The Wedding of River Song

Underrated masterpiece. This episode went from a 3,5 in my first viewing to a perfect score.

First time I watched I was completely lost and I felt a bit cheated with the way the Doctor gets to live. Now, having watched all of classic and new who, plus a modest number of audio stories and a few novels, I have found a love for weird and unorthodox stories. Exactly like this one.

A fast-paced episode where everything seemed to fit in the right place, can't say there's a boring or unnecessary scene, everything moves the plot toward the conclusion. Plus I love episodes with a different timeline that causes the characters to act different, for timey-wimey reasons (like Inferno).

Coming back to the resolution, if you think it through it just makes sense, everyone sees him die, so as far as the universe is concerned, he died, which stops the paradox from being created (the resolution is somewhat similar to what happens in The Fires of Vulcan audio story, with the premise that the TARDIS was found buried in the ruins of Pompeii, which is something I haven't seen pointed out before). Plus, knowing how everything ends makes rewatching this season in particular extremingly gratifying.  The design of the "all of time together" world is really cool too.

I'll end by saying that I'm completely biased toward this era of the show. Moffat is tied with Hinchliffe and Cartmel (from Classic) as my favourite script editor/showrunner, so I'll always prefer a story from this period to any other. I just wish we got another season with the same amount of ambition and cleverness as series 6 had, even if I can understand it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

PS: I loved the Brigadier scene, even more knowing that's what makes the Doctor snap out of another Timelord Victorious moment and get back to reality, forcing him to face his fate.

Great episode. Yeah, there are still unanswered questions but until we find out that they're never gonna be answered, that is no complaint. I'm fully expecting Moffat to explain all of this by the time his run is over.

The Brigadier phone call was great and I'm very intrigued by the fact that they don't want The Doctor to be famous anymore and also that they're gonna explore The Doctor's identity. I'm apprehensive about that because I don't want them to mess it up but it is definitely interesting.

I feel like it was a bit messy but I think this is a solid series finale.

It's messy as hell, very hard to follow on first watch, and full of exhausting moments of cliche, but I don't hate the Wedding of River Song. The whole idea of every moment of time clumped together sounds crazy, but Moffat does a pretty good job of introducing and building up the idea a bit - only for him to basically ignore it entirely as the episode goes on. There's some interesting stuff then introduced around Amy and Rory not remembering each other - only for that, too, to kind of go to the wayside for the final act. The episode feels like three distinct ideas, all of which are pretty interesting but none of them are really followed up on here. It is also pretty disappointing pay-off to all the ideas brought up around Series 6. The Doctor's death really doesn't amount to much of anything at all in hindsight and given the whole Tranzalore thing, the idea gets a bit repetitive in the Moffat era.

Still, I find it very easy to re-watch this one. Maybe because of the frantic pace, excellent main cast, and quick action, but I find in spite of all these flaws, I never really mind watching Wedding of River Song all over again. It has a lot of problems, but I would struggle to call it a bad experience, either.

This had a very similar flavour to A Good Man Goes to War and Let's Kill Hitler, which as a trilogy have too many ideas. Some of the ideas are great, but they aren’t given the space to reach their potential. Moffat seems more interested in being clever than creating a satisfying whole.

Not to do it down too much, there’s a great TARDIS crew here and a good extended cast. Moffat has done a great job of making you care about these characters but there are aspects of his writing which come across a little tired all these years later. The cringe flirting and the mild sexism is just tiresome.

I liked seeing the lengths River will go to protect her husband. And how powerful Amy was in this episode. I was less keen on the Silence who were used to random effect and Madame Kovarian, who we never really get beneath the surface of.

I don’t think Moffat ever goes this “complex” again. Ideas that would be better contained within a single story tend to stay that way from here on out.