5x013 The Big Bang (Grading/Discussion) SPOILERS!!

[Arrqh]

This is the way pretty much all of them work. Some stories, at least, have the courtesy of showing us the loop being created. Such as in Back to the Future. Others just skip it entirely, like in Terminator.

No. In fact, in Terminator it was the same: Kyle Reese was always John Connor's father. There was no "first time" where he had a different father. Other Who examples besides Blink include Time Crash (where the only way the Doctor knew how to solve the problem was his memory of watching himself do it) and even in Forest of the Dead when the Doctor realizes that he "saved" River with the screwdriver. Coincidentally, all things Moffat wrote.

So again, there was never a first time. The Doctor always was able to escape because of the actions of the future Doctor. Just like Sally was always able to send the Tardis back to the Doctor because he set up a scenario based on the information a future version of Sally gave him. Heck, the only reason Sally ever got involved in the events of Blink is because the Doctor knew he was supposed to do it.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

It's funny, I always thought Kyle replaced *whoever* as John Connor's father, I always thought we were seeing the first time. I guess my brain just doesn't wrap around paradoxes that are and have always been with no entry point. At that point it wasn't even a cycle, they stopped Skynet so why did John Connor have to be the same person who would do all the same things?

 

[Winterwind]

Very enjoyable and, for my tastes, a far better series finale than anything RTD gave.

I can't wait for Series 6. And I'm really curious to find out who/what River Song is. This is a woman that can make a Dalek beg for mercy. That's hot. I've always had a thing for older women...

 

[Yminale]

It's funny, I always thought Kyle replaced *whoever* as John Connor's father, I always thought we were seeing the first time. I guess my brain just doesn't wrap around paradoxes that are and have always been with no entry point.

Once you have a time machine, there is no more linear time.

At that point it wasn't even a cycle, they stopped Skynet so why did John Connor have to be the same person who would do all the same things?

They didn't stop Skynet. It's a predestination paradox. There will always be a John Connor and there will always be a Skynet.

 

[Plan 9]

This is the way pretty much all of them work. Some stories, at least, have the courtesy of showing us the loop being created. Such as in Back to the Future. Others just skip it entirely, like in Terminator.

No. In fact, in Terminator it was the same: Kyle Reese was always John Connor's father. There was no "first time" where he had a different father.

What makes you say that? All we saw in the movie was the loop after it had been created. Not how it was created.

Again: Loops like that don't just spontaneously occur. They're created. The "original" John Connor wasn't sired by the same father we saw, nor was his mother originally being hunted by a robot sent from the future. When Skynet decided to try out that strategy, the original John Connor sent one of his men back, and that man happened to have sex with his mother, creating a new John Connor... one who, courtesy of the events of the loop, knew she'd have to make sure her "new" John Connor son knew who to send back to maintain that loop.

So again, there was never a first time.

No, you're just making the same mistake again. Nothing wrong with making mistakes. It's how you learn.

Just because we rarely get to see the original course of events that lead to a paradox and/or time loop, that doesn't mean they don't occur.

 

[Sci]

Good, but a bit underwhelming. I know many people were glad to be rid of spectacle, but I wasn't. I want my season finales of action-adventure programs to be chalk full of big, over-the-top spectacle, and big emotions. I don't mind underplaying the rest of the season, but a finale ought to be a bit different, I think. So I rate it "Good" rather than "Geronimo!," and I'm sorry to report that it's probably my least favorite season finale of the revived series.

But it was still great fun, and parts of it were pure brilliance.

The "Amy brings the Doctor back into history through the power of love" thing is pure sentimental nonsense, but I don't care and I enjoyed it anyway.

I wonder if the doctor really was expecting to be saved, or if it was a bit of a surprise in the end.

There was a sense that he gave up; he decided to stop traveling back along his own personal timeline, and he evinces surprise that Amy remembered enough of him to pull him back across into the new timeline.

This is going to be so cool, a universe where the Doctor didn't exist.

I don't think that's what this universe is -- I think that Amy's memory restored the Doctor to all of history, thereby resetting the universe. The Doctor still existed.

After all, otherwise, who would have stopped the Time Lords from destroying time, the Daleks from detonating the reality bomb, the Titanic from destroying England, etc.?

The regeneration limit? I don't know. But if the "Morbius" corollary is correct, there really isn't a regeneration limit, as the Doctor is already well past his thirteenth incarnation.

Not possible. The Doctor specifically identified his current body as his eleventh incarnation in "The Lodger."

Brilliant...absolutely brilliant. Finally a focus on the characters instead of the spectacle. Rory has to be the best "companion" of all time. 2000 years? What a trooper.

Other than the question of the Big Bad the only things I am confused about now are from The Eleventh Hour. What was that strange figure running past the camera just before it went from Amelia's time to Amy's time? Also, near the end of the episode did Amelia reall hear the Tardis and look up or was that just a dream?

The impression I got from "The Big Bang" was that both camps -- the "It's just a dream!" camp and the "The Doctor came back!" camp -- were right. The Doctor did come back that night, but the TARDIS didn't. But, Amy was having dreams about the Doctor because she's been dreaming of him all her life as a result of his reverberation through time. It was just a dream -- but it was a dream because the Doctor came back.

We saw in "Turn Left" a universe where the Doctor didn't exist. Who saved the Earth (and all those other worlds) from all the baddies he's defeated in the last 900 years?

Except the Doctor did exist in that universe; he just happened to be dead when the shit hit the fan.

There is the school of thought in pre-2005 fandom that it was the Doctor's existence that drew out all the baddies and endangered Earth on a nigh-regular basis. Without the Doctor, that lightning rod would be removed. Moffat is old-school enough he might find favor with that theory. This doesn't apply to "Turn Left" because the Doctor already existed, hence the lightning rod would exist, so alien intelligences would have already had their eye on Earth.

Which would explain why Amy doesn't recall the events we see in the prior 4 years, cause in her time-stream it never happened. The prior 4, the whole prior series, hasn't happened to this Earth.

The impression I get is that is has -- if it hadn't, that would interfere with both Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Rather, those events had previously been erased from the past by the Cracks, but, with the Cracks having been retconned, they have no be un-erased and happened again. The past has been restored.

Well, presumably except for the Cyber-King, 'cos that was just silly.

The question is, assuming everything got put back, does she remember them now?

I think the finale made it very clear that she does.

2. The Rory that got married, I'm fairly sure, is human. But Rory died in Cold Blood. Then was erased by the Crack. So how come he didn't die? Did the Doctor, in his rewind, somehow save him?

Yes, because the rewind caused the Cracks to have never happened in the first place. It's like in "Last of the Time Lords" -- the only people who remember the Cracks are the Doctor, Amy, Rory, and River.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

I'M TOO FUCKING STUPID TO APPRECIATE WHY A STORY ARC THAT ISN'T CONFINED TO 13 EPISODES IS A GOOD THING

Is it?

It depends on what you want out of a story, at the end of the day. I tend to prefer story arcs to be wrapped up at the end of a season, myself; that doesn't mean that ones that last longer are bad, but I tend not to enjoy them as much as season-long arcs.

But now you know what I felt like when listening to people complain about RTD.

I wonder if the doctor really was expecting to be saved, or if it was a bit of a surprise in the end.

There was a sense that he gave up; he decided to stop traveling back along his own personal timeline, and he evinces surprise that Amy remembered enough of him to pull him back across into the new timeline.

This is going to be so cool, a universe where the Doctor didn't exist.

How is this a universe in which the Doctor doesn't exist?

When the Doctor is pulled from the ether by Amy's memories, River's book is once again filled with her scribblings of the Doctor.

Rory also mutters, "How could we have forgotten the Doctor?"

And someone still has the Doctor's time-digits since he gets a call (to action) from elsewhere at the end of the episode.

It seemed to me that the Doctor did not exist once he entered the crack. Then, once Amy remembered him, his life and time stream reentered the "rebooted" universe. And, thus, becoming part of it.

Exactly. Everything's been restored to the way it was without the Cracks erasing stuff.

Ugh.

It wasn't really bad, and it had a lot of nice moments (especially the museum presentation on the mysterious Centurion, "Fezzes are cool" and "...something borrowed, something blue"), but – to quote the Prisoner Zero version of Amy from The Eleventh Hour – "what a disappointment you've been." The tone was all over the place, half the solutions to the problems didn't even make any sense, and the cliffhanger from last week was resolved in 30 seconds in the least dramatic way possible. And to top it off, they managed to take the Doctor crossing his own time stream to deliver a message to Amy in the past while he's being wiped from existence and underplay it. Some of that is the result of heightened expectations, I admit, but frankly, the Doctor's time reversal back to "Flesh and Stone" was far less interesting than what I'd imagined the answer could be.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the finale suffered from the worst flaws of the RTD finales but without any of the grand, emotional operatic scope that made those often irrational stories work. Boo.

I agree that it's all underplayed. Ironically, for a writer who's so proud of his Scottish heritage, I'm afraid Moffat's writing strikes me as being, well, a bit English in a way -- emotionally underplayed and suppressed.

I don't dislike that -- in fact, I rather enjoy it. But I agree that a season finale really ought to be grand and epic and huge and operatic in its emotion. It doesn't have to emulate RTD -- but it'd be nice if it were bigger, in the tradition of, say, Joss Whedon.

Question: Why can past Amy and present Amy touch? Shouldn't that have created the same paradox situation that was caused when present Rose touched baby Rose in "Father's day"?

All of history and reality was imploding around them. Would that really have been any worse than what had already happened? Maybe Horrible Things™ did happen, but it was impossible to tell because reality itself was already collapsing.

Heck, maybe their touching was the reason dawn happened earlier than it was supposed to.

How is this a universe in which the Doctor doesn't exist?

Because both the Doctor and River said the rebooted universe would be a universe in which the Doctor never existed.

Yes, and then he said that all the writing in the book was back, and someone gave him a phone call. Obviously his non-existence was un-done.

Also, Amy allegedly could bring back "erased" things because her mind was altered due to living next to the crack for all those years. But the Amy at the end never had a crack in her wall, so how come she could wish the Doctor back?

Presumably for the same reason there was still a photo of Rory in her room after he'd been erased from history: Because even erasures leave a mark on the page. Presumably Amy will always, in any incarnation, have those Crack-caused alterations, even if the Crack never existed.

* * *

I find the arguments about how time travel paradoxes "really" work to be quite amusing. It's fiction and time travel isn't real; it works however the writer says it works. Wibby wobbly timey wimey.

 

[Kelthaz]

Again: Loops like that don't just spontaneously occur. They're created.

We're talking about fictional time travel here. If Doctor Who wants their paradoxes to be spontaneously occuring than they're spontaneously occuring. End of discussion.

 

[Sci]

Again: Loops like that don't just spontaneously occur. They're created.

We're talking about fictional time travel here. If Doctor Who wants their paradoxes to be spontaneously occuring than they're spontaneously occuring. End of discussion.

Exactly. Of course they don't spontaneously occur -- they don't occur at all, because it's fiction. It works however the writer depicts it as working.

 

[Sci]

Also, interesting note:

"The Big Bang" is the first season finale in the revived series where we haven't ended the episode saying goodbye to someone!

Think about it.

In "The Parting of the Ways," we ended the episode saying goodbye to the Ninth Doctor. "You were fantastic, absolutely fantastic! And you know what? So was I!"

In "Doomsday," of course, we ended the episode saying goodbye to Rose Tyler. "I love you..."

In "Last of the Time Lords," we ended the episode saying goodbye to Martha Jones. "So this is me. Getting out."

In "Journey's End," of course, we said goodbye to, well, everybody. But primarily, we said goodbye to Donna. "I want to stay. I was gonna be with you. Forever..."

And, of course, after saying goodbye to everyone -- again -- in "The End of Time, Part Two," we finally said goodbye to the Tenth Doctor. "I don't want to go..."

But this?

This is the first season finale where we don't say goodbye to anybody. In point of fact -- as seems to be typical with Moffat -- everybody lives.

I like that.

 

[David cgc]

Yes we do! Amy says goodbye to her friends and family as she flies off into the Christmas special and next season.

 

[Yminale]

This is the first season finale where we don't say goodbye to anybody. In point of fact -- as seems to be typical with Moffat -- everybody lives.

I like that.

Amy said goodbye to her crummy life but I don't think that counts.

 

[Cutter John]

I think Moffat broke some sort of personal record this episode for jamming clever lines into one episode. so many brilliant quotes and bits of nonsense. And I think finally River has clicked as a character for me.

Of course now I'm left wondering how if the cracks were splits in time that erased whatever touched the touched them, what was the deal with Prisoner Zero way back in the forst epidose, that seemed to have no trouble slipping through the thing. Come to think of it, having rewatched that episode, its voice in serpent form seemed pretty damned similar to the voice in the Tardis. Makes me wonder whether we'll be seeing it again next series.

 

[Yminale]

Well, presumably except for the Cyber-King, 'cos that was just silly.

Come on. Cyber-kings are cool. You know what would make them cooler A FEZ. Yeah a Cyber-king with a FEZ would be ultra-cool.

I agree that it's all underplayed. Ironically, for a writer who's so proud of his Scottish heritage, I'm afraid Moffat's writing strikes me as being, well, a bit English in a way -- emotionally underplayed and suppressed.

I think RTD was just more comfortable with his inner Doctor Who Geekiness. Many of his story ideas seem to resolve around a crazy idea only a fan would love. That's why criticism didn't seem to bother him, he was having fun and everybody was having fun with him.

As for Moffat, he just seems really uncomfortable sometimes. I would say except for Matt and Karen (who seem to enjoy EVERY minute), everybody in the production staff seems really uptight for some reason. Maybe it was just nerves or those rumors about backdoor politicking were true.

That's what I miss about RTD. The man would just gush away about Doctor Who and it was hard to hate anything he made because of his enthusiasm (and Cyber-kings are cool)

 

[DAK]

Also, Amy allegedly could bring back "erased" things because her mind was altered due to living next to the crack for all those years. But the Amy at the end never had a crack in her wall, so how come she could wish the Doctor back?

Presumably for the same reason there was still a photo of Rory in her room after he'd been erased from history: Because even erasures leave a mark on the page. Presumably Amy will always, in any incarnation, have those Crack-caused alterations, even if the Crack never existed.

Remember what the Doctor said to Amy in the previous episode? "Nothing is ever forgotten. Not completely. And if something can be remembered, it can come back." He came back because she remembered him, not because she "wished" him back. Interesting that River obviously remembered him too, but that wasn't enough to bring him back for some reason. And she has many more memories of him than Amy does.

Oh, and the cracks had to have existed at some point, otherwise the Weeping Angels would never have been defeated in "Flesh and Stone". Right? Timey-Wimey is giving me brain cramps.

 

[Sci]

Yes we do! Amy says goodbye to her friends and family as she flies off into the Christmas special and next season.

Yeah, Amy said goodbye. Not we, the viewers. We'd never even met those people before this episode.

 

[Arrqh]

No, you're just making the same mistake again. Nothing wrong with making mistakes. It's how you learn.

Just because we rarely get to see the original course of events that lead to a paradox and/or time loop, that doesn't mean they don't occur.

No, you're just not listening. S'okay, I'm patient, feel free to start any time!

As I already said, the entire point of an ontological paradox is that the information does not "come" from anywhere because there is no "original" version. You're free to go and look it up at your leisure. As I also already said Blink is the same way and neither Blink nor The Big Bang can possibly make sense unless you accept that this is what they're using as a storytelling device. No one had a problem with Blink. Some people for reasons unknown to me all of a sudden have a problem with it now. The show isn't being inconsistent, but some of the people watching it sure are.

 

[Saul]

If my future self comes back in time and gives me a map to a time machine in future that I will use to come back in time and give myself a map then that is a self contained paradox. It's not one created from an original timeline because in this case the paradox always has and will happen.

If it is always the case that I will find the time machine then a paradox is not necessary. But here a paradox is needed for the outcome of these exact events.

Oh dear I think i've gone cross eyed.

 

[Captain Pike]

In "Doomsday," of course, we ended the episode saying goodbye to Rose Tyler. "I love you..."

 

[Plan 9]

Again: Loops like that don't just spontaneously occur. They're created.

We're talking about fictional time travel here. If Doctor Who wants their paradoxes to be spontaneously occuring than they're spontaneously occuring. End of discussion.

Two words: Prove it.

And after you're done trying to prove that, I'd appreciate it if you could take the time to explain why you're so adamant about it being spontaneous instead of being created? Especially since it being created is, you know, sensible?

Or are you one of those "fans" who prefers to be pissy and angry at every little nitpick you can find, no matter how irrational it is?

 

[Sci]

In "Doomsday," of course, we ended the episode saying goodbye to Rose Tyler. "I love you..."

I know! She was so gross and she had cooties and everything.