DALEK

You will be locked in the Pandorica forever! There is no escape!

THE DOCTOR

That’s where you’re wrong, see. It’s all bit “Timey Wimey” but, after I win I’m going to go back in time and give my Sonic Screwdriver to Rory, who’ll let me out.

DALEK

No! When we win, we will go back in time and destroy Rory so that he cannot rescue you from the Pandorica!

THE DOCTOR

Right, well, in that case, when I win, I’ll go back in time and move Rory to a different location so that you can’t find him.

DALEK

When we win we will plant a spy and follow Rory so that we know where you have hidden him!

THE DOCTOR

Ah, but you’re forgetting one thing, Dalek. I’m the Doctor. I always win. Winning’s cool! No going back in time for you, mate.

Yes it’s the same plot as Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. Yes I can live with it. Couldn’t have the Doctor languishing inside a box for more than a few minutes now could you?

Also: Fezzes are cool.

After writing the last post I had a bath. I always like to find something to watch at the same time, and today I decided to rewatch the “Dream Lord” episode again, because I’m sure I could remember something about it. I was a bit drunk the first time, didn’t really pay too much attention and wanted to be sure. Here it is:

Sure enough, here’s the “Dream Lord”, a manifestation of the Doctor’s subconscious, visible to the Doctor as a reflection in the console of the Tardis while he’s awake.

You know what this smells like to me? It smells like herring. Red herring. A distinctly fishy aroma indeed. There’s a piece of information we’re missing from the series, some hint of a nemesis not connected with the “Axis of Evil.” At least, it could be a nemesis of some kind. But what evidence is there for a mysterious as-yet-unidentified antagonist? Is it entirely safe to rule out the rather lame Dream Lord?

So with these questions in mind, I began to think about the other unanswered questions from the series we’ve seen so far. It meant going back over all the episodes and double checking various things. The first stop on the journey was to ‘The Lodger’ with one of the series’ biggest unanswered questions:

DOCTOR

Oh… Oh, of course! The time engine isn’t in the flat. The time engine IS the flat. Someone’s attempt to… build a Tardis

Crikey! Someone’s tried to build a Tardis, eh? The question is… who? Who’d have the knowledge and ability to do it? Apart from the Doctor himself, obviously. But the design of the home brew Tardis is much neater than anything you’d expect from the Doctor. It’s all a bit dark, isn’t it?

Another clue to the mysterious third party came in the last episode, The Pandorica Opens. River Song is attempting to pilot the Tardis with little joy.

RIVER SONG

Doctor! There’s something wrong with the Tardis…. like something else is controlling it.

[And Later on in the episode:]

RIVER SONG

Someone else is flying it. An external force. I’ve lost control!

All very mysterious indeed. Who’s that ‘other’ person? Is there another person? Are they connected with the person who built the home-brew Tardis, or is that another decoy, another red herring?

I’m almost convinced it’s a red herring. Let’s go back a bit further to something pointed out by the blogger, “Ian B”. In the second part of the 2 parter about the Weeping Angels, Amy is left alone in the woods with her eyes closed. Here’s the Doctor just before he runs off:

Note that he’s not wearing his jacket. But the Doctor comes back with some final words… but wait! What’s this! He’s suddenly wearing his jacket again!

Wow! What a continuity error, yes? Well, maybe not. Here’s the dialogue from that scene:

DOCTOR

Amy. You need to start trusting me. It’s never been more important.

AMY

But you don’t always tell me the truth.

DOCTOR

If I always told you the truth I wouldn’t need you to trust me.

AMY

Doctor. [beat] The crack on my wall. [beat] How can it be here?

DOCTOR

I don’t know yet but I’m working it out. Now, listen: Remember what I told you when you were seven.

AMY

What did you tell me?

DOCTOR

No! No, that’s not the point. You have to remember.

AMY

Remember what?

And with that the Doctor, with Jacket, is also gone. Again I feel the need to say crikey. What can it all mean? So let’s jump forward again to The Pandorica Opens. Amy’s confronting the Doctor about the engagement ring she’s found in the Doctor’s jacket pocket at the end of the previous episode, “The Lodger”

AMY

I found this in your pocket

DOCTOR

No no, that’s a memory. A friend of mine, someone I lost. Would you [hesitating] mind?

AMY

It’s weird… I feel… dunno… something.

DOCTOR

People fall out of the world sometimes. But they always leave traces. Little things we can’t quite account for. Faces in Photographs, luggage, half eaten meals… rings. Nothing is ever forgotten. Not completely. And… if something can be remembered, it can come back.

Ah ha! Now, I think, we’re getting to the meat of what this series is all about, about how the Doctor will magically save the universe. Well, sort of. Let’s go back to find out what the Doctor said to Amy when she was 7. Most of it was to do with food, but there were a few lines that leap out that could be important. Useful, at least, to remember – if you’re a companion, that is.

DOCTOR

The only way to close the breach is to open it all the way, and it’ll snap itself shut

and

DOCTOR

The engines are phasing. It’s going to burn! 5 minute hop into the future should do it!

Ah ha! Is this it? Or is it something rather simpler?

DOCTOR

Trust me… I’m the Doctor.

Another interesting little bit of oddness from The Eleventh Hour was that the crack in Amy’s wall wasn’t a Stalinist one. It didn’t delete things from existence. It allowed things to jump from one part of the Universe to another. In other words, in all likelihood, the Doctor – assuming he gets out of the Pandorica (and let’s assume that he does) – will be using those cracks to flip around to all the various places and times that cracks appear to set things straight.

Perhaps.

It may be that we’re not going to get answers to the mysterious antagonist in the next episode. That might be left as a cliff-hanger for the next series, and if that’s what happens I think I’ll be able to live with it. I’d actually be pretty impressed. As for fixing the Universe… it seems that as long as there’s someone left to remember it, it can be brought back – according to Moffat’s logic of the way his Universe works.

It’s not enough information to entirely predict what’s going to happen in “The Big Bang” but it’ll certainly give people something to chew on, I think!

Right… so…. okay. Deep breath. It turns out that the cracks in the Universe ARE the Doctor’s fault. Or, at least, it’s the fault of his Tardis, anyway. It explodes and leaves strangely identical cracks everywhere and every time in the universe.

Having seen what’s about to happen, all of the Doctor’s enemies have formed an sort of “axis” of “evil” if you will, in order to stop the Doctor blowing up the universe. They don’t realise that they’re making a terrible mistake, that the Tardis explodes under the control of Doctor River Song, Not Doctor Flipperon Quixojifflesquagmoxoid or whatever his real name is.

But, look, let’s just analyse this a little bit further and ask a really obvious question here. The enemies of the Doctor, with their “axis” of “evil” manage to trick the Doctor. They have him entirely under their control. What do they do? Do they vaporise him on the spot, making sure he doesn’t regenerate? No. No they decide to lock him in a box. There’s the Doctor, completely helpless, powerless to resist whatever they want to do, entirely unable to defend himself… and they don’t kill him.

That’s right. They just lock him in a box. Sheesh.

And, in the next episode, he’s inevitably going to escape or be rescued, and their great chance to have got rid of the Doctor once and for all will have been squandered. Again.

Why do villains do this? MORONS! Just. Shoot. The. F**ker.

Presumably there’ll be recriminations and blame. The Cybermen will blame the Daleks. The Daleks will blame the weird Rhino people. The Rhino people will blame the freaky potato people. The potato people will blame the Cybermen. The truth is they’re all stupid. Soooo stupid.

I’m looking around at the some other reviews of the Lost finale and seeing a lot of people not really getting what happened. It’s an ending that leaves Lost fans with the thing they loved about the show more than anything else: Having something to chew over, but come on – it wasn’t THAT unclear.

As they always promised, it was going to be about concluding the character’s stories, not 2 and a half hours of wretched exposition. The one tiny bit of exposition we got was, truly, the most cringeworthy moment of the last 6 years for me, and that was when Christian Shepherd explained the ‘Flash Upwards.’

“You created this” he says, “so that you could find each other.”

A lot of people have said, “OMG PURGATORY!” but, sadly, these people are wrong. It’s not purgatory. It’s a specially created fantasy world and it’s their reward, and it’s happened because of their actions on the Island and the fact that Hurley is left in control of it. Whether you think it’s a good enough reward for the death and misery they endured I’ll leave entirely up to you.

But the point is the Losties cured the Island of a plague: Most of the pain and suffering was the direct result of Jacob’s rules and the Man In Black’s schemes and plans. That’s what’s gone. The Island is at peace, but the price that’s been paid by the Losties has been immeasurable.

Hense this attempt at a reward. Not much of a reward, really, but it’s the nearest thing to a happy ending these characters could ever hope to get considering they were, in effect, “collateral damage” in the big scheme of things.

With only one more normal episode to go before the grand finale, I thought I’d attempt to find out if, after 6 years, I’ve finally got the measure of this most brilliant, mind-bending, challenging TV series. Trying to figure out what’s going on is, of course, all part of the fun but I discovered a strategy that’s been working surprisingly well for this final series.

The trick is simple: Remember that Lost is a TV series written by very talented writers, not real life. That’s where you start. You don’t start by trying to make logical sense of what you’ve seen. Instead, you look at what, narratively, would make the best story. Doing this I scored a rare direct hit in predicting that Charles Widmore would have Desmond in that locked room in the submarine. The logic? Well, they needed to bring back Desmond and it seemed as good a way as any. That’s it.

This time? I want to make a much braver prediction based on what we’ve just seen in the episode, “Across the Sea.” I could be completely wrong, of course, but in many respects this is my last chance to go on the record. It’s now or never.

So, here’s what I’m thinking. Before the finale starts the writers need to get us to a specific point, and that point is quite simple: We need to know what’s at stake for all the characters, and we need to make sure that the vast majority of the questions are answered and out of the way so as to avoid ruining the finale with tedious info dump. So: What’s at stake? What happens if the Man In Black gets off the Island? What did Jacob’s mother mean by ‘made it so you can’t kill each other’? How did she fill the well they’d dug and kill all the settlers? Why did Jacob continue to prevent the Man In Black leaving the Island, and importantly… how? Was it simply by interfering with his plans just as Jacob’s mother did by filling the well and killing the settlers?

So there’s a lot of work to do between now and the finale, so how can they do it? How can they bring everything that’s happening in the present together with all this stuff from the past and make us understand what’s really at stake?

Here’s my prediction: We’re going to discover why The Others killed the Dharma Initiative. Why? Because we need to know how Charles Widmore knows the Man In Black and how to fight him. He’s the key here – he was leader of The Others during that time. Let’s just suppose that the Man In Black had been manipulating the Dharma Initiative just as he’d manipulated those early settlers. That was enough for Jacob’s mother to go on a killing spree, wasn’t it? Has Jacob followed in his mother’s footsteps here? In telling us this story, however they do it, they can reveal much more about the relationship between the two – the bit we didn’t see in “Across the Sea” and, at the same time, explain what the hell is going on with Charles Widmore.

Beyond that? Who knows. The complexities of the two timelines and Desmond straddling them both (and being Mr Action in one and Mr Passive in the other) is beyond my ability to comprehend properly although a tentative guess, based on the Lost writers’ love of repetition of key themes, I’m expecting Desmond to somehow ‘trigger the failsafe’ as he did in the Hatch, rather than continuing the ‘push the button’ (in this case, pushing the button means replacing the Island’s protector over and over). The Island will probably sink, and the other timeline will be all that remains, granting a miserable ending ‘On Island’ and a fairly happy ending ‘Off Island’. Perhaps.

But even now, at the very last minute, they’re stil keeping us guessing.. and that’s why I love it.

But yes: Dharma Initiative. Why they were killed. That’s my guess.