He gets me. :D
Some of you don’t watch Doctor Who, so I’ll explain a little bit more…. Saturday was the fifth-season finale of the revived Doctor Who series, titled “The Big Bang”. I won’t spoil that episode, but I’ll spoil the one before it – just a little bit.
5x12 - THE PANDORICA OPENS
The few times that it’s been mentioned this season, the Pandorica has been described as a prison that the Doctor believes to be a fairytale. The prison was for a “warrior, or a trickster” who couldn’t be reasoned with or stopped, and would just drop in and wreck your world.
Fans were correct in figuring out that this meant The Doctor, but they were wrong in thinking that he would already be in there. Instead, an alliance of his worst enemies – Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Judoon, and a lot more – were there to seal him in to the device, in a twisted plan to save the universe.
Irony fucked them (hard) and, by locking him up, they actually set the universe to the destruction that they’d thought the Doctor would cause. Auton-Rory is there, holding the deceased Amy and mourning the universe’s demise, when the Doctor arrives out of nowhere, with River Song’s vortex manipulator.
…
But the Doctor was locked in the box. The inescapable prison designed specifically to hold him. The Pandorica. How is he here, when he’s there? And more importantly, where did that fez come from?
Turns out that this is a Doctor from the future, although fairly recent in his own future, but quite a ways away in Rory’s. He gives Rory the sonic screwdriver and tells him how to free him, and to put the sonic screwdriver into Amy’s coat pocket when he’s done doing that.
The Doctor is freed from the Pandorica because Rory freed him, and he went to the future, and then came back into the past to tell Rory how to free him. He’s free because he told Rory how to free him, with the knowledge seemingly coming from no original point of it’s own.
Less than five minutes in, Steven Moffat plays with ontological paradoxes.
THAT is why I love this show. Thank you, Steven Moffat.
