Following this finale, it’s really funny to go back and re-read our Let’s Kill Hitler reaction post, from what seems like so long ago already. In that, our biggest concern with the second half of Series Six was that Moffat had built too large of a house of cards this time around. That, as io9 recently put it, he wouldn’t catch all the balls he was juggling in the finale. He was doing so many wonderful, fascinating, unique things to the show, to the Doctor’s, the Ponds’, and River’s plotlines--but would it all come together in a way that both made sense and was satisfying?
In that sense, this finale did not disappoint in the slightest. Some things felt a bit rushed, yes, but that seemed mostly to be a consequence of the fact that the finale was only one episode long (which we’ll deal with later). And in the end--in those last ten minutes especially--everything felt complete. It made sense. The Doctor evading death was not a hand-waving, timey-wimey thing this time, as it was in The Big Bang last year. His emotional journey--at least for this season--has been completed in a way that actually brings us closure. River’s biggest mysteries were solved in a way that did not feel ret-conned. Sure, there are still some questions, but we were not left with the burning, gaping holes we were left with at the end of Series Five. And after all the doubts we had about Moffat’s ability to pull this off, seeing it all play out in this way was so incredibly satisfying.
