11.27: The Wedding of River Song

In which everything breaks, but very entertainingly.

Broadcast: October 2011

Watched: January 2022

“This is absurd. Other worlds! Carnivorous skulls! Talking heads!” 

Possibly the single weirdest structure any episode had used to this point. The first 20 minutes is all flashback. It’s also that long until the Doctor gets to Lake Silencio, where he was heading at the very end of the last episode. The companion for the first third is alt history Winston Churchill; for the second it’s Dorium’s head, in a box. 

And it’s absolutely stuffed with lines that feel like they say something about the process of making it. Asides from the above:

“I’m not sure I completely understand.” “Er, we got married and had a kid and that’s her.”

Or, in a sign Moffat is resorting to muscle memory:

“What happened to time?” “A woman.”

“So do you think you can top last year’s Christmas special?” feels quite telling, too.

Actually, the idea of collapsing all of history into a single time and place feels oddly like it might be a comment on the process of writing Doctor Who, too. Churchill is clever enough to see it when nobody else can.

Considering the fact it’s a load of nonsense it’s *incredibly* entertaining. The pre-credits sequence alone gives us pterodactyls, Romans, monorails, the Wars of the Roses and Dickens. Smith having loads of fun playing Doctor as Indiana Jones (“Ewww, I hate rats”). Then Mark Gattiss gets eaten alive by skulls. Cool.

The largely gratuitous Teselecta scene at the beginning is clearly there at least partly to throw us off the scent after it appeared in “previously on” bit. It’s tempting to say the solution to the Doctor’s death is a cheat, but it isn’t really – obviously the Doctor wasn’t really dead, there would always be something like this. The iffy thing I think is actually old Canton’s “That is definitely the Doctor, and he is definitely dead” back in episode one. There’s no wriggle room, it’s just a lie to the audience. 

Also, in this episode’s scene at the lake, the conversation with River obviously takes far too long for the version we got in episode 1... When the Doctor says “You won’t even remember”, is this true or another “the Doctor lies” thing?

(It is sort of funny that Moffat invents “the Doctor lies” to cover for the fact the writer does.)

Two other big questions:

1) If the Silence raised River as the Doctor’s bespoke psychopath then why does it need a suit in control to kill her?

2) What is the mechanism by which River changes history? Why is the version of Lake Silencio we get in this episode different to the one we get in episode 1?

Taken as a whole, the episode really sums up the season. It’s loads of fun, exciting, funny, very watchable... but it doesn’t really deliver, the whole thing’s a piece of misdirection. As you watch them, the opening two-parter and 7 feel note perfect, 8 & 12 the wheels have come off but cover for it through pure energy... But really the whole thing is an overreach. It just doesn’t seem to be the sort of story you can tell in Doctor, either for practical reasons (there isn’t enough writing/planning time to do it justice) or tonal ones (having the companion commit a murder is not actually an adequate ending to a plotline about a stolen baby).

Oh, and it’s not really a wedding either is it. Never mind, other things.

• In both the first and last stories of the season, the Doctor has a beard. Tempting to read this as another, “No, he is old enough to play the Doctor, look” thing.

• There are some weird resonances with the last finale. It’s another one where Amy can’t remember Rory and a companion f*cks the enemy right up when the Doctor isn’t looking. Also there’s another army of spaceships, this time to show the Doctor people would rather he didn’t die. I’m not sure how much of this is deliberate mirroring, how much just Moffat on autopilot.

• I LOVE that it turns out the eyepatch isn’t sinister... until the Silence turn it into a weapon. 

• “Liz the First is still waiting in a grove to elope with me” – no she isn’t, the 10th Doctor already married her. Moffit must goe.

• The Brig’s death bit is touching, but must have been absolutely baffling to a large chunk of the audience. (My ex, who really enjoyed this episode, had literally never heard of him.)

• The Doctor trying to remind Amy she knows him while she waits for him to notice all the Doctor stuff is hilarious. How can she tell the Doctor is older, though?