Something has happened to time... Pterodactyls are attacking small children, Winston Churchill is heralded as Caesar, and Charles Dickens is promoting his new book on BBC Breakfast. On the 22nd of April 2011 at 5.02pm, everything that has ever happened and ever will, is happening all at once. In The Wedding of River Song, Steven Moffat's grand finale brings things full circle, ending the series perfectly, but leaves many threads still hanging.
This moment has been coming a long time, and as it's a fixed point in time, maybe it's always been coming; the death of the Doctor. Having put it off for almost 200 years, touring the Universe bidding everyone one last goodbye, the Doctor knows his time is fast approaching and goes searching for an answer as to why he must die. Tracking down members of the order of the Silence, the Doctor follows a trail of contacts to take him to the man who may just tell him why.
"On the fields of Trenzalor, at the fall of the eleventh, when no living creature could speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked. A question which must never ever be answered..."
Meanwhile, in a distorted time-line, all of history is happening at once. The clocks are still, the past and the future are the present, and for some reason this means that cars are borne aloft by hot air balloons. In this bizarre other-world, the Doctor is regarded as a soothsayer – albeit a dangerous one – as he is apparently the only one who knows why this is happening, and how it can be fixed. At Area 52, which just so happens to be a pyramid on a train line, both the cause of the problem and it's solution can be found. But a sinister foe lies in wait...
As the finale of the series, The Wedding of River Song promised to be monumental, bizarre, captivating, and timey-wimey. All those boxes were indeed ticked (I keep a tally on those four traits, not just for Doctor Who but in general!). Flitting between the 'real' time-line and the constant-now, how this all happened begins to piece itself together, and all the metaphorical fingers point the blame towards River Song fighting pre-destiny.
Everything about the episode revolved around the Doctor's death, or rather, in the constant-now, his non-death. For all the complaints of Doctor Who being too complicated now, the solution (which some people feared was to be so convoluted that it would be comparable to attempting to divide something by zero) was actually remarkably simple, if executed in a rather clever style. As much as I love the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who, the stories spawned from Moffat's Mind tend to play a lot more with duplicity and the concept of time travel to great effect.
Knowing that to prevent the whole of reality from falling apart he must die, and River's reluctance to kill him, the Doctor cunningly fakes his inevitable death by disguising the Teselecta as himself (the Ganger Doctor was a red herring, I guess). Only revealing this twist to River, events play out as they should, and the rest of the Universe (aside from River, and later Amy and Rory) believes the Doctor to be dead, essentially rebooting the show to it's earlier days. Moffat's vision of the Doctor as a mysterious adventurer can now take form and bury the legendary mantle of the Time Lord Victorious. Personally, I'm quite looking forward to the return to the days of the Doctor as an anonymous traveller without him being the be-all and end-all of the Universe.
Throughout the episode, Matt Smith was once again on top form, certainly cementing himself as a contender to rival Tennant and Baker as one of the greatest and most iconic Doctors of all time. It was also good to see Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill return after their supposed 'farewell' at the end of The God Complex, and in a different capacity than usual. Amy's leading an operation against the Silence and to help the Doctor, able to recall events from the 'real' time-line, whilst Rory has embraced the honourable warrior within him that's been glimpsed at before in episodes like A Good Man Goes To War. Once again, this was an episode which saw the whole cast at the absolute top of their game.
And so, with only three people (and a head) aware that he's still alive, the Doctor continues on his eternal journey of exploration and adventure across time and space. But still he bears a secret, the answer to the first question, and the question that must never be answered...
Doctor Who?
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