Sometimes, you see, I just have these brilliant ideas.

Like last night, when I had the brilliant idea of reading until past midnight and then setting my alarm for 3:45 am so I could watch the World Cup final.

And then, some three hours later, when I realised that I’d been awake for longer than I’d actually been asleep, I had the brilliant idea of shaking my phone (which randomises the Hipstamatic settings) and then taking some photos of the dawn, since this is at least the fourth dawn I’ve seen from well the other side in the last ten days.

So now, because I’m so generous and, frankly, exhausted, you get to share in this brilliant idea.

(If you’d like to share in my other brilliant idea and get up at 3:45 am tomorrow, feel free.)

Pre-live-blogging alert: Heather is with us this week, albeit currently playing Plants vs Zombies (not, as I originally typed Pants Vs Zombies, though that would be awesome) but Michelle is off being fabulous all over the U.S., so she’s not with us.

Half a peanut gallery is better than none, I find.

Now we’re discussing man-love in the football, which delights us but which we think should be more widespread. (You hear that, men? Begin embracing each other in public. Unless you are doing that already. In which case, keep up the good work. In other news, I got up at 4 am this morning, to watch the football.)

ME: I hate live-blogging when I’m tired.
HEATHER: It will be fabulous. I COMMAND IT!

Before the show:

ME: Sorry, I don’t need to see Komodo dragon sex.
HEATHER: Yes, you do. You have to blog that.
NICK AND HEATHER: Ew! That’s just wrong. Don’t do that to the Komodo dragon!

Long, looong pre-show recap.

We open 1,894 years later. And we’re at Amy’s house, which looks surprisingly like it did when the Doctor first arrived.

HEATHER: Well, it must all be okay, if the house is there.
NICK: You’ll see.
HEATHER: Oh, Nick.

Amelia is praying, as she did in “The Eleventh Hour.” As she gets to the bit about the policeman, the wind rises, but when she looks out the window, the shed is intact. She makes a rueful face, as we see the moon alone in a dark sky.

Then a woman is looking at Amelia’s painting of the moon and the stars, and after Amelia’s aunt’s exasperated “Amelia!”, they head outside so Amelia can be shown that there’s no such thing as stars. Just the moon and the dark.

Amelia eavesdrops on her aunt’s conversation as the aunt says that she doesn’t want Amelia to end up a star cultist: “I don’t trust that Richard Dawkins,” she says.

Then someone drops an pamphlet for a museum through the letterbox, with the hand-written note, “Come along, Pond.”

Amelia drags her aunt through the museum, ignoring the Daleks and other exhibits, until she reaches the Pandorica, where someone steals her drink just before she notices a Post-it note saying, “Stick around, Pond.”

Amelia hides, and sneaks out from behind some penguins (not without casualties) late at night, sneaking past the Daleks (surrounded by palms, which Nick points out is totally their natural habitat) and up to the Pandorica.

She pulls off the Post-it note and then presses her hand against the Pandorica, which begins unlocking. Amelia steps back as the Pandorica opens, its light reaching one of the Daleks, and then we see, strapped inside, Amy, who says, “Okay, kid: this is where it gets complicated.”

Credits.

1,894 years previously, Rory is cradling the dead Amy in his arms and talking to her about the end of the universe in 102 AD. He’s upset because she would have laughed at all his jokes. He wants her to laugh. But she’s dead, so laughing would be a bit freaky.

Rory wants a ridiculous miracle, and then the Doctor turns up holding a mop and wearing a fez.

He disappears, then reappears without the mop. He tells Rory he needs to get him (the Doctor) out of the Pandorica, and leaves his screwdriver, telling Rory to leave it in Amy’s top pocket.

Rory immediately lets the Doctor out, and the Doctor says, “How did you do that?”

The Doctor’s a little freaked, but he realises that they’re the same sonic screwdriver, but at different times. “I’ve got a future!” he says. “That’s nice.”

There are fossilised Daleks (and others, including Autons) around the Pandorica, which the Doctors says are traces of races that never existed. The Earth, he says, is simply at the eye of the storm, and it takes a little longer for the light to go out.

Rory reveals that he shot Amy, and asks if the Doctor can do anything. The Doctor says he could, if he had time.

DOCTOR: Your girlfriend isn’t more important than the whole universe.

Rory punches him in the face, which delights the Doctor, because he wanted to make sure that Rory was really Rory, and not just a Nestene duplicate. (This is, it seems, because of Amy growing up with the universe pouring through her dreams.) He shoves her in the Pandorica, saying that it’ll keep her alive (the ultimate prison) until it gets a trace of her living DNA in about two thousand years.

We cut to Amy gasping on the floor of the National Museum, telling Amelia that it’s a long story. A very long story, she realises, seeing the history of the Pandorica.

Back at the Pandorica in Stonehenge, the Doctor says Amy will be in there for two thousand years, but they’ll take a short cut, thanks to River’s Time Vortex manipulator.

But Rory wants to stay, to guard the Pandorica. He says it’ll keep Amy safer.

DOCTOR: Why do you have to be so human?
RORY: Because right now I’m not.

The Doctor points out that Rory’s not immortal and can’t heal, so he needs to stay out of trouble.

Then Rory puts on his helmet, draws his sword, and sits on the edge of the Pandorica.

We cut to a museum video recording of the legend of the centurion who guards the Pandorica, and his last known appearance, when he dragged the Pandorica from the flames when the warehouse was bombed in World War Two.

Amy cries.

But she’s cut short by “Exterminate!” And then the Doctor appears in the fray, shouting, “Come along, Ponds!”

Amy asks what’s happening.

DOCTOR: We’re running into a dead end, where I will have a brilliant plan that basically involves not being in one.

Luckily, a security guard turns up, and he just happens to have a gun for a hand.

Rory!

Amy and Rory kiss.

AMY: Oh, so shut up.
DOCTOR: And breathe. And breathe. Well, someone didn’t get out much for two thousand years.
AMELIA: I’m thirsty. Can I get a drink?
DOCTOR: Oh, it’s all mouths today, isn’t it?

They leave while the Dalek is repairing, the Doctor helping himself to a fez and a mop. Rory points out that this is how he looked two thousand years ago, so we flip back and forth between this and the earlier scene, with the Doctor wearing the fez the whole time.

Then he asks Amelia how she knew to come here, and flips back to leave her a note through her letterbox and then to steal her drink eight or so hours ago, so he can give it to her now.

They’re heading up to the roof when another Doctor appears, looking terribly ill, and tumbles down the stairs, grabs our Doctor, and then, according to our Doctor, dies.

The Doctor says, quite happily, that he’s going to die in twelve minutes.

DOCTOR: Oh, you can do loads in twelve minutes. Suck a mint, buy a sled, have a fast bath.

And then Amelia disappears. They’re still at the eye of the storm, but the eye is closing fast. And as they hare up to the roof, we hear the Dalek shouting, “Restore!”

NICK: Daleks are very useful, with their internal monologue.

On the roof:

RORY: What are you doing?
DOCTOR: Looking for the TARDIS.
RORY: But the TARDIS exploded.
DOCTOR: Then I’m looking for an exploding TARDIS.

What people have been assuming was the Sun is actually the TARDIS burning up. And Rory, with his plastic ears, can hear that River is at the heart of the explosion, trapped in a time loop of the events we saw at the end of the last episode, where she tries to get the doors open.

The loop is interrupted by the Doctor:

DOCTOR: Hi, honey. I’m home.
RIVER: And what time do you call this?

He flips River back to the roof, where she tells an unsavoury anecdote about dating a Nestene duplicate, and then asks what in sanity the Doctor is wearing on his head. He claims that fezzes are cool, but Amy grabs it off his head and throws it up into the air, where River shoots it—just as the Dalek appears above the roof.

The Doctor says that the Dalek is due to kill him, but there’s also a lot of information here about “rebooting the universe,” which I simply can’t keep up with. Though River has a good point about the Pandorica only partially restoring one Dalek.

Then the Doctor is shot by a Dalek.

Well, I didn’t see that happening.

Rory shoots the Dalek. River tries to talk to the Doctor, but he disappears—Amy and Rory say he’s downstairs and he died. River tells them to go to the Doctor while she waits with the Dalek. And threatens it.

DALEK: Records indicate you will show mercy. You are an associate of the Doctor’s.
RIVER: I’m River Song. Check your records again.
DALEK: Mercy?
RIVER: Say it again.
DALEK: Mercy?
RIVER: One. More. Time.
DALEK: Mercy!

Downstairs, Amy and Rory have discovered that the Doctor lied about being dead, not to River’s surprise, as she strides down the stairs.

AMY: What happened to the Dalek?
RIVER: It died.

The Doctor has strapped himself into the Pandorica, still talking about Big Bang Two.

River explains that throwing the Pandorica into the heart of the TARDIS explosion would bring everything back—a restoration field, powered by an exploding TARDIS, occurring simultaneously everywhere in time.

RIVER: He’s going to fly the Pandorica into the heart of the explosion.
HEATHER: Well, he better bloody well hurry up about it.
NICK: We’re on a tight schedule here, people.
HEATHER: Seriously.

The Doctor is asking for Amy. River explains that if this works, the Doctor will be on the other side of the cracks in time when they close, and he’ll never have existed.

RIVER: Now please: he wants to talk to you before he goes.
AMY: Not to you?
RIVER: He doesn’t really know me yet. Now he never will.

The lighting in this scene is phenomenal. Not only does the Doctor look ancient, he also looks like a completely different face.

Oh, you know what I mean.

And we have nearly half an hour left! I’ll never last.

The Doctor talks to Amy about the impossibilities of her life, about her missing parents (who haven’t died; she’s just forgotten them as time swallowed them up), and he tells her that nothing is ever forgotten, but she has to remember. He says that she can bring her parents back, if she remembers them.

DOCTOR: You’ll have your family back. You won’t need your imaginary friend any more. Amy Pond. Crying over me, eh? Guess what?
AMY: What?
DOCTOR: Gotcha.

Whimper.

Then he takes off, to the fabulous Doctor action theme, which I love (like a brother).

He sends one message back to River: “Geronimo.” Oh, thank goodness they’ve used that sparingly.

Then we flip backwards through time, through Amy’s death, and the destruction of the universe, then the Doctor wakes up in the TARDIS.

DOCTOR: Legs? Yes. Bow tie? Cool. Eh, I can buy a fez.

But it’s not now, it’s last week, when they went to Space Florida. (We assume this joke is especially for Heather, who was raised in Terrestrial Florida, as I guess we call it.)

Amy can hear the Doctor, both here and when he flips back three weeks to “The Lodger.” But she can’t see him.

But if she hear him, then this is a good time for the Doctor to flip back to the time when Amy can’t open her eyes, in the stone angels two-parter.

AMY: Doctor, the crack in my wall. How can it be here?
DOCTOR: I don’t know. But I’m working it out.

And he looks over at his other self, as his other self works it out. Love it.

The Doctor tells Amy she needs to remember what he told her when she was seven, and then flips back to when Amy was seven. She’s asleep in the garden in her cute wellies, and he picks her up and takes her back to bed.

He sits next to her and talks about her parents, and how she won’t remember him.

I have to try and get this next bit verbatim.

DOCTOR: I’ll be a story in your head. That’s okay. We’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, okay? Because it was, you know. It was the best. The daft old man, who stole a magic box, and ran away. Did I ever tell you that story? Well, I borrowed it. I was always going to take it back. That box. Oh, Amy: you’ll dream about that box. It’ll never leave you. Big and little. Brand new and ancient. And the bluest blue ever. And the times we had. Would have had. Never had. In your dreams, they’ll still be there. The Doctor and Amy Pond. And the days that never came. The cracks are closing. But they can’t close properly till I’m on the other side. I don’t belong here any more. I think I’ll skip the rest of the rewind. I hate repeats. Live well. Love Rory. Bye bye, Pond.

Then his shadow flashes on the wall above Amy’s bed, and he’s gone.

When Amy wakes (and she’s apparently sleeping in her watch, which leads to a conversation I can’t blog), she’s an adult, who glances over at her Raggedy Doctor toys, all laid out on the bureau, and her mum comes in and gives her breakfast, freaking Amy out.

Even more freaky, her dad is in the living room. “And you’re my tiny little Dad!” she says, throwing herself on him. Her parents are nonplussed by this, but when she rings Rory, he doesn’t seem to notice that anything’s amiss, and Amy’s distracted by her wedding dress.

Next thing we know, Amy and Rory are married—and there’s River walking slowly past the windows of the reception hall.

RORY: Ah, you’re crying.
AMY: So I am. Why am I doing that?
RORY: Because you’re happy, probably. Happy Mrs Rory. Happy, happy, happy.
AMY: No, I’m sad. I’m really, really sad.
RORY: Great!

River has left her TARDIS notebook, but it’s blank. Amy asks why anyone would leave such a gift, and Rory reminds her of the “old wedding saying.”

Amy’s dad (Augustus Pond, a Roald Dahl name, as Nick points out) starts giving his speech, as Amy looks around the room and notices braces and bowties and all sorts of signs.

Then Amy stands up, telling her dad to shut up. (People are used to that, from Amy, is the implication of this scene.) She tells the story of the Raggedy Doctor, ending with “Raggedy Man, I remember you. And you are late for my wedding!”

The TARDIS starts materialising, and Rory asks what it is.

AMY: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

As the TARDIS appears, Rory says, “It’s the Doctor. How could we forget the Doctor?” Luckily, the Doctor’s wearing white tie.

AMY: You absolutely, definitely may kiss the bride.
DOCTOR: Amelia, from now on, I shall leave the kissing to the brand-new Mr Pond.
RORY: No. I’m not Mr Pond. That’s not how it works.
DOCTOR: Yeah, it is.
RORY: Yeah, it is.

The Doctor dances spectacularly badly.

Then he slips away to the TARDIS, where River finds him.

RIVER: Did you dance? Well, you always dance at weddings.
DOCTOR: You tell me.
RIVER: Spoilers.
DOCTOR: The writing’s all back, but I didn’t peek. Are you married, River?
RIVER: Are you asking?
DOCTOR: Yes.
RIVER: Yes.
DOCTOR: No, hang on a minute, did you think I was asking you to marry me, or asking if you were married?
RIVER: Yes.
DOCTOR: No, but was that “Yes” or “Yes”?
RIVER: Yes.
DOCTOR: River, who are you?
RIVER: You’re going to find out very soon now. And I’m sorry, but that’s when everything changes.

The Doctor tries to sneak away, but he’s interrupted first by Amy and then by a phone call about an Egyptian goddess loose on the Orient Express in space (please, please be the Christmas special), and he says this has to be goodbye.

AMY: Oh, I think this is goodbye. Don’t you?
RORY: Yeah, this is definitely goodbye.

Then Amy leans out the TARDIS in her wedding dress, shouting “Goodbye!” and we’re out until Christmas. See you all then!

ME: I suppose I should get back to the folding of laundry. So, so boring.
NICK: Ah well.
ME: Also?
NICK: Yes?
ME: Don’t think I didn’t notice that you left a bottle of tomato sauce on the bookcase.
NICK: Well, it started out as tomato juice, but, well, time makes fools of us all.
ME: Yes. You do realise, don’t you that, tomato sauce is not to tomato juice as yoghurt is to milk?
NICK: I did know that. And furthermore I was fairly sure you’d point that out too. So you’ve really fallen into my trap, there.
ME: Yes, clearly you win this round.

This is bound to be a confusing, fast-paced, and complicated episode, but let’s see if I can keep up with it, shall we?

My peanut gallery is absent this week, because they’ve gone to attend a wedding (which, I suppose, has a higher priority than live-blogging Doctor Who, but I’m sure it was a tough choice).

We open in France in 1890, where Vincent is having some kind of attack. And he’s painted a picture that is “even worse than his usual rubbish.” But we don’t get to see what the painting looks like.

In the Cabinet War Bunker, Bracewell shows Churchill a “genuine Van Gogh” that “is obviously a message.” Churchill says he can’t understand it, but Bracewell says he’s only supposed to deliver it.

Then the phone rings in the Stormcage Containment Facility in a date that I memorised and then instantly forgot (sometime in the 5000s), where a phone rings. It’s Churchill, looking for the Doctor, but the TARDIS had rerouted the call to River Song.

She hangs up the phone looking worried, and then snogs the guard. He says to his fellow guards, as they come rushing up, that she had the hallucinogenic lipstick, but “Your tricks don’t work in here, Dr Song.”

Sadly, he’s saying this to a caricature she’s scribbled on the wall.

Then we flip to the Royal Collection, where River, in a fetching black catsuit, is stealing a painting before being challenged by Liz10: “This is the Royal Collection. And I’m the bloody queen.”

Elsewhere, River is buying something from a blue chappie in an expensive-looking pub.

BLUE CHAPPIE: A vortex manipulator. Fresh off the wrist of a handsome Time Agent. (Sigh) I said off the wrist.

He agrees to sell it for a callisto pulse, which will neutralise the micro-explosives that River’s just put in his wine.

In the TARDIS, Amy is staring at the engagement ring as the Doctor says they’re going to go to the oldest planet in the universe and use the TARDIS’s translation circuits to translate the oldest writing in the universe.

Which, if course, reads “Hello, Sweetie.” And some co-ordinates.

DOCTOR: Earth. Britain. 1:02 a.m. No, p.m. No, AD.

They’re facing a Roman legion.

AMY: Oh, I know. My favourite topic at school: “Invasion of the Hot Italians.” Yeah, I did get marked down for the title.

A legionnaire comes up and addresses the Doctor as “Caesar,” telling him that Cleopatra awaits. He’s smothered in lipstick.

Cleopatra, who is of course River, hands the Doctor a painting, Vincent’s painting, of the TARDIS exploding.

Credits.

Post-credits, we’re cutting between the three of them galloping horses to an unknown destination—which seems risky, what with rabbit holes—and Cleopatra telling the Doctor about the Pandorica, about the painting, and about the co-ordinates on the painting.

The Doctor says that “if you’d buried the most dangerous thing in the universe, you’d want to remember where you’d buried it.”

That means Stonehenge.

At Stonehenge, River is picking up traces of energy weapons, but the Doctor doesn’t seem to think this is surprising, given what’s buried in the Pandorica. They need, he says, to get under Stonehenge, so River attaches some anti-gravity . . . thingies to a rock and floats it away, so they can access the “Underhenge.”

As they pass into the tunnels, we pan away to see a disembodied Cyberman head.

Underhenge, they come to enormous, barricaded doors, which River and the Doctor seem equally delighted to throw open.

Behind them is the Pandorica.

RIVER: More than just a fairytale.

And a Cyberman arm, but I’m sure that can’t be relevant to the plot, at all.

The Doctor barely glances at the Cyber-arm: he’s all about the Pandorica, an enormous, intricately marked box.

DOCTOR: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior—a nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared thing in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and destroy your world.

Hmm. Does that sound like anyone you know?

Amy asks how the creature was stopped, and the Doctor says, “You know fairytales. A good wizard tricked it.”

RIVER: I hate good wizards in fairytales. They always turn out to be him.

Amy mentions that this sounds like Pandora’s Box, which was her favourite book when she was a kid. The Doctor seems momentarily alarmed by this, but only momentarily: “Never ignore a coincidence. Unless you’re busy, in which case, always ignore a coincidence.”

More disturbing is the fact that, as River realises faster than the Doctor, Stonehenge is transmitting information about the Pandorica, which means other people are hearing and coming.

River folds the signal back, and we hear the voices of Daleks, Cybermen, and every other race that the Doctor has ever frustrated.

DOCTOR: Sontarans. Talk about cross. Who stole all their handbags?

The music is a bit jaunty here, isn’t it?

RIVER: You can’t win this one. You can’t even fight it. Please, Doctor, just this once, you have to run.
DOCTOR: Run where?
RIVER: Fight how?

She has a point, I admit. But the Doctor just suggests that the Roman army is a good place to start.

ROMAN COMMANDER: I return to my command after one week to find that we’ve been hosting Cleopatra. Who’s in Eygpt. And dead.

River is fairly convincing, though, since she obliterates the Roman commander’s writing desk. I hope his wife’s letters weren’t in there.

The Roman commander isn’t too keen on the idea, but a shadowed legionnaire offers his men.

With the Pandorica, the Doctor is trying to buy some time.

AMY: What good is half an hour?
DOCTOR: There are fruit flies on Hoppington 6 who live for half an hour, and they don’t even mate for life. There’s going to be a point to that. I’ll get back to you.

Amy, though, wants to know if the Doctor is going to propose to someone, and pulls out the ring. The Doctor says no: the ring is a memory. He tries to prompt Amy to use the ring to remember Rory, but she can’t quite grasp it.

He does, however, start to tell Amy why he asked her to run away with him. He gets to the point where he asks her if it ever bothers her that her life doesn’t make sense when they’re attacked by the Cyber-arm.

DOCTOR: Now the robot part is looking for fresh meat.
AMY: You mean us?
DOCTOR: Yeah. It’s like being an organ donor, only you’re alive and sort of screaming.

The Doctor manages to disarm the arm (I kill myself) but is electrocuted by it while Amy is attacked by the Cyber-head. There’s a bit here where the head splits open to show a desiccated human skull that is really quite revolting.

Amy’s doing quite well, despite being drugged, until the rest of the Cyberman’s body shows up. Well, the rest minus an arm.

She locks herself in a tiny room, and though the Cyberman is beating on the door, she seems safe enough—especially when a sword comes through the door.

Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but trust me.

The sword belongs to the shadowy legionnaire, who is, once he dramatically removes his helmet, Rory.

Rory!

Amy faints at this point.

The Doctor comes haring in, screaming, “Amy!” He seems pleased to see the Romans, but seems frustrated by the mere fifty men that Rory has brought. Rory says River was persuasive, but it’s a tough sell.

DOCTOR: Yes, I know that, Rory. I’m not exactly one to miss the obvious.

And he’s not: it takes him a little while and at least one more instance of him calling Rory by name, but he realises that Rory is actually Rory.

He’s thrilled to see Rory, in a way, but mostly totally freaked out by the mere fact that Rory, in his words, “died and turned into a Roman. It’s very distracting.”

Rory asks if Amy missed him, but luckily the Doctor doesn’t have to answer, because the Pandorica reaches the final phase, and starts opening.

River tells the Doctor that he’s surrounded—as we can tell from the engine noises outside—and he tells her to go and get the TARDIS. She wheels the horse, and she’s off.

And the Doctor heads up to give a speech. I wish I could transcribe the whole thing, but I can’t type that fast. The Doctor sounds distinctly drunk at some parts of the speech, but it’s still marvellous.

DOCTOR: Hello, Stonehenge! Who takes the Pandoria takes the universe! But bad news, everyone. Because guess who? You lot, you’re all whizzing around. It’s very distracting. Could you all keep still for a moment, because I am talking. Question of the hour: who has the Pandorica? I do! Next question: Who’s coming to take it from me? [. . .] Just remember who’s standing in your way. Remember every black day I ever stopped you. And then—and then! Do the smart thing: let somebody else try first.

River leaps into the TARDIS, even though she’s acting a bit oddly.

The TARDIS, that is. Not River.

Amy wakes up from her knock-out drops, and the Doctor, seeing her coming in, tells Rory that he’ll have to be very brave. Rory, not surprisingly, is quite devastated to find out that, firstly, his fiancee doesn’t remember him and, secondly, that this is because he never actually existed.

The Doctor explains all this, and Rory asks how he ended up as a Roman. But Rory isn’t entirely sure.

RORY: And I was just here. A Roman soldier. A proper Roman. Head full of Roman . . . stuff. A whole other life.

He works himself up to a fine point of distress about the whole thing, but the Doctor tells him to shut up and then throws an engagement ring at him.

Rory still wants to know the meaning of his existence. Don’t we all, Rory? But the Doctor says it might just be a miracle.

DOCTOR: Now get upstairs: she’s Amy and she’s surrounded by Romans. Not sure history can take it.

Elsewhere, the TARDIS has landed River outside Amy’s house, thanks, it seems, to a creepy voice intoning, “Silence will fall.” There are the marks of landing pads on the grass—or aerosol, if you want to be uncharitable. (They’re not terribly convincing, it must be said.) And inside, River does the traditional, “walk through the house with a flashlight,” which always bewilders me.

I’d turn the lights on.

River realises that this is Amy’s house when she sees Amy’s childhood toys of the “Raggedy Doctor,” sighing, “Oh, Doctor. Why do I let you out?”

She stops worrying about that, though, when she finds a book about Roman Britain and another of The Legend of Pandora’s Box, which has a picture of the Pandorica on it.

Rory finds Amy upstairs.

RORY: You’ve got a blanket. That’s good. Who gave you that?
AMY: One of the fellers.
RORY: Which one?
AMY: I don’t know. Does it matter?
RORY: No. Forget him. It. Forget it.

Then she starts crying.

River rings the Doctor, telling him not to raise his voice or look alarmed.

Amy tells Rory that she’s crying because she’s happy (and more than a little manic), and she doesn’t know why.

River tells the Doctor about the Romans and the book in Amy’s room. She’s bewildered that her lipstick worked on them, but the Doctor says that they might think they’re real.

And then River finds a photograph of Rory in centurion dress.

Oh, dear.

Luckily, they’re distracted by the TARDIS going wrong. The Doctor thinks that River’s flying it wrong, until she says that it’s the 26th of June 2010, the fatal date. The Doctor tells her to shut everything down, but the creepy “Silence will fall” voice comes back, and River says someone else, an external force, is flying the TARDIS.

Elsewhere, Amy is trying to come to terms with whether or not she’s seen Rory before, when the centurions all shut down and the Pandorica begins to open.

The Doctor tells River to just land the TARDIS, as the centurions begin to converge on the TARDIS and Rory says he’s not going: “I’m Rory!”

The Doctor tells River to just get out, so that the TARDIS engines shut down automatically. We see that the centurions are Autons, as they flip their hands open to show their handguns. (Again, I kill myself.)

River can’t open the doors.

Amy finally recognises Rory, but he’s begging her to run because he can’t control himself.

And the Doctor is dragged along the floor by two centurions, as they say, “The Pandorica is ready.”

“You mean open?” asks the Doctor, who has his back to it.

Then a Dalek voice says, “You have been scanned.”

And three Daleks appear in the room.

Amy tells Rory to show her the ring.

And the Daleks are joined by Cybermen and Sontarans, who say that the Pandorica is ready.

DOCTOR: Ready for what?
DALEKS: Ready for you.

Over some oddly jaunty music, for the second time this episode, Rory shoots Amy (against his will), the Doctor is dragged, scuffing his feet the whole way, towards the Pandorica, and River tries desperately to open the TARDIS doors.

The Doctor, strapped in the Pandorica—and still saying, “And you’ve come to me for help?”, because he’s eternally optimistic—wants to know how all these creatures are working together as an Alliance.

The Alliance think they’re saving the universe, because only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS. The Doctor says that the TARDIS is exploding as they speak, but they still seal the Pandorica.

And River finally gets the doors open, to see a wall of solid rock. “I’m sorry, my love,” she says, as the engines explode behind her.

We pan up from Rory, sobbing and hauling Amy’s body up in his arms to see the cracks spread, the stars disappear, and the Earth float away alone into the void.

Cliffhanger!

Nick and I split the preparations for a party:

NICK: I’m going to vacuum now.
ME: No.
NICK: I’ve finished the dusting!
ME: This table and lamp haven’t been dusted.
NICK: Yeah.
ME: Nor has this table.
NICK: Okay.
ME: And I’m pretty sure you haven’t dusted this one because it has a stale cracker on it.
NICK: You see things I don’t see.
ME: Like furniture?

You’ll all be pleased to hear that the peanut gallery is back for this week’s episode—but currently Heather is playing with my camera and Michelle is playing with Nick’s iPad. So we won’t know yet whether they’re going to stop in order to comment.

The third last episode of the season! Let’s see how well this one goes. I worry sometimes that my live-blogging has run away with me. I fear it controls me, instead of vice versa.

Of course, I also fear that I’m completely mad, so you probably shouldn’t listen to me.

Except when it comes to Doctor Who. You should definitely listen to me on Doctor Who.

The TARDIS materialises in a park, and the Doctor steps out the door—just before he’s thrown away from the TARDIS by an explosion, leaving Amy alone in the TARDIS.

Amy freaks out in the TARDIS and the Doctor freaks out in the park.

One day later, a young boy walks past a house, as a voice, coming from the intercom, asks if he can help.

HEATHER: Are you my mummy?

The boy walks in, and a shadowy man at the top of the stairs says something terrible has happened, and asks if the boy can help.

The door closes behind the boy.

In the downstairs flat, a woman asks what’s wrong with the ceiling, just before the spreading stain spreads even further. The man with her says that the man upstairs is “just some bloke.”

The man has put an ad in the paper for a new flat mate.

MAN: Otherwise you’ll have to settle for me.
WOMAN: You’d have to settle for me first.

They settle in for pizza-booze-telly night, before the woman gets a phone call and has to leave. She leans back against the door for a minute, and we all say, “Aww.”

Craig looks at the fridge—which shows he’s visited the Van Gogh exhibition—before realising the woman has left her keys behind. When the doorbell rings, he wanders down the hallways with her keys, rehearsing, “I love you. I love you.”

When he opens the door with “I love you!”, the Doctor says, “That’s good. Because I’m your new lodger.”

Credits.

Craig isn’t thrilled about the Doctor as a lodger—he’s more pleased when the Doctor hands him a paper bag full of money but less thrilled when the Doctor kisses him on both cheeks, saying, “That’s how you greet each other these days, isn’t it?”

Second intra-textual moment of the episode.

The Doctor uses the psychic paper to flash his credentials. (No euphemisms.)

CRAIG: Is that a reference from the Archbishop of Canterbury?
DOCTOR: I’m his special favourite.
HEATHER: Ew!

Amy materialises in the TARDIS, but only briefly.

The Doctor asks about the photo of Sophie on the fridge, asking if she’s Craig’s girlfriend.

CRAIG: Friend who’s a girl. There’s nothing going on.
DOCTOR: That’s perfectly normal. Works for me.

Then the Doctor cooks an omelette, and when Craig asks where he learned to cook, says, “Paris. Eighteenth century. No, that’s not recent, is it? Seventeenth century. No. I’m not used to doing things in the right order.”

But the Doctor’s weird and he cooks, so Craig lets him stay. The Doctor settles in his new room, and contacts “Pond” on his fancy, vaguely Cyborg earpiece.

On the phone to Craig, Sophie wonders whether “the Doctor” is a dealer, since he has three grand in a paper bag.

The mysterious voice drags another person into the house, this time a woman who looks as though she’s already had a pretty bad night.

The Doctor’s already aware of the mysterious man upstairs, and keeping an eye on the damp stain. He needs to stay anonymous.

DOCTOR: So, no sonicing.
MICHELLE: No what?!

The clock in the Doctor’s bedroom starts going tonto, and the Doctor says it’s a “localised time distortion”. The TARDIS is responding badly, but the Doctor can talk her down. Lucky, since he needs to leave to “pick up a few items”—including a bicycle wheel.

The next morning, the Doctor’s in the shower, singing away, while Craig shouts through the door that he’s just going upstairs.

This finally gets through to the Doctor, who throws himself out of the shower and hares upstairs in a towel, wielding an electronic toothbrush.

There were all sorts of rumours online about whether he was thoroughly covered in these scenes.

As he’s halfway up the stairs in the towel, Sophie comes in. The Doctor kisses her on both cheeks, and it’s delightfully awkward. Then Craig invites the Doctor to come and play football with the pub team. Apparently, Matt Smith was national-level when he was a schoolboy, then hurt his back. So here’s a chance for him to show his skills.

Sophie and Craig flirt awkwardly but sweetly.

The Doctor wanders down to the park in his football kit and tweed jacket, and kisses all his teammates on the cheek.

Are you any good, though? asks Sean.

The Doctor says they’ll find out.

He’s definitely good, but taking Craig’s free kick (or is that a penalty? Hard to see in a pub match) is not the nicest thing to do.

The game ends with Craig standing alone while, off-screen, everyone chants “Doc-tor! Doc-tor! Doc-tor!”

The house attracts another victim, this time a middle-aged woman.

At the park, the Doctor pontificates a bit about being the Oncoming Storm, before his team-mates get caught in a time loop, ad we cut to the middle-aged woman screaming.

Amy, in the TARDIS, is caught in the disturbance, but the Doctor manages to stabilise things.

DOCTOR: I thought for a moment the TARDIS had been flung off into the vortex with you inside it, lost forever.

This, it seems, is the first time the Doctor has mentioned this.

Back at the flat, Craig knocks on the Doctor’s door to ask if he could give them some “space” tonight, because Sophie’s coming round for “pizza-beer-telly.” The Doctor says that Craig won’t even know he’s here, before disappearing back into his room and smacking some things around.

That night, Craig is halfway through a confession of his love—which prompts Michelle to shout, “Just say it!”—when the Doctor pops up behind the sofa, claiming to be rewiring the flat. Sophie asks him to stay and have a drink, and the Doctor agrees.

The Doctor’s fiddling with things in his armchair and failing to drink red wine (okay, ew!), while Sophie talks about wanting to go and live with orangutans. The Doctor taunts her for a bit, until he tells her to work out what’s really keeping her here.

This leads to an awkward Craig-and-Sophie hug in the hallway, and we all give up hope that they’ll ever snog.

The Doctor, back in his room, has some weird device built of rakes and paddles and bicycle wheels, which he’s built on his bed.

In the living room, Craig, annoyed by both the Doctor and the growing stain on his ceiling, touches the stain, despite the Doctor telling him twenty minutes ago not to do that.

Nick points out that those are totally our sofas, and Michelle suggests that they’re also our ceilings.

We all look nervously for mould on the ceiling, but there’s just the same old plaster that’s been falling off in strips for nine years.

Craig is dying in bed the next morning, until the Doctor restores him by thumping his chest and then serving him tea from a Charles and Diana wedding teapot.

He wakes up late in the afternoon, hares into work, and finds that the Doctor has taken over his job and is alienating all his best customers and being served tea and custard creams by Sophie, who is about the start work as a volunteer at a orangutan sanctuary.

DOCTOR: Hello, Mr Jorgensen? Can you hold? I have to eat a biscuit.

Craig, at home, enters the Doctor’s bedroom and isn’t too pleased to see the whirling machine on the bed.

He’s less pleased to find the Doctor sitting on the steps communicating with the cat.

He kicks the Doctor out, saying that these have been the three weirdest days of his life. He thought it was good weird, but it’s bad weird, and he can’t cope.

So the Doctor says he’s going to do something, even though he’ll regret it—and he headbutts Craig, giving him first general information and then specific details about the weird stuff going on in the house.

Of course, this all coincides with Sophie letting herself into the house and being sidetracked on the stairs by a little girl.

Sophie heads up the stairs, though Michelle tells her “No.”

Amy still hasn’t found the plans to the house that the Doctor asked her to find, but the time distortions begin again, showing us that someone is dying upstairs.

The Doctor and Craig hare upstairs, but Amy says that she’s found the plans, and they can’t be upstairs.

They are, says the Doctor.

No, says Amy: there’s no upstairs. It’s a one-storey house.

There’s a lovely shot here where the camera zooms back down the stairs.

Of course, it’s our old friend the perception filter.

What’s happening—they find, as they save Sophie—that the crew has died in a crash, and the holographic emergency protocol has been trying one pilot after another, even though their brains just fry.

Should have gone with a holographic doctor. Those are totes safe.

But now they’ve found the Doctor. And the Doctor can’t fly without the entire Solar System exploding.

The Doctor tells Craig that he needs to touch the panel instead. He says that Craig is the man who doesn’t want to leave, so he needs to think about why he wants to stay.

The answer’s Sophie, of course. And Sophie loves him, too. As we knew she did.

They waffle about it for a bit, until the Doctor gets impatient.

DOCTOR: Not now, Craig. The planet’s about to burn. For God’s sake, kiss the girl!

Craig does, and it comes perilously close to “saving an android through the power of love.”

Then the spaceship implodes, and we’re left with a one-storey house.

CRAIG: I could see the point of Paris, if you were there with me.
SOPHIE: First, let’s destroy our friendship completely.
HEATHER: Okay, ew.

Craig insists that the Doctor takes the house keys, and then we see this week’s crack.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor insists that Amy leave a note for him, the note that directed him to the house in the first place. But in looking for a pen, she finds her engagement ring.

And the crack opens a little further.

Next week: the first of the two-part finale.

And the strange thing? I’m not sure I was even tempted.

Of course, I’m always a little tempted by books in general, but this trend hasn’t really appealed to me. (And I’m as surprised about that as you are: after all, I’m still buying vampire boarding-school stories.)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was fun enough, I suppose, though the random chipmunk thoroughly annoyed me. (So lazy.) But it doesn’t feel as though there’s enough inventiveness in the idea to spawn an entire genre of books like this.

And yet here they are.

So I didn’t buy them. Maybe, just maybe, if I had unlimited shelf space and weren’t already forgetting about half of what I own, then I might have bought them.

Or maybe just Little Vampire Women—I do find the idea of Laurie being desperate to join the undead March family slightly intriguing.

Slightly.

Last night:

ME: It’s cold. Richard the Third and I think it’s cold.
NICK: I don’t get that. Oh! “Now is the winter of our discontent”?
ME: I was talking about my bookmark, but that’s quite clever.

Let’s see if I can do justice to this episode, shall we? I admit, I was highly uncertain about a Richard Curtis episode, despite being ambivalent about Notting Hill, fond of the funeral scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and devoted to Blackadder (from season two onwards). But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here.

Of course, for now I’m just shouting at the weather bulletin, which makes me inexplicably angry.

We open on cornfields, waving in the breeze. No, not waving: thrashing.

They’re being painted by Vincent Van Gogh—and that’s not a spoiler, because we cut to Bill Nighy, commenting on the astonishing output of Van Gogh in the last year of his life. Amy and the Doctor are looking at the exhibition. Amy says he’s being so nice to her, and she finds it suspicious.

DOCTOR: It’s not suspicious. There’s nothing to be suspicious about.
AMY: Okay, I was joking. Why aren’t you?

I can’t explain how intensely charming Bill Nighy is in this scene. Amy’s thrilled to see Vincent’s painting of the church, but the Doctor is distracted by an evil face in the window.

DOCTOR: I know evil when I see it, and I see it in that window.

He interrupts Bill, claiming to be from the Ministry of Art and Artiness, and wants to know when the church was painted—preferably without a long explanation.

Bill says less than a year before Vincent killed himself. They compliment each other on their bowties, and then the Doctor literally shoves Amy out of the room, telling her this is a matter of life and death.

Credits.

They materialise in a small alley, and head off to look for Vincent in the local cafe, which looks exactly like one of Vincent’s paintings, with a little less impasto.

Oh, this is a beautiful episode.

The barmaids laugh uproariously at the idea that Vincent is a good painter, while Vincent himself comes out offering the owner a painting for one last drink. The Doctor offers to buy either a drink or the painting.

VINCENT: One, I pay for my own drinks, thank you. Two, no one ever buys any of my paintings or they’d be laughed out of town. So I suggest if you want to stay in town, you keep your cash to yourself. Three, your friend’s cute, but you should keep your big nose out of other people’s business.

Amy jumps in, and says she’ll buy a bottle of wine, which she’ll share with whomever she wants to.

Vincent’s happy with that.

They sit and chat, with Vincent asking if Amy’s from Holland, like him. (Hee!) The Doctor introduces himself, and Vincent bristles, thinking that his brother Theo has sent yet another doctor after him. He flirts a bit with Amy, in a rather rusty fashion, until the Doctor manages to introduce the idea of the church.

But then they’re interrupted by screams, as a young girl is found torn to strips in the street. The townspeople turn on Vincent, pelting him with rubbish. He and the Doctor and Amy flee.

VINCENT: Where are you staying tonight?
DOCTOR: Oh! You’re very kind.

Amy’s in fangirl heaven, staying over-night with Vincent Van Gogh, and him telling her to keep clear of “Bedroom in Arles” because it’s “still wet.” She boggles at it, but his kitchen/sitting room is cluttered with his paintings.

He pops a coffee pot down on one of his paintings as the Doctor tells him to be careful with them, because they’re “precious.”

Only precious to him, says Vincent, but Amy says they’re precious to her, too.

Some time later, Vincent is ranting about colour, until the Doctor, looking uncomfortable, suggests he’s had enough coffee, and should perhaps have a nice cup of camomile tea. He calls for Amy to make it, but Amy’s outside, screaming, because she’s been attacked by something she didn’t see while she was outside looking at the paintings.

Vincent grabs a forked stick, and the Doctor tries to calm him down on the grounds that there’s nothing there, until he’s twice thrown through the air by some invisible adversary.

It’s clear only Vincent can see the creature, because the Doctor’s thrashing around in an entirely other direction while Vincent drives it off.

He asks Vincent what the creature looks like, and Vincent says he’ll shown them, painting over a rather lovely painting to scratch a charcoal picture of something that looks like a cockatoo.

The Doctor legs it with the picture, telling Amy to keep an eye on Vincent.

DOCTOR: I’ll be back before you can say, “Where’s he got to?”
(Pause)
DOCTOR: Not that fast!
AMY AND VINCENT: ACK!
DOCTOR: But pretty fast. See you round.

Back at the TARDIS, the Doctor’s mucking around with an embarrassing present from a two-headed godmother, which scans images and spits out an identification. It works on the Doctor, spitting out a picture of William Hartnell, but not on Vincent’s painting.

DOCTOR: Not accurate enough! This would never happen with Gainsborough, or one of those proper painters.

He steps out of the TARDIS into broad daylight, and the invisible creature pops up behind him. The Doctor mistakes its reflected image for a delayed response from the machine, but it’s not—he gallops through the town, throwing things behind him. But the creature leaves, and Amy pops up, terrifying the Doctor.

At Vincent’s house, the Doctor throws the doors open onto Vincent asleep in the bedroom at Arles—and that is a magnificent set. Just glorious. The Doctor calls Vincent out to breakfast, telling him that Amy has a surprise for him: she’s surrounded by sunflowers, which Vincent says aren’t his favourite—but, he admits, they might be a challenge.

He tells Vincent he needs to paint the church, to attract the Krafayis, the cockatoo-creature.

DOCTOR: Take my word for it. If you paint it, he will come.

He tells Vincent they’ll be out of his hair as soon as this is done, and Vincent leaves to get ready. The Doctor’s uncertain about putting Vincent in danger, but he feels he has no choice.

He heads up to alert Vincent, but Vincent has spiralled down into one of his blackest periods of despair at the idea that Amy and the Doctor, like everyone else, will leave. The Doctor tries ineptly to jolly him out of it, but Vincent screams at the Doctor to get out.

The Doctor tells Amy that they’re leaving, that Vincent is a fragile man. But Vincent comes striding in to the kitchen in his straw hat and a long duster, like a cowboy, and says he’s ready.

As they walk along the dusty road, Vincent tells Amy that he’s shaken off this depressive episode.

AMY: I’m not sad.
VINCENT: Then why are you crying?

And she is: she wipes the tears away and looks at them with astonishment.

VINCENT: It’s all right—I understand.
AMY: I’m not sure I do.

They pass the funeral of the girl from the village, her coffin crowned with sunflowers. At the church, the Doctor tries to talk to Vincent gently about depression, but Vincent tells him to be quiet while he’s painting, and the Doctor rapidly becomes bored with the linear progression of time.

DOCTOR: I remember watching Michaelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. Wow! What a whinger. I said to him, “If you were scared of heights, you shouldn’t have taken the job.”

The Krafayis does appear, in the window, as expected, and the Doctor heads in. Vincent wants to accompany the Doctor, and when the Doctor says no to that, at least suggests that the Doctor should be armed.

DOCTOR: I am!
VINCENT: What with?
DOCTOR: This, over-confidence, and a small screwdriver. I’m absolutely sorted.

He makes Amy promise she won’t follow him, but when Vincent asks if she’ll follow, Amy says, “Of course.”

“I love you,” says Vincent.

The Doctor wanders slowly through the church, using his mirror to check where the creature should be. But outside, Vincent says that it’s moved, the Doctor screams, and Amy goes running into the church after him.

They end up in the confessional, while Vincent holds the creature off with a wicker-bound chair. The Doctor wonders if the sonic screwdriver is having any effect.

DOCTOR: Anything?
VINCENT: Nothing. In fact, he seems to rather enjoy it.

They manage to lock themselves in a side room, while Vincent legs it to grab something and the Doctor says he doesn’t have a plan.

DOCTOR: My only definite plan is that in the future, I’m only definitely using this screwdriver for screwing in screws.

In the absence of a plan, he tries to talk to the Krafayis, who does seem to grow quiet—until it leaps in through a window. But once in the room, as Vincent reappears with his easel, he tells them that it’s feeling its way slowly around the walls of the room.

The Doctor realises that it’s blind: that’s why it doesn’t eat its victims, why its pack left it behind, and why it has such excellent hearing.

Unfortunately, he shouts the last bit, and the Krafayis leaps towards them—only to be stabbed to death by Vincent with his easel. Vincent’s horrified at what he’s done and the Krafayis is terrified of dying—but it dies, nonetheless.

Vincent realises that the Krafayis was only lashing out from fear, like the villagers who stone him, and the Doctor says, “You know, sometimes winning—winning is no fun at all.”

But later, they lie on the ground in a star shape, all holding hands, as Vincent tries to explain how he sees things, and the night sky blossoms into a version of “Starry Night.”

VINCENT: I will miss you terribly.

The next morning, Vincent says he only wishes he had something of real value to give them, as he tries to convince the Doctor to accept a painting, but the Doctor says he couldn’t accept a gift of such value.

Vincent embraces Amy.

VINCENT: And if you tire of this Doctor of yours, return! And we shall have children by the dozen. Doctor, my friend, we have fought monsters together, and we have won. On my own, I fear I shall not do so well.

But before they leave, the Doctor has an idea. He heads back to grab Vincent, and then takes him to the TARDIS, which has been bill-posted in his absence. Vincent does the traditional “walking around the outside of the TARDIS,” which we know the Doctor loves.

Vincent asks what the various controls do, and the Doctor dematerialises the TARDIS under the guise of “making everything go absolutely tonto.”

They materialise outside the Musee D’Orsay—“home to many of the greatest paintings in history.”

They drag Vincent indoors and upstairs, and straight into the Vincent Van Gogh exhibition—he has his head turned towards Rodin’s “The Kiss,” so he doesn’t see the signs.

It bursts on him at once—all these people staring at his paintings, including ones he’s only thought of painting. His mouth drops open.

And the Doctor heads over to Bill Nighy, reminding him that they’ve met. He drags Bill over to Vincent, and asks Bill where Vincent stands in relation to other paintings.

Bill says that in his opinion, Vincent is the greatest painter of them all. As he goes on, Vincent scans the room, looking more at the people than the paintings, and he weeps, and I cry onto my keyboard.

Tony Curran kills this scene. Just kills it.

The Doctor sees Vincent weeping, and apologises, but Vincent says they’re tears of joy. He embraces Bill, apologising for the beard, and the Doctor hustles him out. Bill watches them leave, thinking about the similarity between Vincent and the self-portraits and then shaking his head in rejection of the impossibility.

They deposit Vincent back in France, but Amy’s impatient to get back to the gallery to see the “hundreds of new paintings” that resulted from the “long life of Vincent Van Gogh.”

But, of course, there aren’t any new ones. We come in where we first came in, with Bill showing Vincent’s last painting before his suicide.

Amy’s devastated, but the Doctor has seen Vincent in one of his dark moods, where Amy hadn’t—he’s not surprised, and he says they added to Vincent’s pile of good things.

And then Amy sees something new. She walks towards it slowly—it’s “Sunflowers,” with the vase now inscribed “To Amy.”

She says, “If we had got married, our kids would have had very very red hair.”

She’s crying as much as laughing, but the Doctor embraces her, and we fade out on “Sunflowers.”

Now that is what I mean when I say an episode should be compelling in its own right as well as advancing the main story arc.

Next week: “The Lodger.”

Despite the obvious temptation:

Do you think there’s a Dalek under that skirt? (I can’t see its appeal otherwise.) External evidence would seem to support my reading, no?

This past weekend was the second Lifeline Bookfest for the year—cunningly coinciding with the last of my four major deadlines over the past month and the beginning of the World Cup, just to make my weekend the most relaxed I’ve had all semester.

I often find the June Lifeline Bookfest a bit disappointing: the January one is much bigger and brighter, and I generally find more wonderful things there (in both senses of the comparative—a higher quantity of wonderful things, and things that are just that much more wonderful).

Yep, I know I lost control of that sentence. Let’s move on, shall we?

I’ll get the classics out of the way, because the classics are far less likely to have sparkly holographic covers:

I see I’ve cut half the authors off here, but I’m too lazy to take another picture. Suffice to say that Hargrave is a Fanny Trollope, not an Anthony. (Though she’s Anthony Trollope’s mother.) You don’t often find Fanny Trollope novels lying around at Lifeline Bookfest, so I’m a bit thrilled by that one, especially since it’s a late novel.

(I notice from the Wikipedia page above that “Fanny Trollope” is actually the name used by her detractors, not only because the diminutive is a little insulting in itself, but also because it’s rather a vulgar diminutive. So should editors only be putting her full name on the spines of her novels?)

You also don’t often find Charlotte Yonge novels at Lifeline Bookfest, either, so The Clever Woman of the Family is another bonus.

You do find lots of copies of Doctor Zhivago, but I felt it was about time I had a copy on my shelf. Am I going to read it? Not right now. But who says the reason we buy books is to read them?

See, the same thing goes for Virginia Woolf here:

Am I going to read The Years right now? Probably not. But these are the sort of books I like to have on my shelves, for all that my classics shelves are already double stacked and I sometimes can’t remember what I have.

Case in point?

Great Expectations. I would have sworn I owned a copy of Great Expectations (and Our Mutual Friend), but I checked carefully on my mobile Delicious Library app—much to the irritation of the huffy old woman next to me—and I don’t. What a terrible nineteenth-century scholar I am.

Now, I do already own a copy of The Water Babies, but it’s only a ’70s paperback, and this is one of those lovely hardback facsimile reprints that I collect intermittently and casually—I have Mrs Moleworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, E. Nesbit’s The Magic City, The Romance of King Arthur, and Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno in the same editions.

I’ll get rid of the paperback Kingsley. No, I promise.

But, as usual, I spent most of my time at the children’s fiction tables:

Four Chalet School novels. Four. Okay, The Chalet School and Rosalie isn’t really a novel, or at least not by my standards—it’s less than a hundred pages long. And A Rebel at the Chalet School is barely ten pages longer, although it’s a very early one (1934). But they’re four Chalet School stories that I don’t have already, and that’s sufficient for me.

I also already own a copy of High Wizardry (sadly, on one of the shelves I haven’t actually got around to adding to Delicious Library), but I talked Nick into letting me keep this one the basis of the awesome cover.

And my little pile of Margaret Mahy books expands apace, but can I find a copy of The Changeover? No: no, I can’t.

I did, though, find a copy of an L.M. Montgomery that I’ve never read:

It’s a collection of themed stories (fairly loosely themed, I imagine: I suspect they’re gathered together from newspapers and journals, rather than published originally as a single volume). I already have a full collection of L.M. Montgomery’s novels, so this really just satisfies the completionist in me.

I’m not sure that “completionist” is a real world, but you know what I mean.

Alice in Wonderland and The Patchwork Girl of Oz are also books that I already own—in fact, I may own at least three other copies of Alice in Wonderland. But this is Martin Gardner’s annotated edition: you can’t argue with a good annotated edition. And I talked Nick into letting me keep The Patchwork Girl of Oz on the grounds that it’s a facsimile reprint: I’m slowly collecting all the Oz novels in facsimile editions, though I prefer them in hardback. I was, however, terribly restrained and didn’t buy the little paperback facsimile editions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Ozma of Oz.

(I already own those in facsimile reprint.)

(But it was tempting, anyway.)

And that edition of Birthday Letters on the bottom there is a key example of why you should always check inside the books too. I have no idea how someone managed to managed to scribble so much on the inside without damaging the outside. Still, no harm done: I can ignore pencil scribbles, and they went easy on the highlighter.

Finally:

These are all speculative (not a pun), which is the big advantage of the Lifeline Bookfest: the books are priced so low (even now, when prices have been increasing) that you can always take a punt on something you wouldn’t necessarily pay twenty or thirty dollars for.

And sometimes you might pay twenty or thirty dollars for them—like Carole Wilkinson’s Dragonkeeper, which has won so many awards the medallions barely fit on the cover and which sounds absolutely fascinating. Maybe I would have paid full price for that one. but I’m equally happy to pay $3.50 and also buy facsimile reprints of L. Frank Baum and annotated editions of Lewis Carroll.

ME: Behold! Nicholas returns home, and the house is filled with light.
NICK: I am the King of Light! The Lord of Light?
ME: You leave a lot of lights on.
NICK: That’s … similar.