The latest Black Archive title from Obverse Books covers my favourite Doctor Who story ever – which is just as well because I wrote this book! Yep, you can now pre-order The Black Archive #44: The Pandorica Opens/ The Big Bang, which is written by me – but don’t let that put you off.
The Series 5 finale, written by Steven Moffat, features Total Event Collapse: the TARDIS explodes and takes all of space-time with it. The universe cracks, the Doctor briefly gains a fez, and Amy flirts with some Romans. Oh, it’s all going on.
My Black Archive explores the narrative devices Moffat uses to tell a grand adventure on an intimate scale; factors in how fairytales and the work of Hesiod feed into the serial; and investigates the main theories on how the universe might end – and how it could’ve began.
Does the Big Bang explain everything? What does it mean when we say that the universe is expanding? And is time travel really possible?
Here’s the blurb:
“Who takes the Pandorica takes the universe.”
The TARDIS explodes. The universe is cracked. Space-time is collapsing. The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang typifies Steven Moffat’s ‘timey-wimey’ take on Doctor Who. It draws on the legend of Pandora’s Box and exhorts the power of memories. This Black Archive explores how time operates in the Series 5 finale, in Doctor Who as a wider narrative, and in real life. How do anomalies and paradoxes work in the show? What might the end and beginning of the universe actually look like? And what caused the TARDIS to blow up anyway?
Philip Bates is the editor and co-founder of The Doctor Who Companion.
Yep, it feels a bit odd including the synopsis of a blurb that mentions me!
And I’ve worked out possible reasons why the TARDIS blew up. No, really. These include paradoxes, skewed memories, and quantum entanglement.
Of course, I owe a lot to my editors, Paul Simpson, Philip Purser-Hallard, and Stuart Douglas, who have made it much sharper, and something I’m really proud of.
The Black Archive #44: The Pandorica Opens/ The Big Bang is available to pre-order now from Obverse Books, and will be published on 6th June 2020.
