An Hour of Who a Day: May 9: "The Pandorica Opens"

May 9: "The Pandorica Opens"

Throughout series 5 there's been a sense that Steven Moffat has been doing his own take on the debut album, much like Russell T Davies did with series 1. You get the sense that he's had an awful lot of time to think about what he would do when he was put in charge of the show, and now that he's finally gotten the chance he's not going to waste it.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the series 5 finale: we travel to 19th century France to 20th century London to three different locations in the 52nd century to 2nd century Britain, and that's all in the cold open. Steven Moffat is flexing his muscles and seeing how much he can get away with -- the answer is quite a bit. They even travel to see the oldest message in the entire universe, only to find it says "Hello sweetie" (complete with a theta sigma for the older fans). "You graffitied the oldest cliff face in the universe," the Doctor admonishes River. "You wouldn't answer your phone," she replies airily.

This is the sort of fun that Moffat knows he can get away with, in the service of possibly the most overtly epically-minded story to date. This episode is concerned with the opening of an elaborate prison cell beneath Stonehenge known as the Pandorica, which contains "the most feared thing in all the universe." The Doctor tells us the legend: "There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world." When you don't know what's coming this is intriguing; when you do know what's coming this legend takes on a fascinating new twist, and one can easily imagine Moffat chuckling to himself as he wrote it.

"The Pandorica Opens" is emphatically a series finale (well, the first half of one), and so we get a boatload of cameos of characters from earlier in series 5, but the biggest one is the (initially inexplicable) return of Rory. It's a return that's played for laughs (the Doctor's reaction) and pathos (Amy's non-reaction), but it's unreservedly welcome. It's also confusing, but the eventual explanation is horrifying -- all of the Doctor's old enemies have formed an alliance and basically raided Amy's mind (all right, the psychic residue she left in her house) just to create an elaborate trap, one that the Doctor would believe and walk into. It's a clever piece of writing, even if it takes a bit to wrap your head around, and it provides a satisfying explanation for Rory's reappearance: he's really just an Auton.

The end of the episode sees the Pandorica opened, and the Doctor finally realizes it's a trap when he sees it's empty -- it's been waiting for him, as all his greatest enemies (Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Silurians, Sycorax, and, er, Hoix) force him into the Pandorica, to stop the TARDIS from exploding and destroying the universe. "Only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS," the Supreme Dalek grates, and while the logic is sound we realize how wrong the Dalek is. It's a hell of a cliffhanger: the Doctor locked away inside the Pandorica, River trapped in a TARDIS that's about to explode, and Amy dead by the hand of Rory, who was unable to completely suppress his Auton side. It's a huge, ballsy cliffhanger, appropriate for an episode that has been just as huge in its execution, daring the audience to not keep up. "The Pandorica Opens" sees a supremely confident production flexing its muscles and pushing things into new areas, and it leaves us eager to see what they come up with next.