June 12: "The Wedding of River Song" Prequel / "The Wedding of River Song" / "Death is the Only Answer"

And so here we are at last: the conclusion of series 6.  The prequel to this episode is, it must be said, terribly unexciting: there seems to be something wrong with time (or their clocks, at least) , there are Silents trapped in water tanks, and everyone is wearing an eye patch like Madame Kovarian -- including River Song.  Gasp, I guess.

That leads us into the main event, which is... interesting.  "The Wedding of River Song" is one of those episodes that feels big and exciting and fun, but when you actually stop to look at it, it becomes increasingly more difficult to make any sense out of it.  Actually, I'm not sure that's true.  I think it does make a sort of sense, but it requires the viewer to bring a lot of their own explanations to the table, to fill in the gaps in the narrative.

The big one is the nature of what's happening.  We're told that all of time is happening simultaneously -- so Winston Churchill is Caesar, Charles Dickens is preparing Christmas specials for television (hooray, it's Simon Callow again, back for a quick cameo!), and pteranodons²³⁶ are flying around Hyde Park, harassing children.  But we're also told that time doesn't move, that's it's 5:02pm and that it's always been 5:02pm.  Except people can walk around and have conversations and something an awful lot like time seems to be happening, even if the clocks aren't moving.  The explanation (based on a couple quick lines) is that this is in fact a bubble timeline where all of history is happening at once but remains 5:02pm in relation to the rest of the universe.  But it would have been nice of them to have made that clearer.

But because everything's happening all at once but in a parallel world, it does make it somewhat difficult to work out who should know what at any given moment.  So Amy only has vague feelings of memories and dreams of the Doctor and her travels, rather than anything concrete, and Rory doesn't even have that.  Fair enough that the Doctor and River remember everything (since they were at the epicenter of the time explosion), but why does Madame Kovarian seem to still know exactly what's going on?

The Doctor and River spar while Amy and Madame Kovarian look
on. ("The Wedding of River Song") ©BBC

However, these are the sorts of things that come from looking too closely at this episode.  "The Wedding of River Song" is more an episode that invites you to play along, not to scrutinize -- which is a bit of a problem, given that much of Doctor Who's message over the past 48 years has been to ask questions, but I suppose we can let it go.  Because there's quite a bit about this story that's quite clever.  The use of the Doctor telling Churchill what happened to time as a way to flashback to the events between the end of "Closing Time" and the beginning of this episode is a nice touch, with some fun callbacks (the Teselecta and Dorium Maldovar's head) and an entertaining sequence with a heavily disguised Mark Gatiss as Gantok the chess player.  (Oh, and I love the way he's reading Knitting for Girls for fun as he waits for Gideon Vandaleur to show up -- it's been a long time since we've seen the Doctor read anything for pleasure.)  There's also the touching moment of the Doctor learning that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart has passed away (Nicholas Courtney having died earlier in the year), which is what convinces him that it's time to stop running.  It's also a nice touch, having the Silents all locked up in the pyramid but actually simply waiting for the right moment to strike.  And the eyepatches are explained away as "eyedrives" that allow you to remember the Silents after you've stopped looking at them.  As I said, clever.  And we finally get an acknowledgement from Amy about having Melody taken from her: "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."  It's a long overdue moment, even if it leads to Amy killing Madame Kovarian.  ("I killed someone," she reflects afterwards to River.  "Madame Kovarian, in cold blood."  "In an aborted time line, in a world that never was," River points out.  But Amy is unpersuaded: "Yeah, but I can remember it, so it happened, so I did it."  It's at least recognizing the issue, even if -- as far as I can remember -- it never comes up again.)

The cleverest bit of all is probably the way the Doctor avoids dying at the fixed point that the Silence have set up, by using the Teselecta.  It's one of those things that feels almost obvious in retrospect, but everything is handled adeptly to not make it obvious until right before the revelation.  It also means that the universe thinks the Doctor is dead, so he can now recede into the background.  "I got too big, Dorium," he says at the end.  "Too noisy.  Time to step back into the shadows."  Of course, this still means that the Doctor is heading for Trenzalore, where silence will fall when the question is asked, but that's still in the future.

So I dunno.  There are some lovely clever moments in this episode, but it's all built upon a premise that rather requires you not to think too hard about it.  I suppose that's the definition of a qualified success.  One does wonder what a casual viewer would make out of it all though.

But then, series 6 has seen a more concerted move away from casual viewers in favor of a (more) dedicated audience.  It's not the same feel as during the mid-1980s, when it sometimes seemed like Doctor Who was only targeting its fanbase, but it's still a shift away from Russell T Davies' approach.  Then, there were ongoing references to an overarching series-long plot, but they were kept strictly in the background until episode 12 or so -- a little extra something for fans, but not something that casual viewers had to keep up on.  Now (presumably emboldened by the success of shows like Lost), Steven Moffat is shifting toward a more detailed narrative, in which whole episodes are given over to advancing that longer storyline.  It's not totally successful, though, because he's trying to have it both ways, with episodes that are accessible for more casual viewers still mixed in -- but that makes the dropping of the bigger arc more obvious.

It is something of a first for Doctor Who to go even this far with a storyline, and the time travel nature of the series makes it a less-than-straightforward thread to follow, which is probably why series 6 developed a reputation for being confusing and overcomplicated.  I don't think that's necessarily true.  It is a storyline that requires you to actively participate and think about what you're seeing (another reason elements of "The Wedding of River Song" are problematic), to mentally slot all the pieces together, which does mean that there are fewer "lightbulb" moments where you suddenly understand what's going on, and more dawning realizations instead.  But it's a worrying kind of criticism that says that your audience isn't clever enough to work out what's going on and that you should dumb it down instead.  No, if there's a problem with the big storyline, it's that the nature of the individual episodes make it hard to sustain things like characterization.  Amy and Rory suffer a big, traumatic event that they seem perfectly OK with in the next episode.  If the production team was going to go for this important storyline, then they should have gone for it.  What we get instead is a halfway house between two competing philosophies of television.

Yet even with that caveat, series 6 was a success.  They had some truly exceptional episodes, and the big storyline (the Doctor's death) was handled well on the whole.  Matt Smith cemented his place as one of the best actors to play the Doctor, while Karen Gillan took the chance to make her character more nuanced; series 5 Amy sometimes felt like she was just shouting at the world for no obvious reason, but series 6 Amy (modulo reactions to the kidnapping of her baby) is more like an actual person, with all the pluses and minuses that encapsulates.  And Arthur Darvill is so wonderful as Rory, sardonic and fun and frequently deferring to Amy -- not out of weakness but out of love -- that it's no wonder he's a fan favorite.  All this means that even after 48 years, Doctor Who is still running strong.

Oh!  But we're not quite done with series 6.  Immediately after "The Wedding of River Song" aired, Doctor Who Confidential (the BBC Three documentary series going behind-the-scenes of the episode that had just aired) presented the winner of BBC Learning's "Script-to-Screen" competition, in which schoolchildren competed to have a short three-minute sketch featuring the Doctor and a returning enemy filmed and broadcast.  "Death is the Only Answer", by the Children of Oakley Junior School (as the credits officially state), is a quick story involving Albert Einstein popping into the TARDIS, temporarily turning into an Ood, and then just as quickly being turned back into himself.  It's a fun, lightweight little scene, with some really lovely lines ("Nice hair.  You should keep it, it looks more sciencey") and a charming turn from Nickolas Grace as Einstein.  What more do you need?







²³⁶ The sign in the park calls them "pterodactyls", but they're clearly pteranodons.  (The crest on the head gives them away.)  But we can blame that on the Royal Parks Agency (or whoever it was that put up the sign).