The grand finale. The end of the season, which really reflected the season as a whole; a bit of a mess.

We join the Doctor wearing Roman togs, in a very strange world, an alternate reality, surrounded by odd things from bygone eras, Pterodactyls flying around, hot air balloons (makes a change from zeppelins I suppose), and Winston Churchill in power. So, obviously something has gone wrong with time and space. Again. Oh yes, again. In fact, when is this not happening?

Before we can bat an eyelid we’re then zooming back in time to somewhere after the events of Closing Time (good, because I don’t think I could have handled us going anywhere ‘during’ the events of that episode again) and following, through the Doctor’s narration, another speeded up and very rushed execution of storytelling as to why we started the episode in this strange land. We see the Doctor running around wearing his Stetson and frantically trying to find out a way to prevent his own execution. He has a chat with the Tesselecta crew again, the fat blue man Dorian from A Good Man Goes To War who is now just a fat blue head in a box (don’t ask) and very soon, very quickly, we learn that the Doctor escapes his fate by River Song refusing to shoot him while in the space suit anyway. So why she shot him in the first instance is a mystery, because now she seems quite confident that time can be re-written and has found a way to avoid killing him. So this confusing revelation now creates a paradox of sorts, as the Doctor was always supposed to die, and hence creates this bizarre reality whereby time stands still and all of history exists at the same time.  Following? Good, because many are not, but Doctor Who really wants you to understand what’s going on so you’ll be back for the next series, even if by now you’ve lost all hope. Hold on though, because something hopeful is coming.

So basically, the Doctor next gets picked up by Amy Pond with an eyepatch, who shoots him in the head and then whisks him off to the Orient Express on its way to a pyramid in Cairo. In this pyramid is the dreaded Silence (supposedly imprisoned in water tanks), River Song, and a bunch of soldiers, one of them being Rory with no memory of events of the ‘normal’ timeline. But luckily for the Doctor, Amy remembers everything due to the cracks in her bedroom wall (except for remembering who the hell Rory is, poor sod) and shows the Doctor to a chamber where River Song is waiting and the mysterious Madame Kovarian is tied to a chair.

We next discover that the Doctor must “touch” River to restore time to its natural state, and in doing so end up dying as he was supposed to do in the first place, restoring everything to as it should be. Madame Kovarian then announces that the Silence were never really captive and were just waiting for the Doctor to make an appearance, and start breaking out of their fish tanks to kill everyone in the pyramid. Everyone runs around like headless chickens for a while with eyepatches exploding, and our heroes manage to escape.

In a very rushed finale we learn that River has been sending out a signal to all and sundry to let them know the Doctor is dying and need their help, that he is loved by the whole universe, and then in a somewhat unexplained, contrived and confusing motion the Doctor suddenly agrees that they should get hitched and kiss each other, to “touch” and restore time to its rightful flow.  Wait a minute. Did they really need to get married to do this? The Doctor already proved that just by holding her arm the same result could be achieved, so why on Earth is he marrying her?  Of course this also gives him the chance to whisper what we think at this point must surely be the now famous mysterious words into her ear which, by now, we’re all sick to death of, and still none the wiser about. But no, Moffat teases us yet again! Oh… you little rascal Moffat! How we love to be teased. Groan.

Anyway, they kiss and all of reality returns to normal. We then join River and Amy for a glass of wine in the back garden and learn in the following last scene that the Doctor is actually alive and had been hiding inside the Tessalecta for an extremely long time. And what he actually whispered in River’s ear is not the huge secret of the Doctor’s true name, but “Look into my eye.” How disappointing!

And so, unfortunately, we’re still left wondering what the heck she said to Tennant’s Doctor in Silence in the Library, and the possibility that River will be showing up again and again to lead us to the point where the Doctor tells her this damned secret in the future. But please, can’t that be it? I know, it’s silly, but so is Moffat’s idea of keeping secrets that span three series and two production teams. It may not make the most sense, but would at least explain the strange look on Ten’s face.

So we close another series of Doctor Who, sometimes with rare glimpses of promising hope, but mostly agonising and embarrassing facsimile of what the show used to be. But not before the Doctor utters the most joyous and profound piece of information we here at Eye of Harmony have heard since it was announced the show would return in 2005. “I got too big; too noisy…time to step back into the shadows,” he tells us. Can this really mean a return to the classic format of the Doctor being unknown to all he meets? To become again the mysterious figure to which the very name of the show stands for? We certainly hope so. It is a real chance for Doctor Who to get back to its roots and once again operate on a smaller, more personal, and less dramatic scale, which let’s be honest, suits Doctor Who a lot more that trying to emulate something like Star Trek.

And let it also be a chance for the show to begin to take itself a little more seriously as a result. Let’s have some serious, character driven stories with more thought toward plot and pacing rather than constant jokes, pop culture references, ridiculous CGI and pantomime silliness. The kids can live without it, and the adults really don’t want it.  We have a brilliant Doctor in Matt Smith, give him some great material to work with, and let the writers flex their creative muscles, lest the show ends up back where it was in 1986-1989, because to be honest, lately it’s been getting dangerously close.