Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "The Wedding of River Song"

The Wedding of River Song

• ·      Like “Let’s Kill Hitler”, “The Wedding of River Song” is a hot mess of an episode, a fascinating but flawed finale to cap a fascinating but flawed season. However, it is terrific fun, a finale built on an exploration of perception and memory.
• ·      Let’s start at the beginning. After the title sequence, we start with the image of the Doctor, as seen through the eye of a Dalek: eyes are, not for the first time in this era, a running motif in this episode. The scene is constructed to show how terrifying the Doctor is to a lone Dalek: as in the Pandorica speech, he Doctor is relying on the legend built up around him to terrify his oldest enemy. The Doctor is framed as the monster, at least as seen through the eyes of a genocidal hate machine (this is something that will be picked up at the start of series Seven). The next scene sees the Doctor using the Dalek’s eyestalk as a tool for bartering: the tool through which the Dalek sees the Doctor is used as a means to get information on the Silence.
• ·      After a brief cameo from the Doctor’s oldest enemy, we move to the villains his most pressing threat. The Silence are obviously a Moffat perception monster, but what’s more interesting is the way they represent a convergence of two key themes in Steven Moffat’s writing: perception and memory: they are monsters you can only remember when you see them. With the silence, seeing believing: seeing is remembering. The eye motif continues, as the episode introduces the concept of the Eye Drives as a response to the powers of the silence, furthering the connection of the Silence to sight: an imprint in the eye is used to remember the Silence when the user isn’t looking at them.
• ·      Similarly, Amy is able to remember the Doctor, the universe before River created a new Timeline, due to her growing up with a crack in her bedroom wall. She uses drawings to help herself remember: Amy is at heart creative, a storyteller, and her she once again brings back her memories through the power of art and stories. And this is linked to the episode’s exploration of sight: the drawings recreations of things Amy has seen in alternate other life. For Amy, sight and art combine to help her pull back her memories, and perceive a different reality.
• ·      Also significant is the Doctor and River’s exchange at Lake Silencio:
• “RIVER: That's me. How can I be there?
• DOCTOR: That's you from the future, serving time for a murder you probably can't remember. My murder.
• RIVER: Why would you do that? Make me watch?
• DOCTOR: So that you know this is inevitable. And you are forgiven. Always and completely forgiven”
• The Doctor’s wrong: River does remember the events at Lake Silencio, she makes that clear to Amy at the end of the episode. So his consolation to her younger self is mistaken: River will remember the crime she hasn’t really commited. And that’s a problem, as it means the Doctor, at this point in the episode, is burdening River with guilt she doesn’t deserve.
• ·      The response to this scene comes in the scene at the top of the pyramid: as the Doctor whispers to River, telling her to “Look into [his] eye”: the eyes are the windows of the soul, and here, the Doctor admits an important emotional truth to River, and to himself. Seeing the Doctor in the eye of the Tesselecta, changes his plans for the way River will remember his “death”. When River confronts him with her love and grief, the Doctor is forced to recognise that hiding his plan to cheat death from River will hurt her, and accept that she has a right to know she won’t kill him. This scene is the emotional core of the episode, as the story becomes about his desire to be a lone, brooding hero being proved wrong, and him opening up to the people who love him, recognizing her right to be a part of his plans.
• ·      We then move to Amy and River, and their final scene together, in Amy’s garden. Here, they address Amy’s decision to kill Madame Kovarian in cold blood, with River suggesting the timeline being erased absolves Amy of any need to question her actions, only for Amy to respond by saying, “I remember it, so it happened”. It’s a moment that directly provides a sense of emotional fallout from what happened to Amy in the first half of the season, which as has been mentioned before, has seemed lacking in the second half of this season. But it is interesting to connect this lack of visible fallout to the role of the Silence as creatures of narrative corruption: the silence lurk just outside of the memory, a trauma that remains unknown until they appear explicitly, and so the damage they do to Amy and River disappears from the visible narrative, only lurking in the cracks of the narrative, until they reappear in the finale. It’s only once confronting the narrative wound they represent, and defeating them for good, as Amy does in her confrontation with Kovarian, that Amy and River are able to respond to, and start to process, the trauma they have been through, and take stock of the people they are now.
• ·      And as Amy and River take stock of their trauma, River realises that Amy needs to know the truth of the Doctor’s words at the top of the Pyramid too. It’s interesting to compare River’s confession to Doctor’s: the Doctor is forced to accept that River deserves to remember the truth of what happened at Lake Silencio, in spite of his reluctance, feeling he has to follow a “dark and brooding hero” narrative. River sees Amy’s need, and chooses to let her know the truth, share her memory of the Doctor’s whispered words with her mother, even though she shouldn’t. After going through terrible trauma together, Amy and River end the season united, and helping each other heal.
• ·      This journey through perception and memory leaves us with the Doctor’s faked death, and the way it is remembered. He can’t be seen as “the face of the Devil himself” anymore, as he was through the eye of the Dalek at the start of the episode: his worst enemy provide the episode’s moral critique of the path he has taken, and this critique causes him to “Step back into the shadows”, erase the universes’ memory of him, so that he can become less of a dangerous myth, and return to being an ordinary man who helps people. But to do that, he has to answer the question posed by the title of the show, to find his true identity beneath the legends that have been built up around him.