So that’s it for another year then, or at least until Christmas. And I think it’s fair to say that the episode definitely lived up to it’s title and saw the series out with a bang.

After last week’s confusion I tried my best not to worry too much about the specifics this time, as I think the important thing to do when presented with something as witty, clever and beautiful as this episode is not over-analyse it too much (for all the time-bending cleverness going on, there was a slight feeling that it could very easily be pulled apart if you tried to). Of course I do have a few doubts and niggles which I will no doubt end up mentioning as this review goes on, but I did manage to push them to the back of my mind while the episode was on.

With the episode starting just after the firework display like sight of thousands of stars going out from the end of the last episode the assortment of monsters had been very conveniently wiped out (definitely a good thing for me as I was relieved to see the back of the multi-coloured Daleks) and we were left with Rory and the Doctor being the only ones left (and the Doctor wasn’t of much use what with him being locked up in the Pandorica). I must admit I’m not entirely sure as to why they were spared – I suppose the Doctor was safe inside the impenetrable Pandorica but what about Rory particularly with this version of him being an auton made out of alien plastic – his fellow fake Romans had been wiped out so why wasn’t he, were Amy’s strong memories keeping him alive even though she was dead herself? Or rather, Amy wasn’t entirely dead, just mostly so, but not beyond help as a visiting Doctor from the future (with a fetching combo of Fez and mop) informed Rory, he just had to put her in the Doctor’s place in the Pandorica and she’d be fine. You might say that this would be easier said than done, but apparently not, despite the Pandorica being the ultimate prison, a quick blast from the outside using the Sonic Screwdriver the future Doctor had loaned Rory was enough to get it open. There have been complaints in the past that the Sonic Screwdriver is an excuse for lazy plotting, what with it’s seemingly infinite capabilities and I can definitely see where they’re coming from, although I can also see why it was necessary for it to work in this case as otherwise a significant chunk of the episode would have been taken up with Rory alone struggling to get the Pandorica open, which wouldn’t be much fun.

Anyway, Rory freed the Doctor, put Amy inside and we essentially skipped forward eighteen hundred odd years to the 1990s, not before Robo-Rory had a chance to redeem himself though by stating that he’d guard Amy and the Pandorica for that long (it must be said, despite the Doctor’s dire warnings that he’d lose his mind or possibly die waiting for her, he seemed fine – as fine as a living plastic replica of a dead man can be – when revealed in the almost-present day). And, despite the fact that there are no stars in the sky (either the sun doesn’t count as a star in this script, or the Tardis’ power was keeping the earth going) or alien races to appear on earth and cause chaos, everything seems pretty much the same as it did at the start of the series (although I did like the brief mention if Richard Dawkins now being the leader of a sinister-sounding ’star cult’). Young Amy was once again seen praying to Santa about the crack in her wall, was shown to have an overly vivid imagination (or rather the ability to remember things impossible things unlike others – in this case stars in the sky) and family troubles. Until she was invited by a mysterious stranger (well, not so mysterious as the Doctor’s fez was visible through the glass in her front door) to attend an exhibition in which the Pandorica would be on display. This was so the young Amy would be able to open the Pandorica and revive her older self by touching it and sharing her DNA – not only was this plot device similar to Rose’s first encounter with a Dalek but it also ended up with similar results in that the Doctor and his companions ended up getting chased around a museum by a half-revived Dalek. At the risk of sounding too nerdy, I did note during this that during this the new version of Doctor Who decided to contradict the rules of its older incarnation as one of the few things I remember from that was that if a character met themselves from a different time period they couldn’t touch or there would be catastrophic results (I seem to remember the Five Doctors story involving a plot point where two versions of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart had to be kept apart), but here the adult Amy was able to protectively hug the younger version of herself with no consequences. Not that I’m complaining – it was just something I thought of while watching the episode.

Using the vortex manipulator that River had left the Doctor with he managed to rescue her from the protective time loop of the few moments before the Tardis exploded as seen in the end of the last episode and we were treated to a fun race round the museum, with the aforementioned time-travelling hijinks added, I would try and recap it all here but I think it would get just as jumbled as last week’s attempts to do so if I did, as the Doctor said to Rory at the start of this week’s episode ‘Time travel, you can’t keep it straight in your head’. Handily the Doctor’s penchant for the fez he found in the museum was not only an amusing character detail but helped to keep track of which Doctor was which, that is until the rescued River did the decent thing and blew it up (fortunately the Dalek met the same fate at her hands a few minutes later too).

Then after all that knockabout fun, things took a turn for the moving with the Doctor saving the universe by flying the Pandorica into the exploding Tardis to use its restorative powers to restart everything. Even though what with the series being named after him it was obvious it wouldn’t be the end, it still gave me a bit of a lump in my throat, particularly during the ‘rewind’ section in which the Doctor passed through the events of this series in reverse, as if it was the series getting a well-deserved victory lap.

And thanks to his sacrifice everything went back to normal, or in fact better than normal as Amy now had her parents back as previously they’d been swept away by the time eating energy coming from the crack in her wall and pretty much wiped from her memory. This sort of plot device is normally up there with the ‘it was all a dream’ reveal in the lazy way to end a story stakes, but frankly I was too happy to have Rory back to care, I don’t think I would enjoy Doctor Who as much if it started to get more ruthless with its characters’ fates. Things were then given even more of a happy ending by Amy remembering the Doctor and giving a speech in his honour at her wedding, which brought him back as if by magic (again you could argue that this was lazy plotting, not least because something very similar had been done by Martha at the end of series three to revive the Doctor, but I was just happy to have him back, especially as it was undercut by his cockiness at already being dressed in preparation for her wedding when stepping out of the Tardis, and it meant we were also treated to an enjoyably silly celebratory dance from him at the reception), and Amy and Rory waving goodbye to their wedding to go off and have more adventures with him. I did wonder how River knew to come to the wedding in order to trigger Amy’s memories but as her final exchange with the Doctor showed, she’s still very much an unknown quantity at this point. Hopefully we’ll get to learn a lot more about her in the next series, as well as get the roots of this problem with ‘the silence’ – as the series overseen by Russell T. Davies all ended with the very definite defeat of a foe, it was interesting that this series left things unresolved. Before all that anyway, we have the Christmas special to look forward to, which I am hoping is to feature an Egyptian goddess on the loose on the Orient Express ‘in space’ as the phone call to the Tardis at the end of the episode promised.

So, what are your thoughts? How did you think the episode, and the series as a whole, worked out?