#like truly needing to have a classic reading ''time to lie here & weep'' break. by classic i mean comes up rarely if at all

[unproduciblesmackdown]

chicago shelob puppet is crushing it like horrible lol which is great. look at this giant thing just static in an image in full house lights on, audiences only know what it's like emerging from the dark Moving Around live & in person Giant & Gnarly in front of you

[the-desolated-quill]

The Wedding Of River Song - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Sigh. Okay, let’s get this over with.

The Wedding Of River Song was never going to work. Let’s be honest. This entire arc this series has been handled so poorly that there’s no way Moffat could possibly have tied up all the loose ends in a satisfying way. So at the time I basically resigned myself to the fact that the Series 6 finale was probably going to be a steaming pile of shit. There was always a chance Moffat could have proved me wrong and surprised me with something truly spectacular, but deep down I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

So how was The Wedding Of River Song. Well believe it or not I was actually quite engaged for the first 10 or 15 minutes. The Doctor is zipping around the universe trying to find out why the Silence want him dead (something the series should have been focused on long before this, but better late than never I suppose). This leads to some pretty imaginative locations. I like the idea of ‘Live Chess’ and thought the crypt of the Headless Monks was very creepy (I could have done without the chattering skulls though. Bit too smirksome for my liking). Moffat even managed to wring some genuine emotion out of me in the scene where the Doctor learns about the Brigadier’s death. If you’re not familiar with the classic series, i imagine this scene must have confused you somewhat. For me it was incredibly moving. It’s very well handled, Matt Smith gives a great performance and it seems fitting that the passing of his oldest and dearest friend would be what allows the Doctor to accept his own death.

There’s just one problem with all of this though, and it’s a problem that’s been hanging over this entire series like a dark rain cloud. We know the Doctor isn’t going to die. If this truly was the show’s final ending, a lot of what happens here would have been a lot more impactful. But it isn’t. We knew at the time we were getting another series after this. We knew at the time that they were planning a 50th anniversary special. So all we’re left with is this feeling of mild curiosity as to how the Doctor is going to get out of this situation. There’s no real emotional investment or tension or anything.

But wait. It gets worse. Oh SOOOOOOOOOO much worse!

So the Doctor meets River on the shores of Lake Silencio, but wait a minute. Why does River need to be in the spacesuit? It’s fully automated. She doesn’t have any control over it. And if she’s being held in there against her will, why is she put in prison for it? She’s clearly a pawn of the Silence. Why don’t the Stormcage people go after them? Well here’s the thing, I say she has no control over the spacesuit, but then all of a sudden she does, which was really jarring. But anyway, the Doctor survives and suddenly the whole of time goes wibbly. While the whole concept of time dying is basically just the Series 5 finale all over again, the idea of history happening all at once could be interesting, but Moffat never actually does anything with it. It’s basically just a bunch of anachronisms and other random shit thrown together. Also if all of time is happening at once, how come everyone is capable of having intelligible conversations?

Let’s jump back to River for a minute. Considering Moffat’s one note obsession with her, you’d think she’d come out of this a deeper and more interesting character, but she doesn’t. River Song is not and never has been a character. She’s just a loose collection of character traits that don’t seem to marry up with each other. She’s in love with the Doctor and seems to have a warm relationship with her parents Amy and Rory, but she also frequently describes herself as a psychopath.

Do you see why this doesn’t quite work? And again, would it kill Moffat to Google what a psychopath actually is? You can’t raise one and one of their defining traits is their total lack of empathy. River Song is NOT a psychopath.

And it’s not just River. Characterisation is utterly butchered in this episode all around. Moffat is once again more concerned with tying up the loose ends to his convoluted as fuck series arc instead of actually exploring what the characters are thinking and feeling. River Song is basically little more than a plot device and I will never buy her supposed romance with the Doctor. It’s not Matt Smith or Alex Kingston’s fault. They’re doing their best, but I don’t think even Helen Mirren could salvage anything form this pile of garbage. Rory is once again shoved to the side and the way Moffat handles Amy’s character borders on tactless. A lot of people complained about how Moffat handled the whole pregnancy subplot, and I suspect he added the scene where Amy kills Madame Kovarian to address the lack of emotional followup to Let’s Kill Hitler, but it really doesn’t work. For one thing, it’s too little too late by this point, and another thing, it feels wildly out of character for Amy. Do you honestly expect me to believe that Amy would kill another human, not to save her baby, but as an act of cold blooded revenge? Fuck off Moffat! The ironic thing is I’ve never liked Amy very much, but I think even I have more respect for her character than Moffat clearly does.

The further this episode goes along, the more it falls apart and the more infuriated I became. Once again we see Moffat changing the rules like he did with the Weeping Angels in order to accommodate his crap plot. Remember when River chastised the Doctor for being a dangerous person that millions of people feared? Well now all of a sudden he’s adored by them now and they’re all desperately pleading for him not to die. Well which is it Moffat? You can’t say the Doctor is a feared monster with no justification only to then turn around and go in the complete opposite direction with equally no justification. And that’s not the only thing. River can’t control the spacesuit until all of a sudden she can. The Doctor can’t remember the Silence until all of a sudden he can. Even the series arc itself starts to mutate. Before it was ‘Silence will fall when the question is asked.’ Now it’s ‘Silence must fall when the question is answered.’ Bit of a teeny, tiny difference there, wouldn’t you say?

But if there’s one thing I really can’t stand, it’s the whole lying thing. For some reason Moffat seems to think having the Doctor and River lie constantly makes for clever twists. Well it doesn’t. It’s just cheap and lazy, and it has the consequence of breaking the audience’s faith in what’s happening on screen. See there’s a world of difference between misleading an audience and blatantly lying to them. Were you touched by River’s shock at the Doctor’s death in The Impossible Astronaut? Psyche! She was lying all the time! Were you moved by the Doctor coming to terms with his own mortality? Ha! Gotcha! He had a plan all along and was lying the whole time! It just rips the emotion out of the whole thing and I won’t be inclined to believe anything the characters say or feel ever again. And some lies don’t even make sense. When the Doctor ‘marries’ River, he whispers in her ear about the Tesselecta disguise and then blurts out to Amy and Rory that he told her his real name. But... why would the Doctor need to lie about that? Why not just tell them the plan? It’s not as if they’re going to tell anyone else.

And then we come to the stupid as fuck resolution. The Doctor uses the Tesselecta to fake his death. But wait. What about the fixed point in time? They were quite clear about that. The Doctor needs to die. He’s not dead, so shouldn’t time still be all wibbly? And then he makes the idiotic suggestion that he now needs to step back into the shadows. Easier said than done mate. How do you intend to do that? Presumably you’re still going to be travelling through time and space and fighting aliens. Don’t you think the Silence might catch on to that, you fucking moron?

And the series arc still isn’t finished yet. We’ve still got the Fields of Trenzalore and the Question to deal with, and do you know what? I couldn’t be any less interested. I mean just look at how this arc was handled. Not only is it poorly written and ill conceived, the answers we get to some of the questions we’ve been asking are all so painfully obvious. Who is River to the Doctor? His wife. What crime did she commit? She killed the Doctor. And what’s the First Question hidden in plain sight that must never be answered? Say it with me now, altogether:

Considering all this River Song bullshit started way back in 2008 with the Silence In the Library two parter, was it really worth waiting three years for such an utterly underwhelming conclusion?

You know this actually reminds me of another show Moffat writes for...

What’s that Moffat fans? You thought I was going to let your precious Sherlock off the hook, did you? Guess again my little possums :D

Sherlock is in my opinion the second worst thing Moffat has ever written (the first being Jekyll). It’s an overly produced, convoluted and utterly pretentious pile of rubbish that only bears a passing resemblance to the source material. For seven years people had deluded themselves into think this worthless excuse for a TV show is actually clever and it comes as a blessed relief to see people finally stop drinking the Kool-Aid and realise what a load of utter bollocks Sherlock really is. Fan reception for Series 4 has been pretty negative and some are utterly confused as to how this could have happened. How could such a once great show fall so far? I have an answer for you. The show was never good to begin with. Series 1, 2 and 3 were just as bad as Series 4. The only thing that’s changed is people’s perception of the show. Fans finally started to realise that all these plots and arcs and questions weren’t going to have any satisfying payoff. Series 4 doesn’t represent the slow deterioration of a once great show. It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s a point where Moffat’s bullshit became so blatant and so insulting that not even the diehard fans could possibly justify it. 

The reason I mention Sherlock is because I feel it’s the best example of Moffat’s incredibly flawed approach to storytelling. His whole schtick is teasing bigger mysteries and more interesting stories to come as opposed to, you know, telling interesting stories. With Sherlock, the focus was on prolonging the ridiculous conflict between Sherlock and Moriarty, to the point where character arcs and smaller stories fell to the wayside. The same is true with his series arcs in Doctor Who. Moffat’s first series is about someone blowing up the TARDIS. Then we come to the Doctor dying, at which point the whole mystery of the exploding TARDIS just gets silently dropped. We get a lot of information about River Song’s involvement, but we don’t have time to properly get to know her character outside of all of this because by that point Moffat is teasing the much bigger mystery of Trenzalore, and so on. Arcs are left incomplete and characters left underdeveloped because Moffat is more concerned with teasing bigger and better stories rather than focusing on the story he’s currently telling. And he tries to keep you invested by saying that all the stuff that doesn’t make sense and have been left unresolved might be explained later on. He maintains the illusion that there’s an interesting story just on the horizon, but the fact is you’ll never get to see it because it simply doesn’t exist.

Now don’t me wrong. If you still like Sherlock, that’s your prerogative. I’m not trying to make fun of you. I certainly wouldn’t dream of taking the piss out of the people who came up with the bizarre theory based on wild conjecture and misinterpretation of evidence that there was going to be a secret good fourth Sherlock episode that would solve all the problems of Series 4. They’re not idiots for thinking that. They’re just the ones that bought into Moffat’s bullshit hook, line and sinker. They honestly thought there was an episode coming that would fix everything and explain all the inconsistencies because that’s what Moffat has led them to believe. It’s a deceptive and fraudulent trick I picked up on a long time ago and it makes it hard for me to enjoy Moffat’s so called ‘good’ stories like The Empty Child and The Girl In the Fireplace because once you notice all his tricks and gimmicks, that’s ALL you notice.

Since I started reviewing the Moffat era, I’ve had a few people sending me messages about what an idiot I am and what an undisputed genius Moffat is. I can honestly understand people’s frustration when a smartarse blogger like myself comes along and starts ripping one of their favourite writers to shreds, but with respect, you’re really just deluding yourselves. I’m sorry to have to break this to you, but a writer that relies on blatantly lying to the audience, changing his own established rules and contorting his characters and plots into unnatural shapes to makes his stories work, whilst continuously making false promises that a future episode will one day make sense of all of this convoluted chaos, at the end of the day is just a bad writer.

When I think of Doctor Who Series 6, all I can think of is wasted potential. The Doctor dying, the Silence, and even River Song could have been something really interesting. And while there were some bright spots along the way (The Doctor’s Wife and The Girl Who Waited), Series 6 was ultimately a lacklustre experience, and The Wedding Of River Song just wasn’t a satisfying conclusion no matter how you try and spin it.