Write Everyday Project #10, "The Wedding of River Song"

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Doctor Who season six finale, "The Wedding of River Song."  To ensure there's no problems, I've included some non-Who commentary first.  Everything past the "*  *  *" is spoiler territory.  You have been warned.

It was a busy weekend, and I ended up only getting one post out.  I'm going to need to make sure to get my writing in early on, since there's no guarantee I'll have time later on once things get busy.  Lesson learned.

There was also a lot to write about this weekend, some of which I' may mine for material in days ahead.  The Bears won ugly, I dabbled in Mage, a role playing game I haven't played in maybe twenty years or so, and the Android board game I played got a little wonky due to the randomness of the cards.  I've already touched on that one in the previous WEP post that I forgot to advertise, and is an example what happens when you try to write something at 4am.

Hint: It's a bad idea.  Coherency suffers.

*  *  *

But rather than talk about any of that, I've decided to go with the finale of season six (or season thirty two if you're a purist) of Doctor Who, which aired Saturday and I managed to catch on Sunday.  I'll want to watch the episode again, but my initial impressions can be summed up as follows: Bait and Switch.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the episode.  There were some great moments, and they did resolve the outstanding Death of the Doctor plot introduced back in episode one, though in retrospect they didn't explain why there's a clear regeneration effect coming out of the robot.  Or how the Tessalector crew got so much better at their jobs that they could skip around and hug people as seen in "Impossible Astronaut" and "The Wedding of River Song" when they could only move mechanically in "Let's Kill Hitler."  Or, for that matter, why shooting the Doctor in the middle of his regeneration is supposed to kill him stone dead, but shooting River in the middle of hers in "Hitler" just makes her bullet proof.  Presumably the energy weapon the Silence developed gets around that, but it shows that while they're better at it than they were under Davies, the Who crew still plays fast and loose with details.

What was eminently predictable was that in resolving this season's mystery, they set up next season's.  Last season they explained the Pandorica Opens mystery but left us with the "What is the Silence?" and "Who blew up the TARDIS?"  This season we get the deal with the Silence, and barring further explanations, can only assume that River's programming kicked in and she blew up the TARDIS while she thought she was trying to save her.  But now we get an even more obscure prophecy from Dorium's head.  "On the fields of Trenzalore, at the Fall of the Eleventh, the question will be asked."  The question being, apparently, "Doctor who?"

I grant you that going into the 50th year of the show that is a great question to ask, and if they're smart they'll have Eleven moving through the years in a kind of greatest hits season.  If they're [i]really[/i] smart, they'll use the occasion to bring back the Time Lords, as I talked about over here after "The Doctor's Wife."  One way or another, we'll definitely see Daleks, and fully functional ones rather than the dying victim we saw in "The Wedding of River Song."

Still, I wanted more and better answers, and I didn't get them, and that leaves me feeling empty rather than anticipating the next season.  I'll watch it, of course, but I was looking for more.

I did call that the Doctor wanted to solve the problem that was introduced in Davies' run of the Doctor playing on his reputation to get things done.  He had, as River said in this episode, become too big.  Moffat had wisely let the Doctor keep doing that in season five, then flipped the script at the end of that season and the halfway point of season six by having people decide to take the Doctor down because he's too threatening.  So it was nice to proven right on that point.  It was also nice to be faked out, because even with evidence right in front of us, none of us called the Tessalector as the way the Doctor cheats death.

In total, though, this is the least excited I've been about a "big" Who episode in the Moffat era.  Maybe I've become used to the big two part season finales, because this one just wasn't as big as I wanted it to be, which is an odd thing to say about a show that had everything from Teradactyls to Churchill in it.