(783) The Wedding of River Song

The final episode of the series has to do a lot and unlike previous series finale (namely those by RTD), it manages to achieve it. The episode starts off in totally bonkers style with a sight of London where people have hot air balloons attached to cars and pterodactyls are flying around the parks.Simon Callow returns as Charles Dickins. I thought that it was a nice return bearing in mind that it had been a very long time since The Unquiet Dead. What wasn’t so much of a welcome return was Matt Smith’s dodgy beard. Winston Churchill is living in Buckingham Palace and Malokeh from the SIlurians two parter. Churchill uses the Doctor as a soothsayer and the early part of this story is told in the form of a flashback.

The set with the skulls is a rather creepy set and the bit where Gantok (played by Mark Gatiss) is sucked into the skulls is a rather grim moment. It was one of those moment where I thought that people might complain it was too scary cause it was a bit scarier than normal.

Trenzalore is mentioned in this story and this is the start of the end for Matt Smith’s Doctor. The fall of the eleventh is also another phrase that I think pops up again and again so no sooner are we done with this story arc than another one starts.

This episode features a scene that still gets me emotional and it’s when the Doctor receives a phone call and is informed that the Brigadier had died. It was a short but sweet moment and I thought that it was the goodbye that the Brigadier deserved.

The scene where River shoots the Doctor is a good scene cause its done well by Matt Smith and Alex Kingston and just when the shooting is about to happens things go weird. As impressive as this scene was I couldn’t help but get past the slight continuity problem with Matt Smith’s hair and also the background looks slightly different than it did in The Impossible Planet.

Karen Gillan does appear in the story properly until the half way mark and Arthur Darvill appears a few minutes later. It’s weird that they aren’t husband and wife and don’t even have any idea about it. It doesn’t last long but once the story gets into the final stages they make up for this and their lack of involvement in the first half of the episode.

The action moves to Area 52 which is now one of the pyramids and the Silence appear and so does Madame Kovarian. It’s a great moment when they are out of the tanks that they are in. Kovarian finally gets her comeuppance when her eye drive patch electrocutes her thanks to Amy put it back over her eye after it fell off. It was nice that Amy had a bit of guilt because its not the sort of thing that a companion does and even though technically it didn’t happen at least it wasn’t forgotten straight away.

I love when it’s revealed that the Doctor that got killed in Utah wasn’t the real one but the Teselecta version. I suppose it was kind of obvious if you look at it with the benefit of hindsight but credit to Moffat for coming up with this ending. It was a clever way to get out of the fact that the Doctor has to die on a certain date.

The all important question is revealed at the end of the episode. It’s simply Doctor WHO? Despite this being the final episode of the season it doesn’t have that end of season feeling to it. I don’t know what’s going on but I have enjoyed this way more than I had done in the past. I remember in 2011, that I felt slightly disappointed with this episode thinking that things were left up in the air but on reflection I think that this episode worked really well. The second half of the series has been much better than the first. Only Closing Time didn’t quite hit the mark but even that story was still quite good. This season has been very dark and it was one that took a while to get going but the next series is one that I am looking forward to because its where things change in terms of line up and I think the darkness disappears for a while. Oh well tomorrow sees another Christmas story in the middle of summer.