The Wedding Of River Song: Ranking - 68D

 

 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, its the finale to the biggest DW epic since ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ in 1965 and we finally get round to the storyline everyone expected to follow on from ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ – who exactly is that awful woman with the eyepatch? Where is River Song as a baby being held? And will the Dr escape the death we saw in the opening episode of the run or is the series really over? (hint: its 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). The previous few stories have seen the Dr going back to see old friends certain that he really is going to die and researching as much about The Silence as you can when nobody can remember having encountered them in the first place. After a multi-year procrastination worthy of Boris Johnson, the Dr finally takes his place at the lakeside in Utah and the astronaut is revealed to be River Song after all – a younger version than the one watching from the lake. 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, which given that this is one of those pesky ‘fixed points in time’ the Dr’s been refusing to tamper with since the beginning of the series, is a bit of a problem. The Dr accidentally ‘breaks’ time, waking up in the sort of parallel world we last saw in ‘Inferno’. 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. The eyepatches prevent the people in this world from forgetting about The Silence, which explains a lot about Madame Kovaarian who still has River-baby (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). She also thinks she has a lot of Silence trapped, but an undercover memory-wiped Amy and a soldier Rory (she’s believable but he’s not; surely he’d still be a medic?) who rather sweetly falls in love with her all over again soon put that right. 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. This Amy is callous and ruthless – she’s angry enough at what’s happened to her baby that she’s one of the few DW 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). Rory, meanwhile, has become a soldier due to the change in circumstances, but his compassion and his love for Amy are still the same (even if he keeps it a secret). 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). Goodness knows how either of them remember their anniversary, given that it took lace in a parallel dimension and the Dr and Rover are experiencving time in an opposite order to each other! I’m not entirely sure why the wedding has to take place at all plotwise – yes time stops when they touch but they could have had a quick snog half an hour earlier, even if that would have been something of a lame duck drama wise; presumably just 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. It doesn’t count of course, this timeline being wiped from existence and I doubt vicars or equivalents on any planet would recognise it as a marriage such; it’s the weakest part of the story really, a throwaway extra despite being in the fan-baiting title and everything. Still, the ending itself is super clever – I was kicking myself for having not guessed the teselecta twist (though I did wonder if the Dr was another ganger) and the Dr dying-but-not-dyring so he can run around the universe with all his enemies assuming he’s dead is a worthy end to five breathlessly packed episodes. 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 and their darker sides and especially the Dr 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 more than worthy finale this episode and as clever as all the other parts before it, even if it lacks the playfulness of ‘Hitler’ and gets a bit too dark in the last half. As for the series arc overall its as dramatic, tense, epic and ambitious as anything DW 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 and even if it uses more brainpower to follow than most DW stories and suffers from Moffat’s usual achilles heel of dropping interesting plot developments the minute newer ones come along (I mean, what happened to the moon landings and Cranton Delaware, the key plot hinges of the first two episodes?), its still mostly driven by the heart and the people we’ve come to love, like the rest of this series at its best. Few DW stories offer as much character development and its that you remember, long after eyepatches and ‘The Scream’ painting 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. 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 DW and after 12 years I think I’ve just about got my breath back now.

+ I love the idea of time all happening at once so very very much; so much so that we should have had a whole episode there in its own right instead of it being just a scene-setter in this one. 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). There are some lovely cameos for supporting parts from other stories – Churchill, Dickens and a Silurian from ‘Cold Blood’ as well as characters from earlier parts in this story. They’re all slightly ‘wrong’ though, harking back to the idea running through all five parts about how people are changed by being round the Dr – nasty Churchill, for instance, is very like his old adversary Hitler, surrounded by lackeys and troops (I like to think its Moffat making up for making Churchill out to be such a black and white ‘hero’, despite his known racist and sexist views even for the 1940s, in the episode ‘Victory Of The Daleks’). 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 DW’s ordinary and extraordinary.

- The poor Brigadier really is hard done by in Moffat series finales. Nicholas Courtney died shortly before filming and a line was added at the last minute where the Dr hears about his old friend’s death in a nursing home and is meant to look sad. But the scene is so obviously added at the last minute Matt Smith just looks as if he’s trying to remember his lines and has indigestion. Besides, this is a series about a time machine – the Dr’s luckier than us in that he can go back and visit his old friend as many times as he likes – this scene would have carried far more weight if he’d, say, visited his more Earth-bound friends like Jo or Benton mourning him. Although its better than ‘Death In Heaven’ where the Brig becomes a Zombie cyberman!