Your head is full of poop. First of all, the “Bill and Ted version of time travel,” as you so derisively call it, is more accurately called a closed time-like loop, an entirely appropriate and AWESOME plot device to use albeit sparingly in a show about time travel. Secondly, the universe was collapsing and about to cease existence. I’m pretty sure any “rules” about crossing timestreams loosen a bit in such circumstances. I’d bet those dragon thingies from the 9th doctor ep were among the first to be wiped from the universe. And lastly, it’s not a catch-all device to “pop back and forth”. It only works if there is a vortex manipulator lying next to the time-event-immune super-prison that you just hopped out of with the help of your former companion turned plastic automaton with false memories by the Nestene Consciousness whom you assisted by traveling into your own past after he helped you escape with the help of your future self wibbly wobbly timey wimey you really need to lighten up dude.

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Oh yes, and the fact that the burning Tardis just happened to produce the correct amount of heat and light so as to enable life on earth to continue was another remarkable coincidence. One could go on..

This episode isn’t well thought out sci fi; it was exciting and well acted but, like many in this series, is poor in comparison to previous series.

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Thank God somebody else felt the same way too.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate the episode, I just felt that it was a let down, especially after the sheer brilliance of The Pandorica Opens first part.

From the moment the Doctor popped up in a fez hat to comedically tell Rory how simple it was to open the Pandorica, the episode lost a pile of credibility and suspense.

There were really positive points in the episode though, River Song was excellent and one of the best characters of the revival series thus far. The wedding was a nice touch, except for the ridiculous way Amy was trying to fling herself at the Doctor yet again (yawn) on her wedding day/night no less. We having this touching story of the boy who waited for 2000 years… only for the girl he waited all those years for, cheaply request for a “snog in the bushes” with the Doctor!

I love Matt Smiths incarnation of the Doctor and I think to a degree Stephen Moffat has done a really great job with the series, I just can’t help but wish it wasn’t such a complete departure from Russell T Davies’s show.
Love him or hate him (it seems to be a popular thing these days on the old web to bash “RTD” as the fanboys refer to him) he put out a show that was (mostly) pleasing with characters that people obviously loved (check the Season 4 ratings to the Season 5).

Ah well, we did get one half of a brilliant finale in the end. I’m all for setting up the next series, but would it have hurt to have the evident ‘Big Bad’ behind things make a short appearance or at least attempt to shed a bit of light on the intriguing River Song and her relationship with the Doc.

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Spot on Dan. I’m usually the one to attempt to fill Who plot holes with sci-fi babble but there was so much babble in this sieve-like offering that I gave up caring after 20 minutes. This generally good series has been plagued by a lack of suspense-how can we feel tense if we don’t have a clue where we’re headed? The crack-still not satisfactorily explained-was squandered in the finale. And who wants to be explained at? As anyone who’s ever read a book on creative writing can tell you; show, don’t tell.

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There is really no point in complaining about time loops in any science fiction which involves time travel. Any time travel into the past always implies backwards causality, which is a paradox. All this story does is make explicit the paradox. The best book about this is The Fall of Chronopolis by Barrington J Bailey. The Paradox is quite limited here, since all the Doctor does is give Rory the Auton, the information necessary to open the Pandorica and save Amy. He didn’t engineer Rory’s presence which was a miscalculation by the alliance, who thought they were only creating a facsimile.

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I don’t get the love affair with Tennant some of the posters here have, he was okay to start with but as he went on the stories allowed his own particular breed of self-obsession to flourish, that’s a negative trait folks not a cool confident guy indicator.

Depsite my initial doubts I like Matt Smith, he’s quirky & likable without being irritating and full of himself like Tennant, Smith doesn’t yet have the authority I personally associate with Who but that’ll come I’m sure, by authority I don’t mean the ability to shout “I am talking!”, I mean the fact that the Doctor speaks and people listen because they somehow know that he can solve the problem/situation they’re in.

Big Bang was, as some have hinted above, very much a Bill & Ted/Back to the Future event. So yes the jacketed Doc was a future version come back to speak to Amy, woo-Who, the staircase to nowhere and Amy’s house as the Tardis? Okay one out of three. A little bit of clever foreshadowing mixed with a large number of red herrings. Nothing that hasn’t been done before, so not really that clever.

Did it work? Not for me, it was thin, weak and to be honest there was no sense of tension there. The illogicality of the season as a whole reared its head again throughout the episode.

Positives, we have Rory back to offset Amy’s vileness. We have two mysteries, who is River (okay we already had that one), who is the Big Bad?

Negatives, a pretty crap season as a whole, and Amy is alive, I cannot stand her character, she is just the sort of annoyingly arrogant, self-obsessed, pejorative arse I make it my life’s mission to avoid, I wish Rory would tell her to shut up once in a while.

On balance this season has not been great . Surely someone at the Beeb can see that its time to bin the rush through it in an hour format, I don’t have much hope though because they should have seen that right from the beginning of the Eccleston season. Surely its possible to write stories which kids understand & like but which also include deeper ideas for the adults. If another person posts “… but its only a kid’s show!…” I think I’ll take a lump hammer to my PC. Its a Family show, not kids show, does nobody see the difference anymore. Tweenies is a kids show, Basil Brush is a kid’s show, is that the level you want & expect from Doctor Who?

In the end though New Who seems much like New Labour to me. A revamped, re-imagined entity glorying in the use of an established name but being very careful to emphasise that its New, not the fuddy-duddy old version, it has many of the trappings of the original but is noticeably missing the essential core, the philosophy which was at the heart of the original, or perhaps it simply espouses a different philosophy which in itself invalidates the use of original name.

I suspect New Who will fair just as well as New Labour… which I’m afraid means you only have another 5 years or so before it all falls apart.

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I’m setting myself up for backlash here but here it is: Any finale written by anyone is better than the ones that RTD wrote, with the possible exception of series 1.

I say this because his were always just aliens invading on a large scale (almost always Daleks), killing lots of people and then the Doctor doing something clever and getting them all to miraculously go away all at once. And of course the inevitable nod to homosexuality and atheism.

Whilst I have no problem with either of these being nodded to his obsession with trying to get a nod to each into each episode he wrote made them understandably have similar plot details and it just got monotonous.

At least here the main focus was time travel, and if that’s in every episode that’s ok, since that’s mainly what Doctor Who is about.

And the aliens involved weren’t killing humans or each other or anyone – they were uniting in the face of the thing they hated and feared most. That, no matter whether the epsisode was strong or weak, and give or take the plot flaws, is fairly original.

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I agree with Dan’s comments and will go one further, I think that whole series has been rubbish. Both Matt Smith and Karen Gillan are irritating and what was once a show that all ages could enjoy is now a kids programme, much like the Sarah Jane Adventures, only not as good! As a life long Doctor Who fan, I am just so disappointed.

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I totally agree. The first episode was absolutely fantastic but the finale was a total let down. I was so disappointed having looked forward to watching it. I do find Amy Pond very irritating but all the guys seems to love her. I wonder why lol.

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Im a big Who fan and I really rated this season . the previous last two seasons have been a let down ,Matt smith has done a great job as the new doctor I believe in time amy pond ill be seen as the same mould has Jo grant and Sarah jane smith. i loved the last few episodes , it was a great ending at the wedding
Moffat has done a decent job taking over RTD
there was more of a fairy tale feel to the whole series.
One of the things holding the series back though is the format, 45 minuets episodes are not enough now go to 60 minuet episodes and also bring some of audio stories to the screen
Use more locations around the country
Do a Dalek free seasson, do a story with old campanians my being kidnapped by Omega(three doctors fame)

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I liked the series. I would have expected it to be scarier, as Moffatt was responsible for the weeping angels, who are creepy as hell and actually give me nightmares.

My only problem with the finale was that it didn’t make me cry. I’ve come to expect to be in floods of tears at Doctor Who finales, particularly since Rose went off to the parallel universe. But this one just didn’t do it for me. And it’s not even difficult to make me cry! Try harder next time!

Sarah Jane Adventures is MUCH scarier than Doctor Who, and that’s on CBBC…

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