A Member of the Wedding (of River Song)

It felt fitting that I watched the current series finale of Doctor Who on the same flight back from London where I watched The Hangover Part 2. Both involved weddings and told their story by shifting around in time. More significantly, they both resolved their stories using an answer hidden in plain sight.

I'm on the fence about whether the second Hangover movie is better (i.e. funnier) than the first, but The Wedding of River Song was the best episode of Doctor Who this season, more so even than the episode written by Neil Gaiman's whose appeal was based as much on being a love letter to Doctor Who as being a strong Doctor Who story in its own right. After a season full of disappointments, with good ideas colliding haphazardly with some truly awful ones, I have to give Steven Moffat credit. Though some specifics of the season-long story-line's resolution left me cold, the overall episode was a satisfying conclusion. More than that, it also felt like a nice reboot of the show paving the way for what I hope will be a slightly different (and less overblown) take on my favorite Time Lord, getting back to the things I liked about Matt Smith's portrayal in his earliest episodes.

It probably sounds odd considering the storyline has been running the whole season, but I think this finale would have benefited from being a two-parter or at least closer to an hour as in some earlier seasons. The temporally amalgamated Earth we see looked really fascinating and it would have been cool to explore it more. This could have helped better establish the threat to Earth (and time itself) rather than having it be the abstract dilemma it was portrayed as. In fairness, though, that's a minor qualm because the dilemma and danger for the Doctor himself did come across nicely as did the Doctor's way of getting around it.

My hope earlier in the season was that all the seemingly disparate elements were leading up to something satisfying and overall it turned out they were. My hope for the next season is that head-writer Steven Moffat will find a way to balance his grasp of Doctor Who's conventions, his love of twisted time structures and solid storytelling more effectively over the course of an entire season. He'll have a hard time topping The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, but I'd love to see him get there.