Doctor Who “The Pandorica Opens”

Well, I didn’t see that coming.

That’s a good thing.

There’s a message for the Doctor.  Vincent VanGogh dreamed it up and painted a picture of it.  Winston Churchill got the painting years later and tried to call the TARDIS.  He got River Song instead.  She stole the painting from Liz 10, traded for supplies with an alien, and the Doctor got the message to find her when he went to a legendary mountain on the oldest planet in the universe, where a message in an unknown language could be easily translated by the TARDIS.

It said “Hello Sweetie,” River’s signature greeting.

One trip to Ancient Britain at the time of a Roman invasion, Amy’s favorite time period, and there’s River, posing as Cleopatra with the painting…showing the TARDIS exploding on a certain date.  That can only mean one thing:  someone might be opening the Pandorica, a “fairy tale” of a prison that contained the most dangerous being in the universe.  The Doctor isn’t sure he believes it until he looks a little closer and realizes the thing must be under Stonehenge.

And it is!  An ancient prison, much like Pandora’s Box, Amy’s favorite story…

Um…

Well, an ancient prison built to contain some kind of trickster god or some such, a being who never gave his name but scared the crap out of all of his enemies, and why does that sound familiar?

Regardless, there’s some weird stuff going on.  A signal is going out from the trap, and when River and the Doctor check it, they find a lot of ships coming in.  More than River’s scanner can count!

And they include Daleks!

And…Cybermen?

Wait, Cybermen?  And Daleks?  That makes no sense.  Maybe the Doctor can play them off against each other.  He just needs some of those Romans and…wait, why is Rory a Roman soldier?  He shouldn’t exist anymore.

By this point, the Doctor sent River back to check some things with the TARDIS.  That takes her back to Amy’s house, and in Amy’s room, River figures out why all this stuff feels wrong.  She’s also at the same date the TARDIS is supposed to explode, there’s some weird message coming through that the Silence is coming, and River tells the Doctor that, basically, all this stuff is really an illusion set up based on Amy’s memories.  She loved the Roman time period, Pandora’s Box, and Rory (even if she doesn’t remember him right away), and here’s all that stuff just to lure the Doctor in.

Because it turns out Rory and the Romans are all Autons, and even though Rory-Auton doesn’t want to, he shoots Amy.  And the ships up there?  All the Doctor’s enemies joined forces because the TARDIS’s exploding destroyed the universe, and only the Doctor pilots the TARDIS.

So there they are.  The Daleks.  The Cybermen.  The Judoon.  The Autons.  The Sontarans.  All of them united to save the universe…from the Doctor.

Yeah, that superprison was built for him because these guys didn’t know River could pilot the TARDIS too.

So, the Doctor goes in the cell, Amy gets shot, River is trapped in the TARDIS as it starts to explode, and all the stars in the universe blink out.

Yeah, maybe locking the Doctor up only makes things worse…