jencat | what have they been spiking Steven Moffatt's coffee with, I wonder...?

Obviously, obviously, since I'm currently a third of the way through a mega roadtrip which has so far involved random Denver police stations, close encounters with a grizzly bear and plate tectonics galore, I chose to spend the evening watching the series finale of Dr Who the minute I could find a reliable wifi connection... well, hell, i watched last week's ep whilst sitting outside a tent in Wyoming so I wasn't exactly going to wait til i got home, dammit!!

And it was.. gloriously, wonderfully random, with much devious retroconning, heartrending goodbyes and weird memory/reality stuff going down. My brain seriously hurts after all that, but there was a much better through-line than the RTD era finales (thankthankthankgod there were no scenes of bemused English townfolk wandering around wondering why the aliens were invading again. That reset button thing has to be one of the Moff's best contributions...!)

I'm not sure if it worked entirely, mainly due to the fact that my brain literally can't process the amount of plot jumps required to fit everything in.

And we wind up with Amy and Rory running away in the Tardis on their wedding night to go help the Doc save the universe again (from an ancient Egyptian goddess loose on the Orient Express. In Space.. If i remember rightly. Can we please get to see that one next season guys??). Married companions?? Are we sure we want to go there next year..??

Lots of things make more sense now... the clingy!Doc that was talking to Amy in Flesh and Stone was actually a future version, trying to keep some memory of himself alive in the timestream, somewhere, through Amy, because Amy is special. Although, only special, we think, because that darn crack in the universe basically destroyed most of her life before the Doc turned up to fix it, and he took his own sweet time working out exactly what the problem was.. huh. And is Rory still plastic?? Brain.. melting...!!

I've been terribly ambivalent about this year's reboot - it's so writer-dependent that some of the eps were unspeakably awful, and the rest were genius. I adored the first two, hated the third and loved the fourth.. then we hit a rut. The Dream Master ep was just dreadful, and while I kept trying to watch the Silurian two-parter, it turned out to be incredibly boring. They made the mistake of letting Richard Curtis write whatever the hell he wanted for the Van Gogh episode, which while it was very cute, also piled on the Curtis syrup-factory/lecture tropes and got slightly tiresome. It felt a bit obvious, like watching his The Girl in the Cafe, (a major case of letting your great galumphing politics swamp your characters), and that isn't a good thing when it comes to Who, seriously.
I was very won over by the defiantly charming lodger ep though (so this series has now incorporated Matt playing footie excellently and dancing at a wedding very very badly. But, as River says, the Doctor does dance.. that's another Moffatt trope come back to bite us).

Ohhh... River survived, though. I really thought for a while that she would be the sacrifice (because somebody had to be, surely. That was a very cosy ending from a Moffatt ep.) but there she was at the end, black-clad and mourning him, and getting him back again with her little blue book. She's the Time Traveller's Wife taken to whole new extremes, and she knows he's about to find out quite how bad she's been, because now she's scared of losing him before things have even begun, properly. She steals the show in so many ways - the 'Hello Sweetie' on the prehistoric cliff, apologising endlessly for 2000 years, and absolutely never a chance she was going to show a dalek any mercy. Oh, and the fez. That was classic ("I can buy a new one!"). That really is such an epic story, spinning out across the years of the show and never losing its footing for a moment.

Amy Amy Amy... still have no idea who that girl is, strangely enough. She had some fabulous moments, heaving back to life out of the Pandoricon to instruct her younger self, and the wedding toast scene when her brain just kept skipping ahead of the memories she had to remember. That was classic, when she stormed over the table in her wedding dress and remembered him back to life... except, she just got her life back, and skipped out on it again with a yelled goodbye? Confusifying again, I fear..