The Husbands of River Song

TARDIS Coordinates: December 25, 2015

The Doctor who doesn’t like endings finally decides to end something.

To me, that’s the important part of “The Husbands of River Song.” It’s the point that the rest of the episode serves. The episode opens with him in solitary mourning, and ends with him engineering the long-awaited visit to the Singing Towers of Darillium, according to diary their last meeting before the Library. Apparently, with his foreknowledge that it would be their next-to-last meeting, he kept avoiding it.

I suppose I’ve been putting this off myself.

Did you know you can tinker with the dates of a WordPress post? I can date this entry to whatever I want it to be. I can date it to December 31, 2017, and it wouldn’t post until then. I can date it to July 10, 2011, and it’d be the first post. I split up stories in the Ninth Season that could conceivably have been considered multi-parters. But everything has to end, and this is where we wind up.

Eventually.

Fortunately, the series thus far ends with a bang. The Twelfth Doctor is a wit, just like all of them; the quote files for any Doctor are quite burdened when done properly. Peter Capaldi has a full range, but we don’t see much comedy out of him in Doctor Who; this might, in fact, be the first time I’ve ever seen him laugh. His last season didn’t sport him much of a break; it was an emotionally-exhausting, physically demanding twelve episodes, and watching him slip into comfortable banter with Alex Kingston while the Doctor discovered what River Song was like while he was away, was a masterpiece.

I kind of had the suspicion that River was carrying a bit of an idiot ball, and I think even the Doctor sort of suspected that after a while. It did take her a very, very long time to figure out who the Doctor was and how he managed to place himself in the center of the drama. Then again, the Doctor can be a bloody dunce sometimes, if that’s how we decide to interpret the third-act reveals that bring the story together in so many episodes – it’s not wilful ignorance or mindless stupidity, but an unavailability of important information that has to be discovered. Her first impression, that the Doctor was some bumbling surgeon who’d stumbled across her path, and who she now had to drag along out of some sense of obligation, took a hell of a long time to shake. That’s probably the biggest surprise one gets from her character; that she can be that self-assured.

Of course, the Doctor not only took a chance by playing his own companion, but by playing it up. Sure, his hammy entrance into the TARDIS mocked the reactions of those he’s invited aboard in the past, but he’s also somewhat relegated into running two paces behind River in all things until the reveal. Part of the Doctor wants to see what River is like when he’s not around; part of the Doctor wants to whip off the mask and shout “It’s me!” and those two parts are in conflict for the balance of the narrative. Like the Doctor himself, River needs someone to stop her.

Personally, I think this is a great capstone to the season – a belly laugh and a bittersweet ending. The show itself seems to wave farewell at the end, but rest assured, Doctor Who will be back – and we’ll be waiting.