angelophile | Review: Doctor Who - The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang

And so, it's over. Not with a whimper, but a bang. A big one, in fact. And since it'll be impossible to discuss the last two episodes of this series of Doctor Who without spoiling my colonial cousins, time to take it under the cut.

And there we go. It's seemed like a long series somehow, rather than the standard 13 episodes. We've had highs, we've had lows, but the one thing that's continually impressed me has been Matt Smith's presence as The Doctor. I trusted Moff not to steer us wrong and, while this series has had a couple of duff episodes and, after a decent first episode, started to wobble, over all it stands up well.

So, how about the ending? The RTD era had a tradition of setting up a great penultimate episode or episodes (Utopia – still brilliant) and then tossing it away with annoyances like the Doctor becoming god-like if everyone on the planet says his name or duplicate Doctors. Did the Moff era avoid that pratfall?

Well, the answer comes back… kinda. We're introduced to a huge plotbunny in the shape of the Pandorica and left with an impossible cliffhanger and a big reset buton once more, we have much wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey thrown at us, we have Amy bringing the Doctor back into existence just by remembering him, but…

Somehow, that doesn't seem to matter. Because what Moffat's delivered in his finale is not a "wow, bet they never saw that coming!" piece of nonsense like RTD's excesses or forced emotion but more organic character-based themes.

A friend complained that the finale wasn't sci-fi, it was a fairy tale and, yes, frankly, that's exactly what it was. And good. Amy gets her Prince Charming, the boy who waited and her imaginary friend, the Raggedy Doctor. The whole series has been a fairy tale and the ending, which was a bit of magical "if you wish hard enough your wishes will come true" bunkum, stayed true to that. It helped that, at least, the memory trick had been set up throughout the series, as opposed to tossed into the last episode like some kind of Infinite Impossibility Drive to fix a cliffhanger the writer didn't know a way out of. And while the penultimate episode had the messianic "I am the Doctor, I will stop you, run away" speech that echoed Tennant's excesses, I kinda loved that its sole purpose was to gain the Doctor five minutes to come up with something. He's back to being the Doctor who makes things up on the fly rather than who seems to be all knowledgeable.

So, a flawed ending, logically, with the Pandorica wheeled out to play the magical fix button, but unlike previous years, the magical fix didn't overshadow the characters. Instead of the cheap melodrama of The Last of the Time Lords, we actually got something that was about the Doctor and Rory and Amy as living, breathing, loving beings. When Matt Smith delivered his touching farewell to little Amelia it wasn't forced, it didn't feel manipulative like Tennant's farewells, but a genuine, emotional moment with Smith looking battered and weary and broken and impossibly old. Rory and Amy's reunion likewise, in both episodes, with the surprise of Rory's status a genuinely strong twist. (Although I know others felt manipulated into liking Rory by his sacrifices in the last episode – me, I've always liked him and that just reinforced that.)

So, while Moffat as show-runner might not have been all it could have be, he did nicely pull of a finale that was fun, emotional and exciting without making my eyes roll back so far in my head they spin round or make me feel manipulated which is something of a first since Eccleston bowed out in his final episode.

Once again time to sing the praises of Matt Smith. However, this finale was made great not just by Smith, who managed to play the old man in the young man's body to perfection, but Karen Gillen and Arthur Darville too. I made much of Gillen and Smith's natural chemistry early on, (oh, how different from the wooden Martha and the Doc dynamic), and that's continued, but all praises to Arthur Darville, who managed to shoulder his way into that and become the third member of the TARDIS crew with just as much chemistry. It's, perhaps, still a little hard to see Rory and Amy as husband and wife, but certainly not hard to buy the three of them as friends who'd go kncking about through space-time together. And I'm really glad to see, at last, a permanent duo of companions. A duo who happen to be married, which should make things even more interesting.

So, the series ended, raised by great performances from its central cast, with lots of plot bunnies still dangline, rather than tied up in a neat bow and pushed to one side before the next season starts. Who is River Song? Who was the mysterious voice? Why did the TARDIS explode? I guess we'll find out. There's an interesting theory floating around that the next villain will be the Black Guardian. Would that make River the White Guardian? Or maybe Omega will once again rear his head. We shall no doubt see and it's nice that Moffat didn't feel the need to wrap everything up.

A curates egg of a series, but giving hope for the future. Long live Matt Smith. I hope he's in no rush to leave.