“It’s the story of how Amy is changed by the Doctor. She’s the little girl who believes that men can fall from the sky, eat fish custard and fix everything. And she’s the girl who grows up to believe you should never believe that kind of thing, ‘cause they’re liars and they don’t turn up when they say they will. And the rest of the story is the Doctor trying to make her the girl he first met again, the girl who’s capable of believing in a madman from the sky who likes fish fingers and custard. And that’s what he does. By the end she’s capable of standing up at that wedding and believing all that was real. Raggedy Man, I remember you. That’s what it’s all about. He puts her back, in a way, to the heart and the spirit and the soul of he girl he first met.” - Steven Moffat.
So there you have it straight from the horse’s mouth: Season 5 has been the story of Amy Pond, of a journey that is both a linear growth and a circle (the motif that has been repeated in every episode). But as well as this being the great personal story of the season, it is also the arc and the theme.
By the end of The Pandorica Opens, there are two ways that things could disappear from reality. The TARDIS had exploded and caused a “total event collapse” in which the entire universe has never existed, with only the Earth briefly surviving as the “eye of the storm” around the Pandorica. Metaphorically, the atoms protected within the restoration field of the Pandorica are a “memory” of the universe and the exploding TARDIS can carry this to all time, bringing the universe back into being. Thus “memory” causes what was lost to return.
This, however, will not restore anything swallowed by the cracks. Those taken by the cracks leave behind signs of their presence in the universe - photographs, rings and duck ponds remain - and thus causality is not damaged by their removal. They are, however, forgotten. Only Amy can undo this, by trying to remember. Essentially she has a strange kind of superpower. As the Doctor says to Rory, “Memories are more important than you think and Amy Pond is not an ordinary girl. Grew up with a time crack in her wall, the universe pouring through her dreams every night. The Nestenes took a memory print off her and got a little more than they bargained for. Like you - not just your face but your heart and soul.” So Amy’s memory of Rory literally
is Rory. This, I imagine, is what explains him remembering the experience of his own death. Amy’s memories can actually, literally bring back those removed from time. Whether her mind somehow protects these lost people in her memory, or whether her memories draw them back from wherever they’ve gone, is not clear.
The Doctor’s sacrifice allows the universe to return, but anything that disappeared through a crack before then needs Amy to remember it. So, remembering her parents brings them back. Remembering Rory brings him back. The Doctor should be beyond help, sealed on the other side of the cracks in the Void. However, it turns out that he will first travel back through his own timeline, unravelling as the universe comes into being. This allows him to pull off a cunning trick by telling the sleeping Amelia a story, a fairytale, after previously reminding the adult Amy to remember it. It must be a spontaneous memory, so he links it to the old saying of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” representing the TARDIS. It’s suggested that he knows it will work, because he arrives at Amy’s wedding already dressed up, but actually it requires a bit of help from River Song, and that raises yet more questions. I say “dressed up”, but he’s got it wrong again, wearing evening dress. His line “How lucky I happened to be wearing this old thing,” accompanied by a Hartnell-esque tug of the lapels, makes the fan in me suspect that this is one of the First Doctor’s tailcoats.
Okay, but this is a lot more complex than it seems. The events of the Doctor’s meeting with Amelia in The Eleventh Hour have happened in a straight-forward way, but everything after that becomes wonderfully paradoxical and abstract. When the Doctor tells Amelia her bedtime story, he tells her she will dream of the adventures they would have had together. These dreams form the enhanced memory that not only brings the Doctor back into being, but also all the events of the season. When the Doctor appears at the wedding, Rory suddenly remembers everything and can be faintly heard talking to Amy’s mother, “How did we forget the Doctor? I was plastic. He was the stripper at my stag-” and then we go into the conversation between Amy and the Doctor.
So all the events of the season actually happened, but only because Amelia hears about them as a fairytale, dreams of them, and then remembers them. The point is that this becomes a looping pattern, another circle. It’s impossible to say when the events literally, physically happened, and if this can be distinguished from a fairytale dream of those said events. Difficult and gorgeous. For example, the fact that we saw the future Doctor’s meeting with Amy in the forest in Flesh and Stone implies that we witnessed the events of the season as part of some weird reality loop, rather than seeing them the first time around. It’s as if they are somehow both reality and fairytale. For example, seven-year-old Amelia’s paintings are interesting, and almost certainly draw on Vincent and the Doctor, the events of which both have and haven’t happened to her yet, pouring into her dreams from the crack. As well as her painting of a starry night at the start of the ep, when the future doctor visits her there is a painting of a vase of flowers right beside her bed. Vincent described sunflowers, that he painted for Amy, as “complex, always somewhere between living and dying.” The whole season contains images and references that relate to the main concept.
Certain things from earlier in the season spring into focus, such as the fact that the dolls of herself and the Doctor that Amelia has made often portray her as a adult-sized. I’ll argue that these represent the adventures she remembers back into being, and since, in the closing images of The Eleventh Hour, we see them juxtaposed with her wedding dress, we can see that the concept of these stories becoming real through “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” is built in from the very start of the season. Indeed, the image of the apple in The Eleventh Hour is repeated in The Big Bang by a necklace Amy wears to her wedding. As Becca has pointed out in her review, there is a lovely bit of gentle metafiction: “We’re all stories in the end.”
Becca’s review notes that this episode resolves Amy’s Choice, in that Amy actually gets both options: she has a marriage with Rory and stays with the life of adventure; she grows up and remains a child. The other decision in Amy’s Choice - is it reality or is it a dream? - is dealt with in a similar way, because it is ultimately both reality and dream, moving in a circle. Like Blink, the narrative is an ontological paradox, but where linearity continues after the loop resolves in Blink, in Season 5 linearity continues
before the loop begins. In an even more complex way than he has before, Moffat presents us with mutual effects and causes.
If the events have, as it were, already happened this explains some apparent prior knowledge by the characters. On a number of occasions Amy shows an almost innate knowledge of what’s going on, but most telling is the Doctor saying in Flesh and Stone: “It’s you. It’s all about you. Everything. It’s about you … Amy Pond, mad, impossible Amy Pond, I don’t know why, I have no idea, but quite possibly the single most important thing in the history of the universe is that I get you sorted out right now.” With typical misdirection, Moffat puts this dialogue into a comedy seduction scene that makes us miss it. In fact, the entire season now requires a re-watch!
The time travel loops are silly and fun, and best represented by Amelia’s drink. The Doctor steals it from her earlier self to give it to her future self because she is thirsty. But the reason her future self is thirsty is that he stole the drink from her in the first place, and so on and so forth. (Although the complexity of these ideas pales into insignificance beside the fairytale-reality loop that is the basis for this episode and, indeed, the whole season.) Normally we wouldn‘t have the Doctor going back into his own timeline and changing events - apart from anything else, that would destroy drama - but as Moffat says, things are a little different this time: “In a circumstance when all of reality is collapsing, in a way the gloves are off. The rules are out. He is going to cheat to stop this. He’s not sticking to the rule book this week.”
Moffat has deliberately left many of the questions open. As well, as quite a few on the clues list (
), several are overtly mentioned by the Doctor: who or what is behind the destruction of the TARDIS? what is the silence? why did the TARDIS have to be brought to 26/06/2010, the date of Amy’s wedding, for the explosion? In addition the question of why the exploding TARDIS should cause the end of the universe, is “for another day.” We are also soon to learn more about River Song. Many of the puzzles of this season will continue next year and probably beyond.