There’s an old saying that everyone dies twice. The first time is when a person biologically dies on a physical level, and the second is the last time someone says their name.
The fifth season of the revival of Doctor Who, with Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, is ultimately about the implications of time travel on the second form of death. It takes a long, long time to make that clear, and in all honesty, I came out of the last regular episode going “what did I actually just see?” because the resolution of the plot was rather abstract and easy to miss. But it’s there, in the end. It just takes a bit to think about it and realize what they were going for.
The season starts off with perhaps the best introduction of a new companion in the series’ history. Gillan, looking strikingly different with something like her regular red hair than she does in her nearly unrecognizable blue CGI or makeup as Nebula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, doesn’t come in immediately, as the Doctor, thus far only having been seen in the ongoing demolition of the Tenth Doctor’s TARDIS after regenerating, comes to a crash after that wreckage in the front yard of a little girl named Amelia Pond. She comes out alone to confront him, asking if he’s there to fix the crack in her room. The TARDIS has to fix itself for a while, so he’s stuck, so he goes to take a look while he’s at it. And it becomes clear that this situation isn’t a normal structural crack. She’s got a form of timespace crack breaking through her bedroom wall, and voices are coming out of it.
His TARDIS gets functional enough to sound an alert, which he has to go answer. He promises to come back in five minutes, but, the Doctor’s precision being characteristically bad in this incarnation as it was in previous ones, he doesn’t come back for twelve years. He’s confronted by a strikingly beautiful young woman that appears to be a police officer in a short skirt, which turns out to be the adult Amelia — now going by Amy — in her kissing telegram costume trying to bluff with an unknown intruder.
It turns out that in the mean time since he left, Amy has been talking about a fellow her family dismisses as her “imaginary friend” and has endured a great deal of involuntary psychiatric care, and more than a little haunting by a creature who’s come out of the crack in her house. Her boyfriend Rory comes along off and on, and after a few episodes, he is more or less swallowed up by the energy coming out of the cracks. Amy literally is unable to remember him moments after his disappearance, and goes along as though nothing important just happened, while the Doctor carefully avoids spilling the painful secret.
It’s worth noting that, at least for the first half of the season, the usual relationship between the Doctor and Amy is flipped from the fairly avuncular one that Tennant and Eccleston took with their various companions. For the first several episodes, most of the main puzzles of what start out seeming like fairly normal episodes are actually solved by Pond and not the Doctor himself in the end. This was a rather interesting twist to the formula, and one that made Pond stand out a bit besides being probably the best looking companion any of the new Doctors have had so far.
There comes a point where it stops going that way, though, especially after Rory disappears. And when he disappears, he’s cosmically made into an unperson. And then Amy sort of loses her bearings after that,
The remainder of the series seems to lose its footing somewhat as a result until the end. However, the Doctor points out as it’s ramping towards the climax that Amy’s life makes very little sense. She doesn’t remember the massive Dalek invasion of the previous season despite clearly having been there. She doesn’t remember Rory… and it eventually dawns on them all that she doesn’t remember her parents, either. It’s at this point in time that it occurs to us that we’ve never seen them — in fact, Amy is the first primary companion of any of the new Doctors who, up to this point, never has any of their family show up. While this was a weakness for Donna, in my opinion, because the character herself was limited beyond general sass, Pond carries it a lot better on her own, to a point that it’s kind of hard to notice because, at least in my case, I didn’t mind even a little. She also breaks the mold (for the most part) of having any romantic tension with the Doctor himself.
The ending is extremely confusing at face value. Just about every enemy the Doctor has had appear in this series all show up at once to stuff him in a prison box referred to as the Pandorica, believing the Doctor himself to be behind the cracks and a threat to destroy the universe. Rory seems to reappear out of nowhere as a Roman soldier who doesn’t understand how he got there after he died, only to have it turn out that he’s just a self aware servant of a Nestene Consciousness, who breaks his programming enough due to his disguise working a little too well that he doesn’t want to hurt Pond even when he’s forced to. Amy eventually comes to be shocked out of forgetting the real Rory, just in time for him to be forced to shoot her. Once the Doctor is put into the box after a quite tedious leadup, most of the stars in the universe go supernova, somehow without the Earth being destroyed in the process.
What happens next is extremely surreal… or more so. The child Amelia, now apparently living with her aunt, goes to a museum to see the Pandorica. There are notes all over telling her to stick around, and the Pandorica eventually opens, two thousand years after the Doctor was stuffed into it by his enemies, to reveal… the adult Amy. It eventually comes out that the Doctor saved the wounded Amy by putting her in there, and then the sun is apparently the TARDIS exploding instead of an actual star, since no stars are left now (to a point that Amelia is chided for painting them), and somewhere in edgewise they also forgot the Doctor because he went through the cracks. There is huge head scratching sequence from there where everyone goes through an existential exercise in remembering those who were lost, all while the (genuinely) revived Rory and Amy are getting married.
If that all sounds weird and strange, it’s because it was. I’m trying to recount what of it I remember here upon writing this, but it doesn’t really get less weird at face value. Eventually, the good guys win, the stars return, and everything is all ok because the Doctor does lots of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff until everyone remembers him and everyone and everything else again.
No, seriously… that was the ending.
So… they’re going deep into epistemology and existential philosophy, I think, and blurring the lines between awareness of things becoming the existence of things, and the principal “villain” of the series is that the reverse of this is breaking down. There is never a conscious being that is revealed to be behind this as there is in previous seasons, It Just Is. There’s no spot where it’s clear that the Doctor defeats it. In a way, it may be taking a page from the Neverending Story, where he’s fighting a temporal version of The Nothing. And much like the film where the Nothing is defeated by giving the Empress a new name, this Nothing (which only manifests as the cracks) is defeated by simply remembering its victims, apparently.
After thinking about it a bit, it’s not a total loss, but it was very, very strange in real time. I did eventually come around to what I think they were going for here, and I liked it better than Raised By Wolves as such. It was closer to The Fountain than it was to RBW, although I don’t know if they entirely pulled it off. It’s more abstract than the previous seasons were, but then I didn’t entirely care for the ending to the Tenth Doctor’s final season either.
And then the Christmas special was a pretty simple Christmas Carol knockoff, which was entertaining in its own right and probably better than the actual season. So far, I’m liking the Eleventh Doctor considerably less than the Tenth, although they tried harder for coherent stories here… until they didn’t.
Thanks for reading.
Musings of a Geekzer 