At least Matt Smith was brilliant

Well, the finale has come and gone and the season has finally reached its end. It was a good run, and overall I was blown away at how much better this series has been than the ones that preceded it. Our own Luke Pietnik just posted his thoughts on the finale, and gave it an overall stellar review. His review expresses sentiments similar to those I’ve heard elsewhere. But I’ll be honest: the finale left me cold. At first I felt like the only person in the universe who didn’t like it, but eventually I found a few who shared my objections.

I have been trained thanks to years of spectacular RTD disappointments to keep my mouth shut regarding my dissenting opinions, so I really don’t feel like going into it myself, but thankfully there were others who summed up my objections pretty well.

Freddie Dalladay writes in his review:

The episode itself was pretty disappointing, for many reasons.

Let’s start with the escape from the Pandorica. I thought it was too easily done – an alliance of the Doctor’s greater and lesser foes collaborating to build a device to detain the Doctor and he escapes via Rory and the Sonic. That rather throws doubt on the abilities all the enemies. Are the Daleks and Cybermen really that dulled witted to be thwarted so easily? They’re supposed to be his greatest enemies, not some effortless twaddles who can be danced around by a plastic Roman with a Sonic Screwdriver!

[…]

Moffat rather disappointed me with this episode. The Pandorica Opens was a work of genius, The Big Bang in comparison was a weak imitation of Moffat’s sublime works.

And in the discussion thread for the episode on my forums, my friend RV is even less forgiving.

The TARDIS exploded, and then it didn’t, through the magic power of tears. There’s also the fact that the Doctor managed to escape from the Pandorica with the assistance of his own, post escape, self – yet for this to be even remotely possible, his post escape self would have had to have escaped the Pandorica without a future Doctor’s help, making the fact he helped himself escape sort of pointless because if he escaped without his own help at first, there would be no point in having to help himself escape. Not to mention that this was a deus ex machina of RTD proportions.

Then the only explanation we get is a bit of lampshading, and they move on to the next non-issue. The peril River Song is put in is resolved in three seconds by the vortex manipulator device, then Moffat aimlessly creates more time paradoxes to fill in time before conjuring up a magic power for the Pandorica and “sacrificing” the Doctor. Then the Doctor is saved by tears. You know the last movie I saw that in? The Pokemon movie.

Unless Moffat explains a living shitload of what the fuck just happened, I’m pretty sure I’ve entirely lost faith in his ability to run the series. He built up it all so well, and then created an anticlimax so anticlimactic it probably created a bigger crack in the universe than the exploding TARDIS. RTD’s finales were dumb. Moffat’s was pointless.

All in all, it was a dud of a conclusion to an otherwise brilliant run. There were still problems throughout, and as Mr. Dalladay suggests in his review, I would have liked to have seen a Moffat/Smith era making the initial return of the series, free of lingering influence from RTD in terms of format and scale, but for what it was, it was a substantial step up on virtually all counts. I just hope next year we get a decent finale to bookend it. (Remember the good old days when a finale was just another episode?)