the m0vie blog

“I had to die. I didn’t have to die alone.”

- The Doctor

That was actually a really crammed 45 minutes. If I’m ever looking for an example of how much plotting Steven Moffat can fit into a single regular-sized episode of Doctor Who, I think I only need to look back at The Wedding of River Song. It’s a piece of very smart science-fiction writing, bristling with ideas and tying up quite a lot of the questions that Moffat raised over the course of the last two years, while raising even more. I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of arcs that spread over more than a single season, if only because they run the risk of extending some of the problems with the season as a whole, rather than playing up the individual strengths of the episodes.

Death of the Doctor...

I have, to be honest, never subscribed to the idea of story arcs on Doctor Who. The show is Saturday tea time viewing, and family friendly. This isn’t another of the “dumbing down” arguments that have been oft-repeated over the blogosphere, but a simple acknowledgement that continuity can lock-out casual viewers – the show is situated on the weekend at the early evening, so casual viewers are important. I think that it’s entirely possible that viewers tuning in have no idea who River Song is and the whole thing about the Doctor dying – so it seems a bit counter-productive to return to that plot point time and time again.

I think that two- or even three-parters work well, but I think the shows that got the best responses from critics and fans this year have been stand-alone adventures like The Doctor’s Wife or The Girl Who Waited or even The God Complex, which all played off core themes rather than specific plot points. I think thematic plotlines work better over the course of a season (or multiple seasons) and the “entropy” theme that connected Tom Baker’s final stories is one of my favourite arcs, despite the disappointing conclusion. In short, I worry that the show’s increasing leaning towards arc-driven storytelling is driving it down the same continuity-loaded dead-end that killed televised Star Trek and has terminally infected mainstream comic books. You can tell intelligent and cleverly-constructed narratives, but I do worry that they just aren;t being properly contained.

I'm sure they'll patch it up...

On top of that, season-long arcs mean having to balance the individual stories against the year’s story-arc. Night Terrors felt weird following Let’s Kill Hitler, because Amy and Rory didn’t seem too bothered about the idea that their daughter had been kidnapped and weaponised by a deep-space cult. The God Complex worked because it picked up on thematic hints rather than actual events, portraying the Doctor as something of an arrogant and reckless failure who wasn’t nearly as careful as he should have been with the lives of others – but it feels strange because the season-long plot led viewers to believe that the Doctor’s inability to find Melody might have been the biggest of these and worthy of discussion in context. I think the individual episodes were handled well, but the connective tissue between them didn’t seem to exist.

Maybe Rory and Amy had, as it is suggested, made their peace with their daughter being used to kill their best friend, and were just happy she got to grow up – in The Wedding of River Song, Amy seems to suggest that the fact they’ve interacted with the fully-grown Melody meant they couldn’t change history to prevent it. It seems to run counter to the season’s theme of “time can be rewritten”, and there’s never any indication that Rory and Amy are anything but accepting of this. If it were my child, I’d ignore all the rules of time and tear the universe apart atom-by-atom if I had to – we’re talking Father’s Day, Part II territory here. Instead, it seemed like Rory and Amy just shrugged their shoulders.

Shocking...

Still, enough talking about the flaws with the season as a whole, let’s talk about the individual episode. Which was, in fairness, remarkably well-written and entertaining – just detailed enough that it doesn’t seem Moffat is straying too far into the realm of Chris Carter, refusing to answer anything. Instead, we get the season’s central plotline (the death of the Doctor) handled, while the arc for next year is suggested. While I was wrong when I guessed the Doctor would be in the astronaut suit, I did correctly predict the question (“Doctor Who?”), so my geek credibility isn’t completely in the toilet.

Continuing on from last year’s The Big Bang, Moffat continues to celebrate the end of the year by destroying time itself. Which is a novel twist on the old Russell T. Davies end-of-season cliffhangers. Indeed, Moffat does fall back on the typical “deus ex machina” style last-minute save, but I think that he handles it infinitely better than Davies used to. There’s none of that “clap your hands if you believe” nonsense, or a super and magical TARDIS glow, or an antagonist-absorbing void, to hand. Instead, Moffat shrewdly gives us all the elements he’d use to pull off his magic trick hidden in plain sight. I know a lot of people (myself included, again) suspected that the fakeout would be the almost!Doctor from The Almost People, so the robot!Doctor actually seems a fairly clever way of side-stepping the obvious narrative contrivance with a less-obvious but equal contrived plot-point. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better.

You've had some cowboys in here...

I do like that notion that  “all of history is happening at once” as a consequence of straying from one of those “fixed points” the show tends to go on about. In particular, there were a wealth of slightly creepy touches that seemed like typical Moffat elements. “It’s always two minutes past five,” Churchill observes. “The clocks have stopped ticking.” Is it wrong that I can’t help but hear hints of the White Guardian in the Doctor’s observation that, “Nothing happened, and it’s going to keep happening.” After all, in The Key to Time, the White Guardian’s ultimate sanction for the Doctor was subjecting him to an eternity of nothing.

I loved the big-budget feel of it all, especially the steam punk all-of-history-at-once visuals. I know that there are going to be those on the blogosphere making the case that Moffat has greedily gobbled the bulk of the year’s budget for his own scripts, and it’s hard to argue with that. On the other hand, if scripts like The God Complex and The Girl Who Waited can be produced on a shoestring, there’s little to worry about. More than that, such arguments ignore the fact that there’s no reason every show can’t look like this. Doctor Who is the BBC’s merchandising trump card, and its biggest seller overseas. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t get enough money to look this good every week, save political football inside the BBC offices. You can insert a random conspiracy theory related to the Tories and Michael Grade here, if you so wish.

Eye-stalking the Doctor...

That said, the episode seemed to work even better at a more granular level. I’ve found that interesting of Moffat’s writing – it tends to look better when you look at a smaller level, in contrast to Davies. When you pull back to the year-long arc, I think it struggles to hold together, but it’s moments like the Brigadier’s death, acknowledged beautifully here, that really sell it. Nicholas Courtney was a legend, and a man who was a key part of the franchise – it’s nice to acknowledge his death, especially when he hasn’t been a part of the revived series (though he did appear in a spin-off). I hope Sarah Jane gets a similiar send-off at some point. “We didn’t know how to contact you,” is an absolutely devastating line, which hammers home the central point of the season: the Doctor’s free-wheeling adventures aren’t as glamorous as they appear, and he’s a bit of a reckless cad who never thinks of the consequences.

It’s fascinating that the show pushed the idea of deconstructing the Doctor to its logical conclusion. Asked how he would deal with a threat to reality trapped in a man’s body, Churchill responds, “If I had to, I’d destroy the man.” In many ways, this year has been about destroying the man, picking apart the myth and the legend, showing that he’s not everything he appears to be. It’s Amy’s Choice, writ large. And so it’s fitting that the Moffat ends the season by demonstrating that he can also be fairly awesome. I’m going to be controversial and admit that I didn’t mind the Jesus parallels, with the beard and the robes, if only because they’re more nuanced than usual. He’s a man sacrificing himself for the world… but not really (he rises from the dead, after all). He’s clearly at least a little divine, but he’s also more than a little mortal.

Moffat patched it all together quite well...

I find something interesting in the character’s confession that he’s been “too big, too noisy.” Does that feel like a mission statement from the producer? Is it a way of justifying a more low key season next year, perhaps with a reduced scale (due to an inevitable reduced budget)? Does it mean even less of the “lonely god” and bombastic self-promotion that the Doctor has fallen back on in recent years? Feel free to start your speculation. I’m going to wait and see. I do wonder if the plan is to reveal the Doctor’s name on the fiftieth anniversary though, given the way the hints are going. Though, admittedly, I might be way off track.

So the season arc was a bit much, to be entirely honest, even if I quite liked the episode taken on its own. I am certainly intrigued for next year – if only because the plot point of “Doctor Who?” looks to be less intrusive than pregnancies, temporal assassinations, duplicate robots, kidnapped babies and armies on the edge of forever. But what do I know?

“All I can tell you is that it involves ghosts – and the past and the present and the future – all at the same time.”

- screw Neil Gaiman, Dickens is now my dream Doctor Who writer

Check out our reviews of the current season of Doctor Who:

• The Impossible Astronaut
• Day of the Moon
• The Curse of the Black Spot
• The Doctor’s Wife
• The Rebel Flesh
• The Almost People
• A Good Man Goes to War
• Let’s Kill Hitler
• Night Terrors
• The Girl Who Waited
• The God Complex
• Closing Time
• The Wedding of River Song

Filed under: Television Tagged: | amy, amy pond, bbc, doctor, DoctorWho, Moffat, River Song, rory, russell t. davies, star trek, steven moffat, the wedding of river song, Wedding of River Song, White Guardian