Live from Master Closet Studios, you’re listening to the only podcast on the internet who consents and gladly gives: it’s the Noobs and the Whovian!
My name is Austin and I’m the Whovian, and these are my sons Corbin and Tripp and we’re the noobs!
This is the podcast that introduces a whole new generation to Doctor Who by watching an episode each week and discussing it from the perspective of a dad who’s seen it before, and two sons who haven’t.
Welcome to Episode 90 covering series 6 episode 13: The Wedding of River Song.
Super-short Recap
This is the one where the Doctor, Amy, Rory, & River go to a wedding! For River… and the Doctor… and time is broken.
Remember that one?
Production notes
- Story # 224
- Originally aired October 1, 2011 to 7.67 million viewers
- Written by: Steven Moffat
- Directed by: Jeremy Webb – also did The Curse of the Black Spot
Misc Trivia
- We mentioned last time that this is the first NuWho finale to not be a two-parter. In fact, this is the first Doctor Who finale EVER to be a stand-alone episode, because of the serial nature of Classic Who.
- It’s also the first NuWho finale that doesn’t center on a Classic Who villain. We SEE a Dalek, but it’s not the main villain.
- It’s also ALSO the first NuWho finale where the final scene isn’t in the TARDIS.
- We again have an actor portraying the Doctor AND a different character in the same episode. Smith did this previously in The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People.
Cast
- Doctor Malohkeh (Silurian) – Richard Hope
- Emperor Winston Churchill – Ian McNiece
- Old Canton Delaware – William Morgan Sheppard gets a nod for his appearance in the background at Lake Silencio
- Charles Dickens – Simon Callow
- He played Dickens 6 years earlier in The Unquiet Dead
Checklist
- Name of the episode spoken in dialogue?
- Creature of the week
- Daleks
- Teselecta
- CGI
- Bow ties are cool
- He used the bow tie in the wedding ceremony
- Hats
- The Stetson – when we first saw the Stetson (“I wear a Stetson now, Stetson’s are cool.”), that was a fake! It was created by the Tessalecta.
- Which brings up a side point – When we see the Doctor in The Impossible Astronaut, it’s a fake Doctor all the way up till the younger Doctor walks out of the bathroom in the diner!
- Doctor Who?
- We’ll get to this later, but we definitely got a Doctor Who? In this one!
- Geronimo
- Calmly as he gets his suit
- Running count – 8
- Stuff the Doctor loves
- Jiggery Pokery
- Sonic
- It doesn’t work on wood, but it does do stone, apparently
- TARDIS
- Psychic paper
- Random
- Sonic
- Needless sacrificial death
- Jibberty Jabberty
- We’re opposite poles of the disruption. If we touch, we short out the differential. Time can begin again.
- Silence will fall
- A religious order of great power and discretion. The sentinels of history as they like to call themselves.
- All the times I heard those words, I never realized it was my silence, my death. The Doctor will fall.
- Lake Silencio – it’s a still point in time, easier to create a fixed point.
- Eye-drive – communicates directly with the brain, allows you to remember them
- The Question
- on the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the Eleventh, when no creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a question that must never be answered will be asked: the first question, hidden in plain sight.
- Silence MUST fall would be a better translation.
- Doctor who?
- Eye-patch Lady
- Now we know why she has the eye-patch
- She definitely has a different colored eye-patch
- She meets the inevitable fate of the collaborator
- The Doctor’s Rules
- Rule 1 is mentioned again
- Jammie Dodger sighting
- Running count – 3
- Existential Horror
Other stuff we noticed
- There’s so many rumors about us. Idle gossip. Archaeology. Same thing!
Who’s Who?
- Who is Amy?
- Pond, Amelia Pond
- The Crack gets another mention – the exposure to the crack is what allowed her to notice the problem with time.
- River Song didn’t get it all from you, Madame Kovarian.
- I killed someone. In an aborted timeline in a reality that never was.
- But I remember it, so it happened, so I did it.
- She’s the Doctor’s mother-in-law
- Who is Rory?
- He keeps the eye-drive on
- Rory Williams, the man who dies and dies again
- We got married and had a baby and that’s her…. ok
- Who is River?
- What happened to time, Doctor? A woman…
- What’s she like? Attractive I assume. Hell in high heels
- Take a child, raise her into a psychopath, introduce her to the Doctor, who else was I going to fall in love with?
- We discover at the very end that River pretended to not know who the astronaut was. So there’s no continuity problem here.
- Who is The Doctor?
- He was slowly reading a magazine early on, to which Corbin asked “Why isn’t he speed-reading that?” You’d have to imagine that if he’s not speed reading it’s because he wants to take his time and enjoy it. It was Knitting for Girls!
- He hates rats
- There’s always more, it’s always going on. For me it never stops! Liz I is still waiting for me in a glade, I could help Rose Tyler with her homework, go to all Jack’s stag parties in one night.
- Time catches up with us all, Doctor
- Well it’s never laid a glove on me!
- My friends have always been the best of me.
- I did run, it only brought me here
- He’s so socially awkward!
- She said you were a Mr. Hottie Nurse and she’s interested in going out with you for texting and scones.
- You’ve touched so many lives, saved so many people. Did you ever think that when your time came you would have to do anything more than ask? You think the universe is better off without you, but the universe disagrees.
- Time said I had to die, so I dressed for the occasion. A Doctor in a Doctor suit!
Can we talk about how time works with the companions?
- The Doctor called up Lethbridge-Stewart but he had died.
- As he said himself, he has a TIME MACHINE! He should be able to go back to when he was alive, even the very second after he last saw him.
- It seems like there’s some kind of weird continuity of time between the Doctor and his companions… sometimes.
Classic Who Connection
- The first mention of a fixed point in time was back with the First Doctor in the serial The Aztecs. Barbara wanted to alter their history and the Doctor would not let her.
- The concept that the Doctor’s true name or even identity is a dark secret goes back to the serial The Silver Nemesis and is even talked about by Ian Chesterton in An Unearthly Child
- This episode was a tribute to Nicholas Courtney who played Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and there were a few Easter eggs about him throughout the episode that were last-minute additions
- They mentioned his passing
- There were scenes where everybody was wearing an eyepatch referencing the serial Inferno that takes place in an alternate universe and the alternate reality Lethbridge-Stewart had an eyepatch. At one point during filming Courtney turned around and everyone on set was wearing an eyepatch (he often shared this story at conventions)
- Amy says “We’ll be in Cairo soon” which is where Courtney was born
- Courtney passed away peacefully in his sleep, which was a prophecy made about Lethbridge-Stewart by the Seventh Doctor the serial Battlefield
Overall impressions
- Overall rating out of 10 –
- Jared – 9.5 Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewarts
- Austin – 9.5 upside down Dorium heads
- Corbin – 9.5 Doctor Whos
- Tripp – 10 dead not dead doctors
- Creep Level – out of 500
- Jared – 250, (mostly for the pit of skulls)
- Austin – 225
- Corbin – 250
- Tripp – 265
Theories
- What will happen with Eleven dying?
- Corbin thinks this will be the end of series 6 and they will avert Eleven’s death.
- Tripp
- Corbin’s whole theory
- The River, who is the impossible astronaut and the little girl, kills the Doctor in the season finale and that is why she is in Stormcage. Also, she is the Doctor’s wife.
- Plus my theory that the eyepatches held images of the silence was correct too.
- What happens with Amy and Rory?
- Tripp thinks we never see them again
- Corbin thinks they’re in the season finale
The Game Plan
- Next week, we have our first Timey Wimey of 2020, the year of Bill & Ted: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure!
- The streaming on this is a little squirrely. It’s not on Prime, but it’s part of the Starz add-on. You can do this by going to Amazon and adding it on.
Closing
Noobs and the Whovian is a production of Master Closet Studios, where it’s always smaller on the inside. Your Senior Producer is Austin Reason. Our Audio Engineer is Tripp Reason. Corbin Reason is our Production Editor. Special thanks to tardis.wikia.com for the trivia, Jared for the Classic Who Connection. Shout outs to Victor and Jared for their Patreon support.
You can find us at facebook.com/noobsandthewhovian or twitter.com/noobswhovian and email us at [email protected]. Consider supporting us at https://www.patreon.com/noobsandthewhovian. Please subscribe and leave a rating wherever you found us, and share us with a friend not because we’re a great show but because we watch one.
