Day 769: The Big Bang

I said that Series 5 is my absolute favourite of all series of Doctor Who at the start of me looking at it, but that statement wasn't exactly true. Well, perhaps I worded that incorrectly. It's a statement that I didn't back up with sufficient evidence. You see, to quote the Doctor in this episode, "I hate repeats". I'd only watched Series 5 in its entirety twice before, once on first transmission, and once when I watched it in a marathon with some of my cousins. It's not that I didn't think it was any good, it's just that I like to leave things fresh - I'll try and leave enough space in between viewings so I can forget things so that my re-watch is essentially a new experience. So when I said that Series 5 was my absolute favourite, it was really more of a hunch - that my feelings about watching it for the first time would re-manifest themselves on another viewing. And I was kind of wrong. Because my love of this series wasn't the same as it was before - it was completely and utterly surpassed by what I think of this series now.

The Big Bang is one of my absolute favourite episodes of Doctor Who ever produced. Everything, from the cinematic direction of Toby Haynes to the incredibly witty script from Steven Moffat works on a fundamental level. It takes the base notion of the Doctor as this magical figure who can fix anything - much like what we saw in The Eleventh Hour, and then extrapolates this to the point where the Doctor has to save the Universe from extinction, when all hope seems lost. It feels completely right for this magical character, as he dashes about the story doing all sorts of tricks to save everything from total non-existence. It's the great moment of this magical Doctor, the dramatic ending to this fairy tale.

But then the story goes somewhere else entirely, that's completely beautiful. It reflects on the notion of who the Doctor is to Amy. He was that impossible man who fell out of the sky when she was a little girl. She was her imaginary friend, who suddenly became real. And the Doctor, through the magic of time travel, speaks with Amy as a little girl once more, he says that he will be remembered as just a story to her. And I kind of teared up at that moment.

In that single moment, the story became about every single little boy and girl who watches Doctor Who: past, present and future. Every single one of them who can choose to believe in the Doctor as a fairy tale figure in their imaginations. The impossible man who can travel any where and any when in his impossible blue box. And in Series 5, we get to see one little girl who went on adventures with that fairy tale figure, just like the rest of us could, if we believed hard enough. But we grow up, we forget these stories and fill our heads with other nonsenses to replace the fairy tale nonsense that we used to believe in. Series 5, then, is about going back to that fairy tale world, and leaving the real world far behind. And that entire ethos is so beautiful and perfect, and is the entire reason why I love Series 5 so much.