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alexandraerinI hope you're not expecting coherence. Though you might just get...
First, jumping to the end: we have a season finale that really does seem to elegantly (well, a little sloppily... this is Doctor Who, after all) tie everything off with a bow, including things that seemed like plot holes, inconsistencies, throwaway jokes, bad writing... everybody who said Amelia Pond's background was lacking were right, as it happened, but apparently that didn't mean there was no thought in it.
Then it gets to be the end and you realize that there still isn't any ultimate cause for the catastrophe. The Doctor, however, is already one step ahead -- he knows that while the disaster has been averted, nothing has been resolved because there is still a cause, indeed, a culprit who remains at large.
Do we actually have a multi-season arc? With River Song on the scene, we have two of them.
Jumping back to the part about the Doctor being one step ahead... some people have suggested that Eleven has had his cleverness dialed down so that Amy can shine. I really don't think this is the case. There was the scene in "The Beast Below" where he claimed to not know why he did something. While rule number one is "The Doctor lies", I'm not sure that he was lying in that case... just like I don't think he was completely jerking Amelia Pond around when he told her the sad story and prepared to leave the universe For Ev Ar. I don't think he'd quite worked out exactly what it was that he'd worked out when he told Amelia about the old new borrowed blue box so she'd remember it on the day in her life when she'd be surrounded by bow ties and suspenders.
If I'm right, then Eleven really is one step ahead of everyone, including himself. This allows him to be the brainy Doctor who solves everything and saves (almost) everyone, but also makes it possible for him to miss things that previous incumbents to his life might not have overlooked.
Eleven's not taking a longer view or a deeper view, he's taking a slantways one. Sure, he missed the obvious a couple of times and failed to stop the Daleks where another Doctor might not have, but he also managed to stitch together the incredibly loopy plan to save first himself and his friends and then all of creation using multiple forms of time travel and the two very things that had doomed the universe in the first place.
(Nitpick: I would have liked at least a one-line explanation of the fact that the abbreviated universe with time collapsing further all around them obviated the risks of crossing back and moving around within one's own timeline. On the one hand you can say the universe was a little far gone past the point where one more paradox is going to harm it... but on the other hand, they could have said that. There are a dozen great lines that could have handwaved the problem away.)
Anyway, Eleven's loopier thought processes fit his more alien outlook. Having hurled the rest of his folk back into oblivion, he's come to terms with the fact that he's not just not human, he's not a member of any race. "Am I people? Do I even look like people?" He isn't. The rest of the universe is catching on, too. He's an anomaly, even among fellow anomalies. The most complicated event in time or space. The goblin or trickster or warrior, the nameless terrible thing...
Sidenote: After "Vampires In Venice", I noted with some satisfaction that Eleven no longer showed the grim satisfaction of Ten at the utter desolation of a race that refused his terms. Following the theory that the grosser differences between regenerated personalities and their predecessors are in fact a reaction to something the predecessor went through, could it be that killing his own world a second time that cooled the Doctor on genocide as the all-purpose Plan B?
And and and at the end of the season we're left with exactly what I wanted: Amy, Rory, and The Doctor flying the TARDIS together, with the supposedly inevitable triangle seemingly definitively resolved. And they're going to keep on having adventures, wild and zany and improbable adventures like going to Space Florida where the beaches have automatic sand or trying to recapture an escaped Egyptian goddess on board the Orient Express IN SPACE
So, anyway... I have never, ever come out of a season finale being more excited and impatient for the next season. Of any show. A cliffhanger can make me want to know what happens next, but it won't make me happy about it.
First, jumping to the end: we have a season finale that really does seem to elegantly (well, a little sloppily... this is Doctor Who, after all) tie everything off with a bow, including things that seemed like plot holes, inconsistencies, throwaway jokes, bad writing... everybody who said Amelia Pond's background was lacking were right, as it happened, but apparently that didn't mean there was no thought in it.
Then it gets to be the end and you realize that there still isn't any ultimate cause for the catastrophe. The Doctor, however, is already one step ahead -- he knows that while the disaster has been averted, nothing has been resolved because there is still a cause, indeed, a culprit who remains at large.
Do we actually have a multi-season arc? With River Song on the scene, we have two of them.
Jumping back to the part about the Doctor being one step ahead... some people have suggested that Eleven has had his cleverness dialed down so that Amy can shine. I really don't think this is the case. There was the scene in "The Beast Below" where he claimed to not know why he did something. While rule number one is "The Doctor lies", I'm not sure that he was lying in that case... just like I don't think he was completely jerking Amelia Pond around when he told her the sad story and prepared to leave the universe For Ev Ar. I don't think he'd quite worked out exactly what it was that he'd worked out when he told Amelia about the old new borrowed blue box so she'd remember it on the day in her life when she'd be surrounded by bow ties and suspenders.
If I'm right, then Eleven really is one step ahead of everyone, including himself. This allows him to be the brainy Doctor who solves everything and saves (almost) everyone, but also makes it possible for him to miss things that previous incumbents to his life might not have overlooked.
Eleven's not taking a longer view or a deeper view, he's taking a slantways one. Sure, he missed the obvious a couple of times and failed to stop the Daleks where another Doctor might not have, but he also managed to stitch together the incredibly loopy plan to save first himself and his friends and then all of creation using multiple forms of time travel and the two very things that had doomed the universe in the first place.
(Nitpick: I would have liked at least a one-line explanation of the fact that the abbreviated universe with time collapsing further all around them obviated the risks of crossing back and moving around within one's own timeline. On the one hand you can say the universe was a little far gone past the point where one more paradox is going to harm it... but on the other hand, they could have said that. There are a dozen great lines that could have handwaved the problem away.)
Anyway, Eleven's loopier thought processes fit his more alien outlook. Having hurled the rest of his folk back into oblivion, he's come to terms with the fact that he's not just not human, he's not a member of any race. "Am I people? Do I even look like people?" He isn't. The rest of the universe is catching on, too. He's an anomaly, even among fellow anomalies. The most complicated event in time or space. The goblin or trickster or warrior, the nameless terrible thing...
Sidenote: After "Vampires In Venice", I noted with some satisfaction that Eleven no longer showed the grim satisfaction of Ten at the utter desolation of a race that refused his terms. Following the theory that the grosser differences between regenerated personalities and their predecessors are in fact a reaction to something the predecessor went through, could it be that killing his own world a second time that cooled the Doctor on genocide as the all-purpose Plan B?
And and and at the end of the season we're left with exactly what I wanted: Amy, Rory, and The Doctor flying the TARDIS together, with the supposedly inevitable triangle seemingly definitively resolved. And they're going to keep on having adventures, wild and zany and improbable adventures like going to Space Florida where the beaches have automatic sand or trying to recapture an escaped Egyptian goddess on board the Orient Express IN SPACE
So, anyway... I have never, ever come out of a season finale being more excited and impatient for the next season. Of any show. A cliffhanger can make me want to know what happens next, but it won't make me happy about it.