Okay I’ve spent the last few hours collecting screenshots and transcribing dialogue from the series so far in order to highlight the big unanswered questions and the clues about what might happen in the next episode. It contains spoilers for most of the series, but only speculation about the Finale. Be warned!

If you’re interested, the post is hidden behind SpoilerVision™ again.

Yes, I’m interested, please show me the full post. That would be lovely.

This post is protected by the magic of SpoilerVision™ as it contains spoilers. Obviously.

Yes, I have seen ‘The Pandorica Opens’, please let me read this ‘review’ of yours.

UPDATE: I have watched this episode a second time now, and have picked apart “Season 5″ for the unanswered questions and clues about how this might all be resolved with the result that my opinion has softened. I did actually enjoy this episode, for what it’s worth. This whinging is more about the show as a whole, which really is badly timed because Moffat might – just might – be about to prove me massively wrong. With that in mind, back to the original post..

The non-spoiler version is pointing out my frustration with cliffhangers and the limitations of the ‘Monster of the Week’ formula that this show is bound by.

Mr Moffat’s already got himself a second series. He can afford to be braver, more innovative. Even though the post-Movie revived series has been around for quite a while now, it’s still feeling quite fresh and full of potential, but the format is still an antique, not having changed much from the days of the First Doctor.

It feels decades behind some of the shows coming out of America. It’s nice that Moffat’s brought in the mystery of the ‘crack’ into most of the episodes, but in reality they’ve simply been teasing. It’s not materially changed anything that’s happened. None of the characters have really learnt anything, or changed, or progressed. Nothing’s been resolved or will be. You could easily miss every episode between the first episode and the last and you’d really have missed out on nothing.

No, Doctor Who remains bound by the terrible power of the reset button. Nothing ever changes. The episodes end, the button is pushed, and while the faces and names change over time, everything always goes back to how it started: A man, in a box, travelling from place to place battling against the monster of the week.

Moffat’s abrupt cliffhangers are infuriating, too – and also a throwback to old black and white adventure shows like Flash Gordon. It’s lazy, sloppy writing. Considering how this episode ended, it’s going to require a Deus Ex Machina to resolve. It leaves viewers with an incomplete, unresolved experience and then, next week, gives them another incomplete experience too. Even if you have a cliff hanger, even if you’ve got a long running story arc through your series and through your show, every episode needs a satisfying beginning, middle and end. If you can’t do it, show the next episode straight away. Make it double length.

It’s called treating your audience with the respect they deserve.

I don’t know why I care about this so much, if I’m honest. I just can’t stand that the reasons given for choking the only half-decent SF show the British put out is by saying “it’s only a children’s show” or “it’s traditional”. Not good enough.

Warning: There may be spoilers in the comments. You have been warned!

I saw Four Lions in Bradford, a city with a very large Muslim population. It’s curious then that the cinema did not have any Muslim patrons that night, but then the National Media Museum’s attached cinema is always a strange place to watch a film. It’s what you might call a bit of an ‘Art House’ cinema, with a bar rather than a popcorn kiosk. You don’t get teenagers within a mile of the place, either. It’s like slipping into an alternative reality where only very well behaved, middle class white people exist.

Flight of the Conchords, on the other hand, performed at the Manchester Apollo and it’s painfully obvious this venue was too big for them. Sure, they filled it – absolutely packed it was – but a few locals decided to ruin the talky bits between the songs by constantly yelling things out so loudly that it kept interrupting them to the point where Jermaine had to keep saying, “Shut up! No seriously, just shut up”. And that guy, four rows in front, who got up to buy drinks every 15 minutes, causing 5 or 6 people to have to keep standing up to let him past? You, Sir, are my new enemy.

The two shows couldn’t possibly have been more different… but then one is an indie film from Chris Morris about incompetent suicide bombers and the other was a live performance by two guys from New Zealand singing songs riffing on uncertainty about masculinity.

Conchords manage to make people laugh with self deprecating ordinariness. “You should see what this guy gets up to!” Says Brett. “Oh yes,” says Jermaine. “We were staying in a hotel and there were these complimentary muffins. I was meant to be watching my figure so we said we weren’t going to eat them, but I just went ahead and ate it. That was five years ago.”

At least when they were singing songs the audience were laughing and cheering all the way through. The patience of saints has, indeed, been tried. The poor sods have another couple of nights at the Manchester Apollo, and after they looked visibly shaken by the heckling (from fans, too… it was just done in much the same way that people Tweet at celebrities in the hope of a response, except out loud and right in front of them when they’re performing in front of people who’ve paid good money to see the performers, not endure the tedious interjections of witless bores) I’m sure they can’t wait.

Four Lions, being a film, and not having celebrities tantalisingly close enough to elicit desperate attempts to make some kind of personal contact, was mercifully free of heckling. It was full of laughter though. Professional twat Mark Kermode, Misery for Hire, grumbled on Radio 5 the day before I saw that it just ‘wasn’t funny’ but that it was a grand film regardless. My arse it wasn’t funny. The bit where a suicide bomber trips over a sheep blowing himself and the sheep to Allah had most of the audience laughing uncontrollably, although I’m fairly certain I was still giggling long after everyone else had moved on.

Thing is it’s impossible to write about what’s really going on with Four Lions without in some way annoying Chris Morris. He’s chosen comedy to avoid having to get down and dirty with the directly political stuff, and so pulling back the curtain to expose this particular wizard can’t be that welcome.

We all know that, on one level, Terror is about literally that. It hurts a civilian population to scare them into forcing their own leaders and Governments into giving into the demands of the Terrorists, or like in Osama Bin Laden’s case “destroy Liberty in the West.” I feel bad for people who can’t laugh at this film – and there are many that couldn’t – because it means that it’s fear that’s dominating how they interpret this.

But I suppose the biggest clue to something deeper than this going on comes from the Daily Mail’s review. It complained of “furtive political correctness.” They had to be joking, right? But, sure enough, as the hours after watching the film passed, I began to realise what it was they’d objected to. This is an anti-suicide bombing film in much the same way that Trainspotting was an anti-Heroin film. It shows how Suicide Bombers aren’t religious obsessives – rather, they have lots of different reasons for wanting to do it. They hate McDonalds and consumerism like pretty much all lads their age. One is a clear care in the community case, the other hasn’t had any kind of education at all, another wants to make his wife and kid proud and the other just wants to be cool. They’re too Westernised to fit in with ‘mainstream’ Muslim culture, but not Westernised enough to fit in with the white culture, and so alienated and alone they’re easily exploited into doing something that they all, in the end, realise is monumentally moronic.