Alden Bates' Weblog

All too quickly, Doctor Who series 6 comes to an end. With it being split in two, it actually felt like it was on for less time than it actually was. I wonder if Steve Moffat has been happy with the results. This time we have...

"Closing Time", which, well, if you enjoy watching the Doctor and Craig interact, this episode is for you. If not, skip to about ten minutes before the end and you've missed nothing.

I went into "The Wedding of River Song" not being quite sure what to expect, and I'm still not quite sure what I got. I'll go into more spoilery stuff under the cut, but I thought that it worked well in wrapping up some of the plot arcs of this season, and was even fun. Moffat did far better with last year's wrap-up though, and there was such a lot to cover I wish that it had been a two-parter, which might have helped it. The problem with that being that then it and "Let's Kill Hitler" would have meant a full half of the episodes in this half of the season would have been arc episodes.

More spoilers under the cut.

Huh, "Closing Time". I thought Craig worked great in "The Lodger", but really by the end of that episode I'd seen all I needed to see of him. I get the feeling that the Cybermen were thrown in as an afterthought. While well written, especially for Cybermen, they didn't exude much in the way of menace on-screen. Really they had as much of a role in this as the Nestene did in "Rose" - they're a backdrop to Craig's character arc and that failed to thrill me.

According to the NZ ratings which Paul collected, this is the highest rating Moffat episode which frankly boggles the mind. I have to wonder if the mediocre ratings for the next episode weren't an audience reaction, but it's hard to tell.

The "time happening all at once" thing in "The Wedding of River Song" seems to be "Father's Day" taken to the extremes. Rather than Reapers, we have all of time happening at once. So how come Churchill gets to be Emperor of Britain and not Thatcher or any of the other British PMs? Are there any of the many kings and queens running around? It was a very selective history. The revelation of what the eyepatches are for was inventive. The ending, yes, was a bit of a copout, but just about any method they could have used to avoid the Doctor actually dying would have felt that way. I'm not sure where Moffat is intending to go with his revelation of what the question is that the Silence don't want asked. "Doctor Who?" isn't a question that can be answered on the show without blowing the central premise.

Where to next? Only Steve Moffat knows!