River Songs Swansong

Hello faithful readers,

You know, River Song is a great character, one full of promise and finesse, but one, it seems, with a limited shelf life. Of course, she could go on forever, in a timey wimey way, and her popping up from now until Doomsday with a "shhh, spoiler!" line isn't impossible, but the actual linear narrative of her and the Doctor must come to and end, because it has a built in top, middle and bottom, unlike most relationships which, like Sarah Jane for instance, can be open ended for ever.

The River Song in Closing Time, for what it's worth, is pre-Silence In The Library. I know that might sound a bit like "well, EVERY River since then is pre-that", but by that I mean, literally, she's pre-everything, with the exception of Let's Kill Hitler. Her role in that episode too, will lead us to a few dead certs in a season of what ifs. When we see River on Saturday, we will categorically know that, in at least one scene, in the whole of the series, there have been two Doctors and two Rivers. Sometimes standing right next to each other.

The Silence is a religion, remember, not the big Scream-esque boogie men from Day of the Moon. It's the theme that's been running through two seasons and why the TARDIS blew up. Things have happened that we don't remember - because the characters seeing them don't remember. Our Scream-guys are tools for that job. So, like everything Steven Moffat writes, perspective is everything.

Time can be rewritten, we're told now - but, the question, surely, is which time? In Turn Left we saw a world without the Doctor, a world in which chaos ruled because he wasn't there. Now, if the Doctor, two hundred years older, is killed on the shores of Lake Silencio, we have to ask ourselves, where was he from? What was he doing? Was he visiting the shores of the Silver Devastation? Was he helping Craig Owens change nappies? Or was he, perhaps, doing something entirely different.

For Time to go back to the way it was - not one with dinosaurs and Dickens and Churchill and loop the loops - someone has to kill the best man she knows. And, by the end of Closing Time we'll know how she does that - but perhaps it's the Doctor's death that rights the wrongs done in his name - the big ball of mixed up wibbly wobbly Time Stuff that needs straightening out.

He has his stetson, he has his envelopes, he's travelling alone in the TARDIS... but two of someone in the same place at the same time - echoed in The Girl Who Waited - is a paradox even the TARDIS can't stand.

Even for a half-Time Lord.

And what of the Ponds? Shopping obliviously in Closing Time? Will the Doctor say hello? Will he put them in danger again? Or are they caught in a loop so important he can't. If they do talk, what do they say? And if they say anything, is it really important. For the girl who's tired of waiting, perhaps, she has to wait just a little while longer.

Suffice to say, Steven Moffat has forty five minutes to tie up two years worth of stuff, because, after The Wedding of River Song, the Doctor's off, sans Ponds, sans River, but still very, very much alive.

I wonder how?

Happy Times and Places

Ed
Spoilers