The Wedding of River Song

[eve11]

Well, yet AGAIN we don't know what happened to the TARDIS or why it blew up at the end of Season 5. Except that somehow the question will be asked (I SO called the question, btw!) and if it's answered everything goes to pieces.

The performances were all over the map here, or maybe it was the direction or the editing; it seemed a bit clunky to me. Still, I was entertained. The answers were as straightforward as Moffat said, boo, but at least I was entertained. And LOL the Doctor totally got married. LOL that was fun and also complete crack. But it cleans up a lot of stuff which is good, gives it a fresh start, makes weird enough sense, gives Amy some closure, and sets up anther question again. Who is the Doctor? And actually you know, way back at the start of series 6 my suspicions were that this series might try to explore that a little better.

How did the tesselecta fake the Doctor starting to regenerate? Well, I guess they're good mimics. Not a ganger, but also a bit of a rubbish way of getting out of it at the end, and frustrating that we don't know why. And I'm assuming we don't know why because Moffat doesn't either.

So, better than Last of the Time Lords. But I liked the Big Bang way better. On to the Christmas special and more adventures!

Comments

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

I cannot wait to see this.....my curiosity is making me twitch. ;)

Well....that was very very creative. Must now go watch again. :)

[eve11]

That was a crazy, hot mess. But I think I liked it?

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

Well put....loved that scene at the end with River and Amy. Loved the moment when Amy told Rory they were going to get married. :)

[leaper182.livejournal.com]

Personally, I like to think that the Doctor's had to get married numerous times to different companions over the centuries. Just because. <3

[eve11]

LOL is your icon a hint? :D

[leaper182.livejournal.com]

Possibly? Maybe? PERHAPS.

[kernezelda]

I've never even seen an episode with the Brig, but I was sad that he was dead, having heard so much about how good friends they had been.

So, the Doctor is married - so is River Susan's mother?

[eve11]

Grandmother, right? :D

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Maybe he really was there the first time, and when they fixed time from being broken they sent the Teselecta instead? But I guess he fake regenerated the second time, too.

So, better than Last of the Time Lords. But I liked the Big Bang way better.

Yes. Although I've not seen LotTL. But I've heard about Tinkerbell-Jesus-Ten. I think my problem with Doctor Who is that I came in right before the beginning of S5, so most of my knowledge of it comes from the fairy-tale new Doctor happy reboot-ness of last season. I guess Doctor Who as a whole is very cracky and campy, and last season was something of an anomaly. And I can take campy crack quite happily...I just liked S5 even more than the campy cracky episodes and so I'm always a bit disappointed. (I have seen a fair bit of Ten's run, watched two Fourth Doctor serials, and read lots of fanfic from various eras. So I'm not entirely living under a rock.)

[eve11]

Well the thing is, we're STILL waiting for a payoff from the mysteries of before. And as they say, fool me twice and all that. I think that every era of Who has its ups and downs and quirks. I still love Eleven and I do like the series, but I think it's time for Moffat to ease up on the tropes and the crazy convolutedness of his free-wheeling associations and excessive groundwork-laying, giving us a solid foundation and then getting distracted by new things before finishing anything more than a hastily constructed lean-to on it. I mean, it still looks like we're gonna deal with the Silents, and they're not the kind of villain that can be an iconic one across the years, you know? They're not like Cybermen or Daleks; they are wound around a particular story that Moff wants to tell, and they will be dropped like a stone the moment someone new takes over. So I'd like some closure to their story. Same with River. Well she at least could be a guest character I suppose.

I think season 5 had its own share of highs and lows, and actually so did season 6. I am just very glad I was not highly invested in a big payoff at the end.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Oops, I think I left essentially the same comment again on your other entry. I shouldn't think about Doctor Who after midnight, hehe.

Yes, I think less convoluted would be good. And I don't know what they're going to do about the Silence, but they've sure built them up a lot to be done with them after this season/this arc.

Season 5 definitely had low points. I think I was just so enamored of it that I didn't really care. An episode like "Victory of the Daleks" is not objectively better than "Curse of the Black Spot," but VotD didn't bother me and CotBS did. The handwaving and cliffhangery mysteries also didn't irritate me as much then, but then again they hadn't been cliffhung for a year already at that point....

[ikindofrock]

It was a crazy mess, and not in a way that merits further thought. But naturally, I thought about it anyway :)

Five Questions raised in the last episode (along with theoretical answers!)

http://theoncominghope.blogspot.com/2011/10/five-questions-raised-by-doctor-who.html

[eve11]

Well actually, I think that the point of the Doctor's "death" at Lake Silencio isn't that he had to die there, ever. But that he had to be there and that from the outside observer's viewpoint, he had to die. Time said he had to be there; Amy told him she'd seen him die. I have this theory about fixed points, if you'll pardon the musings of a statistician, and that is that foreknowledge is the only thing that actually brings about a fixed point. It's like updating a prior distribution to a posterior distribution that becomes more and more peaked around the possibilities. The Time Lords kind of doomed themselves by becoming the gatemasters of the Matrix of the Web of Time: they knew everything and thus were forced to not change anything. To them, everything's a fixed point.

And the Doctor decided that was rubbish and so he sacrificed enough knowledge about the world to go live in it and affect things. He's been sliding through the timey-wimey cracks all over the place. He changes things all the time, but some things, the lack of foreknowledge makes it easier for the web of time to spring back, as it were, and some things are too rigid to change and will split things apart.

A true fixed point would be something that everyone who has the power to change it, already knows that they cannot. But as I said, everything is relative to the observer. What is seen and done and experienced is fixed, not the event itself like a death.

[ikindofrock]

That's an interesting point! But surely then, as far as the Doctor's concerned, it would be a fixed point?

I still hold the theory that he (or someone else) is playing a long game, and is lying about it being a fixed point.

But you're talking about a variation Schrodinger's Cat (if you don't know about it beforehand, will it actually happen or not?).

While I really like your theory on a conceptual level, I'm not sure that's exactly what's happening here.

P.S. your point about the Timelords is genius.

[eve11]

Well the fixed point is, from Amy's perspective, she watched him die. He knows he invited her, because she told him so. He knows from the Tesselecta records that it's at Lake Silencio in Utah and that the rest of the world is convinced he dies there. So he knows, not that he dies at lake Silencio, but that someone watches what they are 100% convinced is him dying, and that knowledge propagates. I think he knows surety when he senses it.

I suppose it's kind of like Schroedinger's cat, but it's more like, what is the guiding force of the universe when time travel is a fact? My answer has always been likelihood. In any situation, there are many different paths that the universe can accept, and the Doctor knows how to feel them. Actually I wrote a story about it a while ago. There is a collection of observations that are set in stone, and sometimes they are enough that the latent variables underneath them have no flex or give; events are as they seem. But sometimes there are level curves, that rearrange the unobserved without changing the outcome.

It's almost like Dune Messiah or something, where Paul becomes trapped by his knowledge of what happens in the future. That's what happened to the Time Lords.

I don't think about it like Schroedinger's cat, but that could be because I've spent a good deal of years dealing with probability distributions :)