This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK preview of the episode.

Like a lot of fans, when I heard the title of this episode, I said "really? Dinosaurs... on a spaceship? What is it actually called?" but no that was the title, so amid many raised eyebrows this episode bursts forth, and how, within minutes you've been whipped through multiple timezones and settings at such a dizzying pace that you feel slightly overwhelmed, but that's Doctor Who these days, keep up or turn over and watch The X Factor instead.

This may read as a criticism but it is not, with an episode this bonkers you need an appropriately bonkers start to hurl you straight in, the madness reflects the chaos that is The Doctor and the whirlwind that is his existence, but anyway on with the episode as The Doctor assembles a motley crew of an Egyptian queen, a big game hunter and the Ponds plus Dad to save a ship full of dinosaurs from being blown up by the Indian Space Agency. This is most definitely a story aimed at the family audience rather than "The Fans" but is that really a bad thing? It's hard to be cross with an episode that is just this much fun, the humour doesn't always hit, some of the 'Carry On' style jokes will have you groaning but the more subtle joking raised a laugh from me, in particular the lovely touches of the ship being powered by waves from an internal beach and the tantrum throwing useless robots, beautifully voiced by comedy duo Robert Webb and David Mitchell.

 

 

The tone is also helped along by the guest stars playing it absolutely straight, it would have been easy for them to mug at the camera, falling about and overacting but they're extremely believable, I particularly enjoyed Amy taking on the role of The Doctor with two 'companions' in Nefertiti and Riddell. Our regulars are on excellent form as always with Arthur Darvill really getting his teeth into the comedy aspects, Matt Smith is great, his face is mesmerizing to watch but also subtle, check out his little smirk when he goes unidentified by Solomon's scanner, however the stand out performance in the episode is that of Mark Williams as Rory's Dad Brian, I think we may have found a new Wilfred Mott in him, a man obsessed with golf who carries a trowel with him at all times who in the end of the episode just wants to sit quietly with a sandwich and a cup of tea and gaze down at the Earth, wonderful.

My fears that this episode was just using the Dinosaurs was just a gimmick were quickly allayed by the clever touch of having the ship be a Silurian ark invaded by a sneering villain in the shape of David Bradley's Solomon and here in lies some of the problem with this episode, while it's a ton of fun while our heroes are running about the ship, riding on very nicely realised dinosaurs once it gets down the core the episode becomes less interesting, Solomon is a pretty generic baddie, all full of threats and concern only for profit and the ending is a little pat with The Doctor casually blowing up his ship. Chris Chibnall has had a somewhat checkered history with Doctor Who, writing the good but not great "42" and the underwhelming "The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood", not to mention being largely responsible for the atrocious Torchwood series one. That being said I believe that this is his best work so far, a good, solid episode that's lots of fun but with some nice, deeper moments being mixed in, the little exchange between Amy and The Doctor sends hair standing up on your arms and gives us some heavy foreshadowing of what is to come and I'm ever so grateful he resisted the temptation of having someone say "I've had it with these *expletive deleted* dinosaurs on this *expletive deleted* spaceship!"

This is a story which is most reminiscent of episodes like "The Unicorn and The Wasp" and "The Lodger", an entertaining romp perhaps let down slightly by not having much of a plot to pin it all on to, that being said I enjoyed watching it tremendously and as a slice of Saturday night entertainment it can't be beat, I'm very much looking forward to watching it over again to pick up the little bits of dialogue I missed. In a series where Moffat promised us a blockbuster every week this episode certainly delivers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK preview of the episode.

Has the internet melted yet? Because Asylum of the Daleks may well be the greatest piece of Moffatesque misdirection that Doctor Who has ever enjoyed. “Every Dalek ever!” screamed the advance publicity, promising scale and spectacle and scope. And sure enough, we got all that. But the hype was just a smoke screen set up to protect the real heart of this episode, and its audacious, incredible use of one unexpected character. Rarely has a series opener been as memorable and as history-defining as this, at least in terms of Doctor Who’s overarching mythos. We’ll not see Asylum’s like again: this is a one-shot trick, introducing an important human character only to then mount a stunning, gobsmacking reveal. Almost an inversion of Rob Shearman’s Dalek in places, this time the difference between human and monster is explored from the other side. “Remember me,” the Doctor is told, and I’ve no doubt he will, along with millions of fans.

Asylum of the Daleks is testament to the production team’s impressive ambition, and Moffat’s desire to find new things to do with the Daleks. There’s plenty of life left in the old icons yet, whether it’s the fact they now have a Prime Minister and a Parliament (were all the different Daleks referred to as a ‘Coalition’ in any earlier drafts, I wonder?), as well as an innovative and brilliantly visual way of commandeering puppet humans. The zombie sequence is surprisingly nasty for contemporary Who, veering sharply into horror territory despite its lack of blood and gore.

Along with ringing the changes, Moffat’s script appears to blatantly ignore plot points from ‘Victory of the Daleks’. Though he’d already expounded the view that the Dalek Paradigm were an “officer class” (something that hardly makes much sense of red “drones”), for series seven the showrunner goes right ahead and reinstates popular Davies-era bronze models. In DWM 451, Moffat argues that this “isn’t a continuity error”, and of course he’s right. It’s no error. It’s a deliberate, conscious continuity blanking or resetting after ‘Victory’; a discontinuity aimed at recharging and revitalizing the pepperpot psychopaths. Sometimes ignoring Who’s continuity can enable a brilliant story possibility, or facilitate startling TV spectacle, and Asylum surely provides ammunition for that viewpoint.

After last year, I wasn’t at all surprised that Nick Hurran was allocated to a number of Moffat scripts. I can imagine Moffat watching a cut of The Girl Who Waited and muttering to himself “I’m having some of that!” (although my imagination is fairly warped, I’ll concede). And Hurran plus Daleks doesn’t disappoint; a number of sequences are incredibly tense. In directorial terms, everything just works, as the episode rockets along towards its devastating conclusion with plenty of visual panache.

There’s also some crafty word play – another hallmark of a gold-standard Moffat screenplay. Childhood jokes or mispronounciations of eggs-term-in-ate won't ever be seen in quite the same light after this. And there’s a characteristic mash-up of prior Moffat motifs (he really does seem to love writing a strange, transformative kind of quasi-fan fiction based on appropriating his own previous scripts). On this occasion, it’s back to ‘The Empty Child’/’The Doctor Dances’ for a nano-cloud, Skarosian remix of the nanogenes, mixed with an aspect of 'Let's Kill Hitler'. But on the all-round strength of this showing, if Moffat's ‘new’ ideas amount to shiny rearrangements of old ideas, then so be it.

Weak spots? I’m not sure there are very many, although with so much to cram in, Amy and Rory’s storyline seems curiously rushed, condensed to its essential plot beats. And Moffat’s “feisty” female characters all seem to speak in the same quickfire, gimmicky manner which grates ever so slightly to my ears. Whatever faults one might have attributed to Russell T. Davies’s series openers, he always sketched out convincing characters incredibly well. Even minor figures could take on a dense weight of realism. By contrast, many of Moffat’s characters carry an air of stylized unreality, something which I’d say has been true of Amy Pond in the past, and seems true yet again of the major new character here, thanks partly to things like the “chinboy” and “beaky” shtick.

Akin to ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ last year, this episode helps set up a host of questions, as well as cleverly integrating the “Doctor Who?” business into its events. Forget series five’s partial misfire, because Steven Moffat already has. This episode is the real 'Victory', thanks both to its Dalek depictions and its unprecedented contributions to Who's history. Did you think you’d ever see an introduction quite like this? Unexpected, unpredictable, and utterly, utterly brilliant. You can tick “Daleks” off the list; when is Steven Moffat going to write a proper, full-on Cyberman story?

This review contains plot spoilers 

Dark Horizons is a well-crafted, enjoyable Doctor Who story carrying more than an occasional hint of J.T. Colgan’s primary career as a writer. Better known as Jenny Colgan, author of “chick lit” titles such as Meet Me At the Cupcake Café and Amanda’s Wedding, here Colgan brings romancing, character-driven sensibilities to the action-adventure world of the eleventh Doctor. There’s a running gag about the Time Lord’s knowledge of women – or lack of it – and his (un)suitability as an advisor on matters of the heart. Plus there’s a burgeoning romance between Princess Freydis and her captor Henrik (who oddly shares his name with a twenty-first century department store). Since the Doctor is travelling alone, Freydis and Henrik act as stand-in companions. It's a role these characters play rather effectively, even if Freydis strikes an overly familiar note as feisty and proto-feminist, while Henrik closely resembles Rory in at least one crucial way.

Again drawing attention to the fact that J.T. Colgan is Jenny Colgan, at one point the Doctor declares that if he fully understood human motivations he’d “retire to a hammock with a rather excellent hat and read a lot of novels with pink covers” (p.294), conjuring an image of the Time Lord as a holidaying "chick lit" consumer. But the in-jokes and the romance subplot simply add to a tale well-told, as the Doctor struggles to understand and combat a mysterious fire threatening twelfth century islanders and Vikings alike.

Dark Horizons, like The Coming of the Terraphiles before it, offers a strong argument for welcoming new voices and unexpected writers into the fold. The result this time is a Doctor Who adventure that has a vibrant freshness of touch, and a willingness to do things which old hands might deem unconventional, such as challenging the TARDIS’s powers and potency. One stand-out sequence has the police box proving to be a rather useless submarine whilst the Doctor realizes his time machine might, for once, prove more of a hindrance than a help.

Colgan’s authorial voice also shines through via a focus on character, though her historical figures sometimes read as thinly veiled versions of contemporary norms. It seems that the past is merely a different county; they do things pretty much the same there. Mind you, the TV series already has form on this, and one could just as well argue that Colgan is faithfully emulating the approach of The Fires of Pompeii. In terms of structure, this feels a lot like a Russell T. Davies tale, with the action-oriented storyline ending some time before the novel’s eventual closure and being followed by a coda leaving readers with a warm, fuzzy glow inside. Colgan has seemingly blended a cocktail of showrunners’ tics and tropes: Moffat’s take on monstrosity combined with Davies’s greater feeling for feeling.

And there are some ‘Easter egg’ treats for attentive readers, such as the Doctor’s knowledge of Busted lyrics in Chapter Eighteen, and some delightfully unexpected cameos in Chapter Nineteen. Colgan’s writing enacts its very own time travel in the latter case, skilfully proffering a sudden, vertiginous narrative switch to the present day. This gives her story added scope and scale, and brings home the fact that ancient history can linger unseen within nooks and crannies of the here-and-now. It’s a smart literary trick well suited to the omniscient narrator, and rather more difficult to pull off on TV.

The eleventh Doctor is well depicted, with Matt Smith’s performance style and quickfire dialogue being well captured. And although the Doctor’s method of overcoming the fiery antagonist he faces is very strongly signposted, there are still some unexpected twists and turns along the way. I suspect that BBC Books are deliberately commissioning these stand-alone releases as distinctly seasonal titles; the snowy, silvery Silent Stars Go By was aimed squarely at last year’s Christmas market, while this blazing red-and-bronze effort appears designed as a summer read, with the forthcoming Wheel of Ice again having a wintry feel in time for Christmas 2012. Or perhaps it’s mere coincidence that the range has settled into this publishing schedule of snow, fire, and ice. Given current British weather, BBC Books might be better off acquiring a novel about biblical floods or misbehaving climates for next summer.

As well as expertly catching the eleventh Doctor’s persona, Colgan also has some fun with how he is perceived. Thought to be a God, his identity is recurrently linked to that of Loki, the trickster. It’s a not uncommon parallel for the Time Lord, but one that’s especially relevant to Matt Smith’s Doctor, and also one that’s well integrated into the milieu of this story rather than ever feeling forced or tricksy. Freydis ponders whether the Doctor will meet the fate foretold for Loki, and in turn I wondered whether the novel would leave this thread hanging, implying some wider story arc or foreshadowing. But ultimately it seems that things are all tidied away by the time the Doctor departs for further adventures.

This is another satisfying novel from BBC Books. It features an intriguing, well-developed foe for the Doctor, and it successfully incorporates Colgan’s interests and writing style into Doctor Who. However, on a more critical note I do think that crediting this to "J.T." Colgan is an unhelpful bit of marketing wisdom. Are Jenny Colgan’s fans really going to order this title – with its foil DW logo – expecting it to be her usual brand of writing? Are Doctor Who fans going to read this without an awareness of “J.T”’s identity, given the author photo and description provided inside the back cover? The Coming of the Terraphiles was arguably a less ‘authentic’ Who novel than this, but there was no sign of that being written by “M.J.” Moorcock. Instead, Moorcock’s readers and Doctor Who fans were assumed to form a unified or at least non-antagonistic taste bloc (itself a potentially fallacious assumption). Coy and unconvincing author’s initials convey the shortsighted impression here that modern Doctor Who can’t or shouldn’t be clearly attributed to a bestselling “chick lit” writer. I can’t help but wonder what feisty Princess Freydis would make of this state of affairs. Or whether one “V.A.” Lambert would have sanctioned such dark, narrow horizons of gender and genre.

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK preview of the episode.

Steven Moffat's second Christmas Special returns to his first love as a Doctor Who writer: the theme of motherhood. Rather than that eerie question “are you my mummy?” instead we get young Cyril Arwell's stubborn assertion that “mummy always comes” to the rescue. And in a spot of gender amending, the Doctor further sums up events in two words: “Mother Christmas!”. But before we get to the maternal love-in – with the “basecode of nature” used as justification for assorted meanings of plucky, fierce mother's love – this episode has plenty of (forested) ground to cover. For one thing, its title is misleading three times over: the wardrobe isn't actually a wardrobe, the widow isn't ultimately a widow, and the Doctor isn't quite himself either – he's the caretaker, hiding from his own legend, and keeping away from old friends.

This big festive episode also seems rather like the Who equivalent of a Christmas tree groaning under the weight of years' worth of different decorations – lots of shiny things are there on display, some of which you don't like, and some of which don't match. But if you look carefully, you'll always find something to delight. An impact suit that repairs its occupant; naturally-occurring Christmas trees; dancing chairs; a wintry forest wrapped in a TARDIS-blue gift box; wooden monsters who aren't really monsters. Androzani Major. Bill Bailey in a spaced-out hazard suit. Come on, admit it, that golden crown of fandom is starting to tingle and glow with life force. This is traditional rather than transitional Christmas Who fare, despite the fact that Piers Wenger hands over here to new queen bee exec-producer Caroline Skinner.

My favourite shiny bauble is the fact that at about 44 minutes in, and after a quiet moment where the geodesic sphere spaceship lifts off, we suddenly cut to what appears to be a 'clean' version of the end credits' time vortex (at least, we do in the “rough cut” that I'm reviewing, so fingers crossed that this makes it into the Christmas Day broadcast). Rather than the production team's names whizzing by in the smallest font in the universe, though, we pull back to see the Doctor watching through a triangular window. It's not the end credits at all, crashing in at the wrong moment, it's the time vortex that Madge is selflessly piloting them through. But just for the merest split second you can't help but imagine you're seeing the eleventh Doctor gazing out at the end of a Doctor Who episode. It's a great visual, as Arabella Weir's Billis might say.

Sadly, there is at least one major missed opportunity. It's a shame that after series six has focused on an under-developed and under-explored mother-daughter relationship, the values of being a mum can seemingly only be explored while Amy Pond is off the stage. Of course, all are well in the Arwell clan by episode's end, but I'd argue that Madge (wonderfully played by Claire Skinner) nevertheless gets more character development, and more plot beats surrounding her motherhood, than poor Amy Pond received in an arc's worth of material. It's as if Moffat can only really focus on developing wholly believable characters, and properly writing the mum thing, when he's not preoccupied with series arc plot-twists, or with which episode goes where in the run. Having said that, even the Doctor's emotional journey in this episode occasionally doesn't quite ring true: at certain moments he's clueless with feelings, but at other times he can effortlessly find just the right thing to say to Madge (“they are going to be sad later”). Part-time emotional intelligence guru, and part-time bumbler, perhaps this is a portrayal aiming for the “wise fool”, or the genius-child who can't understand his own feelings, but even so it still sometimes feels jarringly uneven.

If motherhood is a key presence here then so too, oddly enough, is water. This is a very wet Christmas Special. Following on from River and the Ponds, this time out we get “frightful” acid rain, a lemonade tap, a water pistol used as a carol-singing deterrent, and “humany wumany” happy crying in the Doctor's Christmas homecoming. Across the hour we move from a bombastic Star Wars-meets-James Bond pre-credits sequence (surely designed to make the audience sit up and pay attention) to a domestic Doctor-greets-the-Ponds ending. The latter could hardly be any less special effects' intensive, and you definitely have to pay careful attention to get it, as finally a glistening smear of “happy crying” appears below Matt Smith's left eye. People can't resist a door, and neither can the Time Lord as he crosses the threshold into Amy and Rory's home. For the eleventh Doctor, an ordinary front door can be just as much of a dimensional portal as his present to the Arwells – this time, it's a door which transports him into a new world of emotional wonder, and a newfound humanity.

The gimmicky wimmicky of “sciency wiency” workbenches or “humany wumany” crying might be wearing just a tiny bit thin by this point, I suspect, but no doubt it'll see us through to the forthcoming anniversary-wersary. Hold on to your hats, then, because the eleventh Doctor is growing up before our very eyes. He's very much linked to the children Lily and Cyril via his repeated “I know!” early on in this story, and he fails to be a proper (adult) caretaker, unlike Madge who he thanks for “taking care” of him. He even gets told off for not giving Amy and Rory a status update on his vital signs, with Matt Smith playing the “yes, Mum” scene to chastened perfection. But by the time the end-credits fly past, this Doctor is a little bit more of a time-travelling adult, and just a fraction closer to being a Time Lord grown-up. And the possibility of a return visit to Madge Arwell's life has also been deftly sketched in.

This Christmas Special isn't really about Narnia, or portals, or wooden aliens. All these things are, after all, just the decorations on the tree. Underneath the glitter of Farren Blackburn's direction (solid on The Fades and solid here), and underneath the glitz of Stephan Pehrsson's ongoing great work as DoP, this episode's roots and branches are infused with the magic of maternal care. Even the Doctor is “weak” in comparison, it would seem. Yet the TV “mothership” – Doctor Who itself – continues to be strong, even towards the end of a year where its spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures were either put on hold or came to an end, and where Doctor Who Confidential was abruptly consigned to television history. So many unhappy realities getting in the way of the fiction. Nobody should be alone at Christmas, but this year BBC Wales' Doctor Who is notably more alone in the schedules without all of its spin-off family, and if I were to shed a metaphorical tear for that fact then it'd be sad crying, not happy crying, which would glisten damply at the end of Who's 2011.

One of the results of 2011’s split-season of Doctor Who was that there were double the number of “event” episodes – that is, season-openers and season finales. Murray Gold draws attention to this in his liner notes: “There were four musically challenging stories (first and last episodes always need a certain amount of extra impact).” I for one am very glad that Murray rose to this challenge wholeheartedly, because it has led to an outstanding album packed with a broad range of moods and genres (yet still following a single story arc), and one that will be a favourite of mine for a long time.

Disc One kicks off in funky nonchalance with some familiar chords performed by Murray himself on electric guitar. A casual but charged percussive riff joins in, before the whole orchestra explodes into a thrillingly revamped version of the Eleventh Doctor’s theme – “I Am The Doctor In Utah”. With track two, “1969”, we find ourselves in tense, mysterious “high noon” territory. The solo trumpet and the cloudy guitar dissolve into a magical, pained vocal as the Doctor begins to regenerate.

Another standout track is “Help Is On Its Way”. The musical tone of these first two episodes is very consistent, and here the guitar returns with a swinging riff, while violas and violins drive forward with that familiar semiquaver figure that dates back to Series Three and “All The Strange Strange Creatures”. Somehow swanky, somehow sleazy, the brass instruments slide and swing their way in, as we are introduced to Canton (the younger). The rest of the track is a subdued but forceful string and synth underscore, building to several peaks.

One of my very favourites, “I See You Silence” is the music from when River is cornered at the top of the skyscraper. The repetitive, taunting guitar motif at the start of the track perfectly echoes Canton’s sing-song call of “Doctor Song!” The track is a fuller mix than the version used in the episode, and features a funky, guitar-augmented version of the forthcoming “Majestic Tale”.

The Curse of the Black Spot’s offering is excellent; an ominous start, some swashbuckling action and an enchantingly sweet but deadly vocal performance as the Siren by Halia Meguid. Add to that some vigorous fiddling by Eos Chater, and you’ve got yourself the perfect score to a pirate romp.

The Doctor’s Wife also has a good selection of tracks, which work perfectly in the episode, which is perhaps surprising given the recording circumstances explained in Murray’s notes. I love the magical, lilting waltz of “My TARDIS”, but I was slightly disappointed that it was cut short, without venturing into the guttural cello and drum-machine vamp from Amy and Rory’s chase through the TARDIS corridors. I can’t complain though – there is enough terrific material packed into this album to more than make up for it!

That said, there is a lot of material from The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People – perhaps too much. The tracks from these episodes are all quite similar-sounding, and not especially memorable. That’s on first listen though – given time, I have a suspicion I will grow to love these tracks just as much as the others. The last track from this story, “Loving Isn’t Knowing”, is a suite containing some really great music: the vulnerable love theme with tearful violin; the gorgeously simplistic yet soaringly lyrical return to “Amy’s Theme”; the shocking and heart-wrenching music from the realisation that Amy is a Ganger; and the terrifying Madam Kovarian music as the real Amy wakes up on Demons’ Run.

The music from the mid-series finale, A Good Man Goes To War, is wonderful. It’s hard to believe that this is not the full orchestra and just a “good sized band”. “River’s Waltz” is gentle and sentimental, played on a detuned piano, here with more instruments accompanying it. At the end of this episode, when River reveals her identity to the Doctor, we aren’t told or shown immediately what the revelation is. However, from Murray’s music, we know it’s not a bad thing. As realisation dawns on the Doctor, gentle piano and cello melodies blossom into a beautiful, flowing tune, deepening in grandeur with horns until, as the Doctor inexplicably disappears in the TARDIS, out comes a majestic and moving reprise of the “I Am The Doctor” motif. The final track on this disc, “Melody Pond”, begins with a vocal version of River’s theme as heard in The Impossible Astronaut. The second half of the track is the theme that has accompanied River throughout the series; an emotional vocal with a repeating string pattern, ending with a soaring development and orchestral flourish.

Disc Two begins with tracks from Let’s Kill Hitler. “Growing Up Fast” is brilliantly nostalgic and frivolous, painting the perfect picture of the childhood of Amy, Rory and Mels. With its bouncing acoustic guitars, jumpy percussion and nursery-rhyme melody, it almost sounds as if it could be a theme tune from children’s TV.

“The Blush Of Love” is rich and gorgeous. It sounds like a film score – the attention to detail is remarkable (I suspect credit is due here largely to Ben Foster’s orchestration). I particularly like the way the melody passes between the oboe, flute and violin.

“Terror of the Reich” begins with a bombastic Nazi march. The second half of the track is excellent – a little bit Bond. The bopping drum machine and quirky woodwind perfectly capture the twee-ness of a robot operated by lots of miniature people!

Mark Gatiss’ Night Terrors was the first time we heard the “Tick Tock” theme, presented mainly instrumentally in this episode. There’s something very scary about simple child-like music, particularly as it gradually, barely-perceptibly, gets faster throughout the track, as if it’s liable to go out of control.

The sound-world of The Girl Who Waited was one of slightly out-of-tune electronic sounds, as exemplified in the first track, “Apalapucia”. This was perfect for the strange, clinical setting and the slipping of time-streams. “Amy’s Theme” returns in “36 Years”, in a reflective acoustic guitar version. I can’t hear this track without remembering the glum-looking Rory skipping along to it!

If you thought the sounds of The Girl Who Waited were weird, they’re nothing compared to The God Complex. Murray says in his notes that they decided to go for an electronic score to “emphasise the crooked angles and giddy mixture of merriment and terror portrayed in the episode”. This definitely worked. The result is disorienting, very scary, slightly ironic and just fantastic. That said, I don’t think the Doctor Who Fan Orchestra will be attempting it any time soon!

Gareth Roberts’ Closing Time was a superb follow-up to 2010’s The Lodger. Motifs from the earlier episode returned, such as “You Must Like It Here”, which shows up in “Stormageddon, Dark Lord Of All”, and “Thank You Craig”, which is echoed in “Fragrance”. The sound of Closing Time is much more filmic, and somehow weightier; it really feels as if we are revisiting the world of The Lodger but with a fresh approach, and, of course, the shadow of the Doctor’s oncoming death looming over.

The final episode of the season, The Wedding of River Song, opened with a bang. A montage showing “all of time” happening at once was accompanied by an epic rock track, “5:02 PM”, featuring a loud choir, electric guitars and saxes. In “Forgiven”, the theme from “Melody Pond” (also foreshadowed in Series Five’s “A River Of Tears”) comes to a breathtaking resolution, breaking into a reprise with similar orchestration to “The Sad Man With A Box”. “Time Is Moving” is a funky, jazzy riff on the Eleventh Doctor’s theme, with locomotive-style percussion (appropriate to its usage in the “train-office” scene near the beginning of the episode). The episode’s namesake track is a final reflection on River’s theme, building to darkly emotional horns and gentle flutes and glockenspiel. After a rock interlude, we hear a brief nod to Amy’s child theme, on a beautiful solo flute (in fact lifted from “Amy’s Starless Life”).

And yes – the very last track was put in at the special request of the many Twitter users who asked for it. Murray is quite right – it’s a fitting end to the album, and encapsulates all we love about the Eleventh Doctor and his adventures.

The overall tone of this album is much subtler than any of the previous Doctor Who soundtrack releases. It covers a wide spectrum, but it definitely feels consistent. The music of Doctor Who has been becoming more and more filmic since 2005, and this album is the absolute pinnacle on that front. I look forward hugely to hearing what Murray Gold comes up with for the next series!

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode.

Including series six's punctuation this is the third finale from Steven Moffat, and strong patterns can be seen to emerge. Firstly, the showrunner revels in misdirection – setting up loyal, fan audiences to interpret details in a particular way, e.g. expecting that the Doctor will tell River his name as part of a Time Lord wedding ceremony, only to find we've been well and truly hoodwinked. Advance rumours and spoilers also indicated that the Daleks would turn up, and they do. Sort of. But rather than the ultimate evil (or even the ultimate wedding party gatecrasher), this Dalek is just a stepping stone to information about the Silence, again misdirecting audiences. Dorium Maldovar's involvement offers yet more sleight of hand; how on earth can a previously beheaded character return? Easily enough, of course, if it's accepted that talking heads can make for fun rather than dull TV.

An undoubted master in misdirection, Moffat also delights in opposing audience expectations. Having set up crucial puzzles and questions he immediately undercuts them. Last year we were all wondering how the Doctor could escape from the perfect prison, only to find he'd managed it before the episode 13 title sequence rolled. This year, we're primed to expect mysteries over how the Doctor can avoid a fixed point in time... and what we get instead looks like the opposite; a tale in which that very fixed point has to be safely restored.

Some fan knowledge is rewarded rather than opposed, though; it's hard not to view all the eyepatches as part of a Nicholas Courtney tribute, with one of Doctor Who's most infamous behind-the-scenes anecdotes finally getting in front of the camera. Such a feeling is reinforced by the Doctor's forlorn phone call to the Brig; even time travellers are sometimes too late. Moffat allows his fandom to shine through, creating a moment of media-pro fan fiction. This is a brand of fan fiction aimed at professionally commemorating the programme's long history, its own fixed points of reference, and its own markers of painful loss. In an episode where time is frozen, its real world passing is most certainly not forgotten.

The ultimate enemy here isn't the Doctor's death, though, or even the Brigadier's heartbreaking absence; it's the end of storytelling itself. Cheating a fixed point means all of time happening at once, stuck in the same day and time, over and over. It's a world which sustains surreal special effects and wonderful juxtapositions, making for some eyecatching, unusual TV drama. But it's also a world in which no more stories can be lived out: cause and effect, sequences of events – what we usually call plots and narratives – no longer seem possible. In part, this is a story-arc finale threatening a finale to all storytelling.

Only the Soothsayer can bring back the pleasures of a tale properly told. Fittingly enough, given that this is the culmination of an arc, The Wedding of River Song is fixated on acts of storytelling and stories. While the Doctor battles against history's cancellation, Steven Moffat plays games with the audience by exploiting our desire to find out all the answers: the Doctor begins to tell Emperor Winston Churchill his tale, while Dorium also promises an account of great import. These yarn-spinners, and their insistent delays and deferrals, deliberately tease the audience. And the false ending before River visits Amy does more of the same, playing a further game with our desire to find out what really happened.

Despite its focus on acts of storytelling, I'd argue that The Wedding of River Song isn't really that interested in answers. It gives some, sure, but almost resentfully, and because it has to. The Teselecta's use is somewhat anticlimactic, if not eminently guessable as soon as it appears. It's not really the point – the point is how we get there, and what new questions can be posed, because as a showrunner Steven Moffat seems far more interested in the transformation of Doctor Who's possibilities. Series five's finale combined the Doctor's opponents in a monster mash; series six part one concluded by combining characters and races in the Doctor's army, and now six part two combines all of Earth's history. Or rather, Earth history largely as depicted in the Moffat era. It's Victory of the Daleks meets Cold Blood meets The Impossible Astronaut; a demented mash-up of episodes previously overseen by this production team, with just a (Dickensian) dash of the old regime. Each of Moffat's finales has sought to mix up and transform usual ways of thinking about Doctor Who – what if all the monsters decided to team up? What if the Doctor brought together a team of fighters? And this time, what if different episodes teamed up? Like a fan remixing Who, Moffat performs transformative work on the show, but by doing so, he transforms his own prior labours as showrunner. This is Doctor Who as a full-on game of self-referencing and self-sampling.

Truth be told, though, The Wedding of River Song is pretty useless as a whodunnit. It's really an anti-whodunnit, a skilled exercise in suspense when we know all along who dies and who the killer is. It's pure storytelling: constant interruptions and colourful incidents that happen to get in the way of an ending for 45 minutes or so. And as with The Big Bang and A Good Man Goes To War, this finale again offers a breakneck blend of misdirection, opposition, fan fiction, and transformation. To coin a playful acronym, these things are a finale's m.o.f.f.a.t. quotient.