It’s hard not to love an episode of Doctor Who that has dinosaurs, Rory’s dad and Queen Nefertiti. On a spaceship hurtling toward the Earth.

You can feel, however, the march toward the end of Amy & Rory’s run as companions, which we know is coming this season.

They’re only occasional companions now, helping out now and again when the Doctor gets in trouble with the Daleks or rogue spaceships. They even wonder whether the Doctor has a current companion, though we’re reminded several times how utterly linear Earthlings’ thinking is when it comes to time, as Ten said, which really is just a “big ball of wibbly wobbly … time-y wimey … stuff.”

Keeping things somewhat, occasionally linear does help the viewer, though, and for that we’re grateful.

So Amy and Rory are back together. (How jarring was the opening episode of the season when the Ponds were – gasp! – getting divorced? It was one of the most shocking revelations in Doctor Who history, IMHO.) Rory still can’t get any respect from his dad, despite the fact that he’s thousands of years old and has died more times than, well, everyone in the history of mankind.

Much like the Silurian’s spaceship/ark thingy, we’re hurtling toward uncertainty: Who will the new companion be? Yes, we know it’s Oswin, sort of kind of, but we don’t really know if she will be she. Or another version of her. Or a previous version of her. Or a descendant.

Whatever the case, we don’t really know how they’ll interact. They will be different. And will River be jealous? She never needed to worry about The Doctor’s relationship with her mom, after all. But I don’t imagine that River will take to a new companion easily. Could something relating to this be the cause of River’s shift to moving through time in the opposite direction as the Doctor?

Only one thing’s for sure: Nothing is for sure.