Winston Churchill

I look at The Wedding of River Song, the Series 6 finale, where River refuses to shoot the Doctor at Lake Silencio, all of history collapses into a single afternoon, and the show finally has to pay off the fixed point it’s been promising since the first episode.

I enjoyed the ride a great deal, the opening images are the best the show’s managed in years and the Brigadier phone call is perfectly judged, but the ending gets out of the season’s big promise through a loophole, and a year of grief turns out to have been running on something the Doctor kept to himself. So I gave it 3.5/5.

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’s insisted from the first episode couldn’t 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. There’s a wedding, a pyramid and a whole army of eyepatches to get through first, too. Whether that ruins it depends almost entirely on how much you enjoy the forty-five minutes. I enjoyed them a great deal, honestly. But I also think the season wrote a cheque here it couldn’t quite cover, and I came away from it feeling a bit short-changed even while I was grinning at half of it.

The opening’s the best sustained run of images the show’s produced in years. Because River won’t 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, cars hanging from hot air balloons over London, Charles Dickens on the breakfast news plugging his Christmas special. Winston Churchill as Holy Roman Emperor, carried through a Britain that’s Victorian, Roman and modern all at once, asking his Soothsayer why the clocks have stopped, and the Soothsayer is the Doctor, bearded and locked up. It’s the sort of thing Doctor Who can normally only gesture at on its budget, and it’s done with real wit, because the joke isn’t that time’s broken, it’s that everyone’s adjusted, filed the paperwork and carried on. I could’ve watched an hour of just that.

A phone call

In the middle of all that noise comes the quietest scene of the season. Before any of the time-collapse business, the Doctor’s working out whether he ought to stop running, and he rings an old friend, and a nurse at a care home tells him gently that Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart passed away a few months ago, peacefully, and that he always had a glass of brandy poured for the Doctor, just in case he ever dropped by. Matt Smith plays the next ten seconds with nothing at all, no speech and no tears, just a man taking in that the world’s quietly gone on without him and taken somebody with it. And it’s what makes the Doctor decide to stop running and keep his appointment, which I thought was exactly right.

Nicholas Courtney died earlier this year, and rather than build a whole 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, a few seconds of screen time that I’ve thought about more than anything else in the finale. There’s something right about the Brigadier going quietly in his bed after all those years of soldiers and guns, and something even more right about him still keeping a drink out for a friend who never came. I’m not ashamed to say it got me. The Brigadier’s been part of this show for longer than most of its audience has been alive, and a phone call is about the most dignified send-off you could give him.

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 tiny time agents that turned up with almost no ceremony 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’s 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, and the whisper at the wedding on top of the pyramid turns out to be not his name but “look into my eye”, an instruction rather than a confession. It even covers the regeneration that starts on the beach, which the Teselecta was faking along with everything else. As a bit of construction, it’s tidy.

The trouble is what it costs. The season’s whole emotional weight rested on the Doctor genuinely walking towards his own death, back to the moment he went down on the sand in The Impossible Astronaut, and the finale reveals he had a workaround in his pocket for a while and just 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, and the show spent thirteen episodes telling me the universe can’t be argued with before arguing with it on a loophole.

Amy and Kovarian

River, the Doctor and Amy wearing eye drives in the collapsed timeline of The Wedding of River Song

The collapsed timeline does give Karen Gillan the darkest stuff 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 an eye drive that’ll kill her if it’s put back in place. Amy puts it back on her, and tells her, quite steadily, that River Song didn’t get it all from the Doctor. Then she lets her die. The episode doesn’t treat this as a triumph or a horror, it just happens, and it stays with Amy afterwards, in a timeline that technically never happened but that she can still remember. It’s the most morally interesting thing in the finale and it gets a lot less attention than the wedding does, which is a shame.

There’s a good, sad scene later too, between Amy, 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’s older than she is and that she’s never once been anyone’s mother in any way that counts, and Gillan plays it without any self-pity at all. After the shortcut Let’s Kill Hitler took, it’s welcome to see the show finally sit in that for a minute. And River gets to tell her mum the Doctor’s alive, which is a lovely little reversal, the daughter bringing the good news home for once. Rory gets something too, back in the broken timeline, where he’s Captain Williams of Amy’s little army and she doesn’t quite remember that she married him, and he follows her anyway, which is the boy who waited all over again and I loved it.

Doctor who?

And then the closing scene, which reframes everything and sets something up that’s clearly going to take a while to pay off. Dorium Maldovar, the arms dealer the Doctor’s already dug out from among the Headless Monks earlier in the episode, now a severed head in a box and grumpy about it, cheerfully explains what the Silence have been about all along. They aren’t a species so much as a religious order, and their whole purpose is to stop 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. He’s 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 answer is to get smaller, go quiet, and let the universe forget him.

Rating: 3.5/5. I really enjoyed watching it, it’s brilliant in the parts, but it’s a little hollow in the whole, and that escape hatch is going to bother me for a while.

Did the Teselecta get-out work for you, or did it take the air out of a whole series of build-up? Tell me in the comments.

“Victory of the Daleks” is the third episode of Doctor Who’s fifth series, in which Matt Smith’s Doctor and Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond land in London during the Blitz and find Winston Churchill relying on a new secret weapon: tea-serving Daleks he calls Ironsides. The review covers the Doctor’s reaction to them, the Dalek plan behind the offer of help, and the new multi-coloured Dalek design.

It praises the premise, Smith’s angry Doctor and Ian McNeice’s Churchill, enjoys the Spitfires in space, and is less sure about the redesigned Daleks and an ending where the Doctor loses. No rating is given.

After the fairy tale start of The Eleventh Hour and the dystopian city ship of The Beast Below, Doctor Who’s fifth series takes a sharp turn into familiar territory with “Victory of the Daleks”. Much like Dalek did for the Ninth Doctor, this one brings back the Doctor’s most iconic enemy, and it does it with a twist that I suspect a lot of fans are going to argue about.

The premise is deliciously simple. Winston Churchill has enlisted the help of some mysterious “Ironsides” to fight the Nazi threat, and these Ironsides are, of course, Daleks, painted khaki green, serving tea and calling everyone “sir”. It’s an image as unsettling as the gas mask kids asking “Are you my mummy?” in The Empty Child, though for entirely different reasons. We expect hatred and extermination and we get subservience and helpfulness instead. That cognitive dissonance is perfect.

The Doctor and his oldest enemy

Matt Smith’s Doctor shines here, and his newness gives us a fresh take on the Doctor’s deep-seated hatred of the Daleks. Eccleston’s Doctor was a traumatised survivor and Tennant’s could be a vengeful warrior, but Smith’s approaches them with an almost childlike rage, pure and uncontained and a bit dangerous. When he beats a Dalek with a comically large wrench and shouts “I am the Doctor, and you are the Daleks!” it’s both frightening and revealing. Like Bad Wolf, it shows how much his history with these enemies has shaped him.

The supporting cast is stellar too, with Ian McNeice’s Churchill stealing every scene he’s in. His relationship with the Doctor feels lived-in, as if there’s a long history we’ve never seen. Karen Gillan’s Amy continues to develop nicely, though it’s odd that she doesn’t recognise the Daleks at all, given how recently they were all over the Earth. That’s got to be a deliberate hole and I’m curious where it goes. Doctor Who TV has a poll running if you want to score the episode yourself.

The real story is the Daleks themselves. Their plan is convoluted but clever: play humble servants to trick the Doctor into identifying them, and that identification activates the Progenitor device, which wouldn’t otherwise accept these Time War survivors as pure enough to use it. It’s a neat way of getting more Daleks into the show and also of redesigning them. I like that they win by losing, letting the Doctor abuse and defeat them while the real plan goes ahead behind his back. It’s a clever twist on the usual “Doctor defeats Daleks” formula we’ve seen since The Parting of the Ways.

The redesign is where I stumble. The new “Paradigm” Daleks, with their colour-coded roles and chunky bodies, are a big departure from the bronze warriors we’ve had since “Dalek”, and the colours are a bit Power Rangers for my taste. The idea of a hierarchy based on function is interesting, but the execution left me cold, and from what I’ve read around the fan sites I’m not alone. I’d happily be proven wrong once they’ve had a few more outings.

The wartime setting is used well, though maybe not as immersively as in The Empty Child. The threat of German bombers keeps a constant tension in the background, and whether Churchill should be allowed to use Daleks as weapons adds some real weight. It reminds me of the dilemma in The Unquiet Dead, about whether to trust apparently helpful aliens. Britain’s eventual victory is presented as inevitable, yet the episode reminds us that in 1941 nothing felt certain. Churchill himself is a good example, a man who’ll grab any weapon that might win the war and doesn’t much want to hear the Doctor’s objections, which makes the Daleks’ offer feel plausible rather than silly.

There’s also Bracewell, the human scientist who turns out to be an android built by the Daleks, which gives the story some heart and a clever resolution. Like The Doctor Dances, it comes down to human emotion and memory averting disaster. The scene where Amy talks Bracewell through his “memories” to stop him blowing himself up is lovely, even if it resolves a bit too easily. The Doctor spends most of the episode shouting at Daleks, so it’s good that the thing that actually saves the day is somebody being kind to a frightened machine. I’d have liked a little more time with him before the reveal, but the cast sells it, and it’s the emotional centre of the hour for me.

Spitfires in space

The climax, a space battle between Spitfires and Daleks, is Doctor Who at its most gloriously ridiculous. It’s the kind of sequence only this show could play with a straight face, and the gravity bubble that lets Second World War fighters reach orbit is exactly the pseudo-scientific nonsense that makes it so much fun.

The ending is where I’m least happy. The Daleks get away with their victory complete and leave a rather hollow human triumph behind. It sets up more Daleks, sure, but it lacks the punch of “Dalek” or the scale of Bad Wolf, and the Doctor’s failure feels more like a plot necessity than a dramatic choice. Even so, it’s an entertaining hour with some genuinely clever ideas, and it shows the new team isn’t afraid to take risks with the established parts of the show, the same way The Beast Below did. Amy not remembering the Daleks, Bracewell’s artificial memories and Churchill’s own view of what winning takes all seem to be circling the same theme of memory, and I’ll be watching to see if it pays off. Sometimes the old enemies are the best ones, even with a new paint job.