The latest series of Doctor Who has come to an end, but with a few months left until Who returns for the holidays, I thought I’d take one more look back at series six of Doctor Who and share some of what I personally  felt were the best and worst moments from this past season.

The 5 Worst Moments in Season 6

5. Gangers, Gangers, and more Gangers.

All right, I can understand where the whole Ganger thing might have been important to help with the whole, “Amy isn’t really Amy, and she’s not really here” aspect of the overlying story-arc, but did it really need to be dragged out into two episodes? The Gangers were annoying, and, in a word, uninteresting. The only mildly interesting part of everything involving the Gangers was the Doctor getting to meet the Doctor. The interaction between the Doctor and his Ganger was pretty swell, I’ll admit, but this is really the only thing that the Gangers had going for them.

4. Pirates.

All I’m going to say about this is, who gives scurvy-ridden pirates from the 1800s a spaceship? For reals, Doctor? Also, this episode began/continued a trend with Rory dying (most pointlessly) in several episodes.

3. “Look into my eye.”

All right, I did praise the ending of series six and the whole idea of all of time existing at once, but at the same time, I feel like the little men in their man-mimicking robot taking the place of the Doctor when he “died” is a really big cop-out.

2. Peg dolls.

I think that Night Terrors was supposed to be creepy; on some levels, it seemed like it was really trying, but in the end, it really didn’t deliver. Peg dolls that could be held off with giant spoons and unresolved plot issues about what kind of alien the boy was, where he came from, and why he was left there completely overshadowed any moral lessons or scary vibes.

1. “You named your daughter after your daughter.”

After waiting all summer to see how the Doctor would rescue Melody Pond, we were introduced to this character we’d never seen nor heard of before, Mels, that was supposedly Amy and Rory’s best friend — and, as it turns out, she was actually Melody Pond, their daughter, brainwashed by The Silence to assassinate the Doctor. I was extremely upset about this throughout the rest of the series, and was only mildly comforted when Amy told Madame Kovarian, “You took my baby from me and hurt her. And now she’s all grown up and she’s fine. But I’ll never see my baby again.” At the very least, they did acknowledge that Amy shouldn’t have been 100% fine with never seeing her baby again.

The 5 Best Moments in Season 6

5. The Doctor’s “Mwah Mwah.”

We first saw Eleven do the “mwah mwah” not-quite-cheek kiss in the series 5 episode The Lodger, and much to our delight, this seems not to be just a throwaway action. The Doctor seems to believe that this is how all humans greet each other at all times, and has subsequently made certain to greet everyone in this manner, no matter how absurd they think he’s being. I know Rob is a fan of this, and personally, I feel it’s right up there with “Lapels” as a classic Doctor gesture.

4. “Explain to me in terms that I can understand. What happened to time?” “A woman.”

Admittedly, I feel like it takes a lot of cajones for Steven Moffat (#allhailthemoff) to take things quite as far as they did. The Doctor lived and time, to put it simply, broke. All of time began to exist at once (then, why didn’t we see Vincent Van Gogh along with everyone else? Boo!) because “a woman” — River Song — refused to do what had to be done to save the universe and kill the Doctor. Moffatt has a way of wrapping some things up with neat little bows, and this series ender does that rather well. Too bad we didn’t get any loose ends tied from the cracks in the universe and the cause of the TARDIS exploding in series 5.

3. “Rory’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever met.”

At the end of the episode The Girl Who Waited, Dan said to me, “I take it you liked the episode?” because I was pretty much sobbing by that point. Rory obviously loves Amy very much, which we see with comments like, “I don’t care that you got old. I care that we didn’t grow old together,” but we also see how deeply Amy loves Rory as well, when both Amy’s declare, “Rory’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever met” and old Amy sacrifices herself to give Rory the chance to live a long and happy life with his Amy. There’s also some great development between the Doctor and Rory’s relationship as Rory laments, “This isn’t fair. You’re turning me into you.”

2. “I just wanted to say, Hello. Hello Doctor. It’s so very very nice to meet you.”

It was hard to choose the best moment from series six, and honestly, if I wasn’t a little Rory-biased, this likely would have come in first. The entire idea of the essence/mind/soul of the TARDIS being put into a woman is brilliant, but the part that really took my breath away was their last moment together, before Idris “died” when she tells the Doctor she’s wanted to say something to him for 900 years. He assumes that she wants to tell him goodbye since she will soon lose her humanoid form, but that isn’t the case. She wants to say “Hello.” It was a beautifully touching moment, and Neil Gaiman should write more Doctor Who episodes in the future.

1. “Would you like me to repeat the question?”

As Rob put it, “Rory takes the Wyndam-Pryce Award of most developed character this season,” and I have to agree. He started out in series 5 with an almost Mickey-esque annoyance factor, a wimpy, wussy guy that was just there because they didn’t want to have people pine for a Doctor/Amy relationship. But from the time that Rory is the boy that waited 2000 years to protect Amy in the Pandorica to the moments he sees an exit inside of the space-Minotaur’s hotel-labyrinth in The God Complex, Rory becomes one of the most complex and developed companions we’ve ever encountered. In a word, Rory is a badass.

Never before has someone seen the Doctor for more than just a “mad man in a blue box,” even confronting him twice about what it really means to travel with the Doctor (“You know what it’s dangerous about you? It’s not that you make people take risks, it’s that you make them want to impress you. You make it so they don’t want to let you down. You have no idea how dangerous you make people to themselves when you’re around.”) to the point that the Doctor actually feels guilt and “saves” Amy and Rory by taking them back to Earth.