Day 783: The Wedding of River Song

Sometimes I'll associate watching Doctor Who with a particular place. I've got a vivid memory of watching The Waters of Mars whilst lying on a small patch of carpet next to a lounge in the house where I spent much of my teenage years, becoming so engrossed in the story that I'm not even noticing the hard surface beneath my head. Other times, I'll remember the time that I watched it, such as watching The Ribos Operation in the dead of night, just before I go to bed in an empty house, just because I wanted to watch it one more time. And for The Wedding of River Song, I couldn't possibly forget the time that I watched it. Which, I suppose, is at least something that I can remember...

You see, I missed both Closing Time and The Wedding of River Song on first transmission. I was in France on a school trip, and thus I was unable to watch Doctor Who at all for those two weeks. When I got home, in the very early hours of the morning, I fired up the set-top box recorder and watched those two episodes. So not only do I associate those two episodes with watching them in quick succession at 2 o'clock in the morning, I also associate them with a general state of haziness as to what actually happened in them.

Closing Time's alright in my brain; a bit fuzzy on certain details, but I was just as fuzzy with The God Complex or The Girl Who Waited. For The Wedding of River Song, on the other hand, I can only remember the hard facts. I remember that the Doctor survived through using the Teselecta. I remember that it takes place in an alternate world where all of history happens at once. I remember that the ending features the Doctor and River getting married. And you might think that that's basically everything about the story. But it isn't - remembering a story is more than just seeing a list of events in the mind's eye. It needs to also be associated with how the story feels; what techniques Steven Moffat and Jeremy Webb use to tell the adventure.

When I watched The Wedding of River Song an hour or so ago, I found myself being quite surprised by it. I wasn't expecting the first third to be told mainly through flashback, for instance, which is an interesting method of using exposition and gives Moffat the chance to open on the BIG nature of all of history happening at once. I'd forgotten that Amy kills Madame Kovarian for stealing her daughter away from her, which feels, whilst not like the closure that I wanted from that particular story line, at least shoved the door a good deal more closed than it was previously. Jokes, like the Doctor telling Rory to ask Amy out, or the reveal of the Doctor's right arm in the scene with Winston Churchill are all things that I'd previously forgotten. And it's these small things that help the story feel right, and make it something that I want to watch, as opposed to watching a man tie up loose ends.

But it still doesn't entirely work. The ending feels rushed - a consequence of Moffat choosing to have the series finale be one episode rather than two. All of history happening at once just feels like a backdrop, not a part of the world in which the characters inhabit, feeling just as forced as the green screen behind River and the Doctor in the Lake Silencio scenes. And the small moments that make the story worth watching aren't presented well enough to really stick in the mind after watching it; I'm still not entirely sure whether it was the time that I watched it, or the supposition that the episode doesn't quite stick in the mind that means that I was hazy about The Wedding of River Song. It all makes for a story that should have been the grand finale to Moffat's first BIG series, but ends on a whimper rather than an explosive bang. Still, at least there's Christmas to look forward to.