Love and Death in Doctor Who: The Wedding of River Song Analysis Part One
"Rather than seeing the archetypes of Death and Life as opposites, they must be held together as the left and right side of a single thought. It is true that within a single love relationship there are many endings. Yet, somehow and somewhere in the delicate layers of the being that is created when two people love one another, there is both a heart and breath. While one side of the heart empties, the other fills. When one breath runs out, another begins. If one believes that the Life/Death/Life force has no stanza beyond death, it is no wonder some humans are frightened of commitment. They are terrified to go through even one ending. They cannot bear to pass from the veranda into the inner rooms."~Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PHD
"The flight of the dreamer from the drab duties of home and town toward the good companions and the magic.... the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat--anywhere to avoid "civilization", which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility… [this escapist] world is not only asexual, however, it is terrible: a world of fear and loneliness, a haunted world…To "light out for the territory" or seek refuge in the forest seems easy and tempting from the vantage point of a chafing and restrictive home; but civilization once disavowed…. the bulwark of woman left behind, the wanderer feels himself without protection, more motherless child than free man…the enemy of society on the run toward "freedom" is also the pariah in flight from his guilt, the guilt of that very flight…" ~Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel
"Our literature as a whole at times seems a chamber of horrors disguised as an amusement park "fun house," where we pay to play at terror and are confronted in the innermost chamber with a series of inter-reflecting mirrors which present us with a thousand versions of our own face." ~Leslie Fiedler
After watching The Wedding of River Song, sure, I felt disappointed. And, I heard many a disgruntled rumblings in the fandom.
Then I turned on my brain.
Come on, GoldenMoonRose, let's not pretend we're not watching Doctor Who here. Let's not pretend that every motif, symbol, and theme of the past two series wasn't leading right here. Let's not pretend that was Chekov's gun on the mantel. Rather, that was Chekov's gun being symbolically and thematically thrust in our faces for two series. Let's not pretend that I didn't just take 20 pages of notes and pull out four reference books while watching this episode.
Because, GoldenMoonRose, let's not pretend that The Wedding of River Song wasn't a big chocolate-drizzled timey wimey dream-logic [3] ball of my most favorite genres: fairy tale, gothic novel, the Western, and Film Noir. This is like if Leslie Fiedler [4], Steven Moffat, Frank L. Baum, Lewis Caroll, John Huston, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne [5], Edgar Allan Poe, and Carl Jung had a baby all over the screen.
A baby I would eat.
I love fairy tale and mythology more than anything ever, but American Literature? That's my bread and butter, folks. Did I ever mention that my degree's concentration was in American Literature [6]? Who knew that it would be the Brits that would write the great American fairy tale!?! [7]
A Western, gothic novel, film noir, fairy tale Doctor Who. Let's not pretend that this, if not quite successful, is, at least, the greatest thing ever. Especially if this is just the beginning [8]. A Western-Film Noir-Fairy Tale through time and space, with the Eleventh Doctor at the center? Yes, please!
Come on, this is exactly what Doctor Who should be. Exactly. The lone, mysterious, nameless hero in the wilderness, straddling the worlds of reality and imagination, time and space, navigating the outer and inner worlds, the macro-cosmos and micro-cosmos, battling his inner dualities and inner demons, striving to be an angel among a sea of monsters, including the one that stares at him from the mirror [9].
"They're going to kill me, too, very soon. I was going to just lie down and take it.
But you know what, before I go, I'd like to know why I have to die." [10]
"He lives on the last horizon of an endlessly retreating vision of innocence--
on the 'frontier,' which is to say, the margin where
the theory of original goodness
and the fact of original sin come face to face."
--Leslie Fielder
The episode begins with the Doctor dressed as we left him: his "badge" [11] and title left behind, as are his companions that define him. He's sporting the Stetson and wearing that sexy long coat, which is equal parts bad ass lone gunfighter and bumbling weary, old detective. That is to say, equal parts cowboy, equal parts private eye. The Eleventh Doctor is embodying the two archetypes of two very American genres: the Western and the Film Noir. Two genres that aren't exclusive in the slightest. Both are very masculine genres, genres about the lone hero escaping from the feminine civilization, up against the wilderness, against the internal wilderness of a lawless country of lawless men. Simultaneously embracing the feminine civilization and the escapism found in the noble savage wilderness. A lone hero, fighting his own inner demons, while living up to a moral code of his own.
Now, of course, I'm totally lying. This isn't where the episode begins. The episode begins with a bookend (which is standard film noir nonlinear storytelling) in another reality, where the Doctor is telling his story to Winston Churchill. The world is wrong: all of time is happening at once, and, yet, time is standing still. This is the stuff of fairy tale. Because it's not really that time is standing still, it's that the next moment will never happen [12]. Time stops so that the lovers will both never be together and never lose each other. In other words, so that both love and death--the greatest dualities of all, the most fundamental dualities of the human psyche and experience, are constantly happening, and constantly never happening.
This is appropriate as all hell because, remember, the past two series have been all about dualities: faith and fear (The God Complex), the old man and the child (The Eleventh Hour), heaven and earth (The Lodger and Closing Time), and, most of all, the beast below and the angel above (The Eleventh Hour/Beast Below, Pandorica Opens/Big Bang, Vincent and the Doctor, The Girl Who Waited, The God Complex). Just as the Doctor's two hearts have been beating away, his identity has been swinging between the fulcrums of these various dualities. Dualities are the means by which one's identity is determined. They are the mirror by which we can see who we are (which is why we've had mirrors and eyeballs all the fuck over the place this series).
But, in order to face the greatest duality of all, love and death, the Doctor needs an external mirror. A living, breathing external mirror that will mean both death and love to him. River.
Which brings us right back to all those American and Western/Film Noir themes! It is delightfully ironic that, while the Doctor was "Ponding" and "lighting out for the territories" in order to escape love and death in its embodiment of River (whose name makes her a symbol for Time itself), River herself stops time in order to prevent this meeting of love and death, her wedding and his death, the murder of her love. As I've said in previous analysis, Time, in Moffat's Who, is a magical--and more importantly, psychological--realm where identity is determined among dualities. Therefore, the fact that River and the Doctor are running (another theme) away from Time means that they are running away from their own (and each other's) identities. It's no wonder, then, that running away means that they have been running towards it all along. Duality is a circle, after all.
River and the Doctor have always been mirrors for each other, and we've known it long before the Doctor saw his reflection in her spacesuit visor at Lake Silencio. It was right from the first moment she raised her visor in The Library that the two have been serving as identity-defining time mirrors, as monster and angel for each other. In determining and knowing each other's past, present, and future, they've determined and known each other's destiny and identity. This was most dramatic in this series' middle double-episodes. In A Good Man Goes to War, River taught the Doctor his name and identity. In Let's Kill Hitler, he did the same for her. If they are mirrors, then they are the literary anima and animus, the perfect match, a marriage of literary and psychological proportions.
"What happened to time?" "A woman."
Is River the woman who marries the Doctor? Or is she the woman who kills him? She must be both. She must be a living duality of love and death, just as she must be the Doctor's mirror. And this all fits perfectly into our American Doctor Who fairy tale Western Film Noir. If the Doctor is playing the archetype of the Western lone gunslinger and the Film Noir grizzled private eye, River is the civilizing, morally-centered, emotional-over-intellect woman at the homestead of the Western and the seductive, amoral femme fatale of Film Noir.
How can you not love that? Jungian psychology and American Western literature and film noir? What a perfect, brilliant portrayal of the dualities of love and death being shown to be exactly the same thing! Marriage and murder are one!
Come on. I can't be the only one punching the air right now.
And how perfect is this for Doctor Who? Domesticity, civilization, has always been death to our Doctor, the great adventurer, who always was the lone gunslinger, the lone hero in his TARDIS (who might as well be his loyal steed). He's been the place where brides run away to on their wedding night to escape the domestic life. But now, now we have a bride running after him in order to marry and kill him. What a brilliant step through the mirror!
But, of course, we all know that River isn't quite the happy homemaker, the embodiment of feminine civilization. River is much more the femme fatale, the lover and the murderer in one. She's the tragic femme fatale, who's roots are much, much older than film noir. She is the temptress, the seductress of the noble knight, La Belle Dame Sans Merci [14], the tragic seductress that can't help but lure the man she loves to his death. She might be the civilized, home-making Western woman archetype, but, if any place is her home, it is the Doctor's TARDIS, which doesn't even have a permanent location in time or space, but is that loyal steed forever running off into the wilderness [13]. River is as much a wild woman as the Doctor is. She matches his wild nature. And, because of this, because she is his living, breathing mirror, the means by which he can become himself, the means by which he can face the wilderness and remain civilized, she will allow him to face death and love and then a rebirth.
Sorry, back to the story, the bookend being told to Winston Churchill. The Doctor, the film noir detective, the lone gunslinger, the fallen man, the man who fell right out of civilization, the man with no identity, is investigating a murder and death: his own. Film noir detectives/heroes are always morally ambiguous and flawed, striding along the line between worlds of civilization and wilderness, between guilt and innocence, between good and evil. The Doctor is both monster and angel, hero and demon, creature of the heavens and the earth, trying to do the right thing and never quite able to separate it from doing the wrong thing. Film noir and Western heroes are deeply alienated. How more alienated can you get than an alien that is the last of his species? The Western and Film Noir hero strives against fate, but is ultimately doomed [15]. That's our Doctor, all right. He's alone and alienated, trying to escape fate, but all the while, knows he's running right towards it, that he must run towards it. To not do so would make him a monster. This is the Film Noir and Western hero.
"Imagine you were dying.
Imagine that you were afraid and a long way from home, in terrible pain.
Just when you thought it couldn't get worse,
you looked up,
and saw the face of the devil himself."
The Doctor walks through the door and into the Dalek's view. This whole image, with the blurred and shadowed cinematography, even the voice-over, is not only film noir and Western in essence, but in theme. We are literally inside the Dalek's mind [16], seeing through his eye, and the voice-over blurs the lines between the Doctor and the Dalek, between the monster and the hero.
It is appropriate that the Doctor steals the Dalek's eye we were just looking out of, particularly considering that this episode ends with the Doctor looking out his own eye. Eyes, of course, have been a running motif of the series. Eyes are exactly like mirrors. Psychological mirrors of identity. They are how the world experiences and identifies each other. And it is in the eyes of others that we see ourselves reflected, which equally defines us. This is the place where the macro-cosmos meet the micro-cosmos. It is not surprising that the episode begins with the Doctor seen outside of the eye, and ends with him inside of the eye.
To be continued...
[1] Actually, this episode/essay has a playlist: Death by White Lies, Runaway by The National, Beyond the Moon by Matt Costa, Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Kids by MGMT.
[2] And John Huston direct?
[3] Because, really, this is fantasy, it doesn't have to make sense. It only has to say something about the universal soul, and it does.
[4] When you have a literary critic as an influence, just goes to show how absolutely META this show has gotten.
[5] Whom I already thought had influenced Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon and even quoted in my review of Night Terrors.
[6]More importantly, in a bizarre twist of fate, my Halloween costume this year? A Steampunk/Western anthropomorphic TARDIS.
[7] Bastards! They just have to do everything brilliantly, don't they?
[8] Am I disappointed that Moffat didn't reveal anything, didn't answer practically any questions? On the one hand, yeah. On the other hand, I'm an old fangirl of Harry Potter and Lost; I'm used to not having questions answered. Actually, I like having unanswered questions. (And I'm so glad that Doctor was totally taking the piss when he supposedly told River his name.) The journey is infinitely more fun than the destination. Also, I'm still in such awe and glee at all the mythology--that there are unanswered questions--in Doctor Who, now, that I'm totally not complaining. I mean, series five was the best series of Doctor Who, and series six blew it out of the water. Can you imagine what Moffat has up his sleeve for series seven and beyond? Of course you can't. That's the point!!
And, I love that, just when I figure the Doctor out, the places where Moffat has moved his character and the very nature of the show, he twists and evolves it a little further. The Eleventh Doctor has changed and evolved in so many ways since he emerged, soaking wet, out of a sideways TARDIS and spit up food all over Amelia Pond's kitchen floor. This show is anything but static, and I'm in love with it.
[9] How could I, a middle school English teacher, not absolutely love this? This show has turned into an allegory of my life. And, as my life is already meta as it is. Oh, the spirals!
[10] Come on, that line could have come out of a John Huston film, either a film noir (The Maltese Falcon) or a western (Treasure of Sierra Madre).
[11] "The Doctor, here to help", the badge that "has my name on it, in case I forget who I am. Very thoughtful, as that does happen." A badge, like that of the archetypical sheriff of the West, tells him his identity in his title.
[12] And yet, like the best of Doctor Who, it is mixed with a touch of science. Suddenly, we're in a three dimensional world, rather than a fourth-dimensional world. We are stuck on the flat plane, where everything is smushed together. Reminds me of that brilliant book, Flatlands by William Abbott Abbott.
[13] The TARDIS itself has been analyzed to death by me and done allegorically these past two series, most significantly in The Lodger and The Doctor's Wife.
[14] Some, in many legends, like in the painting above, put their "victim" to sleep for years, in other words, stopping and speeding up time at once. Exactly as River does. This is why it isn't surprising that the Doctor in the alternative reality is still aging.
[15] According to J. David Slocum, "protagonists assume the literal identities of dead men in nearly fifteen percent of all noir." In The Wedding of River Song, the protagonist is a dead man.
[16]This is not the first time we've seen the Doctor through the Dalek's eye. Back in Victory of the Daleks, we saw through their eyes, which, along with The Beast Below, set up Moffat's Who as a psychological journey of identity as defined in the extremes of monster and angel. Eyes, naturally, are the symbol of this theme.
"The flight of the dreamer from the drab duties of home and town toward the good companions and the magic.... the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat--anywhere to avoid "civilization", which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility… [this escapist] world is not only asexual, however, it is terrible: a world of fear and loneliness, a haunted world…To "light out for the territory" or seek refuge in the forest seems easy and tempting from the vantage point of a chafing and restrictive home; but civilization once disavowed…. the bulwark of woman left behind, the wanderer feels himself without protection, more motherless child than free man…the enemy of society on the run toward "freedom" is also the pariah in flight from his guilt, the guilt of that very flight…" ~Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel
"Our literature as a whole at times seems a chamber of horrors disguised as an amusement park "fun house," where we pay to play at terror and are confronted in the innermost chamber with a series of inter-reflecting mirrors which present us with a thousand versions of our own face." ~Leslie Fiedler
After watching The Wedding of River Song, sure, I felt disappointed. And, I heard many a disgruntled rumblings in the fandom.
Then I turned on my brain.
Come on, GoldenMoonRose, let's not pretend we're not watching Doctor Who here. Let's not pretend that every motif, symbol, and theme of the past two series wasn't leading right here. Let's not pretend that was Chekov's gun on the mantel. Rather, that was Chekov's gun being symbolically and thematically thrust in our faces for two series. Let's not pretend that I didn't just take 20 pages of notes and pull out four reference books while watching this episode.
Because, GoldenMoonRose, let's not pretend that The Wedding of River Song wasn't a big chocolate-drizzled timey wimey dream-logic [3] ball of my most favorite genres: fairy tale, gothic novel, the Western, and Film Noir. This is like if Leslie Fiedler [4], Steven Moffat, Frank L. Baum, Lewis Caroll, John Huston, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne [5], Edgar Allan Poe, and Carl Jung had a baby all over the screen.
A baby I would eat.
I love fairy tale and mythology more than anything ever, but American Literature? That's my bread and butter, folks. Did I ever mention that my degree's concentration was in American Literature [6]? Who knew that it would be the Brits that would write the great American fairy tale!?! [7]
A Western, gothic novel, film noir, fairy tale Doctor Who. Let's not pretend that this, if not quite successful, is, at least, the greatest thing ever. Especially if this is just the beginning [8]. A Western-Film Noir-Fairy Tale through time and space, with the Eleventh Doctor at the center? Yes, please!
Come on, this is exactly what Doctor Who should be. Exactly. The lone, mysterious, nameless hero in the wilderness, straddling the worlds of reality and imagination, time and space, navigating the outer and inner worlds, the macro-cosmos and micro-cosmos, battling his inner dualities and inner demons, striving to be an angel among a sea of monsters, including the one that stares at him from the mirror [9].
"They're going to kill me, too, very soon. I was going to just lie down and take it.
But you know what, before I go, I'd like to know why I have to die." [10]
"He lives on the last horizon of an endlessly retreating vision of innocence--
on the 'frontier,' which is to say, the margin where
the theory of original goodness
and the fact of original sin come face to face."
--Leslie Fielder
The episode begins with the Doctor dressed as we left him: his "badge" [11] and title left behind, as are his companions that define him. He's sporting the Stetson and wearing that sexy long coat, which is equal parts bad ass lone gunfighter and bumbling weary, old detective. That is to say, equal parts cowboy, equal parts private eye. The Eleventh Doctor is embodying the two archetypes of two very American genres: the Western and the Film Noir. Two genres that aren't exclusive in the slightest. Both are very masculine genres, genres about the lone hero escaping from the feminine civilization, up against the wilderness, against the internal wilderness of a lawless country of lawless men. Simultaneously embracing the feminine civilization and the escapism found in the noble savage wilderness. A lone hero, fighting his own inner demons, while living up to a moral code of his own.
Now, of course, I'm totally lying. This isn't where the episode begins. The episode begins with a bookend (which is standard film noir nonlinear storytelling) in another reality, where the Doctor is telling his story to Winston Churchill. The world is wrong: all of time is happening at once, and, yet, time is standing still. This is the stuff of fairy tale. Because it's not really that time is standing still, it's that the next moment will never happen [12]. Time stops so that the lovers will both never be together and never lose each other. In other words, so that both love and death--the greatest dualities of all, the most fundamental dualities of the human psyche and experience, are constantly happening, and constantly never happening.
This is appropriate as all hell because, remember, the past two series have been all about dualities: faith and fear (The God Complex), the old man and the child (The Eleventh Hour), heaven and earth (The Lodger and Closing Time), and, most of all, the beast below and the angel above (The Eleventh Hour/Beast Below, Pandorica Opens/Big Bang, Vincent and the Doctor, The Girl Who Waited, The God Complex). Just as the Doctor's two hearts have been beating away, his identity has been swinging between the fulcrums of these various dualities. Dualities are the means by which one's identity is determined. They are the mirror by which we can see who we are (which is why we've had mirrors and eyeballs all the fuck over the place this series).
But, in order to face the greatest duality of all, love and death, the Doctor needs an external mirror. A living, breathing external mirror that will mean both death and love to him. River.
Which brings us right back to all those American and Western/Film Noir themes! It is delightfully ironic that, while the Doctor was "Ponding" and "lighting out for the territories" in order to escape love and death in its embodiment of River (whose name makes her a symbol for Time itself), River herself stops time in order to prevent this meeting of love and death, her wedding and his death, the murder of her love. As I've said in previous analysis, Time, in Moffat's Who, is a magical--and more importantly, psychological--realm where identity is determined among dualities. Therefore, the fact that River and the Doctor are running (another theme) away from Time means that they are running away from their own (and each other's) identities. It's no wonder, then, that running away means that they have been running towards it all along. Duality is a circle, after all.
River and the Doctor have always been mirrors for each other, and we've known it long before the Doctor saw his reflection in her spacesuit visor at Lake Silencio. It was right from the first moment she raised her visor in The Library that the two have been serving as identity-defining time mirrors, as monster and angel for each other. In determining and knowing each other's past, present, and future, they've determined and known each other's destiny and identity. This was most dramatic in this series' middle double-episodes. In A Good Man Goes to War, River taught the Doctor his name and identity. In Let's Kill Hitler, he did the same for her. If they are mirrors, then they are the literary anima and animus, the perfect match, a marriage of literary and psychological proportions.
"What happened to time?" "A woman."
Is River the woman who marries the Doctor? Or is she the woman who kills him? She must be both. She must be a living duality of love and death, just as she must be the Doctor's mirror. And this all fits perfectly into our American Doctor Who fairy tale Western Film Noir. If the Doctor is playing the archetype of the Western lone gunslinger and the Film Noir grizzled private eye, River is the civilizing, morally-centered, emotional-over-intellect woman at the homestead of the Western and the seductive, amoral femme fatale of Film Noir.
How can you not love that? Jungian psychology and American Western literature and film noir? What a perfect, brilliant portrayal of the dualities of love and death being shown to be exactly the same thing! Marriage and murder are one!
Come on. I can't be the only one punching the air right now.
And how perfect is this for Doctor Who? Domesticity, civilization, has always been death to our Doctor, the great adventurer, who always was the lone gunslinger, the lone hero in his TARDIS (who might as well be his loyal steed). He's been the place where brides run away to on their wedding night to escape the domestic life. But now, now we have a bride running after him in order to marry and kill him. What a brilliant step through the mirror!
But, of course, we all know that River isn't quite the happy homemaker, the embodiment of feminine civilization. River is much more the femme fatale, the lover and the murderer in one. She's the tragic femme fatale, who's roots are much, much older than film noir. She is the temptress, the seductress of the noble knight, La Belle Dame Sans Merci [14], the tragic seductress that can't help but lure the man she loves to his death. She might be the civilized, home-making Western woman archetype, but, if any place is her home, it is the Doctor's TARDIS, which doesn't even have a permanent location in time or space, but is that loyal steed forever running off into the wilderness [13]. River is as much a wild woman as the Doctor is. She matches his wild nature. And, because of this, because she is his living, breathing mirror, the means by which he can become himself, the means by which he can face the wilderness and remain civilized, she will allow him to face death and love and then a rebirth.
Sorry, back to the story, the bookend being told to Winston Churchill. The Doctor, the film noir detective, the lone gunslinger, the fallen man, the man who fell right out of civilization, the man with no identity, is investigating a murder and death: his own. Film noir detectives/heroes are always morally ambiguous and flawed, striding along the line between worlds of civilization and wilderness, between guilt and innocence, between good and evil. The Doctor is both monster and angel, hero and demon, creature of the heavens and the earth, trying to do the right thing and never quite able to separate it from doing the wrong thing. Film noir and Western heroes are deeply alienated. How more alienated can you get than an alien that is the last of his species? The Western and Film Noir hero strives against fate, but is ultimately doomed [15]. That's our Doctor, all right. He's alone and alienated, trying to escape fate, but all the while, knows he's running right towards it, that he must run towards it. To not do so would make him a monster. This is the Film Noir and Western hero.
"Imagine you were dying.
Imagine that you were afraid and a long way from home, in terrible pain.
Just when you thought it couldn't get worse,
you looked up,
and saw the face of the devil himself."
The Doctor walks through the door and into the Dalek's view. This whole image, with the blurred and shadowed cinematography, even the voice-over, is not only film noir and Western in essence, but in theme. We are literally inside the Dalek's mind [16], seeing through his eye, and the voice-over blurs the lines between the Doctor and the Dalek, between the monster and the hero.
It is appropriate that the Doctor steals the Dalek's eye we were just looking out of, particularly considering that this episode ends with the Doctor looking out his own eye. Eyes, of course, have been a running motif of the series. Eyes are exactly like mirrors. Psychological mirrors of identity. They are how the world experiences and identifies each other. And it is in the eyes of others that we see ourselves reflected, which equally defines us. This is the place where the macro-cosmos meet the micro-cosmos. It is not surprising that the episode begins with the Doctor seen outside of the eye, and ends with him inside of the eye.
To be continued...
[1] Actually, this episode/essay has a playlist: Death by White Lies, Runaway by The National, Beyond the Moon by Matt Costa, Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Kids by MGMT.
[2] And John Huston direct?
[3] Because, really, this is fantasy, it doesn't have to make sense. It only has to say something about the universal soul, and it does.
[4] When you have a literary critic as an influence, just goes to show how absolutely META this show has gotten.
[5] Whom I already thought had influenced Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon and even quoted in my review of Night Terrors.
[6]More importantly, in a bizarre twist of fate, my Halloween costume this year? A Steampunk/Western anthropomorphic TARDIS.
[7] Bastards! They just have to do everything brilliantly, don't they?
[8] Am I disappointed that Moffat didn't reveal anything, didn't answer practically any questions? On the one hand, yeah. On the other hand, I'm an old fangirl of Harry Potter and Lost; I'm used to not having questions answered. Actually, I like having unanswered questions. (And I'm so glad that Doctor was totally taking the piss when he supposedly told River his name.) The journey is infinitely more fun than the destination. Also, I'm still in such awe and glee at all the mythology--that there are unanswered questions--in Doctor Who, now, that I'm totally not complaining. I mean, series five was the best series of Doctor Who, and series six blew it out of the water. Can you imagine what Moffat has up his sleeve for series seven and beyond? Of course you can't. That's the point!!
And, I love that, just when I figure the Doctor out, the places where Moffat has moved his character and the very nature of the show, he twists and evolves it a little further. The Eleventh Doctor has changed and evolved in so many ways since he emerged, soaking wet, out of a sideways TARDIS and spit up food all over Amelia Pond's kitchen floor. This show is anything but static, and I'm in love with it.
[9] How could I, a middle school English teacher, not absolutely love this? This show has turned into an allegory of my life. And, as my life is already meta as it is. Oh, the spirals!
[10] Come on, that line could have come out of a John Huston film, either a film noir (The Maltese Falcon) or a western (Treasure of Sierra Madre).
[11] "The Doctor, here to help", the badge that "has my name on it, in case I forget who I am. Very thoughtful, as that does happen." A badge, like that of the archetypical sheriff of the West, tells him his identity in his title.
[12] And yet, like the best of Doctor Who, it is mixed with a touch of science. Suddenly, we're in a three dimensional world, rather than a fourth-dimensional world. We are stuck on the flat plane, where everything is smushed together. Reminds me of that brilliant book, Flatlands by William Abbott Abbott.
[13] The TARDIS itself has been analyzed to death by me and done allegorically these past two series, most significantly in The Lodger and The Doctor's Wife.
[14] Some, in many legends, like in the painting above, put their "victim" to sleep for years, in other words, stopping and speeding up time at once. Exactly as River does. This is why it isn't surprising that the Doctor in the alternative reality is still aging.
[15] According to J. David Slocum, "protagonists assume the literal identities of dead men in nearly fifteen percent of all noir." In The Wedding of River Song, the protagonist is a dead man.
[16]This is not the first time we've seen the Doctor through the Dalek's eye. Back in Victory of the Daleks, we saw through their eyes, which, along with The Beast Below, set up Moffat's Who as a psychological journey of identity as defined in the extremes of monster and angel. Eyes, naturally, are the symbol of this theme.