Plus it turns out that, when it counts, he is actually a bad ass motha fucka. (I hope this is not excessive swearing in CS.) But seriously, the guy fights off Cybermen with a ROMAN SWORD and later drags the Pandorica out of a burning building DURING AN AIR RAID and PUNCHES THE DOCTOR IN THE FACE and looks excessively sharp in a British Museum guard outfit.
Exactly. He had the chance to prove himself and came through with shining colors, proving his worth. I think that’s what made the wedding so much more believable in the end.
River said that everybody would wake up where they should be with no memory of the Doctor, so the idea is that the subjective consciousness (soul?) of Rory WAS in the Auton Rory, but then woke up in meat Rory after Big Bang II. Once Amy brings the Doctor back into time, Rory’s memories of the Doctor pop back.
I’m amazed how complicated the plot of this episode managed to be while resorting to a bare minimum level of handwaving. The whole “restoration field powered by TARDIS energy” was actually hinted at enough throughout the episode that it didn’t feel like a total deus ex machina. I also love that River’s reaction wasn’t, “Oh, hooray, he’s come up with a perfect solution” but more, “Clever! Worth a try.”
And given the timey-wimeyness of it all, it retroactively explains why Amy was in love with him in the first place. He hadn’t done anything impressive yet, but she may have known that he will have done.
Hmm… I can’t see that working. the Duplicate was a machine with memories of Rory from Amy’s point of view whacked in. So it acted like Rory, but probably an idealised version of Rory, because it is Amy. It doesn’t make sense that the replaced Rory would ‘remember’ being the Duplicate.
I felt that the plot was thin, but Dr.Who is definitely not a Trek type of writing so it doesnt really matter. My favourite part was the ‘Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed and Something Blue’. It just worked.
As I took it, the plastic Rory wasn’t “manufactured from Amy’s memories” in that sci-fi cliche. When the Nestene scanned her memories, it included Rory. This pulled him back into existence, but he got tangled up with the duplicate somehow. Plastic Rory wasn’t a “copy,” he subjectively WAS Rory, just Rory that happened to be plastic.
So is there a definitive list of unresolved issues? There’s The Silence, the control of the Tardis by a third party, whoever was attempting to build a Tardis upstairs from James Corden, and the ducks. River has a story that is still largely untold, too. Any more?
Why the Tardis exploded may or may not be related to whomever was controlling it.
-Joe
Steven Moffat has only promised to resolve two outstanding issues next year:
- Who are the silence? Note he uses the words “who are,” not “what is.”
- Who is River Song? This means we’re going to learn something more about her, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some questions are never answered.
These two weren’t specifically mentioned in the interview, but “The Big Bang” ends with the Doctor pondering:
- What tried to blow up the Tardis?
- Why 26 June 2010?
I think far, far too much has been made of the ducks. Amelia’s parents disappeared from the world when she was a child; our minds need not boggle over a few waterfowl. Yes, someone is likely to protest, but the ducks would be unlikely to be in Amy’s bedroom with the crack. Well, Amy was an unusual girl. More seriously, energy from the crack has been shown to reach out and selectively swallow things. There’s no reason to think it couldn’t grab some birds through a window. Besides, it made for a nice metaphor: Amelia Pond, the girl who didn’t make sense in a house with two many empty rooms; the duck pond that never had any ducks.
I also don’t know that James Corden’s upstairs neighbor has more significance than the monster from “Midnight.” “The Lodger” was about the Doctor on his own passing himself off as human (as opposed to being human as in “Human Nature”); the quasi-Tardis on the roof was just an excuse to separate him from his regular companion and motivate him to move in with a stranger. (Mind you, I’ll be happy if there is a callback, but I don’t think it’s a given that there will be.)
In short, I think some of the unexplained things from this season will remain unexplained because they don’t need explanation. They aren’t unresolved issues any more than “Where does the Shadow Proclamation get its authority?” or “Are there any female Judoon”?
I dunno TWDuke, the thing above the house was trying to build an actual Tardis, rather than any other kind of random device. That is surely no throwaway line. The ducks, well, I’ll just have to accept the loss. I like ducks. Damn you Moffat :mad:
June 26th was just the broadcast date though, surely?
I wonder about this. It’s a cliché of British lower middle-class homes that there are ducks on the wall.
Well, I think the significance of that was simply that it was the date of the finale episode.
That’s the real-world explanation, but there’s no reason for the silence to care about the BBC’s broadcast schedule. Besides, at about the 52-minute mark the Doctor says: “Something drew the Tardis to this particular date and blew it up. Why? And why now?” If the Doctor considers it an unresolved issue worthy of further investigation, I’m going to have to agree!
ETA: I understand how you feel about the ducks, Baron Greenback. Take comfort in the fact that I’m quite often wrong.
I reckon the “particular date” was just the date of Amy’s wedding, which exactly fits the story, and the long planned broadcast schedule. Just a little real time thing.
ETA just a real time thing to firmly place continuity
Again, in the final few minutes of the episode, after the cracks are closed and after Amy and Rory have been successfully wedded, the Doctor in the Tardis says, "“Something drew the Tardis to this particular date and blew it up. Why? And why now?” In story, that makes it clear to me that Amy’s wedding was not a sufficient explanation for the Doctor. Real world, there’s no way a competent writer would end with that question unless he were planning to come back to it.
I see it as Amy and Rory’s wedding day - the date is pretty irrelevant, just a date in 2010, the date the last episode was always going to be broadcast. I really can’t see them going back at the Christmas special or whenever the next series starts and making a fuss about about a particular date in the past.
The whole point being that there was no reason to waste screen time on The Doctor specifically wondering about the date once the story had been resolved.
If The Doctor had explained it, it would be done and gone. But it’s not, he instead wonders about it. There was absolutely NO reason to bring it up after everything has been resolved - unless it hasn’t been resolved. Something our main expository character in the show specifically states - it hasn’t been resolved.
Hell, the much more significant date was the day Amelia Pond went to the museum, seeing as how that’s the date the universe got rebooted. .
If it doesn’t go anywhere, it was just a waste of words (and screen time). And I just don’t see that.
-Joe
…oh what a beautiful wedding! Have you seen the photos?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/dw/episodes/b00sxfc7/galleries/wedding
Bride pics
- Why did Amy have no prior knowledge of the Daleks?
Every other gap in her memory can be explained the time crack swallowing up the ducks, or her parents, or whatever, but it’s like the Dalek invasion just never happened.
Did we ever find out if the whole Earth had forgotten about the Daleks or just Amy, or for that matter just the village? And for that matter, did she, or anyone else, remember about Sontarans, Cybermen, Titanics over Buckingham Palace and all the rest?