Series 6 has been a season about a fixed point, a man on a beach in Utah shot dead by an astronaut, in an event the show insisted from the first episode could not be avoided. So the finale’s job is to pay that off without cheating, and “The Wedding of River Song” spends forty-five gorgeous, chaotic minutes doing everything except that, and then cheats. Whether that ruins it depends almost entirely on how much you enjoy the forty-five minutes. I enjoyed them a great deal. I also think the season wrote a cheque here it couldn’t quite cover.
The opening is the best sustained run of images the show has produced in years. Because River refuses to fire at Lake Silencio the fixed point breaks, and all of history collapses into a single moment: 5:02pm on the 22nd of April, 2011, permanently. Pterodactyls in the park. Model T Fords hanging from hot air balloons over London. Steam trains running out of the Gherkin. Charles Dickens on the breakfast news plugging his Christmas special. Winston Churchill as Holy Roman Emperor, carried through a Britain that is simultaneously Victorian, Roman and modern, asking his Soothsayer why time has stopped. The Soothsayer is the Doctor, bearded and unwell, and the episode is confident enough to hold that image for a while before explaining anything. It’s the sort of high-concept spectacle Doctor Who can normally only gesture at on its budget, and here it’s rendered with real wit, because the joke isn’t that time is broken, it’s that everyone has adjusted, filed the paperwork and carried on.
In the middle of all that noise comes the quietest scene in the season. The Doctor, working out why he ought to stop running, calls an old friend, and is told gently by a nursing home that Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart died some months ago, and that he used to keep a glass out on the table every night in case the Doctor ever dropped in. Matt Smith plays the next ten seconds with nothing at all, no speech and no tears, just a man absorbing that the world has quietly gone on without him and taken someone with it. Nicholas Courtney died earlier this year, and rather than build an episode around a tribute the show puts it in a single phone call in the middle of a finale and lets it be as small and as final as these things actually are. It’s the best thing in the episode by a distance, and it’s what makes the Doctor decide to keep his appointment.
The cheat, or not
So he dies on the beach, and he doesn’t. The body in the spacesuit’s line of fire was the Teselecta, the shape-shifting robot crewed by miniaturised time agents introduced with almost no ceremony back in Let’s Kill Hitler, wearing his face, with the Doctor himself standing in the control room inside its head. The fixed point happens. Time is satisfied. Nobody actually burns on that lakeshore. I want to be fair to this, because it isn’t lazy. It’s set up in advance, in the same season, in an episode that made a point of showing us the machine can wear anyone. The clue was given, and given properly, and the whisper at the wedding turns out to be not his name but “look into my eye”, an instruction rather than a confession. As construction, it’s tidy.
The trouble is what it costs. The season’s entire emotional weight rested on the Doctor genuinely walking towards his own death, and the finale reveals he had a workaround in his pocket for some time and simply let everyone, River very much included, believe otherwise. Amy and Rory grieve. River tears the universe apart rather than pull a trigger. And the answer is that he was fine, and organised, and had it handled. A fixed point you can satisfy with a robot in a costume isn’t really a fixed point, it’s a technicality. The show spent thirteen episodes telling us the universe cannot be argued with, and then argues with it on a loophole.
Amy, Kovarian, and a question
The collapsed timeline does give Karen Gillan the darkest material she’s had. In that broken world Amy remembers everything, runs a resistance, and eventually has Madame Kovarian at her mercy, the woman who stole her daughter, with a working eye drive that will kill her if left in place. Amy puts it back in, and tells her, quite steadily, that River Song didn’t get all her ruthlessness from the Doctor. Then she lets her die. The episode does not treat this as a triumph or a horror, it just happens, and it stays with Amy afterwards, in a timeline that technically never occurred but that she can still remember. It’s the most morally interesting thing in the finale and it gets rather less attention than the wedding does. There’s a good, sad scene later too, between Amy and Rory and River in a garden, three people related to each other in an order that makes no sense, drinking wine, with Amy quietly aware that her daughter is older than she is and that she has never once been anyone’s mother in any way that counts. After the shortcut Let’s Kill Hitler took, it’s welcome to see the show finally sit in that for a minute.
And then the closing scene, which reframes everything and sets the next two years running. Dorium Maldovar, a severed head in a box, cheerfully explains what the Silence have been about all along. They are not a species so much as a religious order, and their entire purpose is to prevent a question being answered. Not to kill the Doctor for his crimes, but to stop him reaching a place called Trenzalore, where, at the fall of the Eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, the oldest question in the universe will be asked. The oldest question, hidden in plain sight since 1963: Doctor Who? It’s the sort of thing that could be unbearably pleased with itself and mostly isn’t, because Dorium delivers it as a warning rather than a flourish, and because the show has the sense to end on the Doctor walking away from it rather than on a shock cut. He has spent the season learning that his reputation is a weapon his enemies can use, the argument made properly in A Good Man Goes to War, and his response is to get smaller, go quiet, and let the universe forget him.
Rating: 3.5/5. Dense, funny, visually the most ambitious the series has been, and anchored by a tribute that’s perfectly judged. But it resolves the season’s central promise with an escape hatch, and asks us to accept that a year of grief was running on information the Doctor was quietly withholding. Brilliant in the parts, a little hollow in the whole. He got married on a pyramid to a woman he’d already buried, faked his death in a robot, and walked off to be forgotten. And somewhere ahead of him there’s a field called Trenzalore, and somebody is going to ask him his name.