Doctor Who: “The Wedding of River Song” review

It’s astonishing: Last week’s episode “Closing Time” was mainly set in a branch of Boots, used recycled monsters and had a cast list you could count on a careless butcher’s hand, but it was “The Wedding of River Song” that felt cheap. Other than the spectacular visual set-pieces (I never thought I could dislike something that had a steam train whistling furiously into an Egyptian pyramid) this season finale was an undeniable letdown, ending with a cheat on par with the Gordian Knot but without that solution’s audacity. The “twist” was so banal, so utterly flat and vapid, that you suspect Stephen Moffat simply planned to have the whole thing be a dream, realised that they already did that and scrabbled around for the only other solution that could possibly be less satisfying. Not happy with having a main arc that was too complicated for Doctor Who‘s audience of children, Moffat then wrote a finale that was too simplistic for the adult audience. Strong on big concepts but utterly lacking in the ability to effect their execution, I’m taking back all the nice things I’ve said about Moffat’s tenure as showrunner – that is how lazy the twist in “The Wedding of River Song” is.

Having the Teselecta take the Doctor’s place on the shores of Lake Silencio for his inevitable-no-I-swear-on-my-mum’s-life-it-is death was a narrative mis-step so huge that it’s retroactively damaged the success of the previous episodes: If the solution was that simple all along, why was anybody even worried? Why didn’t the Doctor simply park a scarecrow in a Matt Smith mask on the beach and have done with it? That the Silence were at all taken in by a ruse on par with something McCauley Culkin did in Home Alone has further lowered their credibility as a threat, something I didn’t think possible given how fucking adorable they looked in those suits. Obviously the Doctor was always going to escape his death, but to have him do so by leaning round a door and saying “Actually, do you mind impersonating me to fool those piss-poor excuse for arch-enemies of mine?” was a laughably implausible way of doing so. Moffat attempted to slip a retcon under the radar by suggesting that the Doctor simply had to be present on the beach rather than die there, but it was just further evidence that he initially only wrote “the Doctor dies” on a whiteboard, painted himself into a corner by doing so and took the cheap way out. He’s an ideas man rather than a storyteller and this series has undoubtedly suffered for it: Look no further than how the memory-proof Silents repeatedly stalled stories for proof of that.

That was the twist, then; how did the rest of the episode fare? Predictably, not too well. After a strong in media res opening – all of time suddenly condensed into one eternal moment (although for budgetary reasons we only saw about four eras interact and nothing from the other millions of available years) – we were introduced to a bearded and bedraggled Doctor who proceeded to explain how this had occurred. This part of the narrative was replete with Big Ideas – it had Iain M. Banks-esque Live Chess, an unrecognisable Mark Gatiss as a Space Viking and pterodactyls as pests – but ultimately all it did was set up the reintroduction of the Teselecta for the plot twist at the end. What it did, in effect, was limit the amount of time that we spent with the core cast, preventing any of the actors from giving a performance that might have justified their actions. Take Amy Pond killing Madam Kovarian: We never got the chance to see her meaningfully interact with her stolen daughter River so the murder felt wholly unjustified and out of character. Similarly, during the wedding scene atop the pyramid, with only the main four being present there was simply no reason for the Doctor to maintain the Teselecta ruse, particularly since River immediately revealed it to Amy and Rory. Rather, it was Moffat keeping one eye on preserving a twist which turned out to be piss-poor anyway. The speed of the episode also kept Matt Smith from acting in that quirky, weary manner which has been one of the series’ greatest strengths.

In the modern Whoniverse the characters are hostages to the story Moffat has sold to the press for publicity. The Doctor and company have been wholly reactionary, dragged in the wake of the narrative rather than driving it. Consider the Ponds and their lack of character development since their introduction: They’ve been stuck reiterating the same fake relationship crises, even finding time to enact some Boring Rory Bullshit for two minutes in the only single-episode finale in the show’s history. It’s clear now that their only purpose was to bang on board the TARDIS to create River: It explains why the writers have had to resort to killing Rory time and again to inject drama into a long-since played-out narrative. This cast deserves better than the scripts they’re afforded, and the fans deserve better than cop-outs like this.

Honestly, if this episode hadn’t had such striking visuals (Karen Gillan included) it would have been entirely wasted. I wish I could say it wasn’t the ending the series deserved but, unfortunately, it was. It was entirely symptomatic of a season that’s relied too heavily upon grand concepts and twists than on character development and properly-structured narrative. As for the First Question – I absolutely called it and get to keep my testicle. The only good thing to have come from “The Wedding of River Song” is that a man’s scrotum remains (nearly) symmetrical – is there any more damning criticism?

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3/10

Doctor Who: “Let’s Kill Hitler” review

Whatever you might think of “Let’s Kill Hitler”, you can’t deny it had some spectacular visuals: The opening shot of a cornfield swaying; the Teselecta morphing into a Nazi; Karen Gillan in a schoolgirl’s uniform! These images were plonked atop a now-ridiculously convoluted backstory like an Rubik’s Cube stuck onto a corkscrew and the result, while a spectacle, was still somewhat disappointing.

Despite the differences in setting (Nazi Germany and the recurring Who-location of Some Spaceship, Somewhere) “Let’s Kill Hitler” was an almost direct continuation of last season’s finale “A Good Man Goes To War”, at the end of which we saw the Doctor head off in the TARDIS to find baby Melody Pond. Perhaps because he has essentially infinite amounts of time in which to do this, when Amy and Rory summon him with the most straightforward crop circle ever (more of a crop sentence) at the beginning of the episode he seems to have been more concerned with finding a new jacket. He’s perhaps the second-worst babysitter in the universe. Both episodes are primarily concerned with the ongoing “Who Is River Song?” plot, which at this point requires spreadsheets to understand. If someone were to attempt to jump on the series at this point and asked you for an explanation you’d have to reschedule your week. “Let’s Kill Hitler” collapses under the weight of its own continuity and predestination paradoxes; it wasn’t as fun as Who should be.

Typical reaction to an explanation of River Song's timeline

Briefly (deep breath), River Song is a pseudo-Time Lord created as a weapon by a collection of species cumulatively known as the Silence who are a religious order concerned with preventing the Doctor causing the end of the universe by asking the First Question by means of getting River to cause her own birth by getting her parents together so she can be conceived on the TARDIS becoming a human/Time Lord hybrid then stolen by the Silence in the subjective future as a baby so they can brainwash her to effect the above so that she can ultimately kill the Doctor which she technically did thus completing the brainwashing so she’s free to become the Doctor’s love interest in her respective future but his past and ultimately die in front of a previous incarnation of him. It’s as simple as Π. Her life story makes John Locke‘s look as straightforward as a Mr Men book.

The introduction of River’s former incarnation Mels was a twist that lacked any emotion for the dual reasons that she had a screen time of about fifty seconds and for forty of those it seemed she was just going to be a catalyst for more Boring Rory Bullshit. The Mels-centric flashbacks detailing how Rory and Amy got together reignited concerns that showrunner Stephen Moffat is determined to show the audience every aspect of their lives pre-Doctor i.e. pre-anything interesting happening. Happily, this wasn’t the case – the montage served the secondary role of showing how thoroughly the Silence have manipulated circumstances to prevent the Doctor asking that illusive “First Question” (which I will bet my left bollock to be the show’s name with a ? on the end). Unfortunately this was not the only point in the episode that lacked emotion. Indeed the fact that we know (as was reiterated throughout the episode) the Doctor has a ‘fixed’ date of death prevented his poisoning having any sense of crisis. Consistantly reintroducing these false-threats seems like repeated missteps for the series. In the Russell T. Davies/David Tennant era the danger was always to characters who conceivably could be harmed and the show was much more dramatic as a result.

As with the parasitic species formally thought to be the Silence, the time-travelling cops in this episode is a good idea that comes across as laughable in practice. Their spaceship was a shape-shifting humanoid with lethal halitosis controlled by miniature men, a cross between the Terminator and Eddie Murphy in Meet Dave. Completely ineffectual and clearly just there to deliver exposition, their presence was baffling rather than a necessary part of the episode. Despite that, continuing the series’ grand tradition of having alien doppelgangers of Amy, there is a certain irony in having the Dam–Borrowers‘ fake Amy do what the real one couldn’t and reveal to the Doctor that he’s due to die. As with the majority of last season’s mediocre episodes it was the little moments like this that salvaged the episode from complete failure and lent it such limited success as it did have.

With the River Song storyline seemingly dispensed with for the moment, hopefully the series can get back to the more interesting territory of a near-immortal hero confronting the fact of his own death. At the moment this season feels like it’s spinning its wheels or, to coin a phrase, putting Hitler in a cupboard and promptly forgetting about him. But what other series could you write that about and have it be both a metaphor and literal? Even when it’s disappointing, you can at least count on Doctor Who to be wholly unique.

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5/10

Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife” review

Film trailers are often accused of simply being the best moments of the advertised film in one incredibly succulent bite-size chunk, apparently by people for whom stupidity is a life choice rather than a momentary lapse. This charge is levelled at the movie industry as though in the interests of honesty a proportional amount of the trailer should be clips of the least exciting moments. For the people who express this view the ideal film trailer would be a static pie chart displaying the proportional amount of explosions to exposition.

If there was ever a target for these people it would be the teaser trailer for “The Doctor’s Wife” shown at the end of last week’s high-seas-and-deep-space adventure “The Curse of the Black Spot”, which was a 31 second long, concentrated fangasm. We got the tease of another living Time Lord, a sighting of a member of the universe’s most hard-done-by species the Ood, an indescribably alien landscape, the TARDIS suffused with an ominous green light, a decrepid and ancient Rory and a palpably powerful threat. The raw awesome of the trailer was simply so good that I joined the ranks of braying idiots and claimed the full episode could in no way be the equal of its teaser. I demanded Honesty In Advertising! Show me a good honest pie chart, because this trailer is clearly unrepresentative.

I was wrong: “The Doctor’s Wife” is quite simply the best hour of Doctor Who produced since Stephen Moffat took over as showrunner, and quite possibly even in the show’s long history. It crackled throughout with emotion, discharging it through clever character moments and plot twists. Neil Gaiman’s script elevated its main cast far, far above and beyond anything we’ve seen from them so far and allowed its memorable supporting characters a real time to shine. For the benefit of my former coworkers in Honesty In Advertising, though, here’s how the episode broke down:

DBA = Doctor Being Awesome * HTM = Heartbreaking TARDIS Moments * BRB = Boring Rory Bullshit

As we can see, at 1.5% “The Doctor’s Wife” contains the scantest amount of Boring Rory Bullshit so far this season, a blanket term under which I mean one of Rory or Amy’s endless non-deaths or faux-relationship crises that slow an episode right down. By my count, Rory has died at least once per serial for the past three serials. It’s a shame, too, because Arthur Darville’s Rory is genuinely likeable and it’s plain to see he has some acting chops, but the BRB is the second weakest aspect of the series so far despite the fact that it’s clearly going to reach a head, probably catastrophically. Its relative absence in this episode allowed the show to get back to what it should be: Large amounts of the Doctor being a badass with skeins of molten heartbreak occasionally and unexpectedly erupting.

Hereafter, spoilers.

Surely every Who fan gasped with excitement when Idris (ably played by Suranne Jones) breathed out, emitting the TARDIS-brake noise? As he does with seemingly everything he writes, Neil Gaiman approached Who at an angle markedly different from other writers, creating a standalone episode that paid tribute to the TARDIS as a character in a way that rewarded the fans who feel so strongly about her. Just as with Serenity from Firefly and the Going Merry from One Piece, the TARDIS is as much a main character as the rest of the cast, in many ways more so even than the revolving cast of companions and regerating Doctors. Her exterior has been the one constant coda of Doctor Who and watching her fleetingly interact with “her Doctor” was an experience long-time viewers will cherish just as much as the two of them did. Seeing the archived control room from the Ninth and Tenth Doctor era again was a both a delight and a reminder of just how central the TARDIS is to the show.

Speculation abound as to the meaning of “the only water in the forest is the river”. There’s no such thing as coincidence in the medium of television, so when part of the serial that introduced River Song (specifically the episode in which she died) was entitled “Forest of the Dead”, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that River has a significant part to play in this unfolding saga.

There were other fantastic nods to continuity scattered throughout the episode, of which the most memorable were the Doctor’s rueful admission that Nephew was another Ood he had failed to save and his heartfelt confession that he craves forgiveness for the destruction of the Time Lords at his hands. His giddy glee at the prospect of seeing his old friend the Corsair again (in the processes confirming the long-held speculation that for Time Lords gender is more or less optional) and subsequent barely-contained rage upon finding the source of the distress signals were superbly acted by Matt Smith, who continues to impress with his trait of making the Doctor seem wholly human… right up until the moment when he doesn’t, and you glimpse the yawning gulf of distance between his experience and ours. When tears sprang to his eyes as he said his first and final ‘hello’ to the TARDIS, it was moment worthy of a dozen BAFTAs.

Stephen Moffat once said of the Fifth Doctor that he displayed the “pained heroism of a man who is so much better than the universe he is trying to save but cannot bear to let it stand”, and during this episode we saw how deep the hurt goes. It’s cathartic and joyous to know that, in one respect at least, he’ll never truly be alone.

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10/10