Size isn't everything

Ah, now that's what I call great telly. What a terrific series finale, with ultra-lavish production values, characters I'd grown to know and love despite their many flaws, top-notch acting from a fabulous cast, and gratuitous half-naked men all over the place.

But enough of that season 2 box set of Rome that I just finished watching. What about Doctor Who, eh?

Well, here are some thoughts about The Big Bang:

• Hello, little Amelia! I still like you better than big Amy, even though you have a disappointingly small amount to actually do in this episode, and spend rather a large chunk of your on-screen time asleep.
  
  
• "Okay kid, this is where it gets complicated." - Well, it's not THAT complicated, just a bit wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Or rather, a LOT wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. With hats.
  
  
• I wonder what was written on the museum description card for the Daleks. "Results of nasty barbecue accident, Stonehenge, A.D. 102"? Come to think of it, the multicoloured Dalek army of Steve Jobs is probably a bit peeved that it didn't get a big finale episode to itself. All it got was Running Away Victory of the Daleks and a quick cameo. Now we'll never find out whether the Eternal Dalek empties the bins, if the Drone Dalek is so named for its love of the vuvuzela, or if the Strategist Dalek is planning to raise galactic VAT to 25% over the next tax year.
  
  
• Centurion!Rory reminded me of a slightly more cheerful version of Marvin the paranoid android, stuck waiting the car park for thousands of years. Coincidentally, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation would probably have described him as "Your plastic pal who's (vaguely) fun to be with!"
  
  
• I liked the exploding TARDIS sun, because, like a sad person, I had been wondering how the Earth was surviving in space without a solar system. I also liked Amy and River's preemptive teamwork on the Doctor's inadvisable headwear, and would cheerfully watch a spin-off series where they become Intergalactic Fashion Police and hunt down style criminals across the universe, like Trinny and Susannah with laser blasters.
  
  
• "Hi honey, I'm home." - Hmm, is that some actual River/Doctor chemistry I spy? Did they have a quick shag at the heart of the exploding sun? Answer: only if the Doctor took off the fez, because it's not every woman's desire to get it on with Tommy Cooper.
  
  
• Hmm, looking back at my episode notes, I find there's a big bit in the middle of the show where I singularly failed to make any comments. Other than repeating the words "wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey" to myself, that is.
  
  
• Old, new, borrowed, blue. A line so heavily signalled that it almost needed its own air traffic controller to bring it down. I like to think that the Moff got that joke from reading the dwcanon_fodder sort-of FAQ back in 2006, but it's probably even older than that.
  
  
• Oh, don't try to snog other men at your own wedding, Amy. It's tacky. This isn't Living TV, you know.
  
  
• My heart sank a bit when it became clear that the cracks story isn't over, and silence hasn't even fallen yet. But not half as much as it sank when I realized that the Christmas special will involve Rory and he wasn't going to keel over and die at a convenient point because he wasn't made of plastic any more. I know, I know, I thought I was coming around to him too. But in a back-to-the-usual-adventures storyline, I can't imagine him doing anything other than going "huh?" a lot and having Amy make flirty jokes at his expense. And that sounds like a tedious prospect.
  
  
• Did everything in the last series happen, then? Amy presumably now has memories of those things, but did they happen happen? Does she now remember the events of The Stolen Earth? (I'm guessing yes?) Does Rory remember his Auton self guarding the box? (I'm guessing not? Unless Amy reincarnated him with those memories inside him as well? Could she do that?) What does this mean for continuity? (Nothing, wavy-wavy hands of timey-wimey-ness??) I am forced to admit that I can't even bring myself to ponder particularly hard about these things.
  
  
• In conclusion: okay. Not bad, not annoying, not making me want to throw the telly out of the window, and those are positive qualities for a Who season finale. But (and here is where I find myself in divergence from a large section of the population) neither did I find it thrilling, moving, or emotionally engaging. It was just sort of... okay. Maybe it's because I don't care for reset button stories. Maybe it's because I feel very little for Amy as a character, despite everything. Maybe it was because Bernard Cribbins wasn't in it (your main man for quality Who sobbing!). Or maybe it was just okay, and no better than that.
  
  
• And as a minor postscript, I do have one personal, petite and VERY petty peeve to share, but it's not about the season per se; it's about this picture. Because it was the first widely seen promo shot of the Eleventh Doctor and Amy, I used it as the basis of my first mini-icons of them. This wasn't a problem in the case of Eleven, because he's wearing his standard canonical outfit in it, but I now realize that Amy never actually wore that greeny coloured top in the show. True, I've done other Amys (Amies?) since then, a floaty-in-space one and a policewoman one, but nonetheless, it means that my first Amy, the Ur-Amy, is tragically inaccurate! And because I am somewhat pernickety, this fact is just a teensy bit annoying. But I think I'll get over it...

Before anyone asks, yes, I am making more Who icons. Just give me a few days to finish 'em. Oddly enough, I've got to delete the dregs of my Harry Potter art off my webspace first, to make space, so it's a bit of an end-of-a-fannish-era thing. (Albeit the end of an era that actually ended some years ago, so it's more like the end of the end of an era, plus the clearing up afterwards.)