Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "The Lodger" and "The Pandorica Opens/ The Big Bang"

The Lodger

• ·      This is, quietly, a defining story for the Eleventh Doctor. You can really see the difference between Matt Smith and David Tennant here, running throughout the story: the Tenth Doctor would have slotted into Craig’s life far more naturally than Eleven does here. I haven’t read The Tenth Doctor’s comic version of this story, but I understand that’s one of the main ways the comedy functions differently to the comedy in this episode.
• ·      And this is really sharp writing: the story’s highlights come in its comedic moments, but the heart, Craig and Sophie’s love story, hits some genuinely moving notes. The football montage is the only sequence I’d fault, but it works in the context of the story, and everything else is pretty much spot on.
• ·      It’s also one of the funniest episodes of the new series: this is a genuinely excellent romcom, with a sweet love story being told. The love story works because, while in many ways it is a love story by numbers, effort has been put into capturing small details of Craig and Sophie’s life outside of this episode, giving their relationship a specific feel that is unique to this couple, beneath the familiar broad strokes. It’s also helped by the fact the dynamic is “Craig and Sophie love one another, and have been for some time, but can’t bring themselves to tell the other”, and that’s what the story’s resolution centres on. This dynamic is made clear from the start, and runs throughout the story, so there’s never a risk of it becoming a story that’s solely about Craig winning the girl of his dreams. Instead, Sophie’s feelings regarding the relationship are taken into account and influence the story as well, which does a lot to make the episode work.
• ·      But what really makes the episode sing is the excellent dynamic between Matt Smith and James Corden, with Corden delivering an excellent and unselfish performance by playing the straight man to Smith’s mix of eccentricity and broad physical humour. My personal favourite moment, and one that I think best captures this dynamic is the scene where Craig tries to explain the nature of his date night arrangements, and the Doctor’s cluelessness, and the punchline of Matt Smith’s delivery of the line “I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS!”
• ·      As a result, we get an episode that is brilliant, but doesn’t shout about it. It’s lowkey, and small scale, but has a superb script, and quality performances that make for a top notch episode.

The Pandorica Opens/ The Big Bang

• ·      This remains a truly great story, and one of Doctor Who’s best season finales. Ultimately, “The Pandorica Opens/ The Big Bang” is defined, more than anything, by its endless well of pure joy: it’s a wonderfully joyous, cathartic and moving pair of episodes.
• ·      That joy comes from a couple of places. First, this is easily the most straightforwardly happy ending for a Doctor Who season. Series nine comes close, but this story is unambiguously happy in a way “Hell Bent” isn’t. There isn’t a happier ending than Amy and Rory joyously saying “Goodbye!” to Leadworth as they speed off on new adventures.
• ·      Especially because this ending completes the job “Amy’s Choice” started, rejecting the notion that marriage and domesticity are antithetical to awesome adventures. Amy and Rory get married, and then fly off in the TARDIS together. And it breaks down another common trope in media: getting married is not the end of the story of any relationship. What comes after is just as important.
• ·      Secondly, the joy comes from the visible sense that everyone involved is having enormous fun with a script that’s taking delight in tearing up the rulebook and creating something entirely new by playing with the possibilities of everything a Doctor Who finale can be. To take two examples that aren’t frequently drawn on, instead of the obvious highlights, there’s the lovely way Moffat has the Doctor saying “stay out of […] trouble” fit into his conversation with Rory in 102 AD, and his reuniting with Amy and Amelia as the Dalek attacks in the alternate 1996. The other moment that stands out is the time loop created by the Doctor stealing Amelia’s drink to give to Amelia later because she’s thirsty due to him stealing her drink to quench her thirst. Both are little details that aren’t necessary to make the plot work, but add so much colour to the story, demonstrate beautifully the sheer amount of fun Moffat is having writing “The Big Bang”.
• ·      Also vital is the move from Epic to personal, a divide that defines the two episodes, a theme that runs throughout the Moffat era, and is explored in pretty much all of his finales. The Doctor taking on every monster ever becomes a story about four people running round a museum as they try to reboot the universe, the bombast of the Pandorica speech gives way to the Doctor quietly confessing the real reason he asked Amy to run away with him, and his quiet, tired, bedside speech. And the epic cliffhanger where the entire universe explodes is followed by an episode that ends with a wedding.
• ·      Where “The Eleventh Hour” riffs on the theme of perception and sight, there’s an interesting motif surrounding touch that runs through this story. This comes in humorous form: “It’s all mouths today, isn’t it?”, and in serious form: Amy is restored when Amelia touches the Pandorica. Touching the light of the Pandorica is also what restores the Dalek, and ultimately the universe. Touch represents connection, and that connection gives restoration: Amy and Rory’s love is restored when they are finally able to reunite, Amy and Amelia represent connection with one’s past, which leading to restoration of the self, and The Pandorica and “Big Bang two” become the way the Doctor restores life to the universe.
• ·      Ultimately, this is a finale centered on the theme of memory and stories, which in many ways, is the main thematic preoccupation of the Moffat Era. This theme is explored most explicitly through Amy, the power of her memories, and the weight of her loss, a weight that Karen Gillan conveys beautifully in the way she plays Amy’s reaction to the Doctor asking her “does it ever bother you that your life doesn’t make sense?” Back in “Flesh and stone” the Doctor said that the most important thing in the universe was that he help Amy, and this is the payoff to that. She loses and forgets her parents, Rory, and the Doctor, but brings them back with the power of her memories, before finally reclaiming the trauma of the gap left in her childhood in a public place, standing up to the fear of being mocked and ignored with the story of “something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue”. It’s uplifting, affirming, and it’s one of the most moving moments in all of Doctor Who, the perfect culmination of everything this season has been doing.