Who Review: The Wedding of River Song

So. Things I was absolutely right about:

River is in prison for killing the Doctor. Obvious since "Flesh and Stone."

The question is "Doctor Who." Grr. Argh.

Things I was mostly right about:

They use the eyepatches to remember the Silence.

The Doctor uses a double to avoid getting shot to hell on the beach.

So, it's 2011. Winston Churchill is the Holy Roman Emperor. The Doctor is a lunatic up in his tower. As they get chased around by the Silence, the Doctor relates the final journey of his life. He went to investigate the Silence. So first tortures a Dalek for information, which leads him to the Tesselector (that shapeshifting bigger-on-the-inside ship that isn't a TARDIS, honest), who led him to the Cyclops Viking Guy, who led him to the Headless Blue Guy's Head. (I've stopped keeping track of names, because they're all Gargravaar and such.)

Then the Cyclops Viking Guy gets killed off like the no-longer-useful plot device he is, and the Doctor steals the Headless Blue Guy's Head. He does the Tennant routine about doing the big last dance and avoiding his fate for as long as he can (proving that he himself never read the script for "Closing Time," in which he was basically resigned to die... or does this section of the story take place before "Closing Time?" If so, why is he resigned to die if he already got in the Tesselector aw frak it).

And then he finds out that the Brigadier died, and that during his final months, Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart always left a bottle of brandy out in case the Doctor came calling.

Now for those of you who think the first episode of Doctor Who was "Rose," you're probably unaware of who the Brigadier was, given that he got a mention in "The Sontaran Strategem" but never appeared onscreen. Suffice it to say here that the Brigadier was, well, one of the Doctor's most important allies. Watch virtually anything with Jon Pertwee in it and you'll see what I mean.

Once again, Moffat's problem is not repeat not River Song. Love her or hate her, she's never even been in half the episodes of any season. See, the Brigadier's death is what prompts the Doctor to accept his own fate (except here he was, talking about having out with the Beatles... unless he just meant Paul and Ringo, I assume he intended to put that time machine of his to good use). But that portion of fandom that doesn't know a Zygon from a Thal doesn't know who the Brig is, and why his death should affect the Doctor like that. (Now me, I say screw 'em, but this show's considerably more popular now than it was then, so...)

Headless Blue Guy's Head goes on about how the Doctor's going to die because otherwise, at the Fall of the Eleventh (gee, I wonder...), "the Question" will be asked and Silence will fall. (Meaning, presumably, the Silence will fall. As in, downfall.)

Headless Blue Guy's Head also says one of the most unforgivable phrases in all of fiction: "I didn't tell you before because..." Amazingly, Battlestar Galactica, a show whose writers were notorious for making stuff up on the fly, never had to stoop quite that low. In BSG there were reasons why we didn't get all the information about the Final Five Cylons all at once (beyond the fact that RDM was making it up as he went along, there's also the fact that their memories were wiped, so they only got flashes here and there until Anders got shot, which perfectly restored his memory). Here it's just "oh, did I not mention that earlier? Ha ha silly me." Easily my least favorite scene in the episode.

So the Doctor goes back and lets River kill him (except at this point is he in the Tesselector? I would assume so. Why can't he just tell Spacesuit-River he's in the Tesselector? Does the suit know that? Can it adapt to aw frak it).

Only River doesn't kill him, um, somehow. And so time goes all screwy and Amy Pond shows up with an eyepatch and shoots the Doctor and puts him on a train to Cairo. How does she have a train to Cairo? Eh, that doesn't matter, it's an alternate lunatic universe.

So there's a pyramid there full of Silence, which they're keeping alive, for some reason. And the iPatches let them remember the Silence, somehow. And then the Silence break out, somehow, and try to kill everyone wearing an iPatch including Eye-Patch-Lady, for some reason. And the only two people who can resist the killer iPatch patch are Rory and EPL, for some reason. But then Rory collapses and Amy saves him because, yup, that's how this goes.

And then something fantastic happens.

Eyepatch Lady says that Amy can't kill her because the Doctor wouldn't approve. Amy says the Doctor's not here (he's gone up to the roof), and promptly kills Eyepatch Lady. Because, you know, she kidnapped her daughter and wanted to use her as a tool... (at the risk of overdoing my Who/BSG comparisons, at least Athena didn't wig out about killing Boomer).

So the Doctor and River are up on the roof, and River's somehow got her hands on the Master's Universal PA from Logopolis and has sent a distress call to the entire Universe. But do they do anything? Nooooooooo... River says they're ready to help, but the Doctor just marries her and then goes back with her to the beach so she can kill him.

Now, is the River in the bubble universe Spacesuit-River, who knows everything about the Doctor but has barely spent any time with him, or is she Stormcage-River, who's probably frakked him a good dozen times by now? I assumed she was the latter, because she's more sure of herself and into the whole Doctor/River vibe we saw back in "The Impossible Astronaut." But then after Spacesuit-River kills the Doctor, Stormcage-River from "Flesh and Bone" shows up and tells Amy that the Doctor told her that he was in the Tesselector, and thus did not die. Okay, but that's the last we see of her until she dies in the Library.

So the Tesselector, which is all about preserving the timeline, allows the Doctor to fake his own death and then send River to prison for it. (As a consolation prize, River gets to hop in the Tardis each night with her hubby.) Now the thing about conspiracy theories is, the more people who need to lie to cover up the conspiracy, the less likely it is that the theory is true. How many people are on that Tesselector, and how much do they know?

Also, how long does the Doctor have to lay low for now? Isn't he gonna have to change his name when he regenerates? I mean, the first eleven are pretty well-documented (except for poor Two, whose records we mostly lost, and poor Eight, whose records are mostly apocryphal). Is the Twelfth Doctor going to pretend to be from between Eight and Nine? Does the Valeyard still exist? How many more seasons is Matt Smith sticking around for? And what the frak blew up the TARDIS at the end of Season 5?

To continue the Doctor Who/Battlestar Galactica comparison: there's an episode near the end of BSG called "No Exit," which is basically about two of the Final Five Cylons getting their memories back and explaining most of the plot to everyone else. It's a pair of exposition scenes that basically last an entire episode, which basically exists to answer any questions you still have about the Final Five. Likewise, "The Wedding of River Song" largely exists to answer all your questions about River. On the face of it, "Wedding" is better, because there's action as well as info-dumping. But consider what it took to get here: we had to fake out the audience about killing the Doctor at the beginning of the season. We had to endure the sheer insanity that was "A Good Man Goes to War."

All right. There's really only one thing left that I want to point out. "Silence will fall when the question is asked." The Doctor takes it to mean his silence, meaning his death. But I think it means the Silence (that is, the alien cult) will fall (that is, be destroyed).

So basically I've realized that when it comes to Moffat's tenure, I have to make huge glaring exceptions about how technology and physics work - then again, I have to do that to enjoy, well just about any show set in space, including Battlestar, which in case you can't tell, is pretty much on a pedestal the size of the Empire State Building despite its flaws. So I'll try to focus on plot alone from here on out. This would get an 8 out of ten, but I'm going to give it an extra point for the "Brig is dead" scene. Just cuz.

9 out of 10, which makes it the second-best episode Moffat has written since he became the showrunner (the best is "A Christmas Carol").