It's 2-0 to New Who as we go into the third and final round, the last story for the 11th doctor's first year and the last story of the 5th doctor's second.
The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang (S31Ep12-13)
Moffat certainly likes messing with our heads, as the story constantly jumps back to and references other stories from earlier in the year, the final act going right back to the very start. It's 90 minutes worth of superb timey-whimey madness.
Having thrown most of the Who monster cannon at us in the end of part 1, the only "monster" in part 2 is a malfunctioning Dalek. Instead, the second half focuses on the Doctor carrying out numberless seat-of-the-pants plans to save his friends and the universe. It's a bold move but it works beautifully.
There are numerous highlights throughout the story: Rory waiting 2000 years to protect his beloved, the Doctor challenging a sky full of spaceships, River Song's message carved into the wall, bringing the Doctor back with the old wedding rhyme, the multiple shocking cliffhanger endings to part 1. It's not perfect, but the overall power and momentum of the story is enough to plow through the problems.
The mobius strip solution to getting the Doctor out of the pandorica is a brilliant and baffling concept, the Doctor escaping because he escaped. It's become something of a theme for the show, events happening and characters reacting the way they do purely because it's the Doctor involved. Sometimes it works perfectly, like in this finale. Other times you have the far too absurd situation of a geologist and ex-kiss-o-gram negotiating the division of the Earth between the humans and Silurians. Now that one was just daft.
For all the plot holes and inconsistencies there's really only one major problem I want to bring up. Amy Pond. I wish I could like her but it's just not happening. She ditches her fiancee the night before her wedding to run away with an almost total stranger, who she later snogs and seems to be trying to do even more with. When the Doctor reunites her with Rory she spends the whole time treating the guy like dirt. Then on her wedding day she twice demands the Doctor snog her with her new husband only 3 feet away. Frankly, she's an arrogant tart. Rory protected her for 2000 years. She wouldn't stick around 5 minutes. We're expected to take her to our hearts simply because she's the Doctor's companion and she's sassy, standing up to him. Sorry, but she walks brazenly into danger assuming she can deal with anything only to find she's totally outmatched and this is supposed to be endearing? Bossing around someone 900 years her elder who has spent his life traveling through space and time and dealing with the horrors of the universe is somehow clever? Constantly trying to cheat on her fiancee is romantic? She's simply not a nice person, however good she may look in a mini skirt. Keep Rory in the Tardis by all means, but please chuck this self centred hussy out as soon as possible. Ahem.
Oh, I love River Song. She can stay too.
5/5
Enlightenment (S20Ep17-20)
Old Who never really did barnstorming finales at the end of seasons. The closest they got was when a Doctor regenerated, and these weren't often the strongest of stories (the Caves of Androzani being a notable exception). They did occasionally do multi-story arcs, such as the black guardian trilogy Enlightenment forms the conclusion to, in which they tried to tie up the overall plot with the individual story in suitably grandiose fashion. Sadly, more often than not, they failed.
On it's own, Enlightenment is an engaging story, with a good mixture of mystery, action and excitement. As the end of the trilogy, it's an unfortunate anticlimax. Making the prize of enlightenment Turlough's choice rather than a material possession is a nice idea, but a single scene with the black and white guardians at the end isn't enough. It's unclear whether the Doctor ever even realised Turlough was trying to kill him, and if he did whether he's now forgiven the boy. The black guardian's plan oscillates wildly from moment to moment, the original simplicity of just killing the Doctor changing at random to humiliating or trapping him.
Viewed in isolation there are many nice touches to this episode, from the excellent production design and unsettling atmosphere as the characters explore the ship to the mini arcs for the companions and the intriguing concept of the Eternals needing human minds to create ideas. The new CGI special effects work well, even if they clearly don't have the budget of New Who. It's only when viewed in context as the conclusion to the black guardian trilogy that the story falls down, and it's a shame the production team couldn't either work it in better, or cut it completely.
3/5
