‘Doctor Who’: A Pandora’s Box of a Season Finale

Autons, Daleks, Sontarans, River Song is Cleopatra, Rory and a really Big Box. What’s not to love?

This week’s ‘'Doctor Who'’ initiates part one of the season finale, and "The Pandorica Opens," was definitely a jam-packed box!

We are flung through this episode at a breakneck pace. In the first few minutes we follow a frantic River Song through a series of quick vignettes featuring past and perhaps future characters as she tries to contact the Doctor and get a Vortex Manipulator so she can time travel and meet up with him and Amy at a Roman-era Stonehenge.

I love River’s unique way of leaving the Doctor messages, and this time she does so by defacing a cliff on the "oldest planet in the Universe," which contains the oldest known untranslatable message (nice little nod to "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish"). The setting at Stonehenge, which I believe was partially filmed on location, was simply breathtaking!

So much happens in such a short time. The Pandoria (which holds the most dangerous thing in the Universe) begins to open, Rory returns as a Roman, River Song flies the hijacked TARDIS and gets trapped inside, the Doctor’s enemies gather at Stonehenge, and oh, Rory is actually a Auton and he shoots Amy!

In the end, we have the Doctor in a box — literally.

As with all good cliffhangers, we should be left with more questions than answers, and Moffat delivered on all accounts. This is what ‘Doctor Who’ is all about.

Best Quote: The Doctor to a resurrected Rory: “The Universe is big, it’s vast, and complicated, and ridiculous, and sometimes — very rarely — impossible things just happen and we call them miracles … and, that’s the theory. In 900 years I’ve never seen one yet, but this would do me.”

Best Parts: Wow, Autons, Daleks, Sontarians, River Song is Cleopatra, Rory, and a really Big Box. What’s not to love?

Worst Parts: It all went by so fast that I was forced to watch it twice for the quotes — damn!

My Rating: A great beginning to the end! Sonic-4.

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