Cloister/Wedding Bells

10 and 1 things about Doctor Who's season finale, The Wedding of River Song. In simul-spoiler-vision! You've been warned.A kitchen sink scenario. Well, Moffat certainly threw a tone of stuff at this one. It almost felt like the RTD years again. Romans in the streets, cars on balloons, dinosaurs, pyramids, carnivorous animated skulls, live chess, and loads of guest stars. But despite the "celebratory" stylings of the episode, there was still Moffatry on show. A paradoxical plot, River Song's story continued, and of course, a return to a past episode and explanation of what really happened, like last year's finale. Which may be why I was left hungry. It felt to me like all the temporal shenanigans left less room for clever revelations about the various mysteries of this season and the last (see Unanswered questions, below).

Getting out of it. Perhaps because everyone called the last block's Flesh as the Doctor's get out of jail card, Moffat came up with another way, hiding it in plain sight in this block's opener. It was my blog-buddy Snell who guessed, somewhere on this very blog, the Teselecta would be the key to faking the Doctor's death, and as soon as the justice robot crewed by miniaturized people showed up, I knew he was right. There have been complaints, of course, from people who apparently wanted the Doctor to actually die. For example, there are those who wondered why there was a spray of regeneration energy if it wasn't really the Doctor. Pretty sure the Teselecta could reproduce the effect. There are others who feel like the show cheated by claiming Lake Silencio as a fixed point in time, and then allowing the Doctor to slip away. Anyone with a degree in fake sci fi quantum mechanics can answer that. So I shall: Why Lake Silencio? We're specifically told that this place and time is a fixed point, so it's not "the death of the Doctor" that's fixed. The Silents want to kill the Doctor there because they know that anything that happens there is fixed. So everything Amy, Rory, River, Canton and at least one Silent SEE has to happen. And it does. (A good reason why the Doctor didn't want them to come any closer or interfere.) What causes the paradox is River making the events as seen deviate from what was "fixed", NOT saving the Doctor's life. Corollary question: Why is Lake Silencio a fixed point in history when nothing historical (except this) happens there? My thinking is that a number of witnesses are "complicated space-time events" (the TARDIS crew, River, the Teselecta and potentially its crew, and at least one Silent). That must really put time in a knot.

Back into the shadows. The whole point of this arc was to take a step back from the RTD era, specifically the way Davies made the Doctor into an intergalactic, pantemporal legend. Moffat first gave us consequences of the Doctor being so "noisy" in The Pandorica Opens, and this season too has had an alliance of bad guys trying to kill him. Now that everyone who has the sort of knowledge and equipment to wage war with the Doctor across spacetime believes he's been killed at a fixed point in history, they can't very well try and kill him elsewhere or elsewhen (or they can, but they won't design outlandish plots like the ones Series 6 and 7 have shown us). So if they meet him again, they do so thinking this must be an earlier version of the Doctor and console themselves with the idea that they'll get him later (certainly, Kovarian's cockiness through all her episodes speaks to that assurance). While I wouldn't call that stepping "back into the shadows" exactly - the Doctor is still well-known - I'm sure the writing team will turn that mission statetment into a comfortable thematic reality in the next series, and the Doctor won't be such a universal celebrity.

Amy's killer transformation. So Amy kills someone - or rather enables the Silents to kill someone - in an alternate reality. If she remembers it, does it make her a killer? I dare say no, because the Amy from the other reality had a different upbringing, was a super secret agent, etc. She wasn't the same person. It's a memory implant, that's all. But she'll still feel the remorse. I guess the Doctor dropped her and Rory off too late and she still wound up a "weapon", like Rose, Mickey and Martha. She seems less broken up about mowing down a horde of (alien) Silents though. Though we can defend or condemn the act, it at least brings some closure to the babynapping episode. Many felt that Amy's lack of reaction to losing her baby was a major problem. She was just biding her time until an opportunity presented itself.
Guest stars. Scrunching history together was certainly an opportunity to bring back some of the historical guest stars from across the length of the new series. Churchill was a natural, but the big surprise is Dickens from Series 1, in the role of whoever's in charge of the Christmas Special. Cheeky. SF characters are also served, with the Teselecta and its captain, the Silurian Malokeh, a new Dalek, and Dorium showing up. Amy's drawings evoke even more past episodes, and Rose and Jack get a mention (see also, The Brig, below). A real world guest star crops up to - Meredith Vieira from the Today show is the tv presenter du jour. I wasn't expecting that. And then there's River Song from just after the crash of the Byzantium (Flesh and Stone)...

River Song. The woman continues to be a paradox with her wedding happening in a collapsing untime-line that now never happened and is likely remembered by only three people. Fans who don't want the Doctor to be married are as well served as those that do. It never happened, except it did. It was a robot Doctor, except it really wasn't. And River doesn't really lie when she says she doesn't do weddings. Wherever River is on her personal time track, she seems to have a deep attachment to the Doctor, and yet it would seem this happens just after Lake Silencio, which is just after her graduation, and she got her education so she could find the Doctor again. Ahh, but history has collapsed into one point, so the River in the collapsed history may, like Amy, remember much more - all those untold adventures that occur in the 200-year gap between The God Complex and Closing Time (the way the future Doctor compares notes with River in The Impossible Astronaut leads me to believe his age is not a lie), and possibly, after The Wedding. I'm intrigued about how River and Amy's timelines then crisscross. Amy goes outside for a glass of wine after seeing a "freaky meteor shower", and is unsurprised when her daughter shows up. Have they been having lots of these meetings, usually heralded by meteor showers, maybe caused by the vortex manipulator? I'm glad they kept in touch, and it may be how Amy and Rory are dragged back into events in Series 7.

Time Lord weddings. The bowtie gets a special use! Shades of the Fifth Doctor's 11th hour celery stick. But seriously, folks, I was intrigued by the wedding ceremony improvised by the Doctor on top of the Area 52 pyramid. Is this anything like an actual Time Lord wedding? Obviously, the couple would actually be touching, but otherwise? The parents both give their consent and it's done. The kiss is a human affectation, of course. Gotta respect the bride's side (not that the groom had a side, the TARDIS couldn't make it).

Repeated memes. Moffat weaves in a number of key phrases we've heard before, sometimes as far back as Silence in the Library. Astronaut River wants to rewrite time, making the Doctor admonish her with "Don't you dare", a reverse of River's own death scene in Forest of the Dead. "Honey, I'm home." "And what sort of time do you call this?" is the same exchange the couple had in The Big Bang. And of course, there's the notion that Rory's always dying, mentioned by the Silents in "the man who dies and dies again, die one last time." That one may be a cosmic joke, or it may foreshadow a heart wrenching moment in Series 7. Let's hope it's the former.

The Brig. As you know, Nicholas Courtney died last February, so it was a particularly touching moment when the Doctor called The Brigadier only to be told that he'd died in bed (as the 7th Doctor prophesied in Battlefield). More than a nod to one of the great actors of Who, it's what makes the Doctor accept his fate and face up to his mortality (he only later figures out a way to survive). The dignity Courtney brought to his performance of the Brig inspires our hero to man up, which is a wonderful tribute. I hope Lis Sladen gets as good a send-off when Sarah Jane's time comes.
Eyepatches. Another tribute to Nick Courtney? One of the most famous behind the scenes stories in all of Who is the prank pulled on Courtney during the filming of Inferno. The story features an "evil" parallel Earth where the Brig wears an eyepatch, and Courtney used to tell convention goers that once on set, he turned around, "and they were ALL wearing eyepatches!!!" Eyedrive... eyepatch... it's all the same.

Unanswered questions (but I answer one). Of course, there's a new foreshadowed story with the Fields of Trenzalore where the question will be asked. Apparently that question is "Doctor Who?", an intriguing twist on the show's title, but the real mystery is how being forced to answer will make the Silents fall. How is the Doctor's name/identity/essence a terrible secret that can never be told? But there are more questions, questions left over from past episodes you'd think would have been answered by now. Chief among these, I think, is what made the TARDIS blow up in Series 6. We still don't know. Is the Doctor's answer at Trenzalore something that causes the TARDIS to blow, somehow taking the Silents with it? I don't know, but that's what I'm putting in my betting pool. The other question I thought the finale would answer is why the Doctor changed into a tux in Let's Kill Hitler when he had only minutes to live. THIS, I think I can answer. I watched Doctor Who Confidential's piece about River's story, with Alex Kingston as River narrating the key parts of her story chronologically from her point of view (so from A Good Man Goes to War to Forest of the Dead) AVAILABLE HERE. It's got a couple of errors (she could not possibly have gone from 1969 New York to 1990s Leadworth without an intervening regeneration), but it does remind us of some key dialog from her final moments. Basically, I had an epiphany. She says that the last time she saw him, the real him, the future him, he turned up at her doorstep "with a new haircut and a suit". I now believe that when the Doctor was poisoned and thought he would actually die, he changed into his fancy suit (because face it, he almost always wears a suit, so River must have been talking about something special), and flew to her doorstep to give her the sonic screwdriver that ends up saving her life/mind. In his dying moment, he saves the woman who killed him. It's poetic, and in any case, preordained. If I'm right, it puts extra layers on River's first/last appearance. I'm as impressed by the intricate plotting as I am by the fact Moffat didn't make a point of it. He's letting us discover these things on our own.

Next question: Who will be the next companion? Or will we have a companionless Doctor next year, who adventures with a variable cast of new people and old favorites (i.e. Amy, Rory, River and Craig)? Time will tell. Bring on the Christmas special!