The Wedding Of River Song
(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory and River Song, 1/10/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Jeremy Webb)
Rank: 68D
'Ring ring...Ring ring...' 'You have reached The President's House in Philadelphia...wait, how come you can talk to me little girl? And wait, how come I can hear you? And what is this futuristic receptacle in my hand? I won't tell a lie, I'm not sure how I can help you but by God I won the civil war and I am a founding father so I should be able to help a little girl, so help me or my name's not George Washington! You know you remind me of my little Patsy, God rest her soul, she'd have only been a little older than you...Have you tried blood letting by the way?...Hey little girl, where'd you go?'
Well here we are then, it’s the finale to arguably the biggest Dr Who epic since ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ in 1965 and we finally get round to the storyline started twelve whole episodes ago in ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ and which everyone expected to follow on from ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ months ago – who is that awful woman with the eyepatch? Who the Munch-like ‘Silence’? Will the Dr escape the death we saw in the opening episode of the run or is the series really over? (hint: it’s not). Only, in keeping with the rest of this story arc, even this story doesn’t go where anyone expected it and the finale is half a resolution and half a re-set button, allowing the series to take off in a whole new direction (which sadly future stories don’t do all that much with as it turns out). It’s a slight anti-climax as endings go, if only because the questions have been dragged out for so long now. The really interesting part of this lengthy story arc is River Song and her story’s pretty much told now except for (spoilers) one last universe-restoring kiss. While The Doctor spends half the episode researching The Silence (and talking to Winston Churchill via flashback where he’s been captured as a ‘soothsayer’, a position that suits him being a time-traveller) he doesn’t actually learn that much about them (something not helped by the fact that nobody can remember having encountered them in the first place).
Lots of Moffat stories,
especially those featuring River Song, present us with time running backwards
but this is the only one where all time happens at once. The strongest part of
the story by far is the inventive opening, which really should have been the
whole episode: a timeless universe because River Song refused to kill The
Doctor. For perhaps the one question this story straightforwardly solves is
that it was River in the astronaut outfit shooting The Doctor at Lake Silencio
in Utah . Only it was against her will of course; much of this arc has been
about how good people can become corrupted by being around bad people, from
Hitler through to the companions, but here that backfires spectacularly: a
newly moral River fights her conditioning enough to refuse to kill the Dr and
even though she’s programmed by Moffat has to jump through hoops to get round
the fact that River is there lakeside twice, her older self knowing how things
turn out (note the way she subtly tried to stop Amy and Rory rushing forward). She’s
fallen in love with him instead and, this being Dr Who, love triumphs over
hate. Only given that this is one of those pesky ‘fixed points in time’ the Doctor’s
been refusing to tamper with since the beginning of the series (see ‘Waters Of Mars’ for what happens when these go
wrong) time breaks and gets stuck on the day of the broadcast of ‘The Impossible
Astronaut’,on April 23rd 2011. At 5.02pm (Why 5.02pm given that the
episode was broadcast at 6pm? Clayton Hickman wrote in a list of ‘truths’ and ‘lies’
into the ‘Brilliant Book Of 2011’ and Moffat thought it would be funny if a
line, intended to be ‘false’, turned out to be ‘true’! Also, the light wasn’t
quite right for it to be 6pm Utah time. Not that 5.02pm is an awful lot better
when it’s clearly mid-afternoon). And now there’s been chaos, all because this
isn’t just anyone who has cheated death: it’s The Doctor.
The idea of time all
happening at once (which Moffat saw as ‘more like a traffic jam’ than time
stopping altogether) is a truly brilliant idea. Of all the writers who’ve
worked on Who Moffat is the one who handled the time-travel element best (where
other writers like moving the Dr in space from A to B to cause C he likes
juggling half past A and a quarter past B to make five to C) and it leads to
both drama and comedy quite brilliantly. On the sad side there The Doctor is,
knowing he inadvertently caused all of this and that without the timelords
around to fix it that it’s up to him to put things right. Like Donna in ‘Turn Left’ someone whose spent their
life being so alive is suddenly facing how death might actually be the easier
safer option and the right thing to do. It’s the comedy you remember though:
there are signs in a typical 21st century English park saying ‘don’t
feed the pterodactyls’. According to a news headline ‘The War Of The Roses’ is
entering its second year. Charles Dickens is plugging ‘A Christmas Carol’ on
breakfast television (a lot of writers shy from publicity, but this is exactly
what he would have been doing and makes a neat reference back to Moffat’s
festive episode ‘A Christmas Carol’ too.
Even though we’re in an eternal April so it seems a bit early). There are steam
trains running around London’s newest landmark The Gherkin as well as The
Pyramids. There are Roman chariots at traffic lights. There’s a Silurian
looking after Winston Churchill (a cameo by Gary Russell, one of the key
figures of the ‘wilderness years’ who wrote many a Dr Who book and co-founded
Big Finish, as well as working as script editor on the TV series) who is now
head of the ‘Buckingham Senate’ (actually Cardiff City Council Headquarters! The
hint is that Churchill had to kill all
other politicians, Roman style, for the chance to rule!) Best of all, there’s a
pterodactyl flying past a futuristic motorway in the air which would be
ridiculous if any other series tried it but which is so DW; it might just be my
favourite CGI shot of the new series. All I need now is a diplodocus doing his
tax returns and I’d have the perfect mix of Dr Who’s ordinary and extraordinary.
It still feels as if there should have been ,ore cameos here though: were
Shakespeare, Agatha Christie and Queen Victoria all busy? And it’s sad there
are no War Machines round the post
office tower, like the good old days.
Once again with Moffat
the theme about time and death comes up: this entire story happens because
River loves The Doctor too much to let him do anything as final as die. This
might be the best variation of his frequent ‘everybody lives!’ them though, as
time literally stands still out of grief (certainly far better than the
afterlife that isn’t in ‘Dark Water’,
while it’s a neat mirror of The Doctor ‘saving’ River as a hologram in ‘Silence In the Library’, even though he doesn’t
know who she is yet). It’s also typical Moffat: we’ve spent six months waiting
for answers, desperate to see what comes next and instead we get thrown a
curveball we weren’t expecting, with more questions than answers. I wish we’d
spent longer on this plotpoint though: how do all these people feel finding out
that their time isn’t the only one? How do people re-act when they find out the
empire they fought so hard for and so many men were lost was all for nothing
and another one came along to take their place? Where does everyone live? The
Earth isn’t big enough to hold everyone who’s ever lived. When I wrote this
diea for my Alan’s Album Archives music review April Fool’s Day column I had
each different time period take over a different country – do they try
something similar? What have they done with the Nazis? (I like to think they’re
getting beaten up by Vikings). Perhaps most of all, why? Why does time implode
rather than explode when a fixed point gets changed? And the biggest of all,
how come it affects time before The Doctor’s death, not after it (which would
make a lot more sense?) Even with all
the love in the world (and all the love in the universe River has for him) The
Doctor hasn’t created that many ripples in time. If we’d spent the whole story
teasing out those answers I’d be far happier. Instead there are too many plot
arcs left to tie up for that to happen (could have been a two parter though!)
Perhaps the biggest
question left to solve was what makes The Doctor finally give in to his fate
after a multi-year procrastination worthy of Boris Johnson, what with his death
at a lakeside in Utah being a fixed point in time. Showrunner Steven Moffat
seems to have struggled with that answer most of all, delaying writing this
story till February (even though it was due to be transmitted in October, tight
by modern Who standards). But then he got his answer in the most unexpected
way: Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier, passed away as he was sitting
down to write. Not wanting to simply add a caption for such an important figure
in the Whoniverse Moffat decided to turn that into the reason, with The Doctor
receiving a phonecall about his death and realising that time waits for no one,
not even The Doctor. It probably felt right when Moffat was writing it, the old
soldier against all odds dying peacefully in his sleep, the way the 7th
Doctor once told him he would in ‘Battlefield’
(despite the amount of writers who’d tried to kill his character off, including
in that same story!) with a glass left out in case he turned up. But this
turning point of the story feels sadly forced as transmitted: For one thing it
seems wrong that a time traveller currently in the future and talking to a blue
head in a box should suddenly get a call about a present day event in 2012. For
another it seems an odd moment to stop running. If The Doctor feels nostalgic
then the obvious thing to do is nip back in time and get that drink, or maybe
call in on the Brig as a boy playing soldiers and tell him of all the great
things he’s going to grow up to do (amazingly no writer has done a story about
the Brig’s childhood yet, even though there’s a whole whacking spin-off group
of ‘Lethbridge Stewart’ books about his days before meeting The Doctor and his
rise up through the ranks).The Doctor, famously, doesn’t do ‘endings’ as Moffat
tells us in the very next series. Instead The Doctor crumples and decides it’s
time to die, which might just be the least Brigadiery thing he can possibly do.
Alas Moffat doesn’t leave it there: The Brig’s ghost will rise from the dead to
fight Cybermen in ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’
(no, seriously!)
That’s not the last
tribute to the Brig though: Moffat does what he so often does partway through a
story and abandons the first half entirely, having a gun-toting Amy turn up to
rescue The Doctor from Churchill’s Senate and wearing…an eye-patch. One of the
most beloved of convention anecdotes is Courtney’s turn as the eye-patch
wearing Brigade Leader in ‘Inferno’ where
the rest of the cast were so desperate to make him laugh that they all wore
eye-patches too: it didn’t work, as Courtney was too professional and simply
carried on, while they all got told off for giggling and ruining a take. The
‘i-patches’, soon to come to an Apple store near you no doubt (assuming they
don’t keep The Doctor away) restore people’s memories so that they can remember
the Silence. This part of the story doesn’t quite hang together either: it’s a
reverse of the trick played by The Doctor in ‘Lie Of
The Land’ (where he’s in on what’s happening in a timeless universe and his
companion isn’t). There’s no explanation for instance on how Amy has enough
power in this world to put together an army (or why she doesn’t notice that the
handsome man she keeps doodling as her memories come back is actually her
faithful soldier Rory, yet after spending so much ‘time’ together – a relative
term given how time is at a standstill – she still doesn’t know his first
name). Oh and there’s another far ore subtle tribute to Nicholas Courtney: the
showdown in this story could have been set anywhere but given the amount of
pyramids around it’s hinted we’re in Egypt, the land of his birth.
It does lead to an important
point though. Everyone in this world are even wearing eyepatches, an in-joke
given that this is how we told the ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’ Brigadiers apart in
1970. Just like ‘Inferno’ and ‘Turn Left’ we’re in a parallel world
where the people are slightly ‘wrong’ and have turned into more desperate,
angrier versions of themselves. Once again we’re playing with that idea of
people turning out differently depending on their circumstances: without the Dr
in this universe everyone is hard, even the people we know are really soft.
Moffat got a lot of stick for turning Churchill into a cuddly Uncle in ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ given some of his own personal views on race,
gender, class and empire so it’s a good opportunity to tap into a different
side of his nature, where he’s angry and bitter and has The Doctor wrapped in
chains (though why he should want to is another question never answered). He’s
very much like his old adversary Hitler in fact, surrounded by lackeys and
troops. This Amy is callous and ruthless – she’s angry enough at what’s
happened to her baby that she’s one of the few Dr Who companions to ever cause
the death of a villain directly and not just in self-defence, a great scene
that Karen Gillan plays note-perfectly (its hard to imagine almost any other
character shooting anyone in cold blood, even in revenge. This scene was added
at the last minute when it was decided her original death wasn’t strong enough
after everything she’d put Amy through. Alas Frances Barber, who is badly
miscast as Madame Korvarian struggles to match her). Even Rory is a soldier, which seems very out
of character (surely he’d be a medic? Or is this a ‘Torchwood Series Four
Miracle Day’ style timeless universe where people never get sick? Talking of
which where is everyone else? If all of The Doctor’s Earthbound companions are
here somewhere then you’d think Torchwood would have tracked him down before
Amy, while it’s quite the coincidence it’s his current companion who tracks him
down first. I’d have put money on Ace getting there before Amy). This all harks
back to the idea running through all five parts about how people are changed by
being round the Doctor. It’s fun, too, to see Amy as the sort-of head of UNIT
rather than the Brig (who might well have ended up like this without his friend
there to keep him on the straight and narrow – especially given how gruff he
appears on first meeting in ‘The Web Of Fear’
and how much he’s softened by ‘The
Invasion’).
The eyepatches also have
a physical function, preventing people in this world from forgetting about The
Silence, which explains a lot about Madame Kovarian (I just thought she was a
pirate: especially given that ‘The Curse Of The
Black Spot’ is the story that rather awkwardly follows ‘Day Of The Moon’
and ignores that entire plot). Though a prisoner she also has a lot of Silence
working for her, kept in tanks so that they can’t escape (in a scene inspired
by a holiday Moffat took to Dubai between seasons, where he liked the
juxtaposition of aquariums fitted into stone walls. He’ll try a similar trick
in ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’). But
we never fully find out how they work: this isn’t an invisible monster, people
don’t have problems ‘seeing’ The Silence, just remembering them (are they
really reinforcing the Hippocampus and making sure the memories are stored
safely?) As for The Silence there’s a great Dr Whoy scene of them breaking out
of their tanks but they still don’t actually do anything other than loom: after
such a long elongated build-up and the opening ten minutes being The Doctor
trying to find out everything he can about them I thought they’d feature in the
finale more.
Ditto the title wedding:
how very like Dr Who, to give us one of those just as we were expecting a
funeral (did I mention how close Moffat was to Richard Curtis?! See ‘Vincent and The Doctor’). Just to ram home
the point that the Dr and River don’t have lives like other people we get a
second series finale in a row to feature a wedding, but this one couldn’t be
less like Amy and Rory’s refreshingly normal nuptials back in ‘The Big Bang’
(complete with timelord ‘dad’ dancing!) The Dr was never going to get married
in anything as normal as a church or a registry office. Here it’s a few words
on top of a pyramid in front of witnesses who are terrified, with the adoring
look in each other’s eyes the Dr’s ‘clue’ that (spoilers) he’s really a
teselecta robot replica and River can ‘shoot’ him after all, while the
passionate kiss the moment of contact that allows the timelines to go back to
‘normal’ (though if you ask me life in our real world has been so weird since
2011 I’m not entirely sure we’re back in the right one). Now we’d known about
that fan-baiting episode title ever since the Radio Times preview in April and
it’s now October. We don’t know who River is getting married too, but given all
the flirting it seemed a safe bet it would be the Doctor. How can a wedding
possibly fit into a Dr Who plot? Well, it doesn’t, not really. While the scenes
of River saying that the hurt she’d feel if The Doctor died outweigh all the
misery in a timeless universe where he stayed alive are sweet and beautifully
played by Alex Kingston, there’s no real reason for the wedding to be here. All
they actually need to do is touch to restore the timelines (in what presumably
is a sort of reverse ‘Blinovitch Limitation Effect’ from ‘Mawdryn Undead’) but, being the romantic
he is, Moffat figures it would be more aesthetically pleasing if they kiss and
what more important kiss can there be than the one at a wedding? The thing is,
after what we were anticipating its somewhat of an anticlimax. Only two
witnesses are present (the parents of the bride, one of which hasn’t regained
his memories yet), there’s no official vicar overseeing the vows (or whatever
the timelord equivalent would be) and I for one am sad that there wasn’t a
group of monsters raising their wings/flippers/robotic limbs/plungers at the
‘does anyone know any just cause or impediment…’ line. No ‘till death us do
part or hologram reborn’ line either. What was teased to us for so long and so
apparently important to the plot that it was even used in the title is just a
short scene, lost in the middle of a bigger story that didn’t really need to be
there and which happened in a parallel universe that got wiped from history and
where The Doctor actually turns out to be a (spoilers) Teselecta robot anyway.
I doubt many legal firms
would accept this a fully binding wedding. Which if nothing else saves The
Doctor and River from having to remember their anniversary (what date do you
choose in a universe where all time has stopped anyway?) The scene is also
sort-of here to explain how River knows The Doctor’s name, which she knew in
‘Silence In The Library’ and has never told to anyone else. But why/ he has not
reason to whisper his name at a ‘fake’ wedding (and as things turn out that’s
not what he whispered anyway. Why lie when only Amy and Rory are there to hear?
And when does River learn his true name, as she apparently really does?) For
what it is the scene is well done and it’s sweet the Doctor unravels his bowtie
as a ‘wedding band’ to keep them apart until he right moment (I for one wish
he’d used the 1st Doctor’s ring), but it still feels like a bit of a
cheat. Had The Doctor sneaked up and tapped River on the back it would have
saved an awful lot of the plot. Presumably its here more because their wedding
had mentioned so many times in previous episodes that Moffat, not sure how many
more times he was going to write for River, decided he’d better throw it into
the mix. In which case it’s a sad goodbye, kiss aside: River gets to see The
Doctor live but only after the biggest argument we see them have as The Doctor
snarls ‘you embarrass me’ (Kingston so used to playing River as being on top of
things and heading into smug late period Dr 10 territory, is absolutely crushed
by this, her face crumpling as she bites her tongue not to say anything back). We
needed another happier scene to cushion this (more than we needed a comedy
chess sequence anyway). Well, it was never going to be a normal wedding with
these two characters was it, for whom ‘till death us do part’ means little.
Somehow it feels a bit of a cheat that it wasn’t bigger though or more
important to the plot.
Still, the ending itself
is super clever(mega huge spoilers) – I was kicking myself for having not
guessed the Teselecta twist, that The Doctor had a plan all along and that it
wasn’t really him who died at Lake Silencio but a robot replica(from the people
we met in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’. They
also post the invitations to Utah, after The Doctors asks them to, including to
his younger self who really does turn out to be innocent and makes everyone
rounding on him all the worse in retrospect!) Even that doesn’t make much sense
when you think about it though: The teselecta were more irritated by The Doctor
than anything last time they met and – after trying to kill Amy and Rory – they
weren’t exactly best of friends. Presumably in the future when you can print
these sort of things with a sort of 3D printer it must still cost a lot to make
a walking talking person. How does The Doctor, controlling his robot replica
from his eye, escape before its set alight? Why, having written in the need for
the universe to think that The Doctor is now officially totally ‘dead’ does
Moffat never use it again, bar one episode (‘Asylum
Of The Daleks’ where they don’t recognise him) and one red button prequel?
Perhaps most of all why doesn’t The Doctor let Amy and Rory in on his plan and
that he’s still alive, rather than leaving them to find out from River? That
seems unnecessarily cruel (and Moffat had already got into trouble for doing
just that in ‘Sherlock’ episode ‘The Empty Hearse’ – even though it’s a plot
twist in the Conan Doyle original!) There’s also the fact that the Stetson, presumably,
was part of the Teselecta disguise – and yet River shoots it off The Doctor’s
head!
The best parts of this
episode aren’t the big set pieces though but the small moments between characters.
The Doctor fighting to die while River tries to make him live. The look of
longing from Rory who doesn’t quite know who Amy is or why he’s drawn to her,
choosing her again even in another universe. While Moffat is clearly struggling
to fit this story together last minute he still writes some of his best lines
which are razor sharp even for him. Dorium tells The Doctor that ‘times catches
up with us all’ and as a time traveller he boasts ‘well it’s never laid a glove
on me’. The Doctor explains why he brought his friends to watch his death with
the beautiful line ‘I had to die, I didn’t have to die alone. If it’s time to
go remember what you’re leaving’. There’s a great gag that got a bit lost where
Amy makes her entrance to the words ‘Pond. Amy Pond’ like she’s a certain spy.
As a historian I adore the line that archaeology and gossip are ‘the same thing’
(they really should have done more with River’s background). There’s the neat
variation on ‘what time do you call this?’ with The Doctor and River acting
like a n ordinary married couple, only in extraordinary circumstances (River
referring to how all of time has stood still). Perhaps my favourite line though
is when Churchill asks The Doctor for more and he’s caught up with his story so
replies ‘Nothing happened. Then kept happening’. Amy’s realisation (surprisingly
late in the day) that she’s The Doctor’s mother-in-law. Oh and being teased
from the title and mention of this mess being caused by ‘a woman’ that The
Doctor is about to say ‘darling’ and it becomes ‘Dalek’ instead (their
thirty-second appearance just prevents season six from being the first one not
to feature the metal meanies in the comeback era (that accolade goes to series
ten instead; Moffat says he did not know he was going to write that scene and
had sat down to write another one before it fell out of his pen). I'm not sure
River is exactly ‘hell in high heels’ though, another one of those Moffat lines
that don’t quite fit.
As a finale ‘Wedding’
sort of works. It solves many of the conundrums raised in earlier episodes that
it felt as if we were never going to get answers to such things as the line
that ‘Silence Will Fall’, who River is, made good on the intriguing
how-are-they-going-to-get-out-of-that-then? promise of the opening parts and
added a neat solution that’s entirely fitting and doesn’t feel like cheating
(well, only a little – and just as well, as if this hadn’t been a cheat it
would have been the end of the programme). We find out lots more about River of
course, but also Amy and Rory, their love for each other (there are two love
stories in this episode!) and their darker sides and especially the Doctor, who
gets more characterisation and growth in this one multi-part story than some
whole eras (Matt Smith is never better than in the early part of this story
where he’s convinced he’s walking to his death; we only find out later his
sudden brainwave on how to save himself). It’s a great story for sudden unexpected
surprises, - but alas a bit less satisfying in terms of cohesion. ‘Wedding’
perhaps left itself a bit too much to do to be truly satisfying though and is
awfully disjointed in places, a ‘shotgun’ wedding between disparate parts that
only fit together because we’re told they do: what with all the flashbacks
going on the opening five minutes feel like they’re running at the same speed
as the ‘previously’ recap. The Churchill half is also buried and forgotten once
an eye-patch Amy arrives. While it’s good to see The Doctor acting more like
himself than he was in ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ (albeit he’s still snarky and
downright nasty to River for not following a plan he hadn’t even hinted at)
this is in every other respect the weakest of the quintrology. We still never
fully get our biggest questions asked, like who The Silence are or where Madame
Korvarian came from (and what her agenda against The Doctor/Amy really is)
while other plot elements from earlier episodes (including Canton Delaware’s
entire storyline and anything to do with the Apollo moon landings, while The
Silence go from being a promising new monster to sort of…forgettable, ironically)
are abandoned, to never be turned to again. To cover the pace at which this
story moves there really are an awful lot of scenes of pure exposition too,
even if Moffat does what Chibnall and even Davies to an extent fail to do and
make them interesting (given that most of what we need to know comes from a
head in a box that’s being varied upside down!)
But then this was a series arc that is juggling an awful lot, even by Moffat standards: the surprise isn’t that a few balls got dropped (with lots of loose ends still dangling) so much at how many managed to stay in the air. After all just look at how much he had to have ready before the first day of filming at Utah, when the director was handed two pages of additional lines to shoot that at the time made absolutely no sense to anyone in the crew whatsoever. This is a chess match, played with live ammunition and the charges keep getting bigger with each move of the pieces (funny that…) No wonder we never quite get to the end of the game, but this isn’t quite a satelmate either: Moffat wins on points. This sort of complex, extended series arc is still a good idea, as dramatic, tense, epic and ambitious as anything Dr Who ever did across its sixty years and while Moffat will try something similar in the ‘Lie Of The Land’ trilogy (complete with pyramids and monks, again) he’ll never try anything quite this epic in the following four full years in charge. Mercifully in the eyes of many fans who get a bit lost and fed up with all the interim episodes that take us out of the story and the way the plot insists on jumping from one idea to another, views with which I sympathise. However I don’t agree with the usual criticism that this story is too clever: it is clever, but not in a way that you can’t follow the jumps from A to B (asked by his wife to sum up the episode in a single line Moffat said ‘The Doctor heads to certain death – and it doesn’t quite turn out the way he planned it’, which really is this story in a nutshell) and even if it uses more brainpower to follow than most Dr Who stories and suffers from Moffat’s usual Achilles heel of dropping interesting plot developments the minute newer ones come along, its still mostly driven by the heart and the people we’ve come to love, like the rest of this series at its best. It’s a particularly worthy send off for River Song, who takes centre stage even though her only plot function, now all her mysteries have been revealed is one last kiss to set things back on their right path again This is, after all, the first episode where the viewers actually know more than she does (given we know of her death) and so is the right place to leave her (though she’ll be back as a hologram in ‘Name Of the Doctor’ and as her younger pre-Doctor self in ‘Husbands Of River Song’ where the whole joke is like ‘Library’ in reverse, where The Doctor knows everything and she knows nothing). Few characters are strong enough to have a whole arc built around them and Alex Kingston handles it all well.
But then few Dr Who
stories offer as much character development as this one in a tale that’s
covered war and peace, love and hate, jealousy and unity – all big themes that
might run across other stories individual but never all at once, simultaneously,
as here. It’s that you remember, long after eyepatches and ‘The Scream’
painting come to life have stopped giving you nightmares. It’s a story that
contains the whole gamut of the human existence in one go, even in a story
based round a timelord, one which starts with a funeral and ends with a wedding
and covers pregnancy, birth, love, fear, hate, murder, mankind’s strive for
progress and the darker aspects of human nature that hold us back in between,
all across five episodes that amaze, dazzle, bamboozle and entertain like
rarely before. It was always going to be a step down from here, the last point
before the series started tripping over itself (literally: in a neat metaphor
for things to come Matt Smith fell over after getting home to his flat from the
wrap party and had to have stitched in his head. The reaction to most people
were that they were amazed someone that clumsy wasn’t in A and E every week!) Will
this series ever be as ambitious again, whoever takes over in the future? I
really do hope so. There’s still plenty of room for stories this big and
grandiose in Dr Who and after 12 years I think I’ve just about got my breath
back for another arc like this now. Ultimately ‘Wedding’ feels like an ending,
the last time an audience’s interest can be quite so self-assured for an intricate
episode like this and is indeed the end of an era, the last story to ever have
its own ‘Dr Who Confidential’ episodes. From now on the most interesting tales
happen in front of the cameras, not behind them.
POSITIVES + There’s a
lovely nod to where things first began with a trip through a ‘cave of skulls’
(very like the one in ‘An Unearthly Child’). What’s funny is that this story is
in many ways the polar opposite: a tale about all ‘tribes’ thrown together in a
giant mix. It’s still mostly the same story though: how do we all get along? And
when he’s up against it and needs to sacrifice himself will The Doctor still be
a good man (or will he crush a caveman’s skull in with a rock?) Which is a good
point actually: where are all the cavemen in this timeless universe? Given the
amount of years they covered and how short the lives were they should have
swamped absolutely everyone else!
The dream when I was growing up was to have an
episode of Dr Who fan fiction I’d written be turned into an episode proper, so
imagine my envy when the nation’s 9-11 year olds were invited to do just that
as part of a ‘BBC Learning’ initiative judged by all three of the show’s
then-current executive producers Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger and Beth Willis
(typical, all I got at that age was the cancellation of my favourite show. And
yes it was Dr Who). The rules: for cost reasons it had to only feature the
Doctor and ‘a guest’, had to be set on the Tardis and couldn’t cost the Earth
(so sadly no Daleks or Cybermen). The result was broadcast as part of the ‘Dr
Who Confidential’ episode ‘When Time Froze’ which went out on BBC3 directly
after ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ and for some reason was officially titled
‘Death Is The Only Answer’ (a very Dr Whoy title that has very little to do
with the plot.Which is itself quite Dr Whoy). What happens when you get some
clever Whovians from Oakley Junior School in Basingstoke to write a whole
episode? The single most obvious Dr Who story we hadn’t had so far, a celebrity
historical where the 11th Doctor finally gets to meet Albert
Einstein (who says kids aren’t interested in science or history, eh, David
Cameron?) The Doctor is in the Tardis and has retrieved his gets his fez
(hurrah!) before pressing a wrong button and watching it disappear. Suddenly
there’s a time vortex opening up in the Tardis and in walks a befuddled
Einstein wearing it! Einstein is attempting to build a time machine of his own
but it’s all gone a bit wrong (‘I singed my eyebrows, almost died twice and have
fallen off a cliff’). It turns out the two are old friends and last met when The
Doctor borrowed Einstein’s toothbrush (‘I would give it back but The Daleks
exterminated it!’) while Albert complains about his working conditions, calling
the Tardis console ‘old trash’, much to The Doctor’s horror. I’m not sure he
completely agrees with the Doctor’s conclusions either (‘your fez and my lever
equals time window in the Tardis’) and Einstein’s day gets worse when he drinks
the liquid he was working on…and turns into an Ood. One can only hope he
collected his Nobel prize looking like that! The Ood just has time to give a
very Russell T Davies style cryptic announcement/story arc that has nothing
whatsoever to do with the plot (the title ‘death is the only answer!’) before
The Doctor brings Einstein back, complete with extra sticky-out hair (‘you
should keep it, it’s very sciencey’ an enthusiastic Doctor adds). The script is
pretty darn great actually, full of neat one-liners so Moffaty either the
children were a good copy or the showrunner helped just a little bit and this
minisode fits in well with the atmosphere of series six, whatever mess it makes
of continuity. Nickolas Grace never quite gets a hold of Einstein though: he
doesn’t really look the part and talks in zee most outrrrajus aczunt since
Professor Zaroff (maybe that was a lesson from the showrunner? See kids, all
the best writing in the world won’t save your story if they mess it up in
production and it’s harder than it looks you know!) The story was so well
received there was a second and final competition story ‘Good As Gold’ the
following year (see ‘The
Doctor The Widow and The Wardrobe’). Sadly this episode
has yet to appear on DVD or blu-ray: it’s not even in the ‘Confidential’
episode which was ‘cut down’ for the official set. Even though it would have
been easy enough to include (apparently the children all signed a contract
allowing for repeats and DVD sales) and there was at least one class full of
children who would have bought it just for that extra alone. Nice going BBC Einsteins!
Needless to say neither The Doctor nor Albert mention having already met in ‘Time and The Rani’
(I’d have kept that quiet too if I was them).
The entire third series of Big Finish’s ‘The Diary
Of River Song’ (2018) fills in what she got up to in the gap between ‘A Good Man Goes To War’
and ‘Wedding’ and is arguably the best in the range so far, even though it
features less of the series’ usual thrills (River pairing up with past Doctors
and monsters!) ‘The Lady In The Lake’ has River tracking down other babies who
were captured by Madame Kovarian at a murky planet called ‘Euthanisam’, a cross
between the morgue in ‘Revelation
Of The Daleks’ and Dignitas. The idea is your elder
self does all the paperwork then gets blasted back into time so you were never
born: it’s less miserable than old age, apparently. River,
uncharacteristically, feels out of her depth trying to put things right here so
she leaves a cheery message for the Tardis to pick up – and is astonished when
the 5th Doctor walks in. Even though that’s rather the formula for
how the series works by now (what’s more of a surprise for fans is that Peter
Davison is travelling alone; there just isn’t a gap for that unless something
very weird happened off-screen, such as dropping Nyssa off then picking her up
again between ‘Time-Flight’
and ‘Arc Of Infinity’
or something similar with Turlough post ‘Revelation
Of The Daleks’ or Peri post ‘Planet Of Fire’,
all of which seem unlikely. But then Big Finish found wriggle room to add
Egyptian pharaoh Erimem, who travelled with him and Nyssa in the gap between
seasons nineteen and twenty, so I guess anything’s possible). It’s a decent
scene-setter, full of moral outrage and River’s extroverted-ness and
recklessness works well against the 5th Doctor’s milder cautious
introvert.
Previous ‘Closing
Time’ next ‘The
Doctor The Widow and The Wardrobe’
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