The Big Bang: A Girl, a Museum and an Empty Night Sky

Not with a bang but a whimper… I know it was always going to be very hard for Moffat to top the thrills and spills of The Pandorica Opens, but The Big Bang just didn’t give me the same level of satisfaction. Last week ended with the Doctor locked in the Pandorica, River and the TARDIS getting blown to smithereens, and Amy lying dead in Rory’s arms after being shot. The tension was pretty extreme, as you can imagine, and we looked on track for one of the most intense finales the show has ever done. So the obvious question was whether it could keep that up or whether the whole thing would collapse under its own weight, and for me, unfortunately, it started well and ended well and the middle was anticlimactic, to say the least.

A girl who can’t see the stars

The opening, though, is really cool. We’re back with young Amelia Pond, who’s drawn a picture of the night sky with stars in it, and when her aunt takes her outside to look there aren’t any. There are no stars at all, the sky is just black, and she’s the only one who seems to think that’s odd. Her aunt is talking to yet another psychiatrist about her, and then a leaflet comes through the door for a museum exhibition, and the reflection of whoever posts it looks an awful lot like the Doctor. Which straight away had me asking how on earth he got there if he was locked in the Pandorica. It’s the same lonely little girl from The Eleventh Hour, which makes it hit harder, because we already know how much she wanted someone to come back for her.

So off they go to the museum, and Amelia wanders past a petrified Dalek and a stone Cyberman and other ancient monsters that “never existed”, and somebody has left her a note telling her to hang around. She hides until the museum closes, goes to the Pandorica, touches it, and it starts to glow and opens up, and inside it is… (I know, the suspense is unbearable, isn’t it?) Amy Pond! Grown-up Amy, sitting in the box where we’d just watched the Doctor get sealed in. Doooo dooo dooo. That’s a great way to start an episode. It’s weird and it’s creepy and it throws everything you thought you knew out of the window in about five minutes, and I was totally hooked.

Get out of jail free

Like I said, it starts out cool and interesting, and then it goes downhill from here, although there are still some cool bits strewn around. We jump straight back to the moment the Doctor was sealed in, with Rory holding Amy’s lifeless body. The Doctor pops up out of nowhere in a fez with a mop, tells Rory that she’s not really dead, hands him the sonic screwdriver, disappears, pops back again and tells him to open the Pandorica, put Amy inside, and make sure the screwdriver goes in her pocket. So Rory points the screwdriver at the Pandorica, and it opens, and the Doctor is out, and he’s as surprised as anyone. See what I mean? Really anticlimactic.

I had a couple of big questions at that point. If the universe has ended and everything in it never existed, why is Rory still there when everyone else is gone? And how can you open the most secure prison ever built, made specifically to hold the Doctor, just by pointing a screwdriver at it? All last episode the Doctor was struggling to understand the thing and didn’t even realise it was meant for him. (Grrr… me too.) I’d have loved a proper prison break sequence instead. I wasn’t the only one bothered by it either; Saxon Bullock reckons that Moffat mistakes complicated for satisfying in places, and picks out the screwdriver too.

And it leaves a huge hole: how did the Doctor get out the first time, to start the whole loop off? I hate it when they use time travel as a “get out of jail free” card (literally, in this case), because there still has to be a point where the sequence kicks off, and here there isn’t one. Then he takes River’s time-jumping wristband, which seems a heck of a lot more efficient and accurate than the TARDIS, which can’t be right, surely? The Time Lords built the TARDIS. You’d think they’d have got it right.

The Doctor explains that the Pandorica will keep Amy in suspended animation until it gets a sample of her own DNA, which will come from young Amelia touching it two thousand years later. He offers to jump Rory straight there, and Rory, who isn’t really human anymore but a plastic copy made as part of last week’s trap, asks if Amy would be safer if he stayed behind to guard the box. And the Doctor reluctantly agrees. It all happens at a frantic pace and it’s fun to watch, but it does feel like it’s skating over the gaps.

The centurion, River and the Dalek

Now we’re in the museum in 1996 with Amy and Amelia together, and Amy finds out about the protector of the Pandorica, a lone Roman centurion who’s turned up in the legends and history books guarding it for nearly two thousand years and was last seen in the Blitz. She realises it was Rory, and that she’s lost him. See, there are some cool bits, and this is one of the best. The idea of Rory just standing there through the whole of history, waiting for her, is a lovely, mad, romantic thing. Then the petrified Dalek starts coming back to life, because the light from the Pandorica has partly restored it, and it’s about to kill everyone, when a museum security guard runs in and blasts it. It’s Rory! He survived after all and has been guarding the box the whole time. Big reunion, much smooching, and I’m a bit of a sucker for that when it’s earned.

The Doctor runs off towards the roof and meets… himself, injured and collapsing on the stairs, who manages to whisper something to him before slumping, apparently dead. Up on the roof he works out that the “sun” everyone’s been seeing is actually the TARDIS, exploding at every point in history at once, and it’s the only thing keeping Earth alive while the rest of the universe has gone dark. (Hang on, though, what about the moon young Amelia saw at the start? Shouldn’t that have disappeared too?) And inside the explosion he hears River, who the TARDIS has trapped in a time loop to protect her, repeating the same few seconds over and over. He jumps in with the wristband and pulls her out, which also had me wondering whether anyone can just pop into the TARDIS like that. Pretty lax security, if so.

His plan is to use the Pandorica itself to restart everything, a second big bang, because the box holds a record of every atom of the universe inside it. Then the Dalek turns up hovering at the edge of the roof and shoots the Doctor, very like the way David Tennant got shot running to Rose in The Stolen Earth, and he jumps back in time to the stairs, which is how he ended up meeting himself. Amy and Rory rush off to see if he’s still alive, River stays behind with the Dalek, and when it begs for mercy she does NOT give it any. Another really cool sequence, in my opinion.

Something old, something new

They find the Doctor wired into the Pandorica, getting ready to fly it into the heart of the exploding TARDIS. River works out what that means: to close all the cracks he has to be on the wrong side of them, and it’ll be as if he never existed. He tells Amy that when the universe reboots she’ll get the chance to bring her parents back, then off he goes into the explosion with a “Geronimo!” He seems to come out of it fine, on the TARDIS, and for a second he thinks he’s escaped, but no. In a little rewind sequence we watch him travel backwards through his own short life, trying to reach Amy along the way. Him choosing to stop at the night he first met her is a nice touch, and the speech he gives to young Amelia asleep in her bed about the old blue box is excellent.

And I love the way they tie that speech into what comes next, which is Amy’s wedding! I was really happy to see Amy and Rory finally get together after everything they’ve been through. When Amy remembers and calls the Doctor back, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, it’s really, really good, with the TARDIS turning up in the middle of the reception.

The cracks in time are gone now, but the strange voice in the TARDIS going on about silence still hasn’t been explained, and I can only hope they come back to that in future episodes. To be fair, tying up a whole series and all its running plots in one episode is really hard, and taken on its own this was a good episode. It just wasn’t as good as the one before it, and that’s the only reason I came away slightly disappointed.