Comments | sensiblecat: A bitchy, late-night review of The Wedding of River Song (Spoilers, obviously)

sensiblecat

A bitchy, late-night review of The Wedding of River Song (Spoilers, obviously)

Oct 02, 2011 00:28

My first impression of TWORS is that it's either complete b....s or it'll stand a rewatch. Like all SM's finales it moves too quickly and tries to pack in too much. It's also becoming somewhat too obvious that most of the episodes are starved of cash so he can indulge himself in the finales. He always was a bit like that - remember his hissy fit ( Read more... )

doctor who, matt smith

Comments 10

parrot_knight October 1 2011, 23:41:13 UTC

As someone has pointed out elsewhere, it wasn't the death of the Doctor that turned out to be the fixed point, but his apparent death. As Dorium points out, he has not thereby avoided the fate the Silence wish him to avoid - Silence will not fall because the fall of the eleventh will, presumably, lead to the twelfth...

wendymr October 1 2011, 23:54:59 UTC

Personally, I thought it was a load of old rubbish :(

And your point about River Song putting the entire universe in jeopardy for the sake of True Luv is very well-made. And in her case, she actually gets to keep the "real" Doctor.

Urgh. This time they may well have lost me entirely.

farsh_nuke October 2 2011, 00:51:14 UTC

Ah yes Steven's famous Hissy fit about 10 ridingahorse through a mirror, the one that never actually happened because Steven never really expected it to get included, like a school kid slipping in a Doctor Who reference in his course work.

And as for River being the woman who ends the universe and isn't Moffat sexist and misogynistic? I will say this.

If River were a man where would that extra layer of duality be. I'm entirely happy for the Doctor to be the woman and River the man but don't ruin the beautiful duality for PC ideals.

River is the Doctor's mirror, where he would die for the universe, she would sacrifice the universe for him.

And fixed points in time and space deal with knowledge. In Pompeii they found the bodies, in the Water's of Mars ten could feel fragile history like oceans of glass. By the time he decided to save the day he was doing it as an act of rebellion, he didn't just want to save Adelaide Brooke, he wanted to change history for the better.

earlgreytea68 October 2 2011, 14:14:16 UTC

In a way, isn't the Doctor trying to do that with Adelaide Brooke? I like the comment that says something about how it wasn't the Doctor's death that was a fixed point, but his *apparent* death, that makes sense to me, but it did seem to me in TWoM like the Doctor felt like he could change a fixed point and handle the repercussions. Adelaide took matters into her own hands, but it seemed like there was some kind of precedent for the Doctor starting to think that you can fudge fixed points a little bit. And, after all, he did rescue *some* people from Pompeii, on Donna's pleas for it. I don't think that you can run around changing all fixed points in time, because then you get pterodactyls in the air over picnics, but it seems like the Doctor has a little bit of wiggle room around the fixed points. Like A, B, and C have to happen, but maybe he can sneak in D as well.

sensiblecat October 2 2011, 14:35:01 UTC

Well, I hope so. I think what I'm doing is just interrogating that statement of Ten's, "If you want to take it to a higher authority, there isn't one." If there's a higher authority but you can outwit it, I guess that statement's pretty much true.

I sometimes wonder if the Doctor will turn out to be God.

earlgreytea68 October 2 2011, 14:43:56 UTC

Yeah, I think time might be like a scientific reaction, so that the Doctor has some wiggle room, but there's an equation where, if he messes with it too much, it all explodes.

I worry all the time about the Doctor being God. When I first started watching DW, I was struck by how God-less the universe of the show was, by how the Doctor basically *is* God in this universe. There's one point in the Chaosverse where I have Rose praying, just in case there's a higher authority than her Doctor out there, and I remember when I wrote that thinking how it's something we'd never seen on the show, really, a character turning to something *other* than the Doctor. There's a lot there to unpack.

topaz_eyes October 2 2011, 18:18:29 UTC

And people called Rose Tyler selfish and silly. But then she was working class.

When Eleven mentioned going back in time to help Rose Tyler with her homework, at first I thought it was sweet to mention her. Then I thought of the deeper context, and Moffat, I saw what you did thar. It amuses me how Moff fans don't want to acknowledge that in the end, River is Moff's Rose, simple as that.

Who makes the Laws of Time? And can you really fool them by faking a fixed point?... Are we really meant to think that, whatever that Something is, it can be fooled by what is basically a clever fake? That seems to be getting very close to saying "The laws of time are mine and they will obey me!"I think, in RTD's era, "The Laws of Time" was simply an euphemism for the Law of Mortality (which IMHO is directly related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which ultimately is a natural law). RTD's Who-verse was defined from the start as "Everything ends and everything dies," and no one was exempt from it, including the Doctor ( ... )