Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens

"There's only one way to settle this. FIGHT!"

Like the Spanish Inquisition, Steven Moffat's greatest weapon is the element of surprise. We all knew that Rory was bound to be brought back from the dead, but hands up who foresaw his reincarnation as a half-killer-robot Roman Legionnaire? So that would be no hands then. Verily my eyes nearly popped out of my head.

It was a terrific episode that sometimes teetered on the brink of lunacy but never quite toppled over. Looking back on it, it packed such a lot in that I'm not sure whether it was even the usual length. Firstly, a 'greatest hits' prologue where River Song (yay!) escapes incarceration again to bring the Doctor a Van Gogh painting of the Tardis exploding, with help from various characters from previous episodes of the series (the duffer episodes on the whole, sadly - Winston Churchill, I mean you) plus a blue-faced baldie in a Star Wars-style alien bar, and a message written into cliffs in a nod to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This was followed by a lengthy interlude modelled on Indiana Jones - this ep was homages a-go-go - where the Doctor and co find the Pandorica - basically a big box - underneath Stonehenge in Roman Britain. Some particularly pleasing business with a headless, one armed Cyberman guard followed, plus the cyberman's arm and its head operating independently. If I'd be pre-pubescent I'd have lost my lunch, in one direction or t'other, when the cyberhead opened to reveal the rotten human skull within. Help me Doctor Jones! At some point in all this Roman Rory showed up. How? Because miracles happen and not everything can be explained and OH LOOK WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE? Amy didn't remember him. Then she did. Because it was like he'd never been born only it wasn't because some residue is always left like the ring and even though she'd forgotten him some memory still remains because love conquers all even the death of time, even the destruction of the universe, what's that you say, how, well, I'll tell you how, it's because OH LOOK WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE? Then every baddie in the new Who universe turned up to claim the contents of the box. This was crap. Mainly because it reminded me how crap all the evil aliens are. Oh look, the crap iDaleks. Oh look, the crap ones that look like baked potatoes. Oh look, the kitchen sink. And so on. And the Doctor stood on a bit of Stonehenge with a really powerful microphone which was sadly not calibrated to work terribly well with my TV speakers so I don't actually know exactly what he said but it was some variation on COME AND HAVE A GO IF YOU THINK YOU'RE HARD ENOUGH. Matt Smith: don't tell anyone, but it turns out that I do quite like you after all.

And THEN the Pandorica opened to reveal not, as I was almost correct to expect, the Doctor himself, but a CHAIR for the Doctor to be TRAPPED in, because IT IS ALL A TRAP and it turns out that this whole series is a strange projection of the mind of Amy using psychic dust and some books she read as a child but conveniently keeps sitting on a side table even now that she's an adult, with her model of the Doctor, so that River Song can discover them when exploring her creepy house, just before blowing up the Tardis, but not before dosing us all with a hefty amount of WHAT THE FUCK and also HANG ON A SEC and WHICH UNIVERSE ARE THEY IN ANYWAY and DON'T TELL ME IT WAS ALL A DREAM and while we're on the subject RORY, DEFINITELY SEXIER AS A ROMAN, THOUGH LESS SEXY WHEN KILLING AMY WITH HIS KILLER ROBOT GUN HANDS plus I SERIOUSLY CAN'T FIGURE THIS ONE OUT and really I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU'RE GOING TO GET OUT OF THIS ONE, STEVE but IF IT IS SOME TIMEY WIMEY VARIATION ON IT WAS ALL A DREAM I AM GOING TO FLIP MY LID but in the meantime IT IS GOING TO BE MORE CLEVER THAN THAT or at least I HOPE SO and if they are in a universe ALL OF AMY'S IMAGINING maybe NONE OF THIS MATTERS ANYWAY and I bloody hope that MOFFAT IS BETTER THAN RTD AT RESOLVING THESE THINGS but really THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT.

And thus, see you next week.