Vincent paints a painting, in the grips of some kind of oracular crazy people issue, which finds its way to Churchill, who calls the TARDIS, who reroutes the call to River Song -- in her Stormcage cell, but before the Byzantium -- who escapes for a little bit and vandalizes the first cliff of all time or something, inviting the Doctor and Amy to the Roman invasion of England. Once there, she pretends to be Cleopatra and gets some soldiers to accompany them to Stonehenge, under which lies the Pandorica: A big glowy puzzle box made to contain the universe's most dangerous criminal.
Every single bad guy in the entire new series, from the Nestene to the Silurians, masses on Stonehenge, while the Doctor and Amy run around Underhenge getting into fights with Cybusmen and reacquainting themselves with Rory, who somehow survived death to become a Centurion. Amy does the spooky crying thing again and finally remembers Rory, while the TARDIS randomly takes River back to Amelia's old haunted house in Leadworth.
Among Amelia's childhood obsessions, River discovers not only a book of Roman history, but also the legend of Pandora, and realizes that the entire scenario -- from the soldiers to the Pandorica to Rory himself -- is coming out of Amy's head. Together, she and the Doctor deduce that the whole thing is another bad entity, using Amy's memories to create a scenario that will lead the Doctor to the spot where all the Doctor's enemies -- including my beloved Judoon and dear Sontarans! -- can incarcerate him.
Which is what they do, explaining that he's the cause of the Cracks in time, via his exploding TARDIS on Amy's wedding day. Meanwhile, Auton Rory has been activated to his robot self, and undergoes a sort of Cylon existential crisis before killing Amy (!) -- and the Doctor realizes that he's not the one that blows up the TARDIS, it's River. Which she does (!) as they're locking the Doctor away. Anyway. Great cliffhanger, an appropriate amount of old good guys and bad guys (which is to say negligible, which is thrilling in itself) and a series of clever reversions to expectation: Rory's not Rory, there's nothing in the Pandorica, the bad guys have formed an alliance to save the universe... All very thrilling and believable, even as it turns the assumptions of the series on its head. Still unanswered: The mysterious faux-TARDIS in "The Lodger," the reason this is all centered on Amy's old house, and whether or not River Song will ever do anything that doesn't suck.
Next week: Not sure, but I'm guessing that -- in the grand tradition of the Girls Who Were Spaceships, Libraries, and Other Devices that populate every Moffat story (when they're not being smug unreasonable bitches) -- the Doctor will somehow use the Pond to recreate the whole of time and space, just in time for her wedding. Sound reasonable? I mean, it's not like she was spontaneously going to produce a personality or story of her own, right?
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Well, Vincent van Gogh is not doing so great. He's rolling around in bed screaming his ass off, like you do, but at least he's got a doctor and a judgy old bird-breasted landlady around this time. They're mostly worried about A) his crazy and B) the neighbors, but then she spots one of his paintings -- "even worse than his usual rubbish" -- and wonders what it could be. Vincent is not available for comment, because he's too busy screaming and screaming.
I guess this is because he is a time-traveler? Because they did so well not falling into the oracle/madness trap with him before. In any case, I like that he's flipping out not because of the usual Mean Reds but in fact because he loves the Doctor and Amy and the TARDIS, as we will see. And anyway, it's nice to see him. When I heard about the guest-stars, good guys and otherwise, I got very worried about how this was going to go down -- Daleks v. Cybermen is still a raw little bruise for a lot of us -- but in fact this whole string of time bits is rushed through pretty nicely.
A bunch of years later, in Churchill's bunker, there are phone calls: It's that robot man who remembered how to Love and became a Real Boy instead of a Robot, and who now has a black glove meant I guess to imply that his left hand is very sophisticated robot technology. Churchill chomps on a cigar and twiddles his bowtie and harrumphs and once again makes himself a Churchill cartoon, additionally asking dumb questions without answers which the robot man can then answer:
They randomly just turned up -- since of course it didn't exist until that last scene, which is a cool thing about time travel stories that gets quite a workout here -- a genuine van Gogh ("behind the wall in an attic in France," which for some reason is hilarious to me, like of course, that's where you find most things) and then these same "they" brought it to Churchill because "obviously" it's a message. From who to whom? From van Gogh, to the Doctor, via Churchill. "You're not supposed to understand it, Prime Minister," says the robot man. "You're supposed to deliver it."
Churchill calls the TARDIS to tell him about the painting, but she reroutes the call to Dr. (Not Professor, note) Song. She's in a Stormcage cell in 5145, which puts her ahead of the last time we saw her -- which we know, because the Pandorica is about to open -- and when the poor young guard answers the phone she stops writing in her TARDIS notebook long enough to get really scared for him. For her husband, who danced at their wedding.
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