Well, it seems that the time has come for series six of Doctor Who to end, and we can only hope that the massive plot holes left open over the course of all of this are finally closed. Also LOOK AT THAT GODDAMN TITLE. Let’s all liveblog the fuck out of Doctor Who and then flail about for months.
I have managed to avoid every single spoiler for this episode, so please, let us all be the most awesome community of television watchers on the planet and have respect for a spoiler-free viewing of “The Wedding of River Song,” okay? LET’S DO THIS.
Because we are all on the exact same ground this time around, our spoiler policy for these blogs will be completely different. Anything that has aired in the past is fair game for discussion. Anything that has not publicly aired WILL BE CONSIDERED A SPOILER.
This liveblog will work in relative to when the episode airs for you. So, you may begin your livebloggy commenting down below when the episode starts. To avoid spoilers, I stick to the first page and comment away, and then go back afterwards to add any more
DO. NOT. POST. SPOILERS. This community is not the place for that. You have the rest of the fucking Internet. Go there.
oh my god this is so sad i never want Doctor Who to take breaks.
AHAHASJKLDFHASJDFHLAKSDHFLASD IT IS STARTING!!!
WHAT THE HOLY FUCK IS GOING ON
Doctor Who is what's going on.
OH MY GOD IS IT DICKENS OH MY GOD.
WHAT THE FUCK HOW IS WINSTON CHURCHILL HERE.
what the holy fuck
moffat stop writing about women forever. thank you.
omg dalek. wtf is going on.
hahaha omg tessalecta. THIS IS THE BEST EVER.
OMG THE SKULLS NO THANK YOU.
OMG THERE IS WI-FI. lol
DO NOT CUT AWAY. WHAT IS THE GODDAMN QUESTION.
what. his silence. what. WHAT THE HELL.
How many comments can you use caps lock on in a row?
Maybe THAT is the real question.
oh my god the checkmark. oh my god. oh my god.
Ugh, haven't posted to Mark's blog since he moved from Buzznet, but I've been reading! I'm behind on tonight's episode, but I'm tivo-ing my way back. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH……….
omg he said rose tyler.
omg 🙁 🙁 🙁
omg this is so sad
Late to the party as usual but I couldn't bring myself to look away from the episode to comment
I TOTALLY CALLED THE ENDING WITH THE DOCTOR BEING IN THE WHICH-A-CALL-IT(I fail at remembering names) AS SOON AS I SAW THE "PREVIOUSLY ON…" EEEEEEEE!!
History happening all at once?? Brilliant and confusing and it made this history major's brain hurt. I loved it.
River Song, this amazing character, this woman who is the Doctor's wife, the Doctor's murderer, and the child of Amy Pond and Rory Williams who have to be the most badass companions EVER.
And the biggest question but so simple: Doctor who?
It opens up so much and with next season being the 50th year so much can happen. Maybe bring Susan back? The actress is still alive. There are just to many possibilities.
We are not prepared.
But first thing is first: Christmas special!!!
Can it be December now?
Now?
oh my god i love the goddamn checkmarks.
omg omg omg omg 🙁
wait
what
what
what!!!!
OH MY FUCKING GOD THE CEILING.
AS;LDKFJ;ALSKDFJSDFKLJS IT'S AMY POND OMG OMG OMG
WAIT. AMY WHAT ARE YOU DOING.
omg omg omg omg she remembers THIS IS AMAZING.
A TRAIN SLASH OFFICE. oh god this got so fucking good.
EVEN BETTER, it is apparently the Orient Express i.e. The Most Badass Train Ever
omg rory. omg omg omg.
omg are they going to explain the exploding TARDIS.
but they didn't after all right? UNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG
I think it's related to the Fall of the Eleventh.
Moffat. Corkscrews. He has so much fun applying them, he should be on the other side for a while. Who is with me?
omg this is so cool.
arthur darvill you are a fantastic actor.
MISTER HOTTIE NURSE. texting and scones. this is the best thing ever.
AHHHHHHHHHHH
TiVo, please work faster.
"Pond. Emelia Pond." Hahahaha, cultural humor.
what the fuck is going on.
Wait a minute…River married a robot.
HOLY CHRIST.
RORY. RORY. RORY. OH MY GOD. NO. NO.
This is some of the zanniest combo-mythology this show's ever touched. Just… OMG.
HELL YES AMY POND.
whoa. whoa. AMY WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.
holy shit i am overwhelmed.
Finally caught up. Amy, you badass you.
no i am not crying.
no. not at all.
what the hell. OMG THE WEDDING. WTF.
OH MY GOD. HIS NAME. PLEASE. PLEASE. WHAT THE FUCK.
JESUS CHRIST WHAT IS FUCKING HAPPENING.
STOP IT COMMERCIALS. STOP IT.
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET CLOSURE IN 7 MINUTES COME ON.
also I called Amelia "Emelia" I am the worst fan EVAR.
OR THE VERY BEST ONE.
I SAY BEST ONE.
how the fuck is this going to be explained.
omg. what. what the fuck is happening.
SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME. THERE ARE ONLY THREE MINUTES. I DON'T GET IT.
you
are
kidding
me
WHAT THE FUCK. THAT'S THE QUESTION????
Still mentally cackling over that. I think it's brilliant, YMMV. xD And actually- it does go along with 'hidden in plain sight.'
*laughs*
A couple weeks ago on the spoiler blog:
"Hey, guys, I have an idea. What if the question is "Doctor who?"
"He…he wouldn't do that, would he?"
"He might. It is Moffat."
"You're right. He would."
"The oldest question in the Universe". Well, if you go by broadcast Who, it's the very first words we saw, almost 48 years ago now…
IT'S KIND OF BRILLIANT.
On the other hand, the first question we heard was apparently "Not gone yet?"
The very moment, five weeks ago, that I saw "Let's Kill Hitler" and heard the Tesselecta say "The first question. The oldest question in the universe, hidden in plain sight," I guessed it.
Now my question is, how did Dorium know it?
Obviously, Dorian is an avid Whovian. He did say he had wi-fi in there. 😛
I currently like the theory that Dorium can break the fourth wall and likes to troll the Doctor.
Dorium is Moffat?
I support all of this.
Cos the silence is a large religion and he probably overheard it somehow.
What I love about the question is that it's the oldest question in the show (it's the title!), but it's also kind of a great philosophical question, too. Like, one of the fundamental questions we humans ask ourselves and are trying to figure out is who we as individuals are, which is what this question is asking the Doctor. I think, in order to gain any sort of personal enlightenment, a person is going to have to answer the question "who are you?" (which, for the purposes of this post I'm considering a generic form of the question; like, your version of the question could be "Mark who?", mine would be "Nancy who?", etc.) first before they can figure anything else out.
And, when you look at what the Doctor does, at least with his companions, he helps them figure out who they are. On the other hand, the Doctor himself seems to know who he is in some ways, but not in other ways. Or at least he's fighting with the answer to the question (and has been for ages and ages).
Basically, I kind of love the simplicity and inherent complexity of the question.
This would fit with what we saw earlier this season, with the Doctor having to decide whether he is a "good man" or a "great warrior." I like the idea that the Doctor has been running from that dilemma "his whole life."
On the other hand, Dorium says that on the Plains of Whatever at the Fall of the Eleventh, the question will be asked, at a time when nobody can lie or fail to answer, or something like that. So it seems like there will be a literal answer to the question, even if the meaning behind it is more philosophical.
I think it's brilliant. The Doctor has always been a mysterious stranger but after 47 years on television there have been times when it feels like we know pretty much everything about him. Which isn't good because as the title indicates, you should always be wondering, just who is this guy? By re-establishing Doctor Who as THE major ongoing mystery .They certainly pulled that off in a big way.
Hahahaha, oh man, that was absurdly wonderful. Guess I can finally catch up with the old run.
UGH a little voice in my head kept going BUT THE DOCTOR LOVES ROSE UGHHHHHHHGHGHGHGHGHGH.
doctor who: big love. the spin-off. s/o pls shoot me. I CANNOT WAIT ANOTHER 83 DAYS THE F.
I suppose, but he's (literally) a different man now. Obviously, he still has affection for Rose (as referenced here and in LKH), but times have changed, and he's moved on. Even if he was lying about his age when he died (which wouldn't be a surprise), its been years since he's seen her. YES, he misses Rose, but he's moved on and found River.
Plus, Rose is really well and truly beyond his reach. Even if random phlebotinum happened and he managed to see her again, it's implied she's with his uh…half human clone…thing. He can either pine forever or put it behind him, and Eleven seems especially good at the 'putting it behind/away/out of mind' thing.
Yes, he loved Rose. But that part of his life is over and he's moved on. He's allowed to. Humans do it ALL THE TIME.
Oh My! He's part plastic…. Rory's part centurion with a plastic right hand.
Rory you are the best.
First liveblog? First liveblog! For reals this time.
oh hell yes, do we get Pete's World again?
OKAY I think we are not getting Pete's world again. aaaaa
AAAAA. I cannot. Can not.
MORE COPIES! But why? Please help, please explain.
The Doctor's reading Knitting for Girls. Absolutely priceless.
Live Chess excites me to no end.
"Why are some of them [heads] in boxes?" "Because some people are rich…"
I will write love sonnets to the special effects in Doctor Who.
I have moderate prosopagnosia, but I get the feeling that Caesar is played by the same actor as is Churchill?
um boy, Moffatt. I think we are getting the message that River is ~sexy and dangerous,~ and also Gosh, Those Women. I am not going to say that this is outright sexist! But! It is making me feel mildly uncomfortable.
I think "Caesar" is a title.
Yeah, churchill in that worl just happens to be the Roman Emperor instead of the British prime minister.
Thank you, guys! Learning new things every day.
The Brigadier… *wibble* I hadn't realized that Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen had died in such quick succession. It's kind of… there, it's a thing.
I can do words. <___<
AND ONCE MORE THINGS ARE ENDLESSLY BEWILDERING. What is happening? Who is the old man on the hill? Finger-guns? Why did River have to be the one? WHAT WHAT WHAT.
Ceiling-Silents will never cease to be awful.
CEILING-SILENTS ARE WATCHING YOU EXPLICATE.
check your arm. >:))))
Limiting the rest of my liveblog experience to this comment, as I am afraid of getting horribly obnoxious.
I love the stuffing out of Obtuse!Doctor. From the "I am missing something obvious, Rory!" scene in The Pandorica Opens, to "ZOMG eye-patches are Garments of Evil!" and "Oh hey not noticing walls covered with drawings of alien junk and Tardis cookie jar," and that's just this incarnation. Let's Kill Hitler felt like Moffatt was conflating Doctor Who with Sherlock, but moments like these show that he's really, very much not.
Face-blindness party and I was invited! AUGH! Um, um… Amy's drawing of Rory. Isn't?
Mister hottie-ness. New pickup line? New pickup line!
Love the lampshading of Rory, the Man Who Dies.
I AM FULL OF FEELINGS.
I wasn't aware of it myself, but my best friend was yelling at me that there a lot of Indiana Jones references in the opening scenes. Fits pretty well with the hat!
Ok. That really was very good.
I said before it started that I wouldn't mind if it wasn't a strong episode as long as we got a good resolution to Moffat's long con. As it turned out, it doesn't feel like he had a long con at all (the Tesselecta thing was good but did feel like they could have just made that up at the last minute rather than had it all planned in advance, you know?). So it wasn't what I wanted but the episode was just such good telly that I don't really mind that there was no 'Oh my God!' moment, no real twist.
When the standard is this high, it would feel petty to quibble that, essentially, none of my complicated theories were right. I WANTED TWO DOCTORS BUT I WILL HAPPILY TAKE DOCTOR IN A DOCTOR SUIT. Also, River came twice. HA!
But here is something I do not understand: Amy remembers the aborted timeline because she mentions killing Kovarian to River in the garden. She remembers Kovarian and getting pregnant and being a Ganger and having Melody while she's in that timeline and she remembers it afterwards in the real timeline.
So, if we're to assume that the aborted timeline all took place in the split second that the Doctor was shot, then wouldn't Amy then already know EVERYTHING that happens to her in this season? She'd just spent ages in an alternate timeline in which everything happened at once and, essentially, she remembered her own future.
'Timeline' has just lost all meaning. Surely Amy wouldn't be surprised at ANY of the events this season after Utah, because she knew everything when she was in the other timeline?
That last scene, with Amy and River having wine in her garden, has to take place after The God Complex, when the Doctor dropped Amy and Rory off and, from Amy's point of view, went to die. So, from her perspective, he's dead and not coming back now. No 200-years-younger Doctor will be dropping by because it'll be crossing his own timestream. So Series 6 has already happened for this Amy.
Yeah, this. She makes a brief mention of 'I heard there was going to be a meteor shower' or something, which I think the Doctor mentions when he's leaving her in the God Complex.
i think we're supposed to assume none of theme memories click back for her until where she is after The God Complex. I can't say why, but that's so. And that other time doesn't really show HER personal future, it was a totally different Amy with a totally different life.
I think that's what I'm having trouble with. For some reason I can't get my head round when these memories click into place for her. If she remembers the aborted timeline (which was a different life but still contained a lot of key memories) then at what point did she start remembering it? Logically it would seem that because all of that happened effectively while the Doctor was being shot, she would remember it all on the beach at Utah directly following his death.
But of course that can't be right or the whole season wouldn't make sense. So it must be later, but I can't seem to process her just gaining all these memories at an arbritrary later point!
I shouldn't try to understand timey-wimey things, it just gives me headaches. 🙂
Yeah there's not much particular reason for it. Maybe Time itself chose (well it's not sentient, but you know) when to do it so as not to totally fuck up the timelines when it JUST corrected them. For stability's sake.
I was a bit upset at first that Amy remembered because I thought she would have to remember the 5:02 timeline just after the beach scene too. But actually, in the 5:02 timeline, everything in history happens at once. It's not a big stretch to imagine that Amy there coincides with post!God Complex!Amy because she could be Amy at any or no point at all in her life.
^ that didn't make much sense. Sorry…
5:02 timeline Amy DOES say she remembers both timelines, so yeah, this makes sense. Otherwise she'd only remember the Doctor going up to the Astronaut, and maybe getting shot…but she wouldn't remember that River was her daughter, or anything about Kovarian or any of that, because all of that happens considerably after the Doctor dies at Lake Silencio.
It makes about as much sense as what I said, lol, but I see where you're going with that.
It's interesting that you say that about the "long con," because I don't feel like Moffat is done yet. Watching this episode, it felt like I was watching the ending to the second part of a trilogy–possibly a trilogy of Who seasons. We still don't know what made the TARDIS explode, and the Silence are still around, and there's the thing about the Question. I think Moffat has a longer con than we originally thought.
I'm going to rationalize the whole Amy remembering thing like this:
In TIA, Rory mentioned that the 2000 years worth of memories he spent as a Roman were still there, but he could only sometimes remember them, if he tried. The rest of the time, he just didn't think about it. Maybe Amy is the same way, she didn't have any reason to think back, remember her traveling with the Doctor while she was traveling with him. Afterwards, though, with a nice glass of wine, looking at the stars, she thinks back and remembers the two different timelines there. She's a smart girl with experience, the aborted timeline wouldn't be too hard for her to figure out on her own.
Which makes me wonder if she remembers the 36 years in TGWW.
About the "A woman" line: definitely NOT sexist. It DOES NOT mean "Duh, women, you know, only they can make such a mess". The Doctor is talking about River BREAKING THE UNIVERSE (again, this time voluntarily) TO SAVE HIM. The line means "A very remarkable person, who happens to be female and in a very complicated relationship with me, managed to do this by sheer willpower. This is the story of how she did it…" It's Churchill who asked for a short explanation.
Uh, no. He could have said any number of other things to succinctly describe River. "A friend" "My wife" "An escaped convict" "an archaeologist" basically ANY of the other things that RIver is in addition to being a woman. And as far as I'm concerned Moffat has lost all his claims to the benefit of the doubt given his previous sexist missteps, I'm going to go ahead and assume that he engineered that moment just so he could have the Doctor say "A woman" and therefore imply, sexistly, that women fuck things up all the time, because LOL, we can't help it it's just our nature.
(Minor and confusing) Spoilers ahead!
He wouldn't describe her as any of those things: He wouldn't call her a 'friend' because, at the time, she was killing him (And at the same time trying not to because she loved him, thereby breaking time), 'friend' (or 'companion') probably wouldn't be an appropriate appellation at that point.
"My Wife" carries the same connotations as 'A Woman', him saying that line would have received the same general reception as "It's sexist. He shouldn't refer to her in such terms." (Plus they weren't married at that point, anyway.)
"Escaped convict" is also incorrect, she wasn't in jail at that point. She goes to jail AFTER killing him.
"Archaeologist" is an insult in the Doctor's dictionary, I doubt he would call her that, either.
Consider it from both sides: If the Doctor was a woman, and River a man, would that line ("A man.") be received differently?
Possible alternative line:
"Not what. Who."
The first question! o.0
Yeah, that's basically how I took it
It was just a short version of saying "the disruption of the whole of space and time is the result of the actions of a single person who, for referential purposes, happens to be female." If River Song were a man, he would just have said "a man."
Thank you, you put it better than me. That said, I concur with Shay Guy here that it could have been frased in a less ambigous way (very cool example btw).
So, last night, the clouds decided to unleash their fury upon my cable/internet.
I couldn't watch it until 10 FLIPPING MINUTES AGO.
This happened with A Good Man Goes to War as well, except that time, it was erased so that a certain someone could watch Swamp People.
SWAMP PEOPLE.
Anywho, I'm now in a state of pure excitment and utter despair that I have to wait forevaz for a new episode.
Oh well, MATRIMONY! HOORAY!
And Luther on Wednesday! Three cheers for BBC America!