rivendellrose | in which moffat wins (Reply)

Starting out with live-blogging...

Bitty!Amy is back! ♥♥♥ Still the cutest thing that's ever been on DW.

"I don't want her to turn out like these star-cultists [or something - I had a hard time catching that line] - I don't trust that Richard Dawkins." ♥ Is this some strange AU where Dawkins is an astronomer instead of a biologist? Of course, I suppose he'd be a physicist, as if we didn't have stars we'd be unlikely to have astronomy, but then... oh, wait, there's still a sun. Which is a star. But we don't have stars. So... only Earth gets to have a star? Whatever.

Plaster Daleks in the museum! ...Why? I have no idea! But it's awesome!

And then big!Amy is in the Pandorica. Ooooookay then. I'm assuming that will get explained... as much as anything...

"So, the universe ended - you missed that." ♥ Oh, Rory. And then the Doctor comes back in time, tells Rory to open the Pandorica to get him out, leaves him the sonic, and tells him to put it in Amy's top pocket when he's done. "I've got a future - that's nice."

Apparently the plaster Daleks are echoes or fossils in time.

And Rory's been guarding the Pandorica for 2,000 years. Bless. ♥

And, just in time, the Daleks show up again. Covered in stone. Awwwwww.

And this bit with the screwdriver and the fez and the notes and the mop... is just Moffat showing off. Quite brilliantly. Reminds me of the phone conversation bits in S4 of "Coupling." ♥♥♥

Aaaaand then I had to stop live-blogging because I was missing things. But it was awesome! And, best of all, it broke the wedding curse. All through the Davies era, I was unhappy because he kept marrying companions off when they left and there was a constant theme in the series of a woman's choice between a normal life marrying some (random) man and Life With The Doctor. Only two options. No other choices. So this season when we saw that Amy was going to marry Rory, I panicked. I was sure we were getting the continuation of that dichotomy that had become so familiar during the Davies era, and I was pissed off that even switching production teams wasn't going to rid me of that. But then, a full season later... this episode. In which, yes, our companion gets married to the guy she loves... who happens to possibly still be made of plastic (maybe?) and did devotedly protect her for two thousand years. Pretty damned impressive... as even the Doctor was more than willing to recognize at the end. But then what? They go off with the Doctor together, after waving goodbye to Earth.

Not only are we back to the "team Tardis" type of dynamic that we had in the old days, but, best of all, this finally rids us of the "companion must choose between a normal life with a boring normal man and a fantastic life with the Doctor" theme that's been running through New Who since its inception. Was it perfect? No. But I had a lot of fun, it was well-written, well-acted, well-directed, and it avoided all my hot-buttons while bringing in a lot of things I loved, and I am officially Very Happy Indeed with the Moffat era as it has so far been seen. Unlike the fiasco of the Season of Specials last year, I will be returning to my prior habit of buying the DVDs the instant they come out in the U.S.

And next year? Well, it looks like we'll get at least a few episodes (if not more) with Amy & Rory, and some more episodes with River, and I am very happy indeed about both those things. And we'll have more Eleven, which makes me terribly happy. Despite a lot of pre-series misgivings, I love this new Doctor. May he stick around for a good few years.

Oh, and they did remember to deal with the thing with the Sun being a star. And that made me very happy, too. ♥