beer_good_foamy

1. Finally a season finale that delivers. RTD's finales often delivered emotionally, but also had the annoying habit of suddenly pressing a button and making all the monsters - and everything they might have represented - disappear, as if they weren't important at all except to create problems for the Doctor to solve. Instead, Moffatt (fittingly considering how much his run on Doctor Who so far has felt like really good Doctor Who fanfic) brings the monsters back. And how awesome was that moment at the wedding when Amy gets the diary, Rory says something about old wedding traditions, and they give you just enough to mentally rewind to the Doctor's last speech to 7-year-old Amy and realise that he essentially called the TARDIS old, new, borrowed, and blue? The Doctor lives in the subconscious.

2. "OK, kid, here's where it gets complicated." I kind of love Amy. Amies. Whatever. And Rory. ("I'm not Mr Pond. That's not how it works." "Yeah, it is." "...Yeah, it is.") And River. ("Mercy!") And the Doctor ("burns at the centre of time" indeed). Matt Smith took a couple of episodes to get going, but by the end he really had the "old, possibly not quite sane, man on the run from the old folks' home in a young man's body (and wearing a silly fez)" feel down perfectly. The scene with him and Amy right before he takes off in the Pandorica...

3. "Dear Santa..." Moffatt knows fairy tales. He set this up right away in the season opener, and then he delivered on it. Doctor Who is inherently escapist, the idea of running away in a little blue box and never having to grow up, but the point of escapist fiction is never to escape reality, it's to make sense of reality, to feel like we belong in it. It's all very Gaiman and Pratchett, really; remember Hogfather, after Susan saves the title character (that's Santa Claus to you non-Pratchettians)?

I WILL GIVE YOU A LIFT BACK, said Death, after a while.
'Thank you. Now... tell me . .
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?
'Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?'
NO.
'Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact.'
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
She turned on him.
'It's been a long night, Grandfather! I'm tired and I need a bath! I don't need silliness!'
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
'Really? Then what would have happened, pray?'
A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

And essentially, Amy Pond saves the world by being a fangirl.

4. Moffatt knows horror stories, too. In the finale, he remembered what he knew in "Blink" but seemed to forget in the weeping angels double this season: that one single persistent Dalek or one single rusting Cyberman (and did anyone else spot the The Thing shout-out when the Cyberman head started walking around on its cables?) can be a lot scarier than a whole army of them.

5. Throughout the whole season, people have been asking the Doctor "Then what good are you?" You'd think the answer would be to have him press a button, do a bit of technobabble, wipe out the Daleks for the 18th time and bring everyone back to life. That's not how it works. The Doctor, at first, was never meant to be the protagonist of the story; he was the madman in a box that our heroes got whisked away on. And as much flitting about through time and generally acting like a crazy genius five steps ahead of everyone (except, for once, his enemies) as he does in this finale, it's not he who saves the world - it's human memory, human fantasy, that creates this world. The Doctor, like all fictional characters and imaginary friends, works for us, not the other way around. That doesn't guarantee a happy ending. But this time, partly because Moffatt remembered that, it did.

...I said "quick", didn't I? Sorry.