You Should Be Watching: Breaking Bad

The problem with living in a Golden Age is that you very rarely realise that one is upon you until it has passed. With the constant doom-mongering about the death of most traditional media in the face of a new digital future - nary a week goes by that you won't find an article somewhere proclaiming the death of cinema/the album/the novel/the cotton gin - you would be forgiven for thinking that all culture is in a endless spiral of entropy.

Whilst the aforementioned doom-mongering is, by and large, bullshit, the one medium that everyone agrees is flourishing is television, which over the last decade has emerged from the shadow of cinema to assert itself as the most exhilarating, inventive and entertaining artform going, one capable of delivering visceral thrills and intellectual stimulation, often within the same hour.

Navigating the cultural landscape can be tricky; it's a desert with a few tiny oases spread thinly about the place. With this new feature, which will run over the summer to take advantage of the recent Emmy nominations and the relative lull in the schedules, will help anyone interested in seeking out some new entertainment, and will hopefully generate some knowing, appreciative nods from fellow travellers familiar with the terrain.

We'll kick things off with probably the best show currently on television, Breaking Bad.



In the very first episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a high school chemistry teacher struggling to support his family, discovers that he has terminal lung cancer. Though this would be devastating for most people, for Walt it's just the latest in a long line of indignities and shattered dreams. A handful of scenes before Walter's fateful trip to see his doctor do an economical job of establishing the little humiliations that give Walter just cause to hate his life.

A formerly prodigious chemist who seemed destined for great things, he wound up teaching at a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as well as working a degrading second job at a local car wash where he is demeaned by the kids he tries to teach, and has to look on as his friends and relatives, including his DEA agent brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris), enjoy far greater success. Facing certain death, Walter 'breaks bad', in the parlance of the show, and decides to use his knowledge of chemistry to become a methamphetamine cook in the hopes that he will be able to earn enough money to provide for his family after he is gone.


In order to enter the world of meth cooking and dealing, Walter (going under the alias of Heisenberg) enlists his former pupil, now moderately successful small time meth dealer, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). With Walter's ability to create top quality product, and Jesse's knowledge of the drug trade, the two expect to see a quick, easy return for their work. But things don't turn out that way; as in all experiments, there are variables, and much of the show is spent showing how Walter and Jesse deal with these variables, be they a psychotic local kingpin who takes offense to Heisenberg encroaching on his business, Hank sniffing around when he learns that a high quality and distinct blue meth is being sold in his town, or Walter's wife Skylar (Anna Gunn) asking too many questions and threatening to tear apart the double-life Walter constructs for himself.

Breaking Bad distinguished itself from pretty much its first frame by displaying a scope and ambition that is rare for television. The show is filmed entirely in and around the New Mexico locations of its story, a rarity in television, and this allows the show's directors to take full advantage of the grand, desolate vistas of the surrounding deserts, so often the location for Walt and Jesse's cooking sessions, and which form the background for pretty much the whole series. It's a show that, week-in and week-out, not only looks like a film - as a lot of high end television does these days - but feels like one, too, and the visual storytelling of Breaking Bad is unsurpassed by any show currently on the air. You just have to look at the opening sequence, which climaxes with the now iconic shot of Walter standing in his underwear, gun in hand, preparing to take on the approaching police, to see the skill with which the show evokes Walt's turmoil. Or take any of the show's fantastic 'boiler room' episodes, in which two characters are forced to spend all or most of an episode in one enclosed space, to see how well the show builds simmering tension and atmosphere from the smallest situations. If Anthony Mann were working in television now, I like to think he'd want to work on Breaking Bad.


Of the shows I'll be writing about for this feature, Breaking Bad has probably had the toughest road to greatness. Its first season was meant to be thirteen episodes, but wound up being cut short by the 2007 WAG strike, and creator Vince Gilligan and his team could only put out seven episodes before the strike took effect. What's worse, the truncated season ended in a very uncertain place that, whilst interesting, did not really make good on the previous six episodes and the world Gilligan had so carefully created.

The strike turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though, since at least one major plot point that would have led to a very different show wound up being abandoned, and the show returned for a second, full season that began to move away from the "Walt learns something new about the drug trade, Jesse learns something about science, the two have to find a solution to a practical issue" structure that defined a lot of the first season towards a much richer vein of storytelling, one more focused on the compromises Walt was willing to make in order to stay in business and the consequences that spiraled out from his decisions. It also experimented with narrative by starting most episodes with future events to which the rest of the episode would build, or that the whole season would gradually lead to.

The shift to exploring murkier territory could have taken away from the fun of the show's central premise, but wound up enriching it, as the tensions between Walt - who always disapproved of Jesse's drug habit - and Jesse - who spends much of the second season in a drug-fuelled haze - came to the fore. Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul really upped the ante in the second season, taking the relatively good-humoured relationship that gave the first much of its spark and pushing it to its limits, showing us how these two men would be inexorably drawn towards each other for reasons of mutual self-interest, even if they might come to hate each other as a result. The wit and humour were still there, but now they served a different, better kind of storytelling.

Breaking Bad is one of the best examples of the evolutionary nature of television, in that it has grown and improved over time in the way that only television allows. This is most apparent in the way in which the actors have been able to find new depth and nuance in their characters over three seasons, and the way in which characters that were only on the periphery in Season One have become integral to the emotional landscape of the show by the end of Season Three.


Take, for example, Walt's brother-in-law Hank. When Hank was introduced in the Pilot, he was a bullish, shit-kicking cop very much in the mold of The Shield's Vic Mackey, albeit one who has hasn't constructed an elaborate web of lies and evil around himself. (Given the physical similarity between Dean Norris and Michael Chiklis, I have to think that this connection is not just coincidental.) Over the course of the series, Norris has turned Hank from a fairly standard cop stereotype into a compelling and sympathetic character; he's a man who puts on a blustery front for his men, but who is much more fragile than he would ever let on. If you had told me at the start of the show that Hank would develop into one of the best characters on the show, I wouldn't have thought it possible. Such is the magic of television, and this show in particular.


Speaking of the supporting cast, it'd be remiss of me not to mention Anna Gunn and Bob Odenkirk, who play Skylar White and Saul Goodman, Walt's sleazy criminal lawyer (a lawyer who is a criminal, as opposed to a lawyer who merely represents criminals) respectively.

For the first two seasons, Gunn was limited in her portrayal of Skylar by the fact that she was kept in the dark about Walt's activities. She was always good in the role, and she and Cranston did fine work portraying a marriage in crisis which still functions, but her best work has come in this past season, when she has started to get a glimpse at what Walt has been up to and has had to come to terms with the way in which her world has profoundly changed. She's one of the most interesting female characters on television.


Odenkirk, meanwhile, is just a blast. He joined the show in season two as an occasional guest star but is pretty much a core cast member at this point and is easily the funniest part of the show. Playing the crooked lawyer's crooked lawyer, Odenkirk revels in the chance to be unrelentingly oily and despicable every week. It's a career-defining performance - and that's saying something when Odenkirk has already had a great career - which adds a much needed blast of pure comedy into a show that occasionally gets low on laughs.

If I were to use one word to describe Breaking Bad, it would be "volatile." It's one of the most unpredictable shows going, but it's one whose surprises always make perfect sense and can be dizzying in their disregard for the expectations of televised storytelling. For example, in the first episode of the third season, we are introduced to a pair of mysterious twins who, it is established in a bizarre and Fellini-esque opening, are out to kill Walter. Now, you expect their pursuit of Walter to be a major part of the season and for it to be a plot strand that the show stretches out for a great length of time, but the show pulls the rug out by having them find Walt in the second episode.

It's a simple but profoundly disorientating trick that the show employed beautifully throughout its third season, a season which ranks as one of the best thirteen episodes of television I have ever seen. Breaking Bad took everything it had done so well in Season One and Two - compelling characters, witty dialogue, a willingness to experiment with form and structure - and took them as far as they could go, delivering exhilarating, disturbing and surprising storytelling that didn't waste a single frame (unless you're one of the people who didn't like the episode "Fly") in taking Walt and Jesse deeper into the moral morass that they had gotten themselves lost in. Breaking Bad is, ultimately, the story of one man's pursuit of money and power, and the lengths he will go to in order to achieve that. It's a profoundly American story, and its scope and ambition have already established it as one of the great shows in television history, and the creative team haven't even really started yet.

If you only watch one episode...

The trade off of rich serialised storytelling is that it's hard to choose one episode to recommend; whilst some episodes might stand out, you need the full weight and knowledge of the preceding story to understand the significance of what is going on. It's like starting a book on chapter twelve. I'm tempted to just say start with the Pilot, which is very good, and go from there.

However, if I were to pick just one, I'd go for "One Minute" from Season Three, which deals with the fallout of Hank, who has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, attacking Jesse and getting suspended from the police force. The first forty minutes are indicative of the show at its best, with plenty of time given to the strong supporting cast and an emphasis on just how adrift everyone is in their own problems, but what really sets it apart is its last five minutes, which feature some of the most heart-stopping action I have seen on television. I don't want to ruin what happens, but it's pretty amazing because it pushes the boundaries of what a television show - which, by its nature, has a much shorter production time than a feature film - can do in terms of thrills, suspense and tension. Everything the show does well, it does at its best in One Minute.

Breaking Bad Seasons One and Two are currently available on DVD, Season Three is no doubt available through other means.

Harry Brown

Sickening violence is only acceptable when aimed at the working class.

When Menace II Society, The Hughes Brothers' violent and blisteringly real portrait of life on the streets of L.A. in the late 80s, was released in 1992, it was at least partially intended as a response to John Singleton's Boyz 'N' The Hood, which Allen and Albert Hughes thought presented too sanitised and false an image of that life than the one that they knew. To really hammer the point home, the film's tagline read, "This is how it really is." Given its hysterical and reactionary worldview, Harry Brown could easily have been given the tagline, "This is how you think it is", with the 'you' clearly referring to the sort of people who will take it as a verite dissection of societal decay in modern day Britain.

In a decaying, forgotten council estate in London lives Harry Brown (Michael Caine), an old man quietly living out his twilight years trying not to cause any trouble. Despite being a former member of the marines, Harry is too afraid to use the underpass near his home for fear of being attacked by the local youths. His friend Leonard (David Bradley) isn't going to take it anymore, though, and when he is killed trying to take the fight to them, and after the police - represented by the bird-boned Emily Mortimer - prove ineffective, Harry takes to avenging his friend's death, by any means necessary.

I have some serious issues with the politics of Harry Brown and I've been trying to think of a way to review it that takes them out of the equation. I want to do this because, despite what I may think about its message and vision of the world, I can appreciate that it is a well made vigilante film with a commanding central performance by Michael Caine, an actor whose rarely less than watchable and can greatly improve pretty much any film he's in, and with some pretty effective moments of violent retribution, but that it also has some clear flaws that I didn't want to get subsumed into my other concerns. The more I thought about it, I came to realise that the films narrative and character weaknesses stem directly from its politics. The two sets of problems are inseparable.

Harry Brown is a vigilante film that sides completely with the vigilante. Harry commits several rather brutal acts of violence against the boys who killed his friend, taking a definite eye for an eye approach to justice, but at no point does Harry - and, by the extension, the film-makers - question whether or not his actions are just. Likewise, the film never goes out of its way to suggest that the police, ineffective though they might be, are better suited to mete out justice, or that crime can be dealt with other than stabbing or shooting people. The best vigilante films at least make an attempt to ask moral questions whilst also satisfying the audience's bloodlust, but Harry Brown is content to sit back and watch Harry kill indiscriminately without even bothering to tackle the moral implications of his actions.

Harry Brown also displays a clear contempt for every other character in its world by showing no interest in trying to make the cartoonish thugs that Harry dispatches into anything other than ridiculous stereotypes. The film opens with footage shot on mobile phones of assorted young people taking drugs and, in a sequence that is so exploitative it walks a fine line between hilarious and horrific, shooting a young mother in the head before getting run over by a truck. The film continues in much the same vein, and the lack of any attempt to give the antagonists any personality - aside from making some, such as a pair of drug dealers who wouldn't be out of place in Reefer Madness, more evil than others - or a semblance of humanity makes it all too easy for Harry to kill them, yet impossible to care about anything else happening in the film. It's a really unpleasant vision of the world that makes Harry's eventual triumph feel rather hopeless; why bother fighting if the whole world is so awful?

Shane Meadows tackled the vigilante film with much greater skill and bravery in Dead Man's Shoes. Meadows was able to deliver visceral, satisfying and effective violence which had weight because Paddy Considine's victims felt like real people. Horrible people capable of true, everyday cruelty, but people nonetheless, and the question of whether they deserved to die gave the film a lot of its power. There are no real stakes here, it's just a bunch of caricatures getting killed by a psychopath.

Having said all this, Harry Brown is a well-shot, well-made film. On a technical level, it's very impressive for a debut feature, and the actors make the most of their sketchily drawn roles. The essential cowardice of the film in its unwillingness to ask tough questions about the actions of its character prevents it from rising above being just a Death Wish clone.

Inception

Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.

During one of the many firefights that litter Christopher Nolan's Inception, Eames, played by Tom Hardy, says to Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, that he "shouldn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling", before using a grenade launcher to dispatch an enemy combatant that Arthur had been unable to kill with a machine gun. It seems that Nolan, who directed the film from his own script, took this advice to heart, because with this film he has definitely dreamed bigger.

Inception is a film of ideas, in that it is both driven by them and is set within them. It takes place within dreams, and dreams within dreams, as we follow Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) the leader of a team of criminals who operate within the subconscious. Cobb's speciality is extraction - the theft of ideas by tricking targets into believing that the dream is real so that they will reveal their secrets. During one operation in which he and Arthur enter the mind of Saito (Ken Watanabe), Cobb and Arthur are undone by the presence of Cobb's ex-wife Mal. Upon waking, they discover that the operation was an audition, and that Saito wants Cobb to undertake a dream crime of his own; an inception - the implanting of an idea into a subject's mind.

Cobb begins to assemble his team. Along with Arthur, he enlists Eames, a 'forger' who is able to change his appearance in dreams in order to trick targets, Yusuf (Dileep Rao),a Chemist who will help them sedate the target long enough to allow the inception to take place, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), an architect who is in change of constructing the dreamscapes within which the team's deception will take place. Ariadne also acts as the audience surrogate to whom the rules of dreams are explained. Sometimes the rules make sense, sometimes they don't (or are explained so breathlessly that they seem not to - I'm still not 100% sure why sometimes it's fine for people to die in dreams, but in others it isn't) but it rarely matters. Nolan and his cast give us just enough of a sense of the peril of entering dreams to give their actions weight. We know that things can go wrong, and that if they do it could be disastrous for them.

As Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio continues a recent trend in his career of playing essentially good men with profound psychological damage. Much like his character in Shutter Island, he is weighed down by a past and a family life that continues to haunt him, somewhat literally, as the spectre of his wife (played by the so-beautiful-she-makes-me-want-to-cry Marion Cotillard) keeps breaking out of his subconscious and manifesting herself in ones in which he is trying to commit crimes. The relationship between the two is hazy, which is only appropriate considering that it is shown only in flashbacks to half-remembered dreams, but it does develop a cumulative power as the film goes on, ultimately delivering a powerful kick when the depths of Cobb's sadness is revealed and we come to understand where his guilt and desire to go home stem from. Without this, the film could very well have ended up being merely an ice sculpture; exquisitely constructed, but cold.

It's also through DiCaprio's performance that one of the more important themes of the film - the nature of reality and how can people who work in dreams tell if they are in a dream or not - comes through. Cobb repeatedly finds himself questioning whether or not he is in a dream or not, and relies upon a spinning top to show him; if it falls, he is in the real world, if it doesn't he's dreaming. Without his nervous, frantic energy and the fact that he practically sweats paranoia, Nolan's film would lose a lot of its eerieness. We need to believe that Cobb is no longer in control of the world around him and his subconscious, and DiCaprio - as well as the superb supporting cast who play off of him - makes us believe.

At its heart, Inception is a marriage between the free-wheeling imagination of dreams and the precisely constructed world of puzzles. This would seem to be an impossible task, since dreams are by their very nature devoid of the kind of logical structure that a good puzzle needs. In dreams, a Rubik's Cube could become a Rubik's Tesseract, and you could solve it not by turning the sides, but by feeding it to a swan. The film reaches an elegant solution to this problem with its conceit of having dreamworlds that must be as realistic as possible in order to fool the targets into not realising that they are asleep. I had a problem with this conceit for much of the film since it seemed like a straitjacket that it was always straining against; it's set in dreams, so anything can happen, but the dreams have to be as real as possible, so it can't.

However, this conceit makes sense when you realise that it makes the moments when the film breaks loose all the more spectacular. An early scene in a cafe, during which Ariadne suddenly becomes aware that she is in a dream and which ends with the dream world exploding spectacularly around her, would be far less effective if such spectacle was the norm. It would also make the jaw-dropping scene in which Arthur battles goons in a corridor that is constantly spinning around (a scene which, in the best Irwin Allen tradition, was done using real revolving sets) would seem commonplace, rather than being possibly the most astounding piece of action cinema of the last ten years.

The real triumph of the film, though, is the ease with which it makes sense of its plot, which takes place not only within the architecture of the mind, but within the architecture of that architecture. As part of the inception, Cobb and his team not only have to build a dream world for the target to lose himself in, but dreams within that dream as well. The story then gets increasingly complex as different events occur on different levels of existence and thought, with each operating at a different speed to the others (for example, ten seconds at one level is equivalent to three minutes at another, an hour at the next, and ten years at another). Done badly, this would be an incomprehensible mess, but Nolan and his editors deliver the story in a way which makes sense and is viscerally exciting. We watch as three separate timelines converge for a simultaneous climax, as the characters battle time, physics and crumbling psychic architecture to complete their task and get out alive. It's a completely cinematic finale in that it could not be done in any other medium, so reliant is it on the ability of the edit to contract or expand time.

Characters existing at different levels of reality, unsure of what is real or not, reminded me of Philip K. Dick's novel Ubik, a book which also deals with reality, identity and multiple plains of existence and has famously resisted adaptation for being completely insane. Inception is a much simpler proposition than Ubik, even with its byzantine construction, because it is an action film first and philosophical treatise second, but it's no less impressive an achievement for it. It's the sort of film that you could only make if your last film was one of the most successful of all time. It's a bold, ambitious film that refuses to hold your hand as it takes you further down the rabbit hole, then makes you wonder if rabbit holes even exist. It's a dream that does not disappear on waking, but lingers and clouds your vision, making you wonder, "What if?" It's dazzling. Simply dazzling.

Toy Story 3

Never trust a bear who sounds like a Southern sheriff.


Toy Story 3 continues and concludes the story started in 1995 with the original Toy Story. The last time we saw Woody, Buzz and their friends, they were happy and united in the loving embrace of their owner, Andy. That was eleven years ago. Andy has grown up, but his toys, cruelly, have not. They have remained the same, and still yearn to be played with even though Andy has long outgrown them and, at the time that the film begins, is preparing to leave for college.

There's a familial warmth from seeing these characters again, particular if - like me - you've grown up with them and delight in seeing them setting out on one more adventure, but there's a sadness as well. There's a palpable sense of desperation with which Woody and his friends try to trick Andy into playing with them using the same sort of elaborate plans that they used in the past to see what new toys Andy would be getting for his birthday. It's a very autumnal film which spends much of its running time establishing the many ways in which the characters are coming to terms with their own obsolescence.

Some, like Mr. Potato Head and Jesse, accept it and choose to go to a daycare centre after a misunderstanding causes them to believe that Andy was going to throw them in the trash. Woody, on the other hand, keeps saying that Andy loves them and that they shouldn't abandon him, and escapes from the daycare centre - which all the other toys believe to be a paradise - just so that he can be with Andy again. Interestingly, even though Woody is right, and we know that he is right from a very early point, the film seems to make out that Woody is at least a little bit crazy. He comes off as a cross between a cult leader and someone who is in an abusive relationship, imploring everyone to trust in Andy unthinkingly because, deep down, he really loves them.

Of course, the daycare centre is a false utopia, presided over by a strawberry scented bear named Lotso (Ned Beatty) who imprisons Andy's toys when they try to rebel and return to their rightful owner, in doing so turning the film into a very funny homage to prison movies like The Great Escape and Cool Hand Luke. Lotso is supported in his reign of terror by a baby with a half-lidded eye (just one of many creepy little touches in the film) and a Ken doll (Michael Keaton) who lives the life of a confirmed bachelor in his dream home until Barbie enters his life. Like most Pixar villains, Lotso is actually quite sympathetic, and is even given a melancholy flashback in which we discover why he is the way he is.

That flashback mirrors the heartbreaking "Ellie's Song" from Toy Story 2, in that it's about a toy whose early experiences haunt them for the rest of their lives, except whilst Jessie became defeated and broken, Lotso became bitter and twisted. It's one of several conscious references to scenes in the earlier films which, rather than just being callbacks, comment on the ways in which the characters have changed over time. Toy Story 3 covers much of the same emotional ground that Toy Story 2 did, particularly with regards to how part of aging is accepting change and the end of friendships, but rather than simply retreading those themes it expands them.

Case in point, there are two moments in the film that I personally found very resonant, and which were powerful on their own, regardless of whether they revisited old ideas. The first came near the end of the film, when Andy has packed up his room and is getting ready to leave for college. His mother comes into the room, and nearly breaks down as she sees her son's room completely empty. It's a scene that perfectly captures the sadness of a child leaving home, and the sense of excitement and adventure that comes with it. The other moment comes right at the very end, and it rivals the opening fifteen minutes of Up as the most affecting work Pixar have ever done. It's a poignant, sad scene that encapsulates everything wonderful about the invention and creativity of being a child.

The third instalment also uses the visual style of the first two films, improving it slightly but without pushing the boundaries too far. Like the thematic recycling, this could seem like an unambitious retread, but instead creates a sense of continuity: It'd seem strange if the final film looked drastically better than the originals. That's not to say that the film doesn't try new things; the cinematography is lightyears ahead of what the studio were able to do back in 1999, and there are some simply stunning action setpieces in the film, ranging in scale from short escapes to a climactic fight for survival in a trash compactor.

As sad as the film can be - and it gets plenty sad, particularly in the last ten minutes - it's also very, very funny. There's a sequence in which, as part of an escape attempt from the daycare centre, Mr. Potato Head detaches his limbs and attaches them to a tortilla wrap so that he can move around outside. The sequence is wordless, and there is something effortlessly funny about seeing this tortilla creature wobbling unsteadily around. Another major source of amusement comes from Buzz being reset to his Spanish mode. It's a simple gag which Michael Arndt's (Little Miss Sunshine) script uses to its fullest without ever exhausting it.

Toy Story 3 is a melancholic film about aging, friendship and the boundless possibilities of the imagination masquerading as a family film about toys. It's deeply sad in places, thrilling in others, and hilarious when it needs to be, but it never feels forced; all its aspects are kept in perfect equilibrium. If this is the end of the series, and I can't help but think that any continuation would sully what is a graceful endpoint, then it is a fine one. As an individual film, it's not the strongest of the trilogy, but as a culmination of everything that has gone before, and a resolution to three films worth of storytelling, it's exceptional.

Also, you don't need to see it in 3D, and can people stop giving Armond White the oxygen of publicity?

Doctor Who - The Big Bang

*Warning: This recap contains spoilers*



At the end of The Pandorica Opens, we were left with a series of cliff-hangers that, had they been parcelled out as the endings of several episodes of Doctor Who, would have provided fans with plenty to ponder and salivate over. Instead, we got one jaw-dropping turn of events piled on top of another; The Doctor was imprisoned in the Pandorica, Rory came back as an Auton then killed Amy, and the universe winked out of existence as River Song was trapped in the exploding TARDIS. As ever, Steven Moffat and his team set themselves a tough challenge and, to my utter delight, they bested it.

After a reprise of the opening scene of "The Eleventh Hour", in which we see young Amelia Pond praying to Santa to send someone to fix the crack her wall, we learn that things are not right. Firstly, The Doctor doesn't crash land in her back garden and set in motion all the adventures they would have. (As well as the psychological damage that Amy seems to have from waiting for her imaginary friend for so long.) Then, when Amelia shows a picture of the night sky to her mother and (assumingly) a psychiatrist, we learn that there are no longer any stars in the sky. It turns out that the Earth is the last light in the universe to go out, and civilization has continued much as before, except humanity lives in an empty void with just the moon and a suspiciously bright sun for company.

I can't help but wonder how different the world would be if there were no stars in the sky. I imagine that it would a drab place largely devoid of wonder, but you can't expect Doctor Who to dwell too much of these things, regardless of how fascinating they may be. It's not really part of their remit as a family show.

Anyway, Amelia gets a letter telling her to go to the British Museum to see...The Pandorica! After hiding out until after everyone has gone, Amelia touches the Pandorica and opens it, to reveal...Amy, alive and well! This, as Amy tells her younger self, is where things get complicated.

It's indicative of how busy and action-packed this finale was that all I have written so far takes up only the first six or seven minutes. If I were to continue to break it down point by point, this would be a very long post indeed.

So, here are the salient points; The Doctor uses a cheap and cheery time travel device to keep leaping back and forth between events, creating a paradox that allows him to tell Rory to let him out of The Pandorica and place Amy inside, where she will remain in stasis until someone with her DNA opens it and revives her, which The Doctor achieves by jumping around a bit more and getting Amelia to go to the museum. Steven Moffat's best episodes have used similarly fractured and clever time travel structures in the past (see: "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink") and I really enjoyed seeing how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together, both in silly ways, such as the explanation for why The Doctor is wearing a fez when he first sees Rory ("I wear a fez now. Fezs are cool."), and more serious moments, such as when The Doctor meets a future version of himself, clearly gravely injured, who tells him that her has twelve minutes before he 'dies'.

In amongst all the high-flying adventure, though, the episode found time for some quieter, more reflective moments, many of which centre on Rory, played brilliantly by Arthur Darvill, who has really grown into the role over the course of the series and has been particularly impressive in this run of episodes. As we learned last week, the Rory that The Doctor, Amy and River encountered at Stonehenge was an Auton version created from Amy's memories who was initially unaware of his artificial nature. In a wonderful scene last week, he became aware only when his programming forced him to shoot Amy, despite his essential, wonderful Rory-ness telling him not to.

This week finds him reeling from his act of murder, only to be offered a chance at redemption when The Doctor explains how The Pandorica can save Amy, but only after he tests Rory by acting as if Amy's death is insignificant. Now, I love Matt Smith's Doctor, and I knew that he couldn't really believe that Amy's death didn't matter, but I still felt a cathartic kick when Rory punched The Doctor in defense of his love, futile though it may be. If that wasn't enough, the episode really hammers home just how devoted to Amy Rory is by having her watch a short video at the museum about a legendary centurion who is believed to protect The Pandorica. It's a beautiful, subtle moment that says so much about Rory and crystallised in my mind how much the character has grown.

The other great, quiet moment came towards the end of the episode, in which The Doctor accepted that, in order to save the universe, he would have to sacrifice himself by flying the Pandorica into the ball of fire that The TARDIS had become, essentially rewriting all of history. As he begins to involuntarily travel back through his own life, The Doctor realises that Amy can hear his voice (which pays off that scene in "Flesh and Stone" in which The Doctor appears and speaks to Amy wearing a jacket, despite having lost his earlier in the episode). He finds Amelia asleep outside her house, and puts her to bed, talking quietly to her as she sleeps about his life and what a great adventure he has had. It's probably Matt Smith's best scene in a series that has been full of great scenes for him. It's full of quiet intensity and the weariness in his voice speaks of centuries of existence filled with wonders and horrors both told and untold. Anyone who has doubts that Matt Smith is The Doctor need only watch that scene to see just what a fine job he has done this series, and will hopefully do so for years to come.

Because, of course, The Doctor comes back. Even being erased from existence can't keep a good Time Lord down. On Amy's wedding day, so long delayed, she starts to feel like something is missing, but she can't figure out just what it is. (This led to possibly my favourite Amy line of the episode when, on the phone to Rory, she says, "Are you just agreeing with me because you're afraid of me?"/"Yes"/"Love you.") At the reception, she suddenly remembers The Doctor when Rory alludes to the famous wedding saying "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue", all of which were phrases The Doctor had worked into his speech to her as a child. The Doctor returns in time for the wedding, and for some hilariously terrible dancing, then heads off in the TARDIS for new adventures with Amy and Rory in tow, talking about how whatever created the cracks is still out there.

This was, hands down, the most satisfying series finale that New Who has ever put out, and it was a great end to a series that was the most consistently entertaining series the show has yet seen. All the previous ones have tended to have brilliant set-ups followed by disappointing climaxes (with the possible exception of the series 1 two-parter "Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways", which provided a thrilling goodbye to Christopher Eccleston's Doctor) but this one had everything. It managed to resolve its hanging plot threads without leaving the audience feeling like they had been cheated, it worked as thrilling climax in and of itself, and it left the show with somewhere to go next year, both with the promise of further battles against the silence and River Song's promise that we will learn who she really is "soon". It even gave the characters a period of grace at the end of the episode so that they could relax and say their goodbyes, even if they were saying goodbye to their old lives, and not each other.

I've very excited about where the show goes from here. I was worried that we would have to proceed without the brilliant Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, or that the show would try to adopt a dynamic which would see the two separated all the time, with Amy off gallivanting with The Doctor and Rory left at home, only occasionally showing up. Now, though, we get a trio of fun, vibrant and exciting characters going out into the universe having adventures.

Furthermore, the revelation that whatever created the cracks wasn't destroyed when they disappeared suggests that Steven Moffat has a far greater vision in mind for the show than previous showrunners, and considering how well he and his team handled the integration of serialised storytelling into this series this can only be a good thing for the show going forward.

Yep, I'm excited. Now let's see if Moffat can break another Doctor Who curse and deliver a genuinely good Christmas special. Which I will dutifully (over)write about.

Rating (as a single episode): 9/10
Rating (as a two-parter): 9/10
Series rating: 8/10