Who Review: Season 31 Wrap-Up

"The Big Bang" plotted a screwball course between epic and corny, and I finally realized that I'm probably just outside the target demographic. Ah well. I'll always have Seasons 7, 10, and 12-14. Anyway, the change from "end of the world" to "wedding day" for the clap-your-hands-if-you-believe deus ex machina (cf. "Last of the Time Lords") was probably for the better, and I can accept the Doctor doing all that paradox-mancy at the beginning because, let's face it, that cliffhanger was a bit... much.

Okay, folks, here's a random idea. No more super-doom cliffhangers that require absurd amounts of deus-ex or suspension of disbelief or whatever. People will watch the show regardless of whether the cliffhanger involves, just to pick two random examples from the 60s, a toilet plunger menacing someone or the Doctor dying and turning into someone else. I could do the whole "the show is tired, out of ideas, and still pretending to be Buffy" shtick, except that it seems to have graduated, if the hero-can't-function-socially subplot of "The Lodger" is anything to go by, to pretending it's Angel. Although it's still got a lot of fairytale elements, and NO FRIKKING EXPLANATION AT ALL for why the TARDIS went and 'sploded.

That said, the "something blue" bit was hilarious, even if the "new" bit was a tad forced. The idea of the Doctor going back on his own timestream is a bit "huh?" when you consider that Amy shouldn't even be able to remember that she's supposed to remember something (that's going to make my head hurt), but seeing him get away with it was pretty cool. Getting Rory back for reals was a nice touch, as was the notion of him standing guard over the Pandorica for a 1,894 years.

(He-e-e-ey... li'l Amelia opens the Pandorica in 1996, but the Doctor seems to think, judging by both his rescue of River and his "eye of the storm" comments, that it's 2010. Maybe that's just me remembering it wrong, though.)

All in all, the finale and season 5 as a whole was a bit hokey, but the show has never not been that. Besides, you can't quite fathom RTD coming up with a story this mad - let's face it, aside from, er, The War Games and The Green Death, there aren't very many stories that concern themselves with what happens after the main crisis is averted. You could almost see this as a regeneration story, except that the Doctor gets saved by a girl who never gave up on her imaginary friend. How sweet. I'm optimistic for the future.