Doctor Who 6.13 and some season thoughts
You know, I think Stephen Moffat has a problem with his own reputation, i.e. because clever twists are his trick in trade, you expect him to be more complicated than he is and feel somewhat let down when he goes for the obvious (River in the suit, the man whom River killed being the Doctor, etc.). The other problem he shares with certain other show runners and a lot of fanfic writers, to wit, a tendency to go "you know what would be cool? This!" and only then bother to consider how the hell he should justify said plot element for the characters.
This being said: I enjoyed several elements of the finale However, as in the overall season, I mostly felt emotionally disengaged. Moffat!Who rarely fails to entertain me, but it doesn't emotionally engange me, safe for the occasional episode (hello, Neil Gaiman and Toby Whitehouse, also sometimes Gareth Roberts!). These are usually not written by the Moff, though I make an exception for The Eleventh Hour and Let's Kill Hitler. Where I part ways with viewers angry about this is that I hardly think this is unprecedented in the show's history, or a mark of bad quality. The first few years of the Fourth Doctor's reign are usually regarded as the pinnacle of Whodom and I can see why, but they don't emotionally engage me, either. (As opposed to the Three and Seven years; insert terse aside about how I resent being told you can't love Three and Seven at the same time.)
To get more season 6 finale specific: take Amy in the eye patch in a train as basically M. Yes, very cool. I got a kick out of watching that. But what does this have to do with what happened to Amy in the course of the season, or the fact she just took her leave from the Doctor? While watching her and the Doctor hug and the Doctor call her his friend it occured to me that not only the most memorable scene between them was him destroying her faith in him in The God Complex, and what he tells Interface!Amelia in Let's Kill Hitler, but that there were not that many other scenes involving the two of them, full stop. Now part of that is that the Doctor now relates to Amy-and-Rory as a unit, and I approve of that, but it also makes the whole best friend appellation feel unearned by what has been shown. The two Amy scenes that really emotionally hit home for me and which I thought were superb and connected to the story so far, emerging from it rather than being there because they're cool to watch, were Amy killing Koravian and her conversation with post-Byzantium River at the end. (More about the later in a minute.) Amy killing Koravian, who kidnapped her, stole her child and tried to make said child into her slave both resulted from all that happened and showed the ruthlessness of older Amy from The Girl Who Waited, being set free by horrible trauma, was there in younger Amy as well. It was the one scene that really really felt like pay off to inflicting pregnancy, kidnapping and los of child on Amy to begin with, and it was treated with the right gravity, as Amy later points out that erased timeline or not, she did it, she remembers doing it, so it was real.
She points this out to River, and here at last we got what I was hoping to see ever since A Good Man Goes To War and didn't; post-awareness of relation Amy and River interacting. Their final scene together was one of the three scenes in the finale which I loved. Of course, it was also a relief to see older, self-assured River back again after the Bella Swan version the younger River from the time bubble, and it was a great choice to have her come from after the adventure of the Byzantium. Among other things, this indicates this is where her prison sentence really ended. And when she said "so young" about Time of the Angels!Amy, you felt and believed that current day Amy is so much older, not in years but in experience and maturity. Not to mention that the idea of post Byzantium River visiting her post - Wedding parents pleases me to no end; I hope for drabbles and stories using it to be written by fandom. Amy used to be a girl, but in this scene I felt two women talking to each other, and I could see where that had come from.
The third scene which I loved in the finale was something that must have been inserted at the last minute but didn't feel like an add-on: the lovely homage to the late Nicholas Courtney aka Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart as the Doctor gets the news of his death. Give credit where due: Moffat placing the scene at just this point was genius, not just because of the transition from manic!Doctor to quiet-and-resolved!Doctor but because hearing about the Brig's death and the way he faced it was the perfect thing to get the Doctor into this different mode. And Matt Smith played the impact the news had perfectly. Lastly, the idea that the Doctor would want to visit the Brig just before facing being shot is just so right.
Things I didn't love but was amused by or okay with: surprisingly, this episode's reause of Jolly Old Churchill. Not least because he wasn't really Carry On Winston; that he was also Caesar and in the habit of flinging disturbing soothsayers in the Tower was a good acknowledgment of Churchill's imperialism as a quintessential character trait. The Tessera as the Chekovian gun and the Doctor's way out of his death without changing history. Also the Doctor's declaration of intending to go small scale which I hope means we're back to the non-Oncoming Storm plots where he's just an excentric traveller through time and space.
Sighed about: River (except for the last scene.) Not that it's ooc for younger River at this point because, as
londonkds pointed out, she's a recovering sociopath and the show as well as the Doctor clearly sees her "to hell with all creation, as long as you live!" attitude as horribly wrong. But it's still a depressing and by now unavoidable thought that River's entire existence revolves around the Doctor, taking away what was originally so appealing about the relationship (as well as differentiating it from that non-recovering sociopath in the Doctor's life, the Master, who'd totally pull that stunt of River's as well, except he'd have caused the timebubble/time burst effect deliberately to prove a point to the Doctor to begin with), the idea of an independent woman who does her own thing and leads her own life, was shaped by her own experiences and intermittently crosses paths with the Doctor. Mind you, post-Byzantium River still comes across that way, but: sure enough, she ends up talking about the Doctor.
Was distinctly displeased with: the fact we're stuck with the Silence for another season at least. I'm not that keen on them as villains. Also, "Doctor Who?"; Moff, don't try to be cute, it's not your strength, and that particular fourth wall breaking is annoying, not endearing. For the second year in a row, we had the really infuriating plot device of the Doctor ignoring something/neglecting to do something just because it wasn't finale time yet without Moffat bothering to come up with a Watsonian explanation. In s5, these were the cracks which were only of the highest priority in arc episodes and of non-concern in standalones; in s6, it was the Doctor not bothering to find the little girl again at the end of the season opener, something for which there was only the obvious Doylist explanation (i.e. if he'd done so, there would have been no River as we know her), and no Watsonian explanation whatsoever. Maybe it's too much to hope s7 won't inflct something similar on us, but I am an eternal optimist. (While nostalgically longing for Bad Wolf, Torchwood and Mr. Saxon or those vanishing bees and planets. Say what you want about Rusty, but using catch words through a season until the finale worked far better because the Doctor didn't look incomprehensibly callous and/or stupid for not investigating something he should.) And, to end where I started, the overall sense that the finale as well as the season resulted from Moffat making a list of "things that would be cool to see on Doctor Who" and then tried to come up with a plot to justify them rather than thinking "these are the characters I have to work with; how could they develop and where do I want to go with them?".
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