{"id":1015,"date":"2011-10-05T22:51:07","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T22:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1015"},"modified":"2011-10-05T22:51:07","modified_gmt":"2011-10-05T22:51:07","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-the-wedding-of-river-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/10\/05\/so-what-did-i-think-of-the-wedding-of-river-song\/","title":{"rendered":"So… what did I think of The Wedding of River Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Oh, that Steven Moffat can write a Doctor Who season finale, can\u2019t he? A weird vision of Earth \u2013 all familiar elements but jumbled up in delightful ways, a storyline which jumps back and forth in time, revisiting events from earlier episodes and seeing them from a new angle, set ups from the very first episode of the season now being paid off, old friends and enemies popping back for a visit, a quick appearance of a Dalek just for fun, Rory nobly in uniform bravely protecting Amy who has forgotten who he is. Some of it was a bit of cheat, sure, and I\u2019m not quite sure I understood what the Doctor did at the end there, but it came with such a huge emotional wallop I really didn\u2019t care. Four stars.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, that\u2019s last year\u2019s season finale I\u2019m talking about. And this year\u2019s slavish emulation of last year\u2019s is the least of its problems.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get the good stuff out of the way. As irrelevant and idiotic as it was, the vision of the 5:02 universe was bracing and superbly well-realised \u2013 what a pleasure to see Simon Callow back as Charles Dickens. The Doctor with a beard is a fun image and the Silents are as effective as ever, albeit rather under-used. Amy\u2019s office-on-a-train is all sorts of awesome and her execution of Madame Kovarian finally gives some heft to the baby-kidnapping plot which has been treated in such an off-hand manner since the series returned. The punch-line with The Doctor (like James Bond at the beginning of You Only Live Twice) believed dead by his enemies is a good way of modestly rebooting a series which was rapidly disappearing up its own probic vent. The tribute to Nicholas Courtney is touching and appropriate.<\/p>\n

Okay, now the minor niggles.<\/p>\n

The whole story requires the Doctor to be constantly talking to other people about how clever he is being, which is dramatically weak, despite Moffat\u2019s best efforts to ramp up the tension by having Churchill\u2019s palace progressively invaded by Silents. When Churchill is abandoned, a not-very-convincingly decapitated Dorium Maldovar takes over the role. The last thing we need at the end of this Moebius Pretzel of a series is the set-up for another arc, let alone one derived from Silver Nemesis<\/em> of all things. Could we not have even a little bit of closure for once?<\/p>\n

My need for a good, hissable villain and some genuinely malevolent monsters is fed by the reappearance of Madame Kovarian and her army of Silents, but her reappearance doesn\u2019t achieve anything (except her satisfying death at Amy\u2019s hands, as noted) and it\u2019s not at all clear to me what, if any, role the Silents played in her plan to turn Rory and Amy\u2019s offspring into a custom-made Doctor-killer, nor really how the events of The Impossible Astronaut<\/em> and A Good Man Goes To War<\/em> are even remotely connected.<\/p>\n

Simon Fisher-Becker needed to keep his head a lot stiller in that box to avoid looking like he was wearing it on his shoulders (which of course, he was). And on the subject of dodgy effects, the sight of Mark Gattiss (for it was he) being chewed up by those skulls was just embarrassing.<\/p>\n

Right.<\/p>\n

Since 23 April 2011 \u2013 161 days ago, 23 weeks, over five months \u2013 we\u2019ve been told that the Doctor dies<\/span> at Lake Silencio. Canton Everett Delaware III intones \u201cthat most certainly is the Doctor and he most certainly is dead.\u201d Now, shortly before the series finale, news reached us that filming on the Christmas Special with Matt Smith had begun, so if even a scintilla of doubt remained that the Doctor would in fact survive this encounter, those doubts were swept away. We all knew, sitting down on 1 October \u2013 as in fact we know every week \u2013 that this was not the end of Our Hero. The question was not \u201cwhether?\u201d but \u201chow?\u201d<\/p>\n

And after this much build-up, after cranking up the stakes this high, after making us wait nearly half a year and then making the Doctor increasingly pessimistic, resigned, fatalistic and gloomy as his certain death <\/span>approaches, the answer that was provided needed to clear a pretty high bar. To be clear, it needed to be\u2026<\/p>\n