense, and a great chance for the audience to depressurize from the escalating drama. And then – surprise, surprise – Rory (Arthur Darvill) shows up as a Roman centurion to slay the silver beastie and rescue Amy. He’s short on explanations – “I died and then I came back as a Roman.” He’s pained over Amy’s failure to remember him, but he seems to have been through enough at this point to know how to handle himself in this sticky situation. Darvill is just excellent here, and this guy’s proven himself to be a worthy addition to the show.

The sequence in which the Doctor preaches the Sermon on the Mount is likely to be a divisive one, and I suspect that had David Tennant played the same material, I wouldn’t have cared for it myself, as I never thought Tennant handled those kinds of scenes very well. But Smith has his own way of doing things, and within his delivery there’s a self-deprecating sense of, “I can’t believe I’m pulling this pompous shit again.” He’s doesn’t appear to be taking it altogether seriously, and in doing so, the scene works better than if he’d been in full-on Oncoming Storm mode.

The third act of the story is a dizzying, crazy ride. Rory, as well as the rest of the Roman army, are revealed to be Autons; River takes the TARDIS to Amy’s home in 2010 only to discover a storybooks on Roman soldiers and Pandora’s Box; the TARDIS begins to explode with River in it; Amy is killed by a broken Rory who’s succumbed to his Auton nature; all of the Doctor’s enemies gather around Stonehenge to take him prisoner and place him in the Pandorica as well as explain that Amy herself was an elaborate trap laid for the Doctor, as they’ve seen the cracks in the universe, and know that the Doctor’s TARDIS is the cause of it all, and will eventually spell the end of the universe. The only way the aliens can stop it is to take the TARDIS’ operator out of the equation. This is quite the spin on previous season finales, which were always built around alien domination of one kind or another. Here, the Doctor is the threat to the universe, and his enemies have gathered together, surprisingly enough, as something of a force for good, if that’s possible. Oh, and then the entire universe disappears, for good measure.

Evil Disembodied Voice: “Silence will fall.”

“The Pandorica Opens” is quite simply one of the best episodes of “Doctor Who” ever, and freshman “Who” director Toby Haynes knocked Steven Moffat’s superb script out of the ballpark. With a setup this perfect, the mind reels as what the conclusion will offer up.
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NEXT TIME: The fifth season of new “Who” concludes with the appropriately titled, “The Big Bang.”

Classic “Who” DVD Recommendation of the Week: Friends, Romans, countrymen – lend me your ears. Check out the first Doctor’s encounter with “The Romans.” It’s a lovely little story, really it is.

(Thanks as always to Sonic Biro for the screencaps.)

I’ve written before about my theories of “Who” cliffhangers, which essentially boils down to “the resolve is rarely as good as the hang.” In this case that probably still holds, but Moffat came awfully close to equaling the hang by delivering a way out of an impossible situation that was surprising and fun. I’m not sure it made a whole lot of sense – the destruction of the gravity globe gave them an updraft? They must make this shit up as they go along (of course, how else do you do it?). The shifting of the camera turning around to show the group on ceiling was gorgeous and great little reveal. But the save is short-lived, and the Angels are restoring themselves via the power of the Byzantium. Everybody follows the Doctor into the ship, and once again, the camera has a lot of fun here – the shot of the Doctor standing upright as Amy looks down the hole at him.

Octavian: “Dr. Song, I’ve lost good Clerics today. Do you trust this man?”
River: “I absolutely trust him.”
Octavian: “He’s not some kind of madman then?”
River: (beat) “I absolutely trust him.”

Then the story shifts into an action flick. The Angels attack in the dark in a thrilling, claustrophobic sequence, peppered with further tension between River (Alex Kingston) and Octavian (Iain Glen). What is this woman hiding? It’s within this sequence that we first hear Amy says the number 10. There’s really so much going on in the action arena in this section of the episode that it’d be pointlessly drab to recap it, and yet it’s amazing to watch. Once they discover the forest within the ship, the story pulls back on the action, but not the tension. It just keeps building. The gimmick of Amy counting down heightens, and during the conversation with Angel Bob, the Doctor finally snaps, and gets to the bottom of what’s going on with the countdown, and it appears Amy looks into the eyes of the videotaped Angel for a tad too long in the previous episode. And as if not enough is going on by this point, the crack from Amy’s wall makes another appearance, only this time everyone sees it. Octavian leads the group away from the crack and into the forest while the Doctor stays behind to investigate the crack. While he’s doing so, the Angels mount yet another attack, this time against the Doctor solo. Particularly effective is the shot of the Angel grabbing the Doctor’s jacket. He manages to worm his way out of his jacket while talking to the Angels about the crack and runs off into the forest.

Again, most of this stuff makes for a lousy recap, but it’s so much damn fun to watch. It’s like trying to explain why “Die Hard” is great action movie by telling someone who hasn’t seen it about John McClane tying himself to a fire hose and jumping off a building in his bare feet. There’s no substitute for the real thing, and it’s rather silly to break it all down, because it wasn’t written to be deconstructed – it was written and directed to be a thrill ride. So kudos to Steven Moffat for writing a cracking screenplay that Adam Smith then proceeded to direct the hell out of. With this two-parter, Moffat has really redeemed himself as both a writer and a showrunner. This is the kind of fare I expected from him but wasn’t getting in 5.2 and 5.3. Adding to that, if this is Moffat’s version of the action-packed two-parters that always featured early in the Davies era, then blow me down. This is scads better than stuff like “Rise of the Cybermen” and “The Sontaran Strategem.” It’s not that those stories were bad, but they always felt like the bubblegum installments of their seasons, whereas this may also be bubblegum, but it’s bubblegum that keeps its flavor for a long, long time; in the midst of all this action, there’s room for great character development, stellar acting and strong drama. Oh, you know what else is mildly noteworthy? As I understand it, these two episodes were the first of the season that were shot, so it’s fascinating to note how firm a grasp Matt Smith and Karen Gillan had on not only their roles, but also the concept of the series at this early stage in the game. I’d speculate on what it must have been like to work through the lame scripts for “The Beast Below” and “Victory of the Daleks” after shooting fare like this first, but I’d best not. Surely these two actors had the time of their lives while making this season no matter how weak any given script may have been.

The worsening of Amy’s condition is another episode highlight. The Doctor doesn’t put on the kid gloves either, which is alien to say the least. That’s a side of the Doctor we didn’t get a whole lot of with Tennant. He matter of factly tells her she dying and to shut up! Loved the moment of rage the Doctor feels when Angel Bob tells him that the countdown is for fun, and the Doctor throws the communicator at the ground. Smith has a way of flitting back and forth between comedy and drama that’s just mesmerizing. I hope I never come to predict what he’s going to do next, as that would be a huge shame. Right now, everything he does is so perfectly played it’s as if he’s not even acting. I’ve bitched a fair amount about Amy’s lack of character in recent times, but in this story she shines. She’s so vulnerable in these scenes with her eyes closed. I particularly liked her delivery of the line “You always say that,” which in its own way makes all the time they’ve spent apart onscreen so far kinda sorta OK.

One moment that’s seems to have gotten fandom all flustered involves the bit where the Doctor comes back to Amy and holds her hand after he’s already seemingly walked away. First off, it must be said that theories like this are precisely why I hate reading fan ramblings, because all too often they make a very good case, and yet they still end up being wrong, which can be very frustrating for those of us who go ahead and get in our heads that they must be right. In this instance, the theory is driven by the fact that the Doctor, in extreme close-up, appears to be wearing his jacket, when he clearly lost it several scenes back with the Angels. The idea proposed here is that this is some Doctor from a future part of the season who’s come back to help Amy through this tough time. The jacket aside, it makes a certain sort of sense what with the way the scene is shot and played. It’s very different in tone than what precedes it. Of course, there are Clerics standing around – wouldn’t they notice this second Doctor popping in? Of course if you take the jacket out of the equation, I’m not sure the theory holds up. It could just be a continuity error. Go back and check it out.

The crack, which we actually learn very little about here, seems to have the ability to swallow people up, as well as screw with the memories of those in the vicinity. I’m sure we’ll learn much more about the crack as the season progresses. Octavian’s death scene is outstanding, as is the dialogue the Doctor has with him prior to his passing. Wow. That was incredible. And then there’s the scene where Amy must navigate her way through the Angels with her eyes closed, all while pretending they’re open. Does this work or not? It contradicts everything we’ve been told about the Angels thus far. I vote for yes it does, because in order for these enemies to remain an effective foe, there are always going to have to be new angles through which they’re explored. We finally get to see the Angels moving, which is truly creepy. And in the end, they all get sucked away by the Doctor turning off the gravity, which sort of takes me back to the climax of “Doomsday.”

Actually, that’s not the ending – no, the ending sees the Doctor taking Amy back to her home so she can show him the wedding dress, and explain about her upcoming wedding to Rory, at which point she attacks him in a fit of lust! My, how “Doctor Who” has changed over the years! I loved this scene, as it puts a finer point on their relationship, and not one that I think anyone saw coming. We had loads of romance in the Davies years but here it’s just sex – sex that the Doctor wants no part of! It’s hilarious. The scene seemingly caused some controversy over in Britain where some deemed it too salty for a family series. To those people I say get a grip, or perhaps get laid. If you can’t have fun with this scene, I’ve a feeling the rest of the season may not set well with you either. I doubt this was an isolated incident as far as sexuality goes in Moffat’s vision of the show, and while I don’t think we’re ever going to see anything truly offensive or over the line, I suspect this is an angle he’s going to play around with in his era. He is, after all, the guy who wrote “Coupling.” But then again, this is also the last Moffat-written script we’re going to get this season until the two-part finale. Here’s to hoping for some great, distinctive voices coming out of the woodwork in his absence.

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NEXT TIME: Take a trip with the Doctor, Amy and Rory to 15th century Italy in “Vampires in Venice” which is written by Toby Whithouse, who wrote “School Reunion” in Season Two, and is also the creator of “Being Human,” so we can assume he knows a thing or two about fangs.

Classic “Who” DVD Recommendation of the Week: Just in time to get you ready for next week’s episode is the recently released Tom Baker/Elisabeth Sladen classic, “The Masque of Mandragora,” which also takes place in 15th century Italy!

(Thanks as always to Sonic Biro for the screencaps.)

The opening sequence – which begins with a man tripping balls – sets the stage for a whacked-out adventure. He’s been dosed with hallucinogenic lipstick by River Song (Alex Kingston). Was the field he was standing in part of the hallucination, or was it a part of the spaceship Byzantium? Clearly River has been up to something on the ship, but we don’t find out what that is straight up. 12,000 years in the future, the Doctor (Matt Smith) is showing Amy (Karen Gillan) a museum, and pointing out all the objects he’s had in hand in saving, which is really quite funny, and vaguely romantic, but mostly just boastful and stodgy on his part, especially since what Amy really wants to see is an alien planet. They come across an ancient home box on which some Old High Gallifreyan is written – it amusingly says “Hello sweetie.” The Doctor steals the box from the museum, which leads him to a rendezvous with River right outside the Byzantium. River, on the run from powers that be, releases an airlock and flies straight through the waiting, open TARDIS doors, and lands on the Doctor. The Byzantium flies away, and River issues a single order: “Follow that ship!” It’s an exhilarating start and very James Bond-like, directed by Adam Smith with precision and thought, as is the rest of the episode.

The sequence that follows it, set in the TARDIS, is equally entertaining, although on a more intimate level. The bickering back and forth from the Doctor and River is reminiscent of the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) and Romana I (Mary Tamm) from the early Key to Time stories, although whereas that relationship was two Time Lords getting to know one another, this one is, at least from River’s POV, rooted in familiarity. One really nice touch that gives me huge giggles is how River hangs her heels on the TARDIS scanner. I love that. Also, the fact that the TARDIS only makes the grinding noise it makes when it materializes because the Doctor leaves the brakes on. Hilarious, as is Smith’s impression of the sound. And of course the blue stabilizers, which the Doctor dubs “blue boringers.” Priceless dialogue here, all the way around.

The TARDIS has followed the Byzantium to the planet Alfava Metraxis, and the Doctor is prepared to drop River off so that she can go about her business, and it’s only at Amy’s insistence at wanting to see a planet that he decides to stay. Outside, the Byzantium has crashed into an ancient temple, and soon the Clerics arrive to meet River. The Clerics – what a wonderful idea; in the future, the Church has gone commando! Led by Father Octavian (Iain Glen), they seem to be there to aid River, but there’s something going on between her and Octavian, as well. Soon it’s revealed there was a solitary Weeping Angel onboard the Byzantium.

The group plans to work their way up to the ship, via the Maze of the Dead, a burial ground where the entombed are encased in the walls, but not before River whips out a 4 second video clip of the Angel in question. This leads to what may be the most brilliant sequence in the episode, although I’m not sure I’d want to make that call, as nearly everything about this half of the story is so perfectly written, planned and executed that it would do a disservice to the rest of the tale to single out one sequence. Nevertheless, as the Doctor discovers soon after, “That which holds the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel,” and Amy finds herself trapped behind a locked door with the Angel slowly, methodically lurching toward her in a way that only an Angel can do. When the Doctor tells her not to blink, she actually attempts the one thing that I’ve been suggesting ever since seeing “Blink” several years ago, and that’s – in lieu of blinking – closing one eye at a time (although I’m not entirely sure if that made into the recap back then or not). Once again, Amy proves that she’s smart enough to travel with the Doctor by making the decision to turn the recording off during the split second where the tape drops out, and thus the Angel disappears. One of the many great things about this episode is that we see all sorts of powers and tricks the Angels have that they didn’t have before. Moffat’s ramped and revved them up and turned them into a potentially ideal race for the Doctor to continue battling with over the long haul. At this point, give me Angels over Daleks and Cybermen every day of the week (although let’s not exhaust the concept so that it, too, becomes tedious and not so special). The shot of sand coming out of Amy’s eye is another inspired bit of weirdness.

The expedition begins, and the group must journey through caverns filled with worn, deformed statues. Even before the Doctor figures it out, it isn’t a stretch for the viewer to put two and two together. The statues look so much like Angels, that it would’ve been highly improbable for them to have not been Angels. Events escalate at an alarming rate – these Angels can kill simply by snapping the necks of their victims, as well as take hold of a portion of their cerebral cortex which can be used as a communication device for their future intended victims (this recalls the voices of the dead from Moffat’s “Silence in the Library” two-parter. And then Amy believes she’s turning to stone, which allows for a funny moment when the Doctor bites her hand to prove that she’s not. As the Angels close in around the group, the Doctor doesn’t intend to go quietly:

“There’s one thing you never put in a trap if you’re smart. If you value your continued existence, if you have any plans about seeing tomorrow, there’s one thing you never, ever put in a trap: Me.”

We’ve heard that line countless times in various trailers and previews, but to finally see it in the proper context is pretty rockin’. Same goes for the Doctor shooting the gun, as well as his punching of Bracewell in the last episode. The latter two incidents in particular – in the trailers – made us think we were going to be getting some kind of violent reimagining of the Doctor, whereas the reality is that he’s anything but. Matt Smith’s Doctor is the most Doctorish Doctor since Peter Davison probably (your mileage will no doubt vary.)

“The Time of Angels” really raises the bar for the season, and delivers a smart, efficient storyline that just whizzes by, never once failing to entertain. Almost every single line in it seems to be important to the story, if not the series itself. This, folks, is where the Steven Moffat era really begins. The interplay between the Doctor and River is a wonderful continuation of what we already know about them, and we even seem to get confirmation that they are indeed husband and wife and some point in the future (or maybe the past). For the first time in the season, the Doctor and Amy actually seem like they’re having a proper Doctor/companion relationship, and Gillan really started coming into her own here, thank goodness. The idea of including religious figures into a story about the Angels was also inspired, right and proper. This story has a real sense of scope – a feel of the wonder of the universe. It seems wholly new and right. It must surely be the best episode of the series since, well, I don’t know – maybe since “Blink”!

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NEXT TIME: Do not, under any circumstances, miss part two of this masterpiece, which is titled, “Flesh and Stone.”

Classic “Who” DVD Recommendation of the Week: It’s tough to come up with anything from the old series that’s going to match this, so I won’t even try. Surely there must be at least one person out there, though, who’s reading this who, for whatever reason, hasn’t seen “Blink,” the first story to feature the Weeping Angels. Has it been long enough that the David Tennant era can be considered Classic “Who”? Heh. Probably not. Regardless, put “Blink” in your Netflix queue. It can be found on Disc Four of the Season Three box set. The same disc also has the outstanding “Human Nature” two-parter, so it’s well worth checking out.

(Thanks as always to Sonic Biro for the screencaps.)