Dr. Who Season 6 finale: The Wedding of River Song

"It's an eyepatch; I wear an eyepatch now. Eyepatches are cool"

Some notes (warning--story discussed in close detail)

1) The vision of London where all time is happening at once is pure delight--I love the high towers, the cars on balloons (steampunk always talks longingly of lighter-than-air transportation, this actually looks like a quick and near-practical way of getting that talk realized, with existing vehicles), the elevated rails, the Romans on chariots, Pterodactyls flying above city parks, Churchill as Ceasar with Cleopatra as his date, Amy introducing herself ("Amy. Amy Pond"--you can tell Moffat was saving that up for a special occasion), then bringing the Doctor to her office-on-a-train (shades of Once Upon a Time in the West, perhaps?).

If I had serious complaint about the episode, it's this: do we really have to make all that go away? Because it looks like a wonderful place to live in...

2) There's talk of the Doctor spending too much time in that world--which I think ridiculous; if anything they spent too little time there. I think the time spent makes for a good clarifying device: Churchill's as confused as we are, so the Doctor has to fill him in (and us along the way) with the details.

3) Madame Kevorian captured--how'd she get there? Amy boss of a secret organization and Rory her faithful but oblivious second in command--when did that happen? Why keep the Silence locked in the pyramids? How'd Amy and River build a distress signal? Lots of questions unanswered, and I for one thought: who cares? If the ride's fast enough and fun enough, that's all we need; questions are secondary.

That's a tricky position to take, though; sometimes Moffat's scripts aren't that satisfying (Day of the Moon comes to mind; so does much of Silence at the Library and Forest of the Dead, at least the bits that didn't involve River--the inventiveness is there, or the attempt to be inventive, but I'm either too confused or not entertained enough). Fine line Moffat's treading, and he's not going to please every one, every time (me included).  

4) There's this interesting article which argues why this finale's better than Season 5's. Lots of good points--this finale does make more sense; this ending is more carefully prepared (instead of just inserting shots of glowing cracks in different episodes a la Season 5), and the breaking of the season into two helps shape the narrative from a rising action (the Doctor believing more and more in his own press) to a falling one (the Doctor feeling more and more he's better off alone and dead).

That said, I still prefer Season 5's--it's more emotionally satisfying. The Eleventh Hour is easily one of Moffat's most delightful and poignant episodes (basically The Girl in the Fireplace retold, only funnier, and with a happier (somewhat) ending). The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang ties that first episodes' questions all up, more or less, adhering to the principle (which I find perfectly valid) that enemies and big events and narrative buildup should be secondary to character and emotional needs (it's All About Amy, in effect), and you can pretty much get away with anything so long as you're witty enough about it ("It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool."). 

If the 6th season is a carefully shaped and prepared run-up to River's wedding, the 5th is basically The Eleventh Hour and its two-part conclusion separated by a series of fairly discrete adventures; that one season is more integrated than the other doesn't necessarily make one superior to the other--that depends on the plotting and dialogue of each episode (profundity and poignancy too--it's not how much time is spent in the telling but how good the writing is). Fact is, Moffat as much as hinted that the next season might just focus more on discrete episodes instead of a season-long story arc; did he hear my complaints, sense the lack in his work, perhaps...?

5) River--I hear a lot of talk about the direction her character's taken; I suppose it is true, familiarity breeds contempt. I do think Kingston does well for the most part--stepped up the dramatic stakes at River's wedding, for one. Think she's still gorgeous--looks great in any dress, even an eyepatch. 

Did Moffat shortchange her wedding? In classic screwball comedy the weddings are as often unelaborate as they are elaborate; they're sometimes done on the run, sometimes even under the gun--I for one find it more romantic that way. Anders, who wrote the article I link to above, thinks the Doctor may have been pressured to marry her, just to save the universe. I don't believe it--he wants her in the worse way. You see it when they're together, the chemistry is palpable. And they've definitely flirted enough that he has to marry her, just to stop all the scandalous talk. 

Anyway; your husband throwing away the universe, just to save your life--who can resist a gesture like that? The Doctor loves her; his wedding's rubbish, but then he's said as much before ("I'm rubbish at weddings, especially my own"). I'm sure he made it up to her on their honeymoon. 

It's the emotional high point too--if I had to kill my husband right after marrying him, I might shed a tear or two. Throw in other high points--Amy confronting Madam Kevorian about Melody's kidnapping, Rory being a true badass (again), that moving tribute to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (nice one, that). Overcomplicated, timey-wimey stuff? Not really--it's still about characters and their feelings, with this one focused on the Doctor trying to reassure his relatively young bride that he loves her, forgives her, wishes her a long and happy life.

6) Then that question that's in front of everyone all along--no, none of us saw that coming, did we? Anyone claiming otherwise--yeah, right. 

Well, a few, actually.

7) Some more clarification of plot points (thanks to Jason E.):

The fixed point in time was River shooting the Teselecta. When River refuses to kill it, that created the rift. Then the Teselecta and River kisses at the wedding, that's the healing of the rift. If River had kissed the real Doctor, that wouldn't heal the rift, because she has to kiss the Teselecta.

Then River shoots the Teselecta. They burn the robot, the Doctor escapes in the TARDIS inside the Teselecta--he gets a little singed in the process. Teselecta gone, all burnt up (presumably it's been preset to incinerate itself, to escape detection).

Everyone watching and the rest of the universe assumes that the fixed point of time is River shooting the Doctor. It isn't; it's River shooting the Teselecta. In fact I'll bet you that if River shot the Doctor all hell would break loose because that's not the fixed point time recognizes. She has to shoot the Teselecta.

And where was the second TARDIS in Utah? Inside the Teselecta.

Confused enough? I think it's brilliant, now.
 
8) No, The Wedding of River Song isn't Moffat's best (but then after two seasons, can even Moffat keep up the pace and quality of his best work?), but it's far from his worst; it's also a satisfying end to a pretty good season.

10.2.11

 

Dr. Who Season 6: The Impossible Astronaut / The Day of the Moon

I liked it overall. Part 1 (The Impossible Astronaut) works better  basically for the lakeside picnic scene, and the visual grandeur it lent the episode (Utah's a lovely place, wish I could visit someday). Also liked the succeeding scene at the diner, which answers two questions ("1. When you take an irreparable step just seven minutes into a season premiere, how do you carry on for the rest of the episode?" and "2. Who does the Doctor trust most of all?"), and the scene at the TARDIS immediately after ("A mysterious summons. What, and I go, just like that?"). One, two, three: Moffat introduces the theme of mortality (every memorable legend from Robin Hood to King Arthur has to have a memorable end, and I feel Moffat has just mustered the effrontery to start preparing us for the Doctor's), shows us the reaction of the Doctor's friends to this theme (introducing a gigantic twist along the way) and, on top of that, shows us the all-too-human, all-too-understandable reaction of the gigantic twist to the twist ("Why should I trust you?").

I love it that Dr. Song is offended, even angry; I love it that she seems just as offended by his choice of No. 1 Most Trusted ("This is cold; even by your standards, this is cold..."). I love it that Rory has to act as hapless go-between to the Doctor and the women, and later, as patient hand-holder to an awestruck newcomer ("It's bigger on the inside than on the outside...").

The business of the girl on the phone, the mysterious spaceman, and the even more mysterious Silence feel smaller, less urgent by comparison (though I do like Stuart Milligan's improbably likable Richard Nixon, and the latest addition to the Doctor's circle of friends, Canton Everett Delaware III (Mark Shepard)). We have heard the chimes at midnight, so on and so forth; we know time is limited (by two hundred years, true, but still...).

By Part 2 (Day of the Moon), however, the strong start seems to be falling apart. The business about Canton chasing them down; the astronaut suit; the Silence's prosthetics being a tad sillier-looking than, say the Weeping Angels' (those floppy fingers)...it's one thing after another, helter-skelter, and we end up feeling a bit confused, bewildered, even disappointed. All a bit much, I think, so we rebel by withholding our total involvement in all this. 

It's not a bad episode--by any other standard than Moffat's it's excellent, with its emphasis on the wonders of the Apollo program, its sharp but sweet moment of poignancy ("there's a first for everything, right?"), and its lift-us-off-the-couch final revelation ("I'm dying. But I can fix that. It's easy, really...").

But overall, compared to, say, the fishsticks-and-custard scene in the previous season premiere (or the Doctor facing down his real opponent at the end of that episode), this feels like a more scattered--I'm tempted to say scatterbrained--effort. Compare either season's high points to Moffat's singletons (The Empty Child; The Doctor Dances; The Girl in the Fireplace; Blink)--to my mind Moffat's best work in the series to date--and in my book at least neither pass muster. There was something to the way Moffat could hook us, make us laugh, make us cry (or as close to crying as we'd care to admit), delight us with endless twists and surprises in the space of forty minutes (or an hour and a half) that was well-nigh miraculous. He came within the neighborhood of touching those previous highs with his work this past two years (The Eleventh Hour; the season finale), but has yet to exceed them (I'm actually more impressed with the episode he wrote for Sherlock, his updated take on the legendary detective).

It'll do for now, I suppose, but I'm hoping Moffat settles down and makes use of all the puzzle pieces he lays out, and that what we're seeing is mostly beginner's blues. I expect--no, hope--to eat my words, and gladly.

.

The Big Bang (Dr. Who 5th Season Finale)

(Warning: plot discussed in close detail)

Moffat's intricately scripted fifth-season finale of Dr. Who--

I like. 

Never mind that it skewered practically every episode of the season and threaded them into a complicated concatenation of unlikely coincidences. 

Never mind that it sewed up every plotline and loophole and issue into one mindtwistingly intricate Gordian knot of a resolution.

Never mind that it did this with snap, speed, and a generous dose of wit and humor.

What I think Moffat's real achievement is, is that he kept his priorities straight. He knew what was important to his idea of the Doctor, and paid due attention to it.

I think nothing illustrates Moffat's priorities better than the moment when River Song--just having been saved from the exploding TARDIS and having to deal with the End of the Universe--strides out to the museum roof, turns to the Doctor and says: "Right then, I have questions, but number one is this: what in the name of sanity have you got on your head?"

Priorities--oh, yeah.

It's not about the Pandorica at all; that's what Hitchcock used to call a McGuffin. Russell T. Davis, god bless 'im for having revived the Doctor so successfully, had at least one major weakness that irked me endlessly: he put too much importance on McGuffins. Daleks, Cybermen, Masters, so on and so forth; it became too soap opera-ty, too grandiose, too End of Time-y; the Doctor's dilemmas became universe-shaking affairs that required a cast of hundreds, including all the Doctor's companions, to resolve. 

Hence: The Pandorica. As it turns out, Moffat has that problem resolved by the Doctor, wearing a fez and holding a mop, popping out of nowhere and handing over a sonic screwdriver. So there, Davies!

What are Moffat's real priorities? Why, screwing up the time scheme and, above all, audience expectations as much as possible (waitaminit, wasn't that the Doctor in the box last episode...?). Trying to fill in Rory's place in Amy's heart. "Will she be safer if I stay?" he asks of the Doctor. "Look at me in the eye and tell me she wouldn't be safer." Moffat grants poor Rory, Amy's much abused and very much dead fiancee, the chance to redress his betrayal and prove his (literally) undying love for her. Instead of spending time on that silly Pandorica--basically a creation of the young Amelia's imagination--Moffat spends the time telling the tale of the devoted centurion, guarding the mysterious box for two thousand years...

And young Amelia. I noticed it throughout the season: Moffat's not afraid to give us valleys along with the mountaintops. I thought The Eleventh Hour was a high note hit far too early, and I was right and wrong at the same time; he'd chosen to hit it at that moment for his own reasons, to fulfill his own ideas about what the whole season would look and feel like. Not saying he had it all planned from the beginning--in interview he's as much as admitted he was racing against the deadlines--but that he had definite ideas about what he wanted to happen in the series, and one of them was to plot a course that deviated from how most Whovians expect the series to go.

Hence, Rory, and River Song with her immortal line about the fez, and the Doctor's equally immortal reply (Song's line has to date turned up forty thousand times on a Google search, and even has its own Facebook page). And young Amelia, who was such a vivid presence in the first episode, and who lives on in the kooky, spiky, sexy performance of Karen Gillan in succeeding episodes. 

This, as I noted before, is really all about Amelia after all, the little girl who waited for her Doctor for fourteen years, and two years after that--if I were to be half-serious about it (the other half being unserious, but only half), all this, all of the Doctor's adventures and sufferings and near-death escapes and running (and oh! has there been so much running), everything and anything he has gone through and experienced the past few months are all meant to bring him back in a gigantic circle so he can pick a sleeping Amelia up in the garden, tuck her back in bed, and tell her a desperate little bedtime story about a very old man and a borrowed blue box. That's Moffat's real priority.

And that's pretty much it, only I have to note that it's really lovely how Moffat can take a piece of folklore ("something old, something new, something borrowed--") that dates back possibly to the Victorian age (though the poem's next line refers to a color that has been linked to weddings since--get this--Roman times) and make it a perfect description of the TARDIS. Makes one actually look upon the little rhyme with suspicion (do you really think the Doctor may have...?), which is what the very best science fiction is all about. It upends conventional thinking (Look at Wells' War of the Worlds and how it upsets our notions of natural superiority). It puts matters--ordinary matters we never much think about--in a brand new perspective (Look at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and how it challenges our notions of what is alive, what is human, and what possesses a human soul). It changes us in ways however small, even something as small as the way we look at an old marriage custom.

Wonderful episode, wonderful season; if I don't think it measures up to the very best of the previous five seasons of the new Doctor, that may be because I consider four of Moffat's six previous scripts for the past four seasons to have set the bar very high. Blink had a more intricate and elegantly structured plot all crammed into a single episode, whereas this finale was developed over the course of an entire season (think of what Moffat achieves here, and of how Nolan's Inception is far less witty, or intricate, on a far more expansive format); The Girl in the Fireplace had more heartbreak (though Rory--and the Doctor himself, towards the end of this episode--did have their moments); The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances turns on a wonderfully original concept, using war-torn Britain as a fitting backdrop (an End-of-the-World scenario taking place against what most Britons at the time must have felt was the End of the World), presenting the chilling image of a boy patiently, implacably, looking for his mother. Moffat's latest joins that august company; here's to hoping his next season will be as good, if not better.