The Wedding of River Song

[tardis_stowaway]

There were a lot of things I liked about "The Wedding of River Song" and some things I loved, and overall I enjoyed it.  However, I don't feel that it managed to salvage some of the messy, frustrating plot arcs of S6 as a whole, and it didn't speak to me emotionally as strongly as previous New Who finales.

Comments

[netgirl_y2k]

Yes. This. There was lots of really cool stuff in there. "Do Not Feed the Pterodactyls" anybody? But I wanted something amazing to counteract the frustration I've been feeling with Moffat and this series arc, and this definitely wasn't it.

[yamx]

I think this all goes back to reality being what everyone thinks is real. If everyone thinks the Doctor died there, and if everyone thinks River killed him, then that's what happened. The thing about a fixed point as I understand it, is that a lot of other events hinge on it. If everyone thinks the Doctor is dead and River murdered him, then everyone will act like they would if that was really the case, so all events that hinge on it will unfold correctly.

I am curious to see the Doctor's attempts to stay "in the shadows" from now on. Somehow, I don't think he'll be good at it. *g*

[reverendjmg]

Yeah, the "Doctor who?" question is something they've used as a joke several times, as in "That's the Doctor," "Wait, Doctor who?" Trying to use it as a serious question occurred many times with Seven, when at the end of another intertemporal mystery being solved the Doctor's companion would close the episode by saying, "That just leaves one question...Doctor, who are you?" Trying to use it as a Big Evil Of The Season is awful and disappointing to me.

I am glad that Amy was vindicated a bit from her perfume line--what with her train-board office and being in charge of an international gang of eye-patch people.

The TARDIS exploding has not been explained, nor is Amy's ability to remember everything even if she's not "at the center" of the timey-wimey.

[skalja]

There was a line explaining Amy's abilities shortly after she first appeared this ep, wasn't there? The Doctor said she could remember because growing up next to a rift in spacetime made her more sensitive to fluctuations in reality, or some such.

[reverendjmg]

I never liked that as an explanation. They throw it around every time it comes up--like in this episode, when the Doctor is trying to encourage her to remember without knowing that she already does--but it does not explain why the rift gave her these superpowers, instead of eating her, like it did to everyone else in her house who lived right next to it.

[skalja]

I thought Amy leaving Kovarian to die was interesting -- she's always struck me as the darkest of the long-running New Who companions (it's hard to compare her to Jack or Mickey for entirely different reasons), and I can believe it of her when I couldn't really buy such an action from Rose, Martha, or Donna. The fact that she did it out of grief over losing River makes the difference between "dark but sympathetic" versus "moral event horizon," to my mind. (Not that I'd condone what she did in real life, either way! But for fiction, yes.)

I loved the tribute to Courtney/the Brig -- easily the most emotionally compelling moment in the episode for me! The namechecks for Rose and Jack were also great, and encourages my hopes that John Barrowman will get his wish for a guest appearance sometime in the future.

I'm pretty sure the fixed point was always the fakeout -- it's just that this episode we finally learned that it was a fake