Companions come and go in DOCTOR WHO. The only real fixed point in space and time is the Doctor. We always knew the day was coming when Amy Pond and Rory Williams would leave. I don't think anyone thought it would be so heartbreakingly sad and so exalting at the same time.
Throughout most of the history of Doctor Who, time travel has usually been a plot device to get the Doctor and his companions from one adventure to the next, like switching narrators in Boccacco's Decameron. Only rarely was it central to the story itself and then it usually was used for paradoxes.
Then Steven Moffatt wrote "The Girl in the Fireplace" for the second series of the revived show and invented the Weeping Angels for "Blink". When he took over as the show runner, we began to see time in a bifurcated fashion: as a fixed dimension in the universe and as as a sequence of events in a person's life. Oh, perhaps that was the point of the confusing welter of events in Terry Nation's "The Chase", but it was never pursued until Moffatt began to build multi-season arcs. For most people, time ran in its fixed course and Tuesday always followed Monday. For others, it consisted of a widely separated series of events that snarled into itself and somehow existed in many ways at the same moment, like Amy Pond. Sometimes it ran backwards and forwards in a manner that made little sense to the outsider, like River Song.
Moffatt has turned Doctor Who into a series of mystery stories, with the solution of the mystery being the teasing out of the timeline of the individuals from the big ball of timey-wimey stuff, with the weekly monster and occasionally saved world thrown in as a bonus. Some fans hate it. Me, I love it. For Moffatt, time is sometimes the hero, sometimes the villain, but always a character that must be dealt with. As a man in his fifties, it's something I appreciate.
For the last story of the Ponds, Moffatt and his staff have pulled out all the stops. We have Alex Kingston as River Song back to say goodbye to her parents. We have the Weeping Angels, Moffatt's scariest monsters, and we have the city of New York, with the cast in the city to do some shooting. There are some lovely shots of Central Park around Belvedere Castle and of Times Square.
It's a great episode and I'm glad that Karen Gillian and Arthur Darvill, the actors who play Amy and Rory, get to go out in such a superb piece of television. It's up to us to wish them well and hope they get more chances to play good roles. For everyone in the cast, crew and audience, it's time to move on.
Throughout most of the history of Doctor Who, time travel has usually been a plot device to get the Doctor and his companions from one adventure to the next, like switching narrators in Boccacco's Decameron. Only rarely was it central to the story itself and then it usually was used for paradoxes.
Then Steven Moffatt wrote "The Girl in the Fireplace" for the second series of the revived show and invented the Weeping Angels for "Blink". When he took over as the show runner, we began to see time in a bifurcated fashion: as a fixed dimension in the universe and as as a sequence of events in a person's life. Oh, perhaps that was the point of the confusing welter of events in Terry Nation's "The Chase", but it was never pursued until Moffatt began to build multi-season arcs. For most people, time ran in its fixed course and Tuesday always followed Monday. For others, it consisted of a widely separated series of events that snarled into itself and somehow existed in many ways at the same moment, like Amy Pond. Sometimes it ran backwards and forwards in a manner that made little sense to the outsider, like River Song.
Moffatt has turned Doctor Who into a series of mystery stories, with the solution of the mystery being the teasing out of the timeline of the individuals from the big ball of timey-wimey stuff, with the weekly monster and occasionally saved world thrown in as a bonus. Some fans hate it. Me, I love it. For Moffatt, time is sometimes the hero, sometimes the villain, but always a character that must be dealt with. As a man in his fifties, it's something I appreciate.
For the last story of the Ponds, Moffatt and his staff have pulled out all the stops. We have Alex Kingston as River Song back to say goodbye to her parents. We have the Weeping Angels, Moffatt's scariest monsters, and we have the city of New York, with the cast in the city to do some shooting. There are some lovely shots of Central Park around Belvedere Castle and of Times Square.
It's a great episode and I'm glad that Karen Gillian and Arthur Darvill, the actors who play Amy and Rory, get to go out in such a superb piece of television. It's up to us to wish them well and hope they get more chances to play good roles. For everyone in the cast, crew and audience, it's time to move on.
